Charles Manson film tells victims’ story
Charles Manson did not wield the knives in the 1969 murder spree that ended the Californian hippy dream, so what drove the people who did so on his orders? That is the question posed in Charlie Says which premiered in Venice on Sunday.
Doctor Who star Matt Smith plays Manson, a wild-eyed petty criminal who sets up a hippy commune where his followers worship him like a messiah, clinging to every word of his incoherent prophecies of Armageddon.
Directed by Canadian Mary Harron, who made the 2000 Christian Bale movie American Psycho, Charlie Says is set three years after the murders of, among others, Roman Polanski’s actress wife Sharon Tate and her unborn child.
Serving life in jail are three women, still in thrall to Manson and clinging to his promise that they will all live out the coming race war in a hole in the desert from which they will emerge to populate a glorious new world.
Trying to reverse the brainwashing is a prison teacher who is astonished that the bright-eyed young women seem untroubled by their crimes and the fact they will die in jail.
“That’s a perspective that no one has seen and no one has really focused entirely on: their story or their journey about how they ended up there and why they did the things they did,” Harron said in an interview. “To me that’s the great mystery. You know Charles Manson was insane, but they were not, so how did he get them to do these things?”
Charlie Says is competing in the Orizzonti segment of the Venice Film Festival that runs until Saturday. ‘Charlie Says’.