I’m not a trained poodle !

This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

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16 February

This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

It seemed inevitable that Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) would bear resemblances to Woody Allen’s 1997 film Deconstructing Harry, if not in terms of the nature of the soundtrack (the film’s title was also asked to serve as the name of the character’s debut solo album, or vice versa¹) : however, unlike Harry Block (writer’s block ?), Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) seems to come to a rather slight realization of his nature, and the film prefers to take comfort in the ploy of using one version of the film’s ending to open it, and then lead us back unawares (on which, more below), as if it is the greatest of ploys.

Either that or it is a Sisyphean world-view, which endorses both Beckettt’s choice of Giambattista Vico as a precursor of James Joyce and his then ‘Work in Progress’ (which became Finnegans Wake) and Stephen’s assertion, in Dimensions (2011):

Now, I believe that every single possible combination of events has happened already, is happening right now, and will happen again in the future

An unexpected attack (which we are made to wait to learn is for insulting someone’s wife) takes us right back to George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), sounding off down the phone to his daughter’s teacher, and then getting a sock in the jaw from her husband in Martini’s Bar, and there are instances where, as Bailey’s do, Davis’ meanderings go from bad to worse – just when it could not be conceived that they can : perhaps this is where the Joycean notion fits in, with Davis having his own (extended) Bloomsday (both are Jewish ?), since this film’s principal cat is called Ulysses ?

Likewise, the upsets that befall Allen’s Block (also Jewish) on his journey, and which – to a very appropriate track – even have him being led down into Hell. Of course, there will almost always be parallels, since no work, even if it aims at originality, exists in a cultural vacuum and can easily claim uniqueness. Whereas, to provide a background to the cat’s reappearance (and, perhaps, to dispel the whiff of the end of the same year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)), The Coen Brothers seem unable to resist invoking The Incredible Journey (1963) with its Disney animals travelling 200 miles across Canada, even if blows the idea that we are really in 1961…

In Inside, though, the cat (the wrong cat) has no choice about travelling, and we are also in the territory of On The Road (2012), its particular company of grotesques as travelling companions being a driver grunting monosyllables or John Goodman’s forthright, stick-wielding jazzer. The contrast with Davis is unmistakeable – Roland Turner is an established artist, and, as so many of the great jazzers were, can afford to be a monster, unimpressed by Davis’ three-chord tunes, and probably, for Davis, sufficient reason to strand him in the car when the driver gets pulled in².

The nomadic life of Davis even reminds of that of Frances Ha (2012), down to the fact that his Chicago is her Paris, his Mike her Sophie (she goes to Tokyo, rather than dying). As with Frances vaguely hoping to meet a friend in Paris (to substitute for Sophie ?), it simply does not bear thinking about why Davis does not post his LP to Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), in case it went astray : for, when he has got himself there with Grossman in Chicago, other than a foolish crack about ‘That’ll be five dollars’ when he hands over the record, Davis seems to have nothing prepared.

As Davis is ‘in the business’, one might think that he would not just have no notion that Grossman is likely to want to hear something or what that ought to be, rather than expecting him to be impressed by being handed yet another record (this is where we learn its title). This half-hearted Davis is the same person makes bold claims to his sister about understanding the music industry when she shows him some embarrassing early recording that he wants to disown.

One might as well turn up for an audition or screen-test without having thought through some of the things that one might be asked to do (as in the embarrassing audition scene in Staub auf unseren Herzen (2012)) – Davis sings well enough³, but he has chosen something that comes from (or sounds as though it does) the older tradition of folk song. Given that he did even know what he was going to perform until he started, he has scarcely calculated his opening gambit, by knowing his audience, in trying to get coverage or representation from Grossman.

In these respects, the meeting, though the song is pleasant enough, mirrors the trouble that Neo, in The Matrix (1999), has to go to reach The Architect, only to find that doing so was only an intermediate goal, and to be told that, after all, he is not The One : yet Davis seems to ingest fully what he is told, and it is only one of his own booby-traps that prevents him going back to sea. As a slice of life, do we believe that he then had a good gig and, despite being beaten up, things are on the up ? Maybe, maybe not, but do we care any more ?

For we have seen the rumpus that he caused at The Gorfeins’⁴ when, perhaps through grief at being reminded of his partner Mike Timlin’s death or perhaps at recalling his loss of a meal-ticket (since Grossman declares him not a frontman), he violently challenges Lillian Gorfein harmonizing ‘Fare Thee Well’ and petulantly objects to the idea of having been asked to give a song at all – not as if he had not (thought they do not know it) lost their cat, and, as it turns out, brought them someone else’s.

In the scene immediately after her screaming ‘Where’s its scrotum ?’, he is seen, as if he does not have wits to do anything else with it, getting into the car bound for Chicago with it – when he first lost Ulysses, he did not have any notion of what to do (with the problem that he had created, allegedly humorously) other than take it across town to Jim and Jean’s⁵. Definitely plot driving character, for, however much fun it is to see him with the cat and people’s responses to that situation, he did not seek far for solutions, let alone where the time goes (unless he rose very late) between leaving The Gorfeins’, leaving the cat at Jim and Jean’s (as if he can, just because he has the need), seeing his agent Mel, and arriving to be confronted with Jean’s hostility.

Reading between the lines of her anger, and her affront at his saying that ‘It takes two to tango’, Davis seems to have forced himself upon her (maybe worse), which later, when she (Carey Mulligan) is on stage with Jim (Justin Timberlake) at The Gaslight Café, he brags about : no other explanation seems likely to explain what she says about Davis.

In Frances Ha, she smacks of something like borderline personality disorder (which therapy can help, and so make the ending less implausible), whereas, with Davis, it could be something in the nature of narcissistic personality disorder, which may be less amenable to change.

At any rate, Davis is not very likeable, he seems to have the same vividly dark beard without ever needing to groom it, and expects the world to revolve around him (he has paid his back dues, but seems to think that, having settled the debt, he can just ask for it back), to the extent that he is always after favours, and blames his sister for his lack of thought when she throws out his box of things when he tells her to.

There are nice touches with him thinking that he has found the cat again, with learning later why Jean is angry with him, and with Pappi claiming that Jean slept with him to get Davis a slot, but they are not enough to support the piece, or its structure. And does even this have significance ? : as against at the beginning (where it finishes with 'Hang me, oh hang me' (Trad., arr. Isaac & Burnett), at the end of the film, Davis concludes his set with a further song, ‘Fare Thee Well’ (Trad., arr. Mumford, Isaac & Burnett), the song that he recorded with his former musical partner Timlin. Also, unlike the opening version of the attack, which ends with him on the floor, he is shown staggering to the top of the alleyway after he has been attacked, and seeing the man get into a cab. He mutters to himself – is it in some recognition that, at some level, he deserved what happened for his coarse heckling of the man’s wife ?

On balance, for depth, balance and musicality, another film about a musician who has a lack of empathy and warmth is far more compelling than this one, Daniel Auteuil in Un Cœur en Hiver (1992), and without the gimmicks or the feeling of being derivative.


Post-script

An interestingly negative review, somehow classified by www.rottentomatoes.com as 'fresh' when it is 'rotten' to the core (not that tomatoes have cores), is by Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman. Mark Kermode's review, in The Observer, also has criticisms to level, but maybe giving 3* counts as being positive...


End-notes

¹ Calling a film Inside Llewyn Davis offers the obvious prospect of getting under the skin of a man with a made-up Christian name (as far as one can tell), but, when one realizes that it is the exercise in PR that is an album-title, maybe one lets go a little of such expectations…

² As if he would be, without resolving the problem that had led to his arrest of the vehicle being inappropriately stopped…
³ Unlike some of the other numbers, where the disjunction between the full-stereo studio sound and the visible acoustic makes one aware of the artificiality, this sounded to be miked / recorded fairly naturally. That said, the songs are, apart from providing the background to the realized image from the poster of a guy loping around with a cat, really the best thing about the film.

⁴ Who seem enlightened in their willingness to entertain not only contact with him a matter of days later – but they are supposed to be intellectuals, who do not bear grudges – but also to put him up again.

Then again, at The Gaslight, Pappi is not an intellectual, but allows back as a performer a man whom he had thrown out the night before.
⁵ He keeps trotting out, as if this both explains and excuses his behaviour, that it is not his cat, it is The Gorfeins' cat.


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Delivered of a burden

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012) (seen at Saffron Screen)

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10 February

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012)

Viewed at Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen), in Saffron Walden (and on a recommendation from @amandarandall5)


Am I so much as... being seen ?

Play, Samuel Beckettt

The Patience Stone (2012) is a film that could be set anywhere, in any time, in case one wants to read in condemnations of where it appears to be set and its rules and religion, but the simple fact is that it acts as an inverted One Thousand and One Nights, where the nameless man and we are both an audience to his nameless wife’s confessions : only the film has to interest just us, to stop us cutting off its head by walking out, although we suspect that the husband, willy-nilly, can hear every word…

With all the adeptness and beauty that Zrinka Cvitesic brought in the role of Danica in My Beautiful Country (2012) to a bedbound Ramiz (Misel Maticevic), a film released in the same year, Golshifteh Farahani tends to her husband, who appears to be in a coma : at the start of the film, she is doubting what she has been told, because the mullah said that her husband would be well in two weeks, and it is the sixteenth day, with him not better, and her running out of money for serum.

It was a beautiful (not just literal) play of light and dark, @Saffronscreen @amandarandall5 - review under way in The King's Arms, SW...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 10, 2014

Birds*  that emerge from darkness on the curtains to a point of maximum light and then back toward shade open the film : they tell us at all sorts of levels that there will, although this is essentially a chamber work (set primarily in the woman’s house and grounds, but also her aunt’s former and present flat, and the street), be a journey, and the film will waver between light and dark.

(Sadly, there are two places where the quality of digital image-capture, as against so beautifully done on film in Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013), lets the aesthetics of the film down, and it verges on pixellation - briefly, both times, in the scene in the basement, and when Farahani is first lit by the light of the hurricane-lamp. That said, the criticism draws attention to how very good the image was the rest of the time that these stood out as momentary exceptions.)

Necessarily, with a man in a coma and despite conflict going on, one is tied, but the inventiveness of blocking the scenes in the principal room is anything but limited, and makes not just for variety, but also for some very striking and even beautiful angles. The man (Hamid Djavadan) and Farahani are in this with such conviction, that, apart from visits from the mullah and a soldier, and time with her children, and her aunt and her family, we barely realize that we are thrown back on their resources.

As a sort of Scheherezade, the woman has a voice, but not for telling stories, such as one that might narrate what happened to the stone of the title that her aunt is reminded of : the account of how she became pregnant might even be from the Nights, with its questionable, but inventive, solution to a practical problem.

It is the final part of what she has been telling her husband throughout the film, and not without reason – so much that she has already related, both of the present and of her past, sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes as if to him within her head, has built up to this revelation. Spurred on by what her aunt has said about the stone, she has continued her confession, even down to having let a visiting cat eat one of her father’s fighting quails and getting a scar by her right eye about which her husband, who maybe has never properly seen her, has never asked.

The very shocking end of the film is ambiguous, and could represent two or three possibilities, on different literal or figurative levels. Twice, once when we think that she might really go away for good because of the impossible conditions in which she is having to leave (and for which she blames her husband), she tells him to ‘Go to hell’, and there is much frank language about sex, including the insult that got her husband into the fight with which he lies wounded. She has had, often enough with her aunt’s advice, had to make her way in this difficult culture, and the film celebrates female ingenuity in getting around male oppression whilst still pretending to be subservient.

The film is thoughtful, throwing one back on one’s preconceptions, and (not knowing much of the woman’s reliance on her aunt) we do not understand at the time why she tells the captain ‘I sell my body’, because his reaction is the last thing that we imagine she wanted : it goes back to the woman’s place, as the aunt expounds the male psychology.

All that the woman has been bottling up, keeping inside – that is why Beckettt is quoted at the head of this review, because, not least in the trilogy of plays* that The Royal Court (@royalcourt) is reviving, he writes (Not I) a part for Mouth, who cannot seem to stop talking, but who is, as the characters in Play are (a man, his wife, and his lover), looking for a response to this flood of words. Hence the quotation, where the Man momentarily interjects the possibility that there is not even an observer to what he is going through by telling his story : as with our lead, he has no name.

Here, that confession is to a man who may not have the conscious faculty to hear it, but for whom the truth is being laid out with candour (as that trilogy of novels taught Beckettt to do). It may not sound much of a basis for a film, but with excellent realizations of Max Richter’s music (which was such a strength of the rather disregarded Sarah’s Key (2010)), carefully wrought cinematography from Thierry Arbogast, and, as well as from those mentioned, lovely performances from Massi Mrowat (the soldier) and Hassina Burgan (the aunt), it is electric.


End-notes

* A twitcher would know what they are, but maybe ducks – thoughts were of M. C. Escher’s panoramic mirror-image.

** Though not written as a trilogy, unlike Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and maybe not even for performance together.


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Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?

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12 January

A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses



We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.

We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?

Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)

Not Gravy - or whatever that film lacking 'it' is - though, @dimensionsmovie @guardian ! #GravityIsGravy
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014

Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.

If these criticisms of All is Lost (2013) (http://t.co/PGOBy7mJWY) mattered, Gravity (2013) would be ruled out of awards hands down !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2014

I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?

Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.

She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…

Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.

What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.

Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.

As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.


End-notes

¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.

As if I didn't know that #BAFTA nominations are stupid, All is Lost (2013) only gets one - for Sound !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2014

³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.

**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.



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Turkish delight II

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3 December (completed 7 December)

This is the second part of a review of Box of Delights, a collection of short animated films, as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival


The first part of this review is here (the first five films out of nine)



Inukshuk (2008)

It should not be imagined that curating a programme such as this is any more straightforward than deciding which poems should go in a collection, and in which order, or programming a concert, but I suspect that this film was not best placed here, after the vibrancy of Nicolas et Guillemette (the last film reviewed here). Kimberley Ballard's account of it makes it sound as though it should, nevertheless, have made an impact, but the impact on an adult watching Box of Delights is almost bound to be different from that of a youngster :

On an enchanted block of ice in the Polar region, an Inuk man and a naughty polar bear watch their world transform as they peer into the dark sea. One of the greatest shorts of recent years, Camille-Elvis Thery conjures his landscape in frost-tinged black and white, and blankets the sublime tale in a string of dreamlike images.


Reading this again afterwards, and at a distance, I have the feeling that I should have been amazed by Inukshuk - one can ponder, with Wikipedia's help, on the meaning of the title (maybe the polar bear, or the whale, was the Inukshuk ?) - but I know that I was not, partly because it did not bear comparison with the world created by the previous film. Partly, though, because of the sketchy nature of the animation, where the sun is just a big circle with lines around the edge, and the bear laughing at the man's stupidity just felt like Entre Deux Miettes. Even the surprise at the end of the true nature of the surface on which they were felt like too little, too late, though for some it might have been transformational.


Rabbit Rabbit (2006)

This is a short (two-minute), quick film of moving images following each other in a mirror, punctuated by three duels (the last with unexpected results, which made me think of bullet-time and The Matrix (1999)) - it is Rabbit Rabbit, because the starting-point for a series of replications and reflections is a stylized rabbit and its mirror-image, which, at times (and probably not just incidentally), resemble a Rorschach test.

Kimberley Ballard is spot on to say that 'its kaleidoscopic cast of rabbits will leave you reeling', which is because it is not just a matter of multiplication, but deft movement, too. A film that works on many layers, suggesting the human population explosion (somehow, rabbits are known for their fecundity), opposing forces, and a world beyond the superficial. Nearly halfway through, the polarity changes, and all is made new again in this charming work with its slurping soundtrack, a little like someone in slippers dragging his or her heels...


Lifeline (2009)

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.


These words by William Blake, which were only published posthumously, do not sum up this film of morphing shapes and creatures, but they are the sort of inspiration for the daughter whom we are shown to try to share a perspective with her father : the title is clearly not meant to be overlooked, with its implication that this is not a casual slideshow of the natural world, but a crucial attempt.

The father does not look as though he can take in beauty, and he appears deeply depressed (or at least to have cares, burdens and woes). In Samuel Beckettt's play Endgame, there is a mention of someone who can only see ashes, and these lines*, too, could have been written for the grey man whom we see. The lively, flowing worlds of  cosmic colours that she brings before him seem like encapsulations of creation in all its dimensions, resembling icons, mandalas and illuminated manuscripts all at once. Somehow, we feel that the father cannot fail to respond**.


Flatworld (1997)

One cannot help being reminded a little of Pratchett's Discworld by the title, though Flatland is a hundred years its senior, but none of this helps as an approach to this piece.

In a film of 28 minutes' duration, Daniel Greaves (who directed Rabbit Rabbit - please see above) has produced something as long as the first five in Box of Delights put together, so it necessarily has a different dynamic and build from the other items screened. It allows us not to understand everything all at once, such as what is being done to the road to repair it, and Greaves wisely does not stick so rigidly to things being two-dimensional that everything is flat.

What he does neatly predict, though, is the flat-screen t.v., which I was getting confused with the fish-tank (because both are hanging on the wall). Just when I was getting excited about the idea that a fish-tank could double as a t.v., that is what Greaves gives me, in a world where a remote-control can change reality :

In the same year as this film, director Michael Haneke talks about the moment at Cannes when the audience applauded when one of the two youthful torturers had been killed - until the other picks up such a device and rewinds what seemed to be normal, live action to remedy the mistake that led to the death of his accomplice. Maybe just coincidence ?

In any case, when the man, his cat and his fish can all enter a colourful world in three dimensions***, courtesy of the t.v. channels, suddenly their world is thrown into relief, the real adventure (rather than the rivalry between the pets) in under way, begins, and the energy is infectious. The other work had drive, and it informs this one, with clever twists and turns, as the man battles to clear his name when mistaken for a burglar, with more than the bag of money at stake. Very entertaining and imaginative !


End-notes

* 'I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look ! There ! All that rising corn ! And there ! Look ! The sails of the herring fleet ! All that loveliness ! (Pause.) He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause.) He alone had been spared.'

** Unless this should be an elaborate metaphor for the supposed wonders of ECT.

*** The less literal suggestion may be that the two-dimensional world imprisons life in a somewhat uninspiring way, because there is not the will and desire to break out of it into one of possibility, potential and freedom. Hints of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) ?


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Ma Bête !

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30 November

This is a review of La Belle et La Bête (1946), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) in a new BFI (@BFI) restoration (a trade-in for writing a Film Note for the festival)

99 = S : 17 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of La Belle et La Bête (1946)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

La Belle et La Bête (Cocteau, chalking up credits, adds the accent as an afterthought) (1946) at @BathFilm - beautiful film and restoration.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 30, 2013

Georges Auric, just on the showing of this score (though, amongst others, he worked his effect on such highly rated films as Passport to Pimlico (1948) and Roman Holiday (1953)), would be considered an insightful composer. He gives us, for example, a compact overture, builds to a finale to match the assumptive apotheosis, and, in between, has unresolved chords when a dark forest is being penetrated, tellingly uses the middle part of the oboe’s register at key moments, and transforms and modulates themes to suggest the transitional moods.

As one would expect of him, Jean Cocteau has produced in this film a work that resonates with literary, cultural and homosexual allusion and yields an almost overwhelming richness of meaning*. On one level, Adéläide (Nane Germon) and Félicie (Mila Parély) are the ugly sisters from Cinderella, except that they are not ugly beyond their attitudes and aspirations, but just that La Belle (Josette Day) is more beautiful in all of those things. (We also have something like the looking-glass from Snow White, hints of Goldilocks when the father enters La Bête’s domain, and Little Red Riding Hood with the perilous forest.)


Looked at differently, we have Shakespearean perspectives in La Belle’s father as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, with Bottom’s becoming an ass, and with Lear’s division of the kingdom between his daughters, where La Belle asks but for a rose (as against a monkey or a parrot) and is blamed when plucking one (with all the rich symbolism of rose-picking going back to The Romaunt of the Rose) proves dire.

On the level of realistic narrative, a father looking to save himself at the suggestion that one of his daughter’s should die in his place seems monstrous, though little as monstrous as much in Lear, but it amounts to the same thing : which of the daughters loves him more than the others to take his place (with all the suggestion of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice) ? Link this with the insincerity of La Belle’s sisters, their scheming, and their desire to subjugate her and one has quite a bit more than the Prince Charming story.

What we must also have is inspiration for other filmic enterprises such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Elephant Man (1980), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), but also wide influences from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (for whose film Auric wrote the music ten years later) and Nosferatu (1926) (those doors that open themselves) to the Wife of Bath’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales.


Names are important (though probably inherited by Cocteau, but he would have known what to do with them), with, beyond Belle = Beauty, ones that mean happy or lucky (Félicie), noble or honourable (Adéläide), fame or fighter / warrior (Ludovic), and pleasant or welcoming (Avenant) : link beauty with happiness and honour and you have a powerful trio, but, when being happy means selfishly seeking out one’s own comfort (even at the risk of another becoming a slave) and when it is only honour amongst thieves, one has a pair as corrupt and venal as Goneril and Regan.

The circumstances of shooting, so soon after the end of the war, mean that the privations that Chris Baker brings out in his festival film not only match those of this family wracked by debt by vessels being lost at sea (U-boats, etc.), but are also reminiscent of The Cherry Orchard, with so many people, other than the self-motivated sisters, failing to do anything beyond moping or spending the last pennies in the tavern to remedy the situation (and La Belle only incidentally does that by her holy tears of pity turning to diamonds). The requirements to be careful whom one trusted in war time, and who one’s real friends were, must have been raw topics at this film’s release.

With La Belle and La Bête, the polarity is more obvious, with him moaning Je sais que je suis horrible – she, who was a willing sacrifice, brings to him her goodness and faith, which he finds hard to receive, and is adamantly vocal that she should not kneel to him. At the start, with a clapperboard that was going to set things off interrupted by Cocteau’s written admonition read aloud by him (and, as in the credits, with a superscript five-pointed star), we are urged how to try to enter into this world. La Belle, likewise, enters into La Bête’s world, and, in return for glowing less with a kind of saintliness in her beauty **, takes on a different beauty that she can share with him, where La Bête can become Ma Bête.

As, in more senses than one, this is a tale of enchantment, I had a theory about La Bête (which turned out to be wrong), but I became more interested in his psychology, brought out wonderfully by Jean Marais both in his vocal tone, and his eyes, demeanour and gait. He did change, did develop before our eyes, and the side of him that exacted bargains from people on pain of death, humbled before La Belle, appeared to soften. He is a sort of Prospero, swearing a vengeance on his brother and other betrayers that he does not - cannot - carry out (which is where the Greenaway connection is), or a bit the man behind the illusion of The Wizard of Oz.

Cocteau winds up the story gradually, seeming to be an unmagical one until the branches part in the forest and the father finds himself in La Bête’s domain. When he enters, and the male hands holding a candelabra move and gesture, and the male faces watch and follow, we are conscious that he is a man amongst disembodied male features, and there is a homoerotic tinge (when the hand at the table lets go of the shaft (sic) of the candelabrum to pour the wine, the father jumps a mile) – later, when La Belle passes through, and, after that, describes how they brush her hair, they take on a different character. Striking imagery that could not have failed to say some to a film-maker such as Peter Greenaway, or a writer such as Samuel Beckettt.

Whatever meaning one tries to put on this film, no one will adhere, because it is, with music, words and the visual world, such a coherent piece of art that it is, as Chris Baker says was Cocteau’s desire, poetry, and demands to be watched over again.


End-notes

* Whatever its starting-point in the writing of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.

** I am not with Chris Baker in finding a Vermeer resemblance made out, not even to what is called Girl with a Pearl Earring, as hair swept back and in a headscarf is not an unusual look.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Problems of the Self (to quote Bernard Williams)

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2 November

I saw an experiment being carried out to-day (a video of it), during a lecture called Boundaries Between Self and World by Dr Jane Aspell, Lecturer in Psychology, in Cambridge's Festival of Ideas : The Rubber-Hand Illusion.

If I put a rubber hand in front of you, and then suddenly stuck a fork in it, would you - other than the surprising gesture - be shocked, as if the hand were yours ?

Well, and although you would know what was happening (apart from the fork bit), if a physical barrier shielded your arm from sight, but your hand and the rubber hand (in front of you) were stroked with a paint-brush in the same place, your brain would come to identify the rubber one as yours, confusing the apparent stimulus (on the rubber hand) with the felt one (on your own hand), because of the visual message.

Without the fork element, here is a link to a video from New Scientist.


This all seems surprising, out of context, or even in a lecture of this kind, but is it, and does it show what the experimental psychologists claim ? I am told that the eye's lens throws an inverted image on the retina, and the brain's visual cortex adjusts for this - even to the extent that, if one wore glasses all the time that turned the projected image right way up (and so everything would be seen upside down), the brain adjusts in time, righting the perceived image. Or those walk-in optical illusions, where patterns of black and white can make things seem taller, shorter, or unstable in some way.

Consider, also, going to the theatre, opera or cinema : even if you lose yourself in what is being shown (arguably it is bizarre that projected moving images, when we know that we are in a darkened screen so that they can be seen, can engage us, and seem like life, but they do), part of you knows that it is not real, but does that (or Puccini's music) stop you being tearful over Mimi ?

Or take reading a book, where there is no illusion of reality, but we co-create it with the writer, and, like Beckettt's character Krapp, cry buckets at Effi, or come to hate Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall : as the player has it, what is he to Hecuba, when these are just words on a page ?

Identification of things that are not ourselves, but outside of us, is part of our living and loving - a text-message to say that a friend is delayed, a relative ill, would mean nothing if we did not pity, care, fear, hope, despair, pretend, imagine.


So is the Rubber-Hand Illusion that novel ? No, I think that the appeals that I have made to entering into the world of a film, or a symphony, and feeling something is far, far more remarkable.


More here from this lecture, with what they call OBEs, or Out-of-Body Experiences...


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That's a classy address !

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

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15 September 2013

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

What the connotations were, in 1950, of an address in Sunset Boulevard, I do not know, but I am sure that Billy Wilder knew what his audience would think, and what specifically it signified to have one in the early ten thousands...

Both as Norma Desmond and in real life (Gloria Swanson was then the age of the former actress whom she plays), the end of what is often called The Silent Era partly caused a wane in her popularity in the 1930s. Here, though, Swanson – and Wilder with her – is capitalizing on her name, and I suspect that the photographs with which she decorates her still lavish home are from that home.

With Wilder’s amusing script, we have all the elements for us to be more knowing than William Holden, as Joe Gillis, and for the spooky Max, played delightfully by Erich von Stroheim, to put the wind up him – whether or not one believes that the corpse of Gillis is literally telling the story, or that we somehow hear what he has to say from his perspective, including narrating Desmond’s descent under the direction of Max, is neither here no there.

The strength of what we see unfold is how it is rooted in the fabric and how it brings the characters to life – as Gillis is beckoned into the palazzo, having symbolically lodged, without asking, his pride-and-joy white motor in one of its garages, his mind is already thinking of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. By contrast, the house comes alive, out of a slumber as if he is a Prince Charming to her Sleeping Beauty, and yet the lavishness of what is bestowed on him is not unlike what Pip thinks that he seeks after.

Here, the benefactress needs no guessing at, only how she could have preserved her wealth, and Gillis is no more grateful or moderate with what he is bought by her than Pip is with the attempts to make him a gentleman – in neither case does it prove what is really desired.

Whether we believe that the room over the garage becoming inoccupable is just convenient, or the house having its way with Gillis, it comes back to life with him there, and provides the means for what happens to unfold, even including Miss Desmond’s own vehicle, which Max seemingly effortlessly gets back on the road – the pool would not be there without Gillis, and Miss Desmond would not have a life outside the house without him.
In this house without locks, the doors come to resemble pairs of eyes (as Beckettt was later to play with in Film (1965), and even to ask Buster Keaton to play another serious role), and yet there are secrets, from turning, from Miss Desmond, by turning off the lights of the car when Gillis goes out in it.

What Pip turns out to want is Estella, and Gillis wants is Betty Schaefer and to work with her on a script. In Gillis’ case, he is not big enough to accept her gracious willingness to forget all that he has told her (although maybe he believes that she would not be able to do so, and that she is better off without him), but still thinks that he can give the relatively ageing star ‘the go-by’, after all that he has thrown in her face as fantasy.

The cameras and the lights show who is mistaken in thinking that she is still a star, as Gillis is forced to admit…


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Epiphany : Questions in a comment

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3 April

I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers



(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?


(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?

I can't say that it did.

After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.

I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.

I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.


(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?


(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?


I take it that these belong together.

I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.

In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).

I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).

As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.

They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.


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Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

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16 January

This posting continues from a survey of Elizabeth Price's place amongst the nominees for The Turner Prize 2012

As a starting-point (although it was the last of a triptych of films, shown virtually seamlessly), Elizabeth Price took material relating to a fire at Woolworths in Central Manchester (in 1979), and then built up her own vision to prepare for coming to narrate the events, sometimes using reporting speech, sometimes – as the film developed – giving us directly what seemed to be original audio.

Price’s work did so many things that were admirable – the following are in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list :

* Using different audio techniques, from a single beat that emphasized a visual (or a change of visual)* to processed sound

* Mixing styles of depiction, with, when showing stills, often a stereoscopic presentation (later, with footage of burning, this technique had a different effect)

* Risking an authoritative description of church architecture, which might have felt patronizing, and softening it by showing (apparent) source-material for the propositions argued for

* Not holding back from continuing the imagery from the second, dance-movement-related film, into the beginning of the third, when those who seemed to have been contemporary eye-witnesses to the fire from the exterior were saying what they had seen

* Partly in line with the lecture feel of (the opening of) the first film, using graphic design to show, in three dimensions, the feature being described, and integrating it with the appearance of text, and using coloured key-words

* A sure touch in matching the visuals to the audio, particularly in the central film, and in the transition to it, with the first suggestion that, whereas what has gone before has not been untruthful, it has shown material whose tone and style are being subverted

* Moving into the second film, Price blurs what has been precise and clear in giving detail about parcloses and misericords**, giving us sometimes tantalizing moving fragments of dancers or singers, and no longer allowing us the luxury of clearly reading the text that she employs

* This approach, coupled with the slightly crazy message about a definite movement of the right wrist, is all part of signalling that what went before was for a purpose, and that purpose is no longer served by the adjuncts of the lecture theatre (albeit at the behest of a lecturer disinclined to dwell too long on some feature or explanation)

* In the third film, after the initial eye-witness comments, it promptly moved to another level, with on-screen lettering to label the event, and shots of fire-fighters standing down their equipment (including a paced shot of a fireman winding up a compressed fire-hose)

* The stereoscopic device returned to pair slightly non-synchronized clips of flames, with the effect that the comparison between the right-hand (advanced) and left-hand (normal) images showed the change in the effect of the combustion over time, and hence intensified one’s appreciation of the destructiveness of the process of burning


Afterwards, seeing the video- and sound-editing software, on an Apple platform, that Price runs***, I found it evident that she manipulates her material with a skill that makes it look like ease.

The first film in the present work (from 2011 ?) appears to be one on which Price has since built. As the mini-feature also revealed, she says it can take her one or two years of continuing to work even on a video that she has exhibited (she tended to refer to works as ‘videos’) before she considers it finished, so I imagine it likely, if I am right, that the film Choir took a yet different one again when it was envisaged within a larger whole.

At some point, the submerged rhyme choir / fire that underlies the triptych must have occurred to Price, although it need by no means have been the first thing that, for her, linked the Woolworths event and the earlier film. That rhyme catches one up, because, if one knows that the work’s full title is The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the expectation is that a choir of real singers fits in somewhere, and so it catches one up****.

Whatever Price’s starting-point for transmuting CHOIR to be the first of three parts, it was clearly, at heart, the sense of confinement of the furniture store at Woolworths, a rectangular enclosure with similarities to the ecclesiastical space that has become the choir of a church or cathedral, which was the place where the fire started. No greater suggestion of similarity than that is made, save by the title, and Price eschews any comparison between the living physical fire that we see, as already described, in the clips that she has used.

This is Price’s greatest strength as an artist, save only to the skill with which she edits and manipulates her material resources, seen and heard : that she knows when too little is enough so that the work, speaking in its own terms, does so with her voice and stamp of authority.


Questions on Epiphany II via a comment



End-notes

* I detected influences that may have been assimilated, ranging from Beckettt’s radio plays with a score, such as Words and Music, to his work for t.v., Quad Parts I and II, to the films of John Smith.

** Price did not deviate into giving too much detail here (just as she could have done, if she had wanted to explain the term rood-screen).

*** In the mini-feature, which each of the nominees had.

**** Not, one imagines, gruesomely by the victims’ screams, though we learn that cups were being thrown down into the street (perhaps to draw attention to a plight that was being thought ignored).


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Fuckin' Bruges

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20 January

* Contains spoilers *

I don’t know whether In Bruges (2008) made the city even more attractive to tourists, but it was so well shot by Eigil Bryld – even the set-pieces from the typical guide-book – that it should have done.

For this was certainly not a film that did as that year’s Woody Allen’s Barcelona-titled work (as it had funding to be filmed in that city¹) and just treated us to a picture-show (however nicely), but one that embedded Bruges in the development of the film right from the opening to the closing shots (as Allen’s Paris- and Rome-centred films then did three and four years later, although it may be fanciful, just by virtue of the comparison, to suggest that Allen learnt from what Martin McDonagh’s picture does).

I did not see the film when it was released, but was aware of it at the time of Brendan Gleeson’s excellent performance in The Guard (2011), and then at the recent run of Seven Psychopaths (2012), in the light of finding which dire a friend lent me his DVD, so I know why people expected better from McDonagh writing / directing again.

In truth, though, what seemed like an under-par performance from common link Colin Farrell (as Ray) threatened to have me stop watching (either because it was too close to the use to which he was put in Psychopaths, or, perhaps, because I had thought more of him in another Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream (2007)), which makes it less implausible that Allen had seen this other Farrell film. I am glad that I did not quit, because, around the time that Ken (Gleeson) goes to see Yuri to get a gun, the film picked up for me.

Until then, possibly because I like the place, I had been rather irritated by Ray’s opening condemnation of Bruges as a shit-hole, his refusal to join in with Ken’s spirit of making the best of being sent there, including a smart-arsed comparison with Dublin, and even by his baiting some overweight Americans into chasing him : most of those things came back to haunt, as does the accidental killing that has led Ken to bring Ray to Bruges, and make the ending powerfully effective. Yes, the final theme does owe something to the t.v. series Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), and maybe even to the feeling of The Truman Show (1998), but I did not see it coming.

Early on, there had been palpable references to the exchanges between Gogo and Didi from Beckettt’s Waiting for Godot, to the situation in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter** (and, for good measure, to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as Ken is flustered and cannot remember which of the two aliases used is his), and I wrongly wondered how original the writing was going to be, before realizing that they were probably passing mentions (almost inevitable in a work with buddies).

Equally fleeting appeared the echoes of Dante in the theological chat, both in front of the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Last Judgement², of which we are shown details from the centre panel, at the art gallery, and on the bench afterwards. (Giving a message to Death, anatomy lessons involving human dissection, and gruesome, if miraculous, saints’ lives had all preceded the Bosch scenes, and pricked Ray’s sensibility (and conscience ?).)

Stepping back a bit, the film opens with these words, narrated over night-time shots by an unseen Ray :

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: Get the fuck out of London, you’s dumb fucks – get to Bruges ! [quotation truncated]


However, we may not have fully caught these words, and, because of hearing the voice saying that he did not know where Bruges was (and so momentarily feeling superior ?), may not later spot a mismatch. This occurs when a boy with adults, whom Ray sees walking across a square, gives rise to a flashback, at the end of which Ray is dragged (seemingly by Ken) from the scene where a priest and a boy lie dead (re-enter Pinter ?).

At the end, as Ray is being put on a stretcher, and, from Ray’s point of view, we see an oxygen-mask being lowered (shades of John Simm as Sam Tyler, and Beckettt’s doubt-filled trilogy ?), we hear him narrate again, as the stretcher slides inside an ambulance :

[…] And I thought, if I survive all this, I’ll go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison, death – it didn’t matter. Cos, at least in prison, and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me, and I realized. Fuck, man - maybe that’s what Hell is : the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges ! And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die…


We have followed Ken and Ray thus far, latterly with their boss Harry Waters (another stunning role for Ralph Fiennes, that champion scene-stealer), as the triangle has been brought together by principle, betrayal, disobedience and sacrifice, centring in Bruges (words that unforcedly ring through the screenplay). Harry, who had professed a boyhood wonder for the place when he speaks to Ken, stalks through it, so fixed on his quarry that he scarcely seems to see it and its Christmas magic, which we, too, then feel less with the tense - turning to pounding and grinding - music of the chase, reminiscent of that of The Matrix (1999).

Both Ken and Ray still have life in them when, by rights (though I do not have the knowledge of the Flemish anatomists shown earlier) one might have thought that they should be dead. It is Ken’s bid to save Ray (just as it was when Ken, about to kill, stopped Ray shooting himself and put him on a train) that elevates matters above one killer (Ken himself) and whether he kills or is killed by another killer (Harry), although we are not really drawn to take sides (but cannot take the extreme behaviour of the ticket-seller of the belfry as reason for what Harry does in reprisal – one for McDonagh’s later tally of psychopaths !). (Stoppardian logic with the scene atop the belfry.)

Unknown to Ray, Harry has apparently wanted him to enjoy Bruges before being executed, but, from first to last, excepting that Chloe lives there (and, even so, he has to insult the city on their date), he never gives it a chance, whereas Ken has been soaking in the sights and experiences. Are there subterranean glimpses, here, of a meaning beyond the superficial, that Ken may be a Clarence to Ray’s George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) – after all, there is Ray’s attempt on his own life, from which Ken, appointed to kill him, saved him (more Stoppardian logic), and, for example, when Ken encourages Ray to look at something during their canal-boat trip, he is hunched in his coat and does not even raise his head ?

Is Ken actually real, or no more so to anyone else than, say, Charles is to John Nash (A Beautiful Mind (2001), or Harvey to Elwood (Harvey (1950), although Harvey is, in fact, visible to others), because, of course, Ray is narrating the story and we only see what he envisages ? Enough in this film, I think, to give us pause whether Ray, like Sam Tyler, may be talking to us and / or himself from a coma, because of the horrific injuries from Harry’s dum-dum bullets (we have seen what one did to the head of Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), dressed as a schoolboy). If Ken is Ray's guide, is he a sort of Virgil to Ray's Dante ?

At the end of the film, the location of the film that is being made⁴ (on which Ray met Chloe) is peopled by some Bosch-like creatures, one of whom knocks Ray to the ground with his beak, and, somehow, Marie from the hotel is there, as well as Chloe (so even a bit of a feel of The Game (1997) or maybe 8½ (1963)).

When, after Chloe and Ray kissed (during which we saw Harry, intend on business with Ken, walk straight past, and Chloe said, of herself, ‘The most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in all of your stupid life’ as a reason for what Ray has to stay for), they took a romantic drink together. When Jimmy came over, he said about his character and that night’s shoot that ‘the psycho-dork turns out to be some loveable schoolboy and it’s all some Boschian nightmare’.

Stephen, in Joyce’s Ulysses, says the much-quoted words History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In this film (with Ray’s past of an accidental shot that killed a praying boy, whose prayers, clutched in his hand, Ray reads), Ray says of history, as a retort to Ken’s interest in it – just before, at the hotel, Ken was reading The Death of Capone – I used to hate history, didn’t you ? It’s all just a load of stuff that’s already happened !, and immediately rushes off, because there are ‘midgets being filmed’.

At that moment, Ray isn’t trying to awake from history, but avoid it, by chatting up (the willing) Chloe, and hearing about the dream-sequence that is being filmed, which, she tells him, is neither a pastiche of, nor an homage to, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), but an overhead : the belfry and all the buildings do not interest him, but Chloe and Jimmy and the film do, and he is drawn to them.

He almost so wants to be part of the film-world that it is no surprise that he ends up on location again in the finale. Chloe had talked about site security, and Ray says that he evaded it, but there is certainly no evidence of any now. Does Ray have a little feel about him of Bill Harford from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (taken from a short story by Schnitzler) ?

However we interpret this film, there are a couple of constants – Ray’s lively, beetling brows (into which Farrell channels much of his acting), and his decorative shirt, which would seem to be the only one that he has (despite the fact that Ken and he are both shouldering bags when they arrive in the city). There are some shots where one can get a closer view of this shirt, and realize that what decorates it, which I took for music for a long time (trying to confirm which detracted from the action and drew attention to what seemed Farrell’s apparent one-dimensionality), is something else.

It cannot really be made out, but could resemble wild-card characters from an ASCII set together with a paper-trace-type pattern (when programs and data were fed in on paper-tape), or, put another way, the ones accessed from a font such as Symbol. Is that it ? Is Ray’s shirt a symbol – is it, as with the letters and numbers that, if one can see them, make up the world of The Matrix, an indication that he is – whether because he is really in a coma or in Hell (or Purgatory) – a piece of source-code amongst all this imagined reality, where Marie, Eirik, and Chloe are all somehow there to see his wounded body carried away ?


Post-script

Whatever Ray may say about Bruges, acting as a dismissive gobshite, when Ken alludes to what has brought him there, he is figuratively on his knees, as he is in front of the vivid depictions in The Groeninge Museum. Although, as dinner with Chloe shows, he is capable of violence in defence of that image, it does not seem to be his inner nature, which is to be fascinated by Jimmy (because he is 'a midget' - a childish state of wonder), to talk blarney to Chloe, to be reduced to the fear and trembling of a schoolboy facing his doom.

As Ray lies wounded, probably likely to die, and is thinking, these parts of him combine in deriving an eschatology where being in Hell equates to being in Bruges : the part of him that hopes, though founded on this extreme aversion, does not want to die and end up there eternally, but, with his wounds, living will necessarily be at the cost of being there for quite a while. If, that is, the whole foregoing has not been confused by his near-death state and he has confused and deluded himself...


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End-notes

¹ For a screenplay apparently originally set in LA.

² The play is a big clue as to what instructions can eventually be expected. (The likeness to Father Ted, where Ken is an amalgam of Ted and Dougal, and Ray a more benign Jack, is less helpful.)

³ The work is a triptych, with the other two panels painted on the inside of doors that are hinged to meet in the middle, which, I gather, was a common method at the time for keeping the main painting concealed and protected when not required for devotional purposes.

Unusually for films, the work is where it is said to be, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, although the opening sequence had, which is why I have checked, made me wonder whether all the gargoyles, statues, moons and the like had been shot on location (as well as whether the topography is fairly represented in the depiction of the scenes).


⁴ Psychopaths tries to repeat this, and other elements of Bruges (e.g. the Harry Waters character is mirrored by Charlie Brooker), with a film within a film, but it just doesn’t work.


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