A less-than-divine comedy ?

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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12 September

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014), which had its UK premiere at

Cambridge Film Festival

According to one who also struggled with Amour Fou (2014), but not in Screen 1 at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse), but at Cannes, the film had been billed as a comedy.

Admittedly, a few people did laugh occasionally, but laughing at the manners of the early nineteenth century from the perspective of two hundred years later, and (not necessarily the same thing) seeing the film not as in earnest, but as pastiche, was clearly – if it was one – a conceit that seemed to have been largely lost on the Festival audience (this was the first Festival screening, the UK premiere) :

Yet watch this film as if it were a serious portrayal of the times and miens of the age, and it is literally tedious, i.e. one could not wait for its long-winded vacuum to be refreshed by the buzz and tang of reality in the Picturehouse bar, or on St Andrew’s Street – anywhere, really, but the world of director Jessica Hausner.

-> Under the Skin (2013), for example, one might not enjoy, but think good, @TakeOneCFF - neither was Amour Fou found good, nor enjoyed.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 10, 2014

From this perspective, it is a lifeless piece about love and death – which soon leaves one craving the relative complexity, affectionate Russian (versus German) lampoonery, and tears of joy of Woody Allen’s own Love and Death (1975). Maybe that was the springboard for this pale story, about a man (Heinrich), who is to and fro between two women with his indecent proposal and a ludicrous – even if period – hat.

Except that the word ‘ludicrous’ connotes laughter, not cringing at the notion that such a whining bore, let alone a poet of talent, should be entertained by any except the most pretentious family : melancholy may still have been the fashion (despite a good work-out in places such as England from the mid-sixteenth to early-seventeenth centuries, with Richard Burton even publishing his guide-book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621), but this Heinrich seems to be almost feigning it as a bargaining tool for what seems, through notoriety, to be a way – if an extreme one – to gain attention for his works.

God forbid, but maybe we were meant to relish Friedrich and Henriette’s implausible patronage, even if, because clearly strained financially, they are lesser nobility / land-owners. Not that one has gone to research the social interaction, the salon life, of Germany in this age (when, in England, Austen would have been preparing Pride and Prejudice for the press), but it seems scarcely likely that any but a Goethe (active at this time) or a Schiller (who died in 1805) might be revered as a person, not just for his or her works, and treated as an equal.

For patronage has ever been an uneasy relationship, but the derogatory opinion of scribbling, and the desire to prove that Shakespeare’s poetry and plays are enobled by really having been produced by such a one as the Earl of Oxford (as beyond the ken of a grammar-school boy from Stratford-on-Avon), have been ever with us, and they linger. Exceptions may lie in real aristocratic patronage, such as what – for him – appear to have been the taxing times for René Descartes (and other scholars and thinkers), at the beck and call of Christina, Queen of Sweden (as Beckettt alludes to in his early prize-winning poem ‘Whoroscope’).

Or, in tribute to the great director, his account of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 – 1798) in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) through the medium of Donald Sutherland – let alone Josef Haydn, languishing first at Schloß Esterházy, then at Esterháza (broadly 1761 to 1790), Johann Sebastian Bach, restricted at the court of Cöthen (1717 to 1723), or Wolfgang Amadeus, running away from service to the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg (1773 to 1777) to Vienna.

In film terms, at any rate, we have another Sleeping Beauty (2011), which defies us to stay awake, and taunts us if we do so and hate it : there, as a student waitressing to pay her way through some course (as part of which she is required to study games theory), Lucy / Melissa (Emily Browning) is short of money. Yet that film is not one about how she is trapped into a form of (or what is little better than) prostitution.

At best, it is her acknowledging to herself what she must have known all along (there have been clues enough) : she is not special, nor is she, though, a Sonmi-451 (in Doona Bae), coming to consciousness (in the visualization of Cloud Atlas (2012)) and stirring up a movement with consequences, any more than Heinrich has an original bone in his body, with his longing for one woman (or the other – it does not matter much to him) to accompany him in his quest for immortality.

In relation to this film, we have scant notion of what Heinrich’s writing might be like – unless the text of the two songs to which we are ‘treated’ (fortepiano and voice, twice each) might be inferred to be his (see below). And many a celebrated Lied has started as an unremarkable poem, from which a musical talent has crafted a finer creation (although also ones by Goethe (Heidenröslein*) or Heine (the settings in Schwanengesang, D. 957) have also been not unequal to being set well).

Those who are acquainted with the plot of Die Marquise von O. (The Marquise of O), but forget that its author was Heinrich von Kleist (to whom our Heinrich does turn out to bear a striking resemblance, physically at least), may be surprised to find Heinrich appearing to pass it off as his own… But would it, any more than if we had been confronted with, say, William in Love, add anything that a version of the real story of Kleist is being told here in semi-disguise (although aspects of Kleist’s life and work have appeared in at least a dozen other films) ?

Well, try comparing this with Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut’s film based on a novel, with a woman in between the two title-characters, and there is no knowingness, no depth, in Heinrich’s wheedling**. Even on the best interpretation of Amour Fou, namely that it wishes to depict for our amusement the foibles of the bourgeois classes and their dangerous flirt with the arts, it has nothing much to say, least of all with its – apparently hypothetical – suggestion about the facts at the end (which, given the preceding confusion and implausible sudden certainty, does not actually surprise, because one had surmised the position to be quite arbitrary).

And one doubts that, ready to laugh, the clumsy consummation of something that was meant to be beautiful (and to transcend the misery of life) either has one laugh – or, if what is felt seems an inappropriate reaction, choke it back.


End-notes

* To which Das Veilchen, a setting of which (twice) we hear, is Goethe’s companion piece : to judge from Wikipedia®, it appears that Mozart's is the most celebrated setting...

** The film is set, if only in static words, in the era of post-Revolutionary France, and amongst the chatter of those who stand to lose concerning the changes to make taxation general, but even that background feels unimportant, if the film wanted to say something to us about our own times. Nothing, in any terms, seems to amplify (by taking us beyond it, in a running-time of what felt much longer than the advertised 96 minutes) the general description given in the Festival’s printed programme…


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

Inside his mind : Iago in the midst

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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19 August (corrected 20 August)

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see the note on screenings below), at 1.00 p.m. on Sunday 7 September (Screen 2)


The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so;
And will as tenderly be led by th’nose
As asses are.

Act I, Scene iii, 390–393

Sometimes the strength of a film lies in the resonance with which it reminds you of your other viewing – and reading.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions - the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?) :

In a similar way, this film invites us to consider whether Othello is a flawed tragic character, distant from our lives as a character in a play by Shakespeare (whose fictionality is celebratedly emphasized by claims that it relies too heavily on a stolen handkerchief*) – or whether the pressures that cause Othello to believe Desdemona unfaithful (and kill her) can be made to act on a Moroccan amateur actor (Youcef), who has been cast in that role for the film that we see being shot (though nothing explains the manner of the direction).

Yet it is no mere framing device, nor no piece of Brechtian alienation technique (Verfremdungseffekt, in the original German), to have cast and crew alike visible to us, but, rather, something that enables us to feel inside the depths of the Shakespeare story : seeing what happens to Ann (Desdemona) and Youcef, a real-life couple for two years, as they play the lead roles is enhanced by seeing how constructed film is as a medium, where, say, the people who hold the sound-booms must also play their part, and this approach is at the centre of why the film has been made. (Otherwise, it would be a much longer Othello, shot on the black, curtained stage-set, and looking like a filmed play (please see below).)

The direction that we see of Youcef, Ann and Kike (as Michael Cassio) on camera may not exactly be Peter Brook (or the play’s adaptation that of Steven Berkoff, or Charles Marowitz), but it is experimenting with the actors and their performances, seeking the life in the latter, trying to find engagement with the text (a word that we see so often in the sub-titles, signifying Action !) : unlike this dynamic process (which is also at the much lighter heart of another Catalan film shown at Cambridge Film Festival, V.O.S. (2009)), we are also reminded that, when we watch a film, it is a finished, duplicated artefact, which will be the same to-morrow as next week (if we choose to watch it again after this evening’s screening).

Otel.lo is, at times, painful to watch, because it goes beyond the stories that we hear about how directors get the take that they want (such as were circulating about the love-scenes had been shot in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)) and into the immoral manipulation and lies of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), yet it is worth doing so because of how immensely it enriches our sense of the operation of jealousy, flirtation, attraction – as real, living feelings and behaviours.

However, as the film develops, and the cast is being put upon, one is in mind of Gloucester, sightless on the heath in King Lear, saying ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’ (Act IV, Scene i)**. Or of Samuel Beckettt’s ironic mimes Act Without Words I and II, with their characters being prompted from without, as well as tempted, seduced, and disappointed.

Linking with texts such as these, and entering into the world of the film, actually widens our appreciation of what happens on screen : scenes with the actors in character become as real as, or more real than, when Ann and Youcef talk singly to camera, with the director asking them questions. Here, unlike the effect of Polanski’s Venus in Furs (2013) (whose ‘staginess’ seemed to negate one’s interest, and to make one question the purpose of the film over the original play), laying bare the artifice heightens the drama.


It may be, as the title’s rendering suggests, a low-budget production that is depicted (for it is a modest team), but, as those who experiment with their cinema- or theatre-going will know, a big budget is not a guarantee of greater satisfaction. For example, another Catalan film that screened at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival, The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), was made on almost no budget, but the film is beautiful, using natural light wherever possible, and without no compromise over quality.

Though running at just over an hour, Otel.lo is complete in itself and not (unlike last year’s micro-budget film The Cherry Orchard (2013)) one that shows preparation for a performance that we do not see : performance and the production are integrated, at all levels, and one simply could not desire the intensity of Otel.lo for longer. As has been suggested, it is meta-textual in a way that is highly thoughtful, and it is sure both to arouse interest, and to provoke differences of opinions about what its core-values are.


Othello :
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body ?


Iago :
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.

Act V, Scene ii, 297–300

This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings, etc. :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


End-notes

* E.g. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693).

** Yet, later in the play, Edgar (who had providentially met Gloucester) feigns other identities to lead his father to what the other thinks is the edge of the cliffs at Dover – Gloucester is persuaded to believe that he has survived pushing himself off the edge, and that his life thus has a meaning.


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

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

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This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


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

From the archive : The Language of Insults

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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11 May

The Language of Insults


Let’s abuse each other !

Waiting for Godot, Act I

If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem, again, to be polysyllabic.)

OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because, they say, they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a ‘fucking psycho’, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (For we use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting, or of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if beautified, goes along the lines We don’t like you – or want you around – because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here, where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust .
Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic

At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I suggest :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make...


End-notes

* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').

** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

*** Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :
man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .

**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.


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

From the #UCFF archive : The Lottery Ticket (submitted to @BBCRadio3 as a competition entry)

The Lottery Ticket :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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11 May

The Lottery Ticket :

Six Numbers

[In homage to Stravinky’s Jeu de Cartes
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)]

To Svetlana

Alex frowned.

He had become captivated (again) by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and now he just didn’t know how to go on… In particular, he found the story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ perplexing, and his equilibrium upset. (This was, of course, before technology would render his musings virtually redundant, but at the impossibly high cost of re-creating another Borgesian fantasy, that of a library without end or catalogue, or even meaning.)

Despite the clear reference to another of this century’s great writers in the name of ‘the sacred latrine’, which – maybe? – threatened to undermine the whole edifice as artifice, was there ironic plausibility in the claim that ‘A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out’? After all, hadn’t he heard that the same writer, in his A Universal History of Infamy, had plundered – or rather dismembered – the Encyclopaedia Britannica in search of tales of ‘Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’ and of ‘The Tichborne Claimant’?

That being so, why shouldn’t there be a grain of truth in a lottery in an ancient land decreeing ‘that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates’, or giving rise to a world where it could be said that ‘Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave’?

He cursed Borges under his breath at the notion that, in the simple frustration that he just couldn’t know the answer, there lay the beauty of the text, and, in search of sleep, turned over once more.

13

* * * * *

Christy woke him – too early! – the following morning, with a shake. ‘Wassamatter?’, he raged incoherently. ‘Your mother is here’, came the stark answer that brought him unerringly into the wakefulness that he sought to avoid. Christy had a knack for doing that, and for being to hand as the (logically necessary) messenger-boy in the first place.

Alex threw on some clothes, and descended into the farmhouse kitchen. There, indeed, she was, brandishing a pale pink oblong of paper. ‘Now I’ll be rid of the lot of you!’, she shrieked; ‘And you all told me, over and over till I nearly was, that I was out of my mind!’. He had no idea what she was talking about, but there was no chance to find out, because she had metamorphosed into Science Officer Spock, complete with tricorder, blue top, and those ever so slightly kinky boots, and started flying around the room.

He jerked himself awake, regretting that the act of emergence meant that, the revels being, though thankfully, ended, he would have to face the day.

And who the hell was Christy?, he railed to himself. (Or was that, as he surmised as soon as he’d said it, an unbidden consequence of listening to Beckettt’s All That Fall…?)

8

* * * * *

Across the heath, he spotted a shape on the horizon. Not having the patience for it to materialize in a long shot, like Peter O’Toole on horseback, he busied himself with some papers: if, whether or not bearing scythe, it was for him, it would be there soon enough. But where were his notes from the other evening?!

When the knock came at the door, he descended. He half-expected Maria Andreevna – although she was no horsewoman – and accordingly started puzzling at why that term conjured up a satyr-type hybrid for him, whereas the word ‘horseman’ didn’t.

In fact, it was Dr Wassimiter, ever darkly cloaked against the wind. As usual, in the six or more hours that he was with Alex, he drank tea, kvaas and vodka to excess, and consumed copious pickled beetroot and herring, but, most importantly, he had brought the love-note that was so long awaited.

Alex waved him on his way, and fell to opening it.

19

* * * * *

Her carriage came crisply for him at ten, glistening with frost. At first, he was disappointed at the thought that it had been sent to him empty after all, but the pallor of her unveiled face gave her away, when she tried to sneak a further look.

Ably helped, amidst a cloud of powder, he climbed the steps that the footmen let down for him, but, losing his balance at the summit, almost fell into the furs on top of her! Scarcely a fit way to greet your queen when she condescends to call you to have your future read – a horoscope likely cast whilst the Englishman improvised a fantasia or two, and that other saucy fellow embellished further the record of his sexual conquests!

7

* * * * *

All at once, she was Leni to his Josef K., betraying the advocate with her passion, toppling and crushing the piles of paperwork over and over under her willing back.

Or Frieda, bringing the odour of the slops and swill into Klamm’s private rooms at the Herrenhof, into which K. and she had penetrated to avoid the tiresome attention of the assistants – and now found themselves alone, as never before since his arrival in the village, with the luxury to enjoy (rather than snatch at) sex.

He came close behind her, nuzzling the side of her neck and covering it with kisses, as he crossed his hands under and embraced her breasts.

Yes, to-night was the night!

29

* * * * *

As he drove her home the next morning, she caught him unawares, just after he had taken the gentle S-bend by the church.

‘What are you looking like that for, like you’ve won the lottery?’, she said, slyly.

46

31 January

Copyright ® Belston Night Works 2010

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Stranded (Excuse the pun) ?

This is a review of The Sea (2013)

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8 May

This is a review of The Sea (2013)

With no knowledge of the prize-winning novel from which John Banville is credited with adapting the screenplay, one can only comment on other literary features that are apparent, the whiff of L. P. Hartley’s child- and class-centred novel The Go-Between* (also the film of that name from 1970), the feel of Harold Pinter’s troubling Old Times, and of Cocteau’s also troubling text Les Enfants Terribles (and his influence on Jean-Pierre Melville's directorship of Cocteau's screen adaptation). (Not to mention the ring and aura of many Irish actors who have played in Beckettt’s work, or read it aloud.)

The Pinter has a direct link here, for Rufus Sewell, this film’s register-twisting adult male (Carlo Grace), played opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams as Deeley when they magnificently alternated the roles of his wife Kate (reviewed here when KST played her) and Kate’s friend Anna (likewise reviewed – and that on the last night of the run at The Harold Pinter Theatre**).

Where, o where, to start writing about The Sea (2013), as screened at @CamPicturehouse ? Not derivatively, but a debt to Pinter, Hartley...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2014

Sewell brings to the part the mix of lightness and indefinable menace that he found in Deeley, and serves perfectly for Connie Grace’s (Natascha McElhone’s) mate, she seeming to be carefree – and open to misinterpretation (not only tones of Hartley, but also of the mystery of childhood for Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (from 2002), who is similarly drawn back to his past). Connie, more welcoming than Carlo gustily feigns to be, does not reckon with the backlash from Carlo’s and her playful high spirits, in invasive yet immersive scenes that we cannot, deep down, utterly credit being remembered aright (any more than the Pinter trio’s competitive claims for their time in London), because (through colour-balancing in shooting or post production) they are tinged with colour, golden light – as if of a Golden Age.

The mixture of fascinated flirting, stark inadequacy / naivety, and simply being in love with this unworldly family of Graces that Matthew Dillon brings to the role of Max Morden has us hooked into what he feels and then tries to think through – without that immediate involvement with his world, his viewpoint, nothing that Ciarán Hinds brings to his stark, rather gruff universe, whose colour (in a Night and Day contrast, especially at the key moment in the drama) seems to have been sucked from it, would move and affect us.

If we are tempted to think that it is a mystery falsely postponed that Hinds’ character keeps from Charlotte Rampling’s, and hers from him, that each knows who the other is, then it is best thought of as an unfolding : as in Old Times, the power is not in knowing (or guessing) the story, but, as always with Pinter (or in mature Beckettt), in the telling itself, the words, actions, nuances.

As also with Pinter, the resolution – if there is one – is on the level of some sort of acceptance. Max Morden (Hinds), suspicious of whether fellow guest Karl Johnson (Blunden) has a real or invented military past, suspicious and frightened, in fact, of so much, and feeling such pain, hurt and guilt, senses that he has misjudged this man. Perhaps, in his heart, he senses that, even if the forces background is a convenient fabrication, then not only have been his own references to ‘my parole officer’ (or maybe needing to write about Pierre Bonnard), but also the stories and confusions with which he has dogged himself / allowed himself to be dogged by through some misplaced respect, reverence even…

The Sea impresses strongly with how it has been shot and put together, no least as a worthy companion for the stunning Calvary (2014) and its own Irish grounding. Not, in that trite way, that the location is another character – just to the extent that Morden, shunning the present, seeks to inhabit this place in County Wexford, and finds that he has the weight of its cruel reminders to bear, borne in Hinds’ terrified expression of being in thrall.

In its way, more alarming for Morden than the demons of Event Horizon (1997), though not, for us, with its lingering mood (or that of Under the Skin (2013)), but rather with a final promise of peace, which could be as redemptive as that of Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013).


End-notes

* For no very good reason, a dear friend thinks of it as The Gobi Twin (though a title of some resonance after all).

** That review has, at the time of writing, a staggering 1,302 page-views on the blog, the other just 88… !




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

There are other kinds of violence

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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13 April (the day on which Samuel Beckettt claimed to be born, which was also Good Friday that year...)

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

In two parts, which deliberately balance, these words from Saint Augustine appear on the screen at the beginning of Calvary (2014) (Irish writer Samuel Beckettt clearly refers to these words from St Augustine (from his Confessions*) in Waiting for Godot**) :

Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved.
Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.


John Michael McDonagh’s careful, challenging film*** is a meditation, which loses us as to time (despite the fact that the days of the week count down), but roots us in space – almost in the way that The American (Tom Berenger) causes ‘Bull’ McCabe (Richard Harris) to fixate upon the piece of land that gives The Field (1990) its title (a film in which Gleeson appears). Brendan Gleeson, as Father James, seems to live more, which is arguably also on a symbolic level, in the week in which we are with him than the running-time suggests is possible, just as The Field painfully evokes an eternal struggle in a small compass.

At @CamPicturehouse, @CalvaryFilm is Tremendous piece of work !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Subtly, but in every scene (or group of scenes, or the principal scene for the day of the week), there is a base colour – almost as if signifying the Biblical rainbow that the Book of Genesis tells us was established as a covenant between Man and God (9 : 13 (to prevent a further flood and another Noah)), and possibly chiming with Stockhausen’s colour-scaped composition Licht, comprising an opera for each day of the week.

Thus, the tinges in Fr. James’ beard foreshadow his daughter’s hair, and, when she comes into his room and his dog Bruno is lying on the bed and he is reading on a chair next to her, the camera catches her face, the light from the window on her left cheek, and the beauty of her hair. The pattern of coloration, however it turns out to work on a re-viewing, is there, and indicates McDonagh’s underlying thoughts have engaged with the full resonance of his chosen theme, a circumscribed passage of time.

Calvary (2014) rejoices in its colours - copper, red, grey, blue, to name but a few, and is a wonderful script that Brendan Gleeson embodies
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Much else in the film, in other ways, is unspoken (or present in an unvoiced way), and much requires reflection. For example, Fr. James had been married, and his wife, the mother of Fiona (Kelly Reilly), whom he meets from the station, had died what sounds an agonizing death (but there is no more to tell us about her, other than an exchange between Fiona and her father). On Tuesday (maybe Monday) Fiona arrives by train (perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps because of what has just happened to her), and we gradually infer – confirmed by what is said in the pub to those who do not know who Fiona – who she is in relation to him :

At the moment of his meeting her, the connection is suitably opaque, and we momentarily wonder. We wonder, in part, because of how Gleeson, in the police in The Guard (2011), chooses to spend his day off, and how he balances duty and personal life – a theme that recurs here. As to what is happening to Fr. James in this time that we are with him, the only person who knows that anything is amiss is his Bishop (David McSavage) (from what Fr. James says to him).

The Bishop counsels, but seems greatly to respect Fr. James, and does not intervene, does not require him to do certain things, even when something dramatic happens – their exchange of thoughts and views is full and frank, and Gleeson plays another character who commands respect, as his Sergeant Boyle did from FBI Agent Wendell (Don Cheadle) in The Guard. As James is, Boyle is an educated man, although they wear their knowledge differently and to different effect – Boyle does not accord with the expectations of the local force, and makes a rare link with Wendell, whereas, in Calvary there is a barrage of sophistry and posture, as if to shake James out of his faith, and he uses his intelligence as a resource (much as his character Ken, with his appreciation of art and culture, does in In Bruges (2008), not as the inconvenient piece of integrity that it can be to Boyle.

Though not exhaustively or exclusively, Fr. James takes kinds of escape from reality on both Friday, and Saturday. He well knows what he might have to do or face, but he has had a week of others who say that they do not want things that he can see that they do, and vice versa, and they have begun to take their toll on him. In this and other respects, this film has obvious echoes with Bergman’s famous The Seventh Seal (1957) (and, in this film, we even see the outcome of a gentlemanly game of chess between two men who might have reason to be at odds). As in that classic, too, time is a dimension, and the question of how one best judge what requires one’s attention.

The close of Calvary (2014) had @THEAGENTAPSLEY in tears - what a beautiful film, thoughtfully scripted, and made with everyone's care !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Yet, in a sense (though this earlier film by no means precisely maps onto it), Calvary is also an inverted D.O.A. (1950) (with Edmond O’Brien (as Frank Bigelow), and re-made in a version with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in 1988), but with Gleeson in some sort of driving-seat, though not in full command of where the vehicle will go…

Anyone watching Calvary (2014) should wait till the end of the credits : there are stills and footage embedded in them...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Gleeson is a whirlwind of pastoral roles in this film, and one cannot conceive anyone else bringing off the part, supported admirably by Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Orla O’Rourke, Isaach de Bankolé, M. Emmet Walsh, and Chris O’Dowd, to name but a few, and with highly sympathetic contributions from Patrick Cassidy’s score and Larry Smith’s cinematography.


End-notes


* According to Deirdre Bair, who was Beckettt’s first biographer (Samuel Beckettt : A Biography, Jonathan Cape, London, 1978)), ‘The image first took on meaning for Beckettt as early as 1935, when he read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and began to use the expression to define either / or situations. It appears repeatedly in his correspondence [Bair cites the following correspondents in her note (p. 692) : George Reavey, Arland Ussher, Mary Manning Howe, and Thomas McGreevy] from that time onward […] (p. 386)’.


** Against Estragon’s twice saying ‘No’ when asked if he would like to hear, but justified to him by Vladimir on the basis that ‘It’ll pass the time’, Vladimir tells Estragon about the varying accounts of crucifixion (Waiting for Godot, Faber & Faber, London, 1965, pp. 12 – 13). Just before, when Estragon had been examining his hat and his feet, and not listening to him (p. 11), he said these words, on which he elaborates :

One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage.

There is at least one other Beckettt reference in Calvary, when the woman over whose husband Father James has earlier said the last rites, sees him again at the airport, and she fleetingly employs the closing words of his novel The Unnamable : I can’t go on I’ll go on.


*** McDonagh wrote and directed it, as he did The Guard (2011), in which Gleeson also stars.


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I don’t want the spring to come

This is a review of Mother and Son (1997)

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21 February

This is a review of Mother and Son (1997)

* Contains spoilers *

It is not just the nature of the relationship that makes one think of it, because one’s thought is not there, say, with Kristin Scott Thomas as Iva and Marin Orcand Tourrès as Noé in Looking for Hortense (2012) (though she, arguably, is a stepmother, and he too young), but about the quality of the tenderness and the gestures between Aleksei Ananishnov and Gudrun Geyer that makes one think of Jesus and his mother Mary, of the Way of the Cross (Via Crucis), of the crucifixion (Woman, this is your son), and of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

A painterly or sculptural sensibility in the composition and lighting of shots is evident from the opening scene, with the foreground – the mother’s dramatically foreshortened supine body, which yet seems to ripple like waves – relatively dark, and the son lying at right angles, his head by her head, in an uncertain space, and with what seems as though it might be an opaque window onto the luminous sea and sky behind him (for we can hear the ocean, the waves and the wind).

There is a playfulness as well as a more serious connection between the mother and her carer, with her saying that she is ‘pretending’ to be ill, and, though seemingly seriously, concerning herself that she has nothing to wear in the spring, whereas there seems no one to see what one wears (and the son says that he has nothing special to wear either).

When the pair are first seen together in the light, she pale, he ruddy, there is a momentary flicker of Beckettt’s Endgame (Hamm and Nell) in the contrast of the faces, and, over the whole 73 minutes, set in and around what appears to be a small former church or chapel, there is an air of finality, as of something playing itself out*. It is partly built by the fragmentary musical accompaniment, which seems to be a familiar theme refracted (it sounded like Bach, later Brahms, but is credited as Glinka, Verdi and one other), which causes the mind to ruminate, but not reach an answer.

The topography of indoors and the world beyond remain oblique, though, in the former, there is a raised area that could be an altar (or a stage), and the mother, when lying in bed, is in a recess that is surrounded by a stone lintel and so resembles a side-chapel, a bier, or a tomb. The sea that is so much part of the soundtrack is only seen twice, once indistinctly**, and near this place the railway runs, and, at one point, we half wonder whether the son might catch a train and disappear.

Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (1997) evokes Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975) with its wind-blown crop and steam-train...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 20, 2014

Atmospheric in the extreme (because of the skilful use of sound and music), and with even the motion of the train that we see seeming restrained, held back, this is a film at a pace that is determined by the body, by falling in and out of sleep (where the dreams of the two seem to be the same, and to be overladen with poetic words), and by slowly going on ‘a walk’, which is the son carrying his mother. We have no notion how many times these things may have happened before (as with Endgame), but are in the immediacy of the present :

When she is laid on a bench at the front of the building, and – until he comes back into shot and cradles her head in a sort of crouching position, which brings their faces together again – we fear that she will fall, her physical fragility is emphasized by how the camera moves around her, first from a view that heightens the sense again of her being laid out, and then by him coming into shot and the support that he gives, touching her hair, and covering her over. The direction dares keep us wait and beg our patience, time and again, and so heightens the stillness at the centre of this place, despite being in the midst of the noise of the elements.

During the walk, he at least twice puts her on her legs, and countless times lays her down in a comfortable spot, which stresses, large man though he is, at what cost he takes her out in this way. The second time, in a clump of four silver birches and where he leans her against one, we again feel that she is defying gravity, so closely do we believe that this is not an actress who is, of course, capable of standing up - the uncertainty adds to their brief moment, standing side by side and exchanging a few words.

In such a moment in particular, the external world resembles indistinct watercolours, ones that seem to have been deliberately smudged***, not unlike the impression of some of Gerhart Richter’s paintings. This aesthetic of the film, both in its visual and musical elements, feels quite akin to that of Tarkovksy, say where the lens roams over a print of The Adoration of the Magi (by Leonardo da Vinci) in The Sacrifice (1986), his last film, and where the sound of the organ approaches, and then moves away from, a motif that cannot quite be placed****.

Just in a couple of places, the translation (originally rendered into German with dubbing, so the film bears the title Mutter und Sohn) foxes us, such as where the son urges ‘Yourself, yourself’, and, less obscurely, where she later says ‘You got me out’, but this is a slight defect, and cannot detract from the intense feeling in this film.

In its heart, it embodies a meeting with the truth, such as when she says that she was told that he would be clever, but heartless, and he replies I am a cold person : bit by bit, we are subtly asked questions about our own humanity and mortality.


End-notes

* Beckettt’s text has other phrases, which are resonant with this mood, such as Outside of here it’s death.

** The other time is during his walk alone, where we progress from cliffs to a glade, tree trunks, the sound of a bell, and a sailing-vessel at sea.

*** The Wikipedia page for the film suggests some of the techniques used.

**** There, as in this film, the result is more effective, and less inducive of a sensation of nausea, than Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen.


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