Descent into raggedness - the studio version

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

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16 October

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

* Unlike the director's cut, it may be possible to read this version and still see the film without knowing too much already *

I loved Lindsay Duncan in Shooting the Past, vulnerable but knowing, so it is only the ever-present hat that gives me pause with Le Week-End
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2013

Thankfully, Lindsay Duncan only wears the hat at the end - and one soon forgets the title...


Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...

The end references a film clip from Godard, conveniently - unless it is a DVD, not t.v. - on the screen earlier on, but it have been nicer for the film just to have mimicked it, without explanation...

I am unsure about that (or the message that it sends, which will be visited in the director's cut of this posting). I also wonder about Haneif Kuresihi writing the screenplay, and will also need to look into that.

As to the raggedness, when trying to characterize it to someone after the screening who had not seen it, we agreed that the over-elaboration of different styles and types of shot highly resembled someone who is doing a first PowerPoint presentation, and, just because he or she can, having this slide coming in from the left, the next one dissolving - it does not add to the cinematic discourse, but disperses our attention when the crisp focus does not have a function, the arty shot with foregrounded objects wildly out of focus another, and becames variation for the sheer reason of being able to do it, rather than advancing the interpretative message.

The music leaves something to be desired, too. Famously, in the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), Miles Davis and his quintet improvised it in December 1957 : rather cheaply, the composer's sub-Milesian tones were just brought in, from time to time, to convey the beauté triste (if that is the right word order) of Paris, lovers, life. Otherwise, it sounded more like shopping music, vaguely colouring the mood with a sort of sepia, or hitching a ride on Dylan (or the Godard film).

I had my reservations, but the Jim Broadbent strand in Cloud Atlas actually worked in well - plus he is in Le Week-End (avec Le Toast)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2013

Those are the very bad things. The plus, an immense one, is the performances of Duncan (Meg Burroughs) and Jim Broadbent (as her husband Nick), although one did feel that one had been there a bit before with a quietly spoken Duncan not knowing her own mind or why she hides behind her husband and such reputation as he has. That apart, when she says that she'd like to stop teaching, learn Italian, play the piano, and dance the tango, we utterly believe in her desire to transform her live.

We believe in this couple, the dangerousness of being them, and how they surprise, hurt and electrify each other. We believe in Nick, despite an injured knee, on all fours, and wanting to scent Meg's vagina. We believe in him trailing after her, forlornly calling out Meg, Meg, wait, no, when she flounces out on him.
With Jeff Goldblum in the equation, who seems totally unknowing but not necessarily insincere, the implausibility creeps in - as is said at a dinner party, his character, Morgan, is always loud. What we have to say is how he would he possibly have recognized Nick, in a passionate embrace (cheered on by younger French people), from the back of his head, and how, in this world of Facebook and Google, he would not possibly, if he wanted, have known what Nick was doing and made contact. Morgan's entry, not least as described, seemed forced, as if rescuing the plot from not knowing what it intended.

Goldblum's role just about works, though, nice though it was to see him, he was unremarkable. With the film ending as it does, he ends up as more of a magical figure - and, after what Nick says at dinner, it is hard to imagine that Morgan would be calling down the stairs saying when do you leave, do you have to go, send me a text-message, if you do not want to talk.

All in all, the Morgan involvement is unhurried, but lax in the overall sense of cramming in the enjoyment, and clearly only there to provide a deviation from Nick and Meg just together. I am not sure that it spoils the film, but one imagines that Kureishi could have made progress with the couple (in the film's terms) in some way less striking as a contrivance.

Despite the gratuitous ragged cinematography, the film deserves a watch, if only to mull over these questions afterwards.


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

Immediacy of the moment

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 October (updated 22 October)

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

96 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 15 / F : 16


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel


I could estimate the running time of this film, but I do not wish to - doing so would only satisfy that curious sensation of how much cinema-time has elapsed.

I had heard the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964) reviewed on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves [now Free Thinking], but nothing prepared me for the perfection of the picture quality - from its age, it must have been restored, and it has been done gorgeously in this digital re-issue.

This is a piece of work that is not afraid to keep you aware that cinema is a social construct, and it has just that remove, that distance to keep us from thinking that we are engaging - or want to engage - with it. By which I mean nothing bad, nothing that did not connect, for a moment, with feeling that we might stray into Georg Büchner's drama Woyzeck, but moved away again. Cinematically, starting with the chain-gang and the laying of railroad tracks, we have just the right level of interest, and the progression of the work seems effortless, with easy, fluid camerawork.

The story - for which I experience no need to seek out what some call a back story - is of a man (Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson) not prepared to be a white man's nigger, which is what he calls the father (a preacher embodied by Stanley Greene) of the woman whom he marries (Josie, played by Abbey Lincoln), and so not finding things easy.

As the closing words say, it is not going to be so, but there is a finality through the arc of lives that has resolved towards the end. It is set, we are told, eight years since the last racial violence, and after Birmingham, Alabama, has been the home of lynchings : as Duff sees it, those lynchings still go on, but are of a different character.

Contemporaneous with Nothing But a Man, co-writer and director Michael Roemer seems only to have directed one other feature*, and then not to have done anything of this kind except with t.v. twenty years later, so it is hard to know what perspective a Berlin-born child of 1928 brought to these tensions, or how the film was received in the mid-1960s (now see below, on the latter point, and follow the links for how the film came to be made).


End-notes

* According to the Wikipedia® entry for the film, and that given by IMDb for Roemer, he started teaching at Yale University in 1966, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He published a book in 1997, and a two-volume work in 2001, both relating to stories.

Despite winning the San Giorgio Prize at Venice Film Festival, being very favourably reviewed at New York Film Festival, and apparently being a favourite of Malcolm X's, the film was essentially only distributed in film theatres (i.e. cinemas) that specialized in independent and foreign films. In 1993, The Library of Congress selected it to be preserved in The National Film Registry, since when it has achieved a wider release and a warm reception.


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