Can you just put the tops back on these jars, please ?

This is a review of The Trip to Italy (2014)

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22 May

This is a review of The Trip to Italy (2014)

* NB A very crude headline, from The Trip (2010), is quoted *

There were things riding on The Trip to Italy (2014), where they had not been earlier at Cambridge Film Festival for The Trip (2010), and it easily won the double.

The Q&Awas wonderful, @CamPicturehouse, and, if possible, made the pleasure of The Trip to Italy (2014) even greater. Thanks, all !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 21, 2014

Afterwards, in the Q&A broadcast by satellite from one of the London Picturehouses, Steve Coogan gave credit to director Michael Winterbottom for the whole being greater than the sum of the parts (though Coogan twice succeeded in avoiding that classic formulation), which Rob Brydon (@RobBrydon) humorously undercut by saying that he disagreed, and that it was just a matter of pressing play and record. (Winterbottom was in the audience, but was not taking part, which Coogan impishly attributed to wishing to appear profound, and so not saying anything that might give a contrary impression.)

What Winterbottom has done with both films is to craft something in cinematic terms whose essential premise has also given rise to six-part series of thirty minutes : for the films feel like films, not cut down in any way from something else, and it appears that there is material in the film that is not in the series and vice versa, alongside what is in both (at any rate, that was what seemed to have been said when The Trip screened at Cambridge).

Thank you Italy, Winterbottom, Cooganand @RobBrydon for a lovely combination via @CamPicturehouse : as great to watch as The Trip (2010) !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 21, 2014

This film reverses the roles a little from the earlier one, with Coogan not so much the know-all who has learnt facts and quotations to throw into the conversation and impress, but a man with ‘a hiatus’ that conveniently leaves him free to accompany Brydon (one which, it turns out, he hopes will not extend into winter), whereas we see the latter succeed with wooing and work. [We should, however, be calling these semi-fictionalized sides to Coogan and Brydon by the names Steve and Rob, so that when we can tell at a glance whether actor or role is meant…]

For the Steve who pontificates triumphantly in the abbey ruins in The Trip, or who wondrously meets someone with a newspaper bearing the startling headline STEVE COOGAN IS A CUNT, bears a resemblance to Coogan, but only as a starting-point for bringing friends Rob and Steve together for a week of driving, joking, eating and thinking in an invented newspaper commission to cover some culinary hot-spots. The Steve of that film definitely wants to impress more, but, when Coogan said in the Q&A that he tried to learn a couple of quotations from Byron each night to throw into the next day’s improvisation, there is little knowing which is Winterbottom’s creating a persona for Steve, or Coogan embellishing it.

What, though, is clear is that Steve is perfectly de Niro at the lunch on Thursday, and that, in reverse role, Rob truly cracks him up with his inventiveness as Parky : in the Q&A, Brydom let us into the knowledge that he had done it so well, because he had been fired up by some antagonism with Coogan, and, when he felt it just working out, went with it. Who says that it is just oysters that can be irritated to produce pearls ?

When asked about how making the two films compared, Brydon said that this one had been more convivial, and Coogan readily agreed with him, repeating the word. Brydon also said that he had been surprised, in the first one, that Coogan would just suddenly declare We’re not using this !, and so seek to gain control over the material – from which we gathered that there was none (or less) of that this time.

In giving the pair Alanis Morissette’s debut album Jagged Little Pill from 1995 to have with them in the car (though skipping the already much-ridiculed track ‘Ironic’), Winterbottom* seemed, they thought, to be off key. However, they then realized that it worked, and that, in 2014, men of their age would be revisiting it** – simply the resource of that album gave them scope, over several car journeys, for :

* Speculations about how to say ‘Alanis’ (because Steve, with his flat in LA, says that names are pronounced in the States as one chooses) – and then Rob points out that she AM is Canadian

* Then wondering whether, if the name Alan made it there, it would be stressed on the second syllable, and making it long vowel-sound – ‘My name is Alahn’

* Singing along to a track, or interjecting comments between the words, or wondering where Avril Lavigne stands in relation to AM

* Steve’s comment about the sort of interesting woman whom Morisette once represented, but to whom one would now say Can you just put the tops back on these jars, please ?…


The delightful thing is that, when Steve overlooks that Morisette is not from the same part of North America, it is so seamless that we do not know whether Steve has been led astray by Coogan or by Winterbottom. Likewise, when they are boarding the ferry in the direction of Capri, Steve makes a comment about what an instrument-case is made of – as if, from his reply, Rob could care. It may be Steve / Coogan showing off his knowledge, but he is calling what is obviously too small to be anything other than a case containing a cello a double-bass.

With beautiful scenery and cinematography, Steve grumping at having to take photos of Rob with various Byronic or Shelleyean inscriptions (until, that is, the photographer from last time turns up again), and the sheer good-humoured balance of reflecting on mortality*** and enjoying the present, there is plenty enough to enjoy – with all the references to films and stars, with even a Mafia vignette woven in as Rob’s guilty, vengeful dream towards Steve****, The Trip to Italy is a delightful way of enjoying two men being together against the backdrop of history, their usual lives, and their desires, summed up in the shimmering waters off Capri into which Steve and his son dive.

What a shame no one asked whether the Andrew Graham Dixon Italy series ripped off The Trip (2010) / influenced The Trip to Italy (2014)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 21, 2014

End-notes

* Who had made the car a Mini so that they could make reference to The Italian Job – and, of course, to Michael Caine, on imitating whom Steve delights in giving Rob a masterclass in The Trip…

** Coogan insisted on correcting Brydon that they are not both 49, because he has not yet reached his birthday (Happy birthday for 14 October, Steve !).

*** With Brydon even, to Steve’s feigned / Coogan’s real disgust, giving his Small Man Trapped in a Box voice to a supine figure in a plastic box at Pompeii, and then having the Small Man agree with him about Steve being square (This is a real person, Steve says) : as the scene goes on, the humour wins through, at Steve’s expense. (Steve had the last laugh, because, in the Q&A, Brydon realized that his vocal chords would not let the Small Man out just then…)

**** A question by Tweet, via host Boyd Hilton, asked what each man thought most of the other. Brydon said that he had grudging respect for Coogan, who, hesitating to reciprocate, said (and seemed genuine) being at ease with what he has / who he is, amplifying that this is something that he has improved on, but Brydon is still better at doing.


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

The Physics of Poetry

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26 November

Well, you've heard of The Tao of Physics (or even The Tao of Pooh), so why not?

What I mean is a poetry reading, rather than reading (or writing) poetry, and looked at from the point of hearing of a member of the audience (screw the poets – for they choose to do this, and they, or their contacts (or their contacts’ contacts), then involve the listeners in being there, perhaps as witnesses, perhaps as priests, offering or withholding the sacrament).

It is both a very physical (sometimes exhausting) experience – closet close in quiet, concentrate on confessions, confused by colour, word-choice, syntax – and one that, unlike interactions that have a chemistry, is a creature of physics. Why physics, not biology?

OK, the larynx, the vocal-chords, they are necessary participants, just as are ears and auditory processing (What did he just say? Oh, he did slip in ‘fuck’ after all – have I caught what he said next?), but they are in what we call chemistry, what, when there are more people present, we like to call ‘the group dynamic[s]’.

No, this is physics, because bodies are in rotation or opposition about or on the fulcrum of the reading, and they could be as massive as planets, or as tiny as motes (probably not at the same time). Into that void, from who knows where, the reader-poet advances a proposition, a poem (or the so-called prose-poem, as if there could be a cigarette-cigar, for a cigarillo certainly isn’t it), which might be met by a laugh or two, shocked inhalations or a snort, but largely by silence.

Is it even over? Is usually not registering, even by the crude measure of applause, a proper response until what follows I’ll finish with this one is clearly finished just borne out of fear of jumping in too soon? Or is there some more delicate formality in play, some respectful reverence into which sounds other than those that escape us despite ourselves (no, I didn’t mean those) are not meant to intrude?

Perhaps, with some reader-poets, each poem is a letter, spelling – or threatening to spell – the name of God, but one succeeds another, and some of them almost seem to found their sense of success (and succession) on how much distortion and noise they have added.

I do not believe that it can always have been like this with public performances, but I must research it to see if I can find how, for example, a reading of his works by Robert Browning or, better still, Lord Byron was received. (At the opposite extreme is the recital where, despite a clear indication that songs accompanied by piano are to be treated as a group, those present insist on clapping after every one, utterly with the potential to put off the soprano or counter-tenor for (or by) whom a sequence of three or four songs had been conceived as part of the whole.)

And, if I had ten or a dozen poems that might even be worth being heard, I’d allow those present to see the text of what they were hearing (or not, if they preferred the mental crossword-puzzle of fathoming form and content from sound), and I’d memorize those poems (so never do it, as my memory doesn’t favour input in a prescribed form), and I’d learn to look around at those around me, to engage them and engage with them.

I know that I should, because a guy called Mark Waldron did it the other night. Moreover, he didn’t use language to show off his knowledge (or what passes for it), he didn’t just entertain with his rich conceits, and he recited in such a way that I was quite clear of his literal meaning, without abnormal accentuation or the obscurity of the prized referent that has to be explained first.

Poor man’s contumely? There’s always that danger, but I hope the recognition that there is more of stand-up in reading poetry than is given credit for – the comedian needs to know whether the audience is being reached (imagine the straitjacket of no spontaneous applause during a set), and the audience needs to feel that the comedian is reaching out to them with his or her words, not just delivering a joke or story with flatness and expecting their approval as if his or her due.


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