Showing posts with label Chris Baker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Baker. Show all posts

Saturday 30 November 2013

The cable guy

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013

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


30 November (revised 3 December)

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival


89 = S : 15 / A : 15 / C : 14 / M : 16 / P : 14 / F : 15


A rating and review of Channeling (2013)



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)



The title of Channeling* (2013) is deliberately multivalent, meaning both the sense of He channelled his energies into archery, and putting something on a channel (so that others can see and hear it).

As director / writer Drew Thomas told us in answer to one of my questions, the family of whom Wyatt (Taylor Handley), Jonah (Dominic DeVore) and Ashleigh (Skyler Day) are the grown-up offspring is a dysfunctional one : one son travels from Yemen for a funeral, and is then (in his only real-time appearance) told off by the father for not being there in time. I had asked because, when we see him, as a younger man caught on home video, pick up a boy at whom he has barked orders, it is unclear what he did, but it smacked of abuse.

As with Ashleigh’s confessional moment on camera into the mirror, Thomas said that he had intended to portray a self-loathing that might lead someone to seek approval from ratings for their actions or choices (made or to be made). When we saw this system of rating manipulated in the night club, and indeed the events that had led up to it, the film did seem momentarily a bit insubstantial and trivial in a way that The Bling Ring (2013) is in spades, but it moved away from it, and this was something, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that Thomas almost did throughout the film of mining different genres for what they were worth before moving on, and a little too much at the risk of lacking cohesion.

Saying that, the dummy commercial that opens the film is funny, thought provoking, and satirical, with insights into where the world of Twatter and what I call Arsebook logically lead to – it plunges one straight into a counterfactual world that, as in Looper (2012), does not stray far from the things that we know in what it changes.

The moments of humour characterize the film, although we are not always sure that it is permitted to laugh, and it also expects us to do some work in piecing together what has happened in and following the pursuit sequence that we see. Whether it is the equipment that was giving us the audio or how it has been recorded that made the early dialogue hard to follow was unclear – it might partly have been ‘tuning into’ Wyatt’s accent (different from that of his brother, but then his brother is an army sergeant, and has been serving for a long time), or partly that, as in Top Gun (1986) (for example), those in situations of combat or other peril are not perfectly audible in their pressurized communication.

Not least since this is set in California and begins with a car chase, expectations of topping Drive (2011) spring to mind, but the excitement of the action on the road, and elsewhere, has been styled, Thomas told us, to be more like the era of Dirty Harry (1971) (he did not name that series of films) and of film noir. Just in these things (there was a feel of The Rockford Files or Starsky and Hutch, not least with the token black guy who is the IT whizz), there was already quite a mixture of feels, let alone with a gangland punishment (including a British-sounding baddie ?) that made one wonder if it was going to have equivalent scenes in Seven Psychopaths (2012) or – sticking with Colin Farrell – In Bruges (2008) in its sights.

Whether these disparate elements enhance or dissipate the film’s energies, I remain unsure, as it is all too true that many a science-fiction film sticks to type, whereas this one shows off its director’s literacy of references. It also has an enviable soundtrack, making an impact right with the opening commercial, and even a live band in the night club reminiscent of The Doors.

The other question that I asked relates to a film that I only saw once, but which teasingly plays with the question of free will versus determinism, which is Michael Douglas in The Game (1997) : appropriately ‘channelled’ by the festival’s founder**, Chris King, I asked Thomas whether the technology of people sharing their actions and following their ratings, which the film initially seems to be about, had come first, or whether the deterministic theme had always been what interested him most (it had). He had wanted to explore the ways in which people do not (or refuse) to take responsibility for what concerns them, and had seen a link with how people in the US use the technology of social media to arrive at an answer based on what others tell them.

If that Doors tribute was deliberate, maybe it leads off in some other directions : Maybe not the advocacy of mescalin and other mind-altering substances, though, in the film, we see tablets of what turns out to be called Oxy crushed and then snorted as if it were coke, but using the edge of the pervasive sort of mini-tablet as a straight edge to line it up.

Perhaps the Warhol-type being famous for fifteen minutes, and just doing things to get a higher number of followers, is a sort of intoxicant or tranquillizer, not unlike Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’, not least when we see both what use the club bosses are putting participants’ behaviour to and how they control it ?

All in all, a thoughtful film, even if it may be too much of a rich blend of influences for the competing calls on our attention to allow us to settle down – though, since Thomas seems to have aimed at the feel that it has, and if it does still hold together, it may not be right (in a film about people taking responsibility) to imagine a film that he have made by suppressing some of those instincts***…


Postlude

Through fatigue and oversight, a few comments did not get formulated originally as more than notes, from which this text is developed :

Wyatt is not alone in his perilous exploits, for he has an accomplice (or whose side is she on ?) in Tara (Kate French). When Jonah tries to explore what his elder brother has been up to, Tara's allure is tangible, but her first reaction to Jonah using Wyatt's device and channel is hostile (a number of retorts to his attempts to speak, such as wishing him cancer).

Comparisons between the brothers are inevitable and deliberate, and, although we see that the professional soldier (Jonah) is tough, and can also drive, he is never going to be Wyatt (perhaps a pressure that he has always put on himself, helped by his father's attitude and actions).

Perhaps it is Tara's confusion, on all levels, that leads her to blow hot and cold towards Jonah, but she definitely starts by imputing blame : here, there seems to be a sort of fog of war about who people really are and who did what, which, in a digital age, when people do masquerade, and when the film explores the boundaries between what is real, what staged (and what predictable, what fixed), makes for even greater richness of reference.



Other questions from the Q&A

Had the Eyecast technology been patented ? Thomas seemed pleased enough not to have been sued, and did mention Google glasses (which, he said, make one look like a dork). He did not appear to have investigated whether it had any commercial possibilities.

Was Eyecast a real application (some would say 'app'), or had the screens that showed it been green-screened ? Yes, it is a real application, but, for technical reasons, some screen-shots had been re-done in post production.

Was Ashleigh meant to be sympathetic or irritating ? Thomas took it that the questioner must have found her irritating (which was confirmed), but answered by emphasizing her position as a person seeking approval (see main text, above).

Given the acts that people are performing or committing on a live channel, why were the police not - or slow to be - involved ? Thomas pointed to other works on film and t.v. where the police lag behind, and suggested that the same might be as true here. (The Agent Apsley wondered whether Eyecast had bought them.)



End-notes

* One ‘l’, because it is a US spelling.

** Who relayed questions through a microphone linked to the laptop for the Skype connection.

*** Just one likely flaw : when Jonah goes to Eyecast, gains access by his brother’s account name, and passes himself off as he, the assumption is that Wyatt never did what Ashleigh does and put herself on camera by reflection. (It could be that, given how the account has been used, that was never done.)




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

Ma Bête !

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


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)





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.




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