Those two were real class, at the end : Responses by Tweet (and not) to La belle époque (2019)

Responses by Tweet (and not) [an accreting list] to La belle époque (2019)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 November

Responses by Tweet (and not) [an accreting list] to La belle époque (2019)

* With so many (doubtful ?) Twitter-accounts that appear when searching by film-title for the authenticated account, which are claiming to offer free HD streaming of the film, this seemed the safest pick. :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 21, 2019

Key film-references (in order of significance) :

* The Game (1997)
* Midnight in Paris (2011)
* Westworld (1973)
* The Truman Show (1998)
* Les Beaux Jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)
* A Fish called Wanda (1988)
* Nathalie (2001)
* Souvenir (2016)


A film whose (unexplained**) opening, which we may have forgotten by the time of its descent into romantic comedy (which are usually either 'ardour cooled' [Le Week-End (2013)], or 'hate at first sight' [You've Got Mail (1998)]), promised more interesting fare, as if a significant riff on The Game (1982) and others (as just listed) :

In its own terms, it got us to where it wanted, but its ideas could probably have done with being thinned out, so that - some adept pacing and editing apart, which certainly kept the story's tick-over going in the important moments - it did not feel as if some strands had been mimetic of the possibility of something more, but essentially thrown out (but kept in) as misleading pointers (rather than feeling like 'true' misdirections) and / or ideas that had been sent down a dead end :

For a film, itself shot on a set, that is largely set on a set, it is necessarily likely to get quite a bit Sunset Blvd. (1950) [not to say Mulholland Drive (2001)].

[...]


Other references :

* Hope Springs (2012)
* Les émotifs anonymes (Romantics Anonymous) (2010)
* The Pornographer (2001)
* Le Week-End (2013)
* Absolute Beginners (1986)


[...]


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

A historically informed and painterly work of cinema

This is a review of Born (2014) for the ICA's #CatalanAvantGarde series

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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22 August

This is a review of Born (2014) for the #CatalanAvantGarde series
at The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Tickets can be booked here

Note on the title of the film* :

Born is nothing to do with birth, but denotes an area of Barcelona known as El Born (or El Bornet), sometimes conflated with that of La Ribera (meaning ‘the bank’ (of the coastal variety)) in such a way as to denote both areas by the term ‘Born’.

A late-nineteenth-century building survives, called the Mercat del Born (constructed from iron, and formerly a public market), and on its site, when development was planned there (in 2002), extensive remains of the mediaeval city were discovered. Amongst other people, Albert Garcia Espuche has written about this area’s history, and his La Ciutat del Born was an inspiration for this film.


Two years ago, at Cambridge Film Festival (2013) [@camfilmfest / #CamFF], there were two screenings of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) in the Catalan strand (Camera Catalonia) :

That film centred on memories of, and one’s present relationship to, the time when the Italian Air Force was helping Franco’s fascist forces by bombing Barcelona (16 to 18 March 1938), and is described in What is Catalan cinema ? as Movingly mixing documentary, acting, and faux-documentary to dig into past pain. Born evokes that period in Catalan history by observations that one of the characters makes in tidying up the wreckage, and whatever can be salvaged, during the city’s bombardment in the War of [the Spanish] Succession (1701–1714) :

First time was ten years ago. Then it was the French. Now the British. And they will do it again. And every time it will be worse. And us, the poor… the people who only want to earn an honest living, will always be under the bombs. Until we say enough.


In this one way, the writers of the screenplay [credited as including Albert Garcia Espuche (please see the note on the film’s title (above)), and director Claudio Zulian] momentarily step outside the period, making a reference that necessarily reaches forward in time to those both attacking, and trying to defend, Barcelona more than 220 years later [and, in turn in Eyes on the Sky, to the lives of combatants, on each side, 70 years later].

The cover of Albert Garcia Espuche's publication

Not that concerns such as whom to trust, borrowing money to feed one’s family, and being subject to external forces, influences and events are not, now as then, what we will recognize as part of life, but – in every other respect than this passing allusion – Born does what it can to keep closely to its period : the approach of Claudio Zuliano, with which both his cast and crew show themselves to be quite in accord, seems to be not to convince us that the action is in the early 1700s, but for them to believe it themselves. So, not for the first time with Catalan film-making, one finds oneself referencing a piece by Borges (previously, it was with Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font’s Otel.lo (2012) (@otel_lo), from this blog's review of which this is quoted) :

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) ?)


Not method acting as such necessarily, but, as one looks at these locations and how the actors are deporting themselves, one never has in mind that stagey character of, say, some BBC adaptations of Dickens, where one just senses that a street of Georgian properties has been doctored to look as if it is now being occupied in Victorian times [sometimes, one recognizes the Inns of Court in disguise, as they have been well preserved by the legal profession]. Much more, one thinks of how Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013) looked and felt, and because it was so beautifully lit: Born has a painterly regard for how its scenes are composed, and in the use of light and dark*** (another point of contact with Otel.lo (and also El Cafè de la Marina, which screened earlier in the #CatalanAvantGarde series – please also see below).

The film falls into three sections, named after Bonaventura (Bonaventura Alberni : Marc Martínez), his sister Marianna (Vicky Luengo), and Vicenç (Josep Julien), an ambitious businessman, who is one of the former’s creditors : in this respect, as well as in the interconnectedness of people who live in proximity to one another, one is reminded of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy (on which there is more information here in relation to El Cafè de la Marina (2014) (another film in #CatalanAvantGarde)) : the first two parts, in Daniel Auteuil’s version, screened at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013).


Unlike, though, Auteuil’s films of gorgeous technical clarity of image, this film resembles Otel.lo, by making good use of an edgy, documentary style, which really first comes into its own after fifteen minutes : we track Bonaventura, following a confrontation with his landlord, and the immediacy involves us in his inner workings, through the language of demeanour and expression, as he walks the streets.

As we will see both Marianna and Vicenç do, we are with Bonaventura when, after refreshing himself with water from the spring, he makes an important realization / decision in his life, and not conveyed in speech – no moment of soliloquy, but in his look, and then in his movements and gestures, until his purpose becomes clear with what the Notary announces a couple of minutes later. For those who like this sort of approach, and realize that a really good piece of cinema may have been made with dialogue not in English, Born has great dramatic quality, and all the rootedness in how ships and trade govern people’s lives and fortunes that we esteem in a play such as The Merchant of Venice.

Tickets can be booked here

End-notes

* Derived from the Wiki articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercat_del_Born and http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrio_de_La_Ribera.

** Essentially, to see whether Charles III or Philip V would rule Spain (amongst other countries).

*** The director of photography and art director are, respectively, Jimmy Gimferrer and Lali Canosa. One is reminded of the use of darkness in masterpieces by Caravaggio, such as The Supper at Emmaus :

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

Light floods in : through windows, and into souls

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 August

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)
(for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

Funny how a few words on a ticket can say so much

[Claudi]

It is a tribute to a cinematic adaptation of a play, let alone of a celebrated one in verse, when such a film feels cinematic, and when there are not great traces of its origins : the review, on these pages, of August, Osage County (2013) was probably not alone in finding that the film badly failed both tests (so did Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure) (2013)).


The place on the Catalan coast that director Sílvia Munt, when in conversation, said that she had been scouting for has, as we will movingly see at one point, a history, but meaning more than that what once happened here : recognizable individuals, who made a living from the sea, and had families and their community on this shore. It is two centuries on from the time of Born (2014), also showing in Camera Catalonia (at @camfilmfest / #CamFF), but we have that same sense of how the past is still with us, and has given us what we call the present*.

For those who know it, the story of Josep María de Sagarra’s play El Cafè de la Marina has similarities to that of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy** (coincidentally referred to in the informal interview with Munt, before the film screened for the first time in the UK). (The first two parts in Daniel Auteuil’s adaptation, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013), screened at the Festival in 2013, with Auteuil playing César, the anxious father.) The resemblances are there, though it is hardly as though de Sagarra’s status should depend on this single play or its origins. (In company with A. A. Milne, he seems to have been prolific as poet, playwright, novelist, translator and journalist, even if Milne is forgotten for those things.)

Four great films on one #CamFF 2013 page : Not only the Pagnol / Auteuil adaptations, but the colourful Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar) [and a Q&A with the equally colourful Toby Amies (@TobyAmies)], and the best film missed (in error) at the Festival

Moreover, from Chaucer – using dream poetry in French to found his own – to Shakespeare – never seeming to have a plot (even of plays such as Lear or Hamlet) for which he had not relied on one or more sources – writing can be far more about the telling than the story itself (and we do not denigrate One Thousand and One Nights, or The Decameron, for that). Just as de Sagarra wrote a play in verse form, what we need to respect is that Munt has distilled its essence into a film of around eighty minutes.


We begin with two young friends, larking around in what turns out to be the cafè of the title (a bar, to the edge of the foreshore, rather than what English means by the word), on the beach, and in the village : back at the bar, one of them (Rosa) is our means of introduction to her sister Caterina, and Libori, their widowed father, and it is the eve of Rosa’s wedding (to Rafel). Already, Munt has taken us out to the fishing-boats and around about, and, although much time is concentrated in the bar (or on tables outside for the wedding), the film feels liberated from having had an original stage-setting.

An important element is in the soundtrack, which is partly Joan Alavedra’s original melody ‘Marinada’ (and his arrangements for accordion of other compositions), partly a traditional Catalan fishing song, and partly Xavier Capellas’ compositions for himself on piano and various combinations of six other instrumentalists (including Josep Vila Campabadel ?? on accordion). When we meet Rosa and her friend Gracieta, their excitement – whose exact cause is unknown to us – is there in what sounds like a zither, mandolin, and guitar. Later, when Caterina is first talking about her life, as Gracieta makes herself up, we just have soft guitar that does not detract from a visual encapsulation of her position : in focus, just Gracieta’s reflection, and, blurred, Caterina (seen in the mirror (right)) and Gracieta (foregrounded (left)). Likewise, as bride and groom leave the reception, accordion and the chalumeau register of the clarinet catch Caterina’s feelings.

Rosa, and her father

The film is all about feelings. We may, though, have seen – during Camera Catalonia at the Festival in 2014 – in Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), and Ficcío (Fiction) (2006), that there is a reserved side to Catalan behaviour, morals and personality that is not so different from British equivalents (or, for that matter, traditional Russian ones ?), and the playing helps guide us : when someone is being looked out for, we have quiet guitar, piano and cello, but the same instruments, with energy and rhythms, comment on a scene where encouragement has been offered. (Likewise, there is the intensity of light, both when it penetrates into the bar, and in its heightened quality on the walls of the inescapable buildings.)


Ultimately, it is in highly poetic imaginings (easily delivered as more than the equal of those of Marius in Auteuil’s film), and otherwise just in silence, that what matters most is going to be spoken in El Cafè de la Marina. However, Munt has, twice before, effected a wholly filmic transposition between parallel scenes, where the scoring (or, in the latter case, the use of accordion), by leeching from one into the other, has helped prepare the ground for us.


Maybe more importantly, we also gain, in this act of cinema, a sense of a world of events where our connectedness is not mere cause and effect, or consensus rationality [@russellhobanorg], and where what we dare to do, or hope for, matters : utterly different references, admittedly, but the sort of message that continued to attract The Wachowskis in making Cloud Atlas (2012) (or, even if others may have disparaged it, Jupiter Ascending (2015)).


End-notes

* Through the histrionics of the mother (Meryl Streep) in August, Osage County (2013), maybe we are meant to see something other than the stage-ridden behavior of an aggressive and abusive woman, who has tried to dominate her daughters, and about history… However, dislike it though the contemporary critics may have done, Woody Allen achieved far more in Interiors (1978) (and then in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) [first seen at Cambridge Film Festival]), the former of which influenced Mar Coll with the look of Tots volem il millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), which screened twice at last year’s Festival (both screenings had Q&As afterwards).

** Those who have the desire – and a good grasp of Catalan – can find on the Internet what is thought to connect Pagnol and de Sagarra, whereas this link (to the Wikipedia® web-page) tells one fairly little : http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep_Maria_de_Sagarra.


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

It's a matter of conscience

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

9 December (completed 13 December)

* Full of spoilers - only read if you know the film *

Marius (2013) is a superbly compiled piece of cinema, and, from a second viewing, well worthy (with Fanny (2013)) to be in the top five of selections from Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (@camfilmfest).

The first thing that we see from Marius' point of view is out to sea from the harbour bar, which he helps - when he does not just disappear* - his father César run. Then, when we see him, he looks as though he is in prison (which, metaphorically, he is), because the window is barred. He tries to make Fanny believe, when she appears, that he was looking at her, and there the dichotomy is stated in one.

In his beautiful score, Alexandre Desplat has a muted trumpet theme, which is full of longing, and could be longing for a woman or - as it turns out to be - for the sea. A little later, he has a second main theme that is full of piping, and which comes into its own at the end.

Marius likes to believe that he has rationalized his feelings, telling both César and Fanny that he 'cannot marry', and representing to the former (who believes that it is on account of a mistress) that she - really, the sea - might kill herself, if he ended it. As in so many places in this film, the scene gains its strength, because of dramatic irony, in that we know what is really on Marius' mind. How Marius behaves towards Panisse, when Fanny and he are trying to have a quiet drink in the corner of the bar, shows that he has not rationalized things - even though, at the dance at Cascade, Fanny had tried to tell Marius that she is thinking of accepting Panisse's proposal.


When Fanny takes Marius' advice literally, he tries to back out of it, and then ends up revealing to her the draw of the sea, which - if a rap at the door had had a different message - could have taken him away at a moment's notice. In telling her what he had learnt from the crew of the vessel that came from The Leeward Islands, we hear (in Desplat's music that there is) real poetry, intoxication, love... However, Fanny - characterizing it later as an irrational fascination for the land of the green monkeys - must have misconceived, by believing that his love for her would be stronger and overcome.

Having, feeling as he did, hitherto behaved properly towards Fanny, he allows himself to kiss her and presumably also to believe that he can overcome his inclinations, although he had been on the verge of joining a crew, if he had been needed, that very night.

Weeks later, thinking that he has been deceiving his father (whereas César has told his card-laying friends that he knows his ploy of climbing back inside and locking his door from the inside), he slips out to meet Fanny, and, when she overhears her relationship described as 'a matter of conscience' to the captain who wants Marius to serve, she takes the chance to assure the captain that he will go, because she knows that Marius does not love her, and she cannot bear to hear that he will cry himself to sleep, if he does not go (she believes what is said, for the simple reason that the captain must have known others who had been drawn to the sea, but did not go, and has no expectation that she will persuade Marius to go, as she claims).

When Fanny realizes, from what she has heard Marius say, that he is not in love with her, she has as much reason to want him to go to sea (so that she can 'cover her shame' and marry Panisse), but she probably cannot contrive that her mother Honorine (played impassionedly by Marie-Anne Chazel) gets a lift back from her sister's with M. Amourdedieu** so that the lovers are discovered, and Honorine puts pressure on César, who puts it on Marius.

All of these factors come into play when Fanny urges Marius to go to sea : as she is saying that she will look to his matter of conscience, he will not be forced into marriage, if he goes, and he does want to go. She also wants him to go, because she is ashamed of being deceived by him until she hears him speak to the captain. Here, the actual piping, which had been in Desplat's score, evokes the latter by association, with all its resonance. So Fanny covers for him, occupying César, whilst the ship gets ready for sea, and sails.

Panisse, who could have had a message from Marius for his father, instead just has incoherence after Marius has clumsily knocked some crates over, but still goes to try to alert his former schoolmate César to what is happening at the dock - only he is too busy with Fanny's deception, intended to let Marius go. Whatever Pagnol's screen adaptation of his own stage trilogy might have been, it is scarcely possible to conceive Auteuil's version being any less crisp, with scene seamlessly following scene in just 93 minutes.


End-notes

* He tries to leave Fanny in charge when he runs off for a meeting with the captain at the brothel, and she, presumably not knowing why he has gone there (when she follows), ends up crying on her bed.

** Pagnol keeps the names of his trio of linked characters simple (and also that of Panisse), whereas César's circle of friends have some outlandish ones, such as Escartefigue and Frisepoulet (unless that is Auteuil's deviltry !).


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

A matter of Marseille

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

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

26 September

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

Daniel Auteuil has a reason or two to love Pagnol – he was in films such as Manon des Sources from the mid-1980s, but he is also from that area, Provence.

The trilogy that he is making, of which Marius and Fanny screened last weekend and César is still in production, are less bucolic, being set in Marseilles (or, as in French, Marseille, without the ‘s’), and with a veritable maritime feel, almost a whiff (with Fanny’s seafood) of the ocean, which makes for a real freshness to both location and characters.

The story in these first two parts contrasts the fun-loving liberation of the jazz and cinema age with the Roman Catholic attitude to sex (and children as the evidence) before marriage, the desire for a partner and for children with a pull to explore the world. In all of this, Auteuil’s direction is deft, composing shots and a treatment of Pagnol’s writing that always draws the viewer in, and with a careful use of music.

Previously, he worked with Jean-Pierre Darroussin in Conversations with my Gardener (2007), and the other actor is here as a man, Panisse, who acts to save a situation when César (Auteuil) has insulted him by misinterpreting his motives, despite years of friendship going back to schooldays, and initially and violently seeks to oppose what is for the best. The quartet of major players is completed by Raphaël Personnaz and Victoire Bélézy as the other two title characters, and all are so strong, working with the grist of Pagnol’s original, that the result would be thoroughly engaging were they not supported by the likes of Marie-Anne Chazel, and by the old port and the ocean that it gives onto.

César, though, is not a violent man, though he does tend to tease people beyond their limits, and, after a grumpy start, he comes alive on screen when he shows Marius how to make an aperitif with four different ‘one-thirds’ in the same glass. When Marius disappears, as he all too frequently does, and abandons the business, his father just frets over him, addressing the absent Marius rhetorically as ‘mon petit’.

The first film, Marius, teeters around what he wants, and ends with a decision, whereas Fanny (and its title character) has to address what remains – at heart, both are driven by Marius not wanting what he has, and wanting what he cannot have, the latter in such a way that he becomes totally hateful, and is transformed. In all of this, César and Panisse show what grace and love they have, even for Marius and where his desires lead him.

All in all, a fine cast working in a lovely free manner together to create this drama, which so far has run to some 210 minutes, and whose conclusion is likely to be a tour de force.


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

Never go back

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 September

* Contains spoilers *

The film Postcards from the Zoo, in white letters on a black screen, five or six times gives us definitions (acknowledged to be from Webster's or from Wikipedia®) of terms such as translocation and reintroduction, and - as I realized - they relate to Lana's story as much to that of the animals of Ragunan Zoo.

That said, it is possible that the animals whom we see have been tamed in a way that many zoo-captives would not have been, for a young tigress enjoys being showered, and the sole giraffe (Jera) and the hippopotami seem unaverse to touch or to being fed from the hand. Although Jakarta is not known to me, someone in the screening to whom I spoke afterwards had visited the zoo itself, and rated it highly by the standard of others in Indonesia.

We do not know Lana's exact past, except from seeing pictures of a younger she, but she appears to have had no life outside the zoo, until she is captivated (pun intended) and led away by an appealing figure with a hint of Johnny Depp about him (Nicholas Saputra), who turns out happily to let her shoulder pushing a heavy handcart behind him.

Leaving the zoo with him may be the fantasy, and - to the extent that the zoo itself is highly symbolic - it may or may not happen, but, at any rate, he would only have needed, as he more or less does, to snap his fingers at her for her to follow him. (There are echoes of The Girl on the Bridge (1999), though Lana does not need rescuing in the same way, and maybe Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) has more to offer Vanessa Paradis as Adèle than is given to Lana in the role of assistant to this man of few words, however fetchingly she dresses to become his pair).

Whatever her connection to him, Lana then seems, when he departs, cut off from relating to the zoo, which she once loved: we painfully see her essentially motionless figure in scenes of activity, sensing that she is barely participating in or witnessing the life going on around her. The contact will get re-established, but it takes the massive dream equivalent of the elephant in the room to get her there.

Unlike being shooed out of Eden, it is as if the zoo itself transports Lana back to where her real life lies, and perhaps, in legends of Indira, we can find a further level of meaning. (In Strindberg's A Dream Play, it is Indra, whose daughter Agnes goes to Earth to experience life there.)


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