Up here is where it really matters [?] ~ Amelia Wren*

Responses to The Aeronauts (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]

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

27 November

Responses to The Aeronauts (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]

Only Dreams are in The Cloud ~ Jung

But Carl didn't mean @AeronautsFilmUK

'Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones reunite to tell the story of balloon pilot Amelia Wren and scientist James Glaisher' :

Unlike The Theory of Everything (2014), a story in which Glaisher only existed

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2019

The early scene for Amelia and her sister's carriage - or later re-purposing locations (Lancaster Gate or Holland Park ?) to resemble the period - had been set up more carefully than the actual words uttered :

In 100 mins, trying symbolically what Locke's ambitions were in 85 ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2019

End-notes :

* An amalgam of people, there was no Amelia Wren as such - to quote the IMDb entry for the film :

With [James Glaisher's] co-pilot aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell, they broke the world record for altitude on September 5, 1862. Coxwell is omitted from the film, and replaced with the fictional Amelia Wren.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Beforehand, one had jokingly called it such things as The Danish Whirl…

This is a review of The Danish Girl (2015)

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

21 January (addition to first end-note, 25 January)

This is a review of The Danish Girl (2015)

For my fellow film-goer, Karen Goddard

One has blogged elsewhere [in a review of Qu’Allah bénisse la France ! (May Allah bless France !) (2014)] about when in films, if at all, the title proves to show its relevance – with the classic example of that of Frances Ha (2012), which leaves it to the very last moment, when we are no longer bothered about it (whereas that of Mistress America (2015), another collaboration between Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, is explained fairly swiftly, yet not so as to be out of the way, but giving connotations to the unfolding film).

Here, there is, on the face of what we are told, no good reason why this film is called The Danish Girl¹. (Possibly, as with The English Patient (1996), we are in doubt whether the nationality or the noun is the word to stress, but, in the latter case, one not only argues that the word ‘Patient’ is the more important one (in need of a slight accent), but also points out that Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) is not English (though taken for it now, when it matters least to him, because of what he lost on account of patently not passing for English²).)

Really, if we do not search out more about the film and its subject beforehand, the title tells us no more than the film’s publicity visuals, because we know from the start that the central married couple (Gerda Wegener (née Gottlieb) (Alicia Vikander) and her husband Einar (Eddie Redmayne)) live in Copenhagen, and we gather that they are Danish. The film’s one caption locates us, in Denmark, in 1926 : with a story such as this one, one can on one level understand wishing to be light on demarcating the effluxion of time³ (albeit telling not what one might imagine, for its time, to be fantasy⁴), and where there appeared to be layers of reality subtly in operation :

(1) The opening shots of the natural world chose to disappoint a little, by eschewing being strikingly cinematographic (for truly gorgeous shots of that kind can just wow one, e.g. giving the eye treats in The Hunter (2011) [distinguished from other films in that year as IV in IMDb’s listing (@IMDb)]), but in that way setting up memories for the other end of the film.

(2) Principally with the visual treatment of Copenhagen, the feel of what the external world of that period must have been like, reminiscent, say, of that of Babette’s Feast (1987) (or, probably also, Fanny and Alexander (1982)) and Buddenbrooks (2008)⁵.

(3) Finally (though not to say that there might not have been other gradations of depiction at play), and again principally in the home interiors in Copenhagen, where Einar and Gerda are co-conspirators in a game that develops in its own way, without them, and defying them [when Gerda says, of the game, This is not how it goes, one is reminded not a little of Agent Smith’s puzzlement in the key scene at the end of Matrix Revolutions (2003)] – the way in which we telescope in and out of the space in and between the rooms, almost as if, suggestive of undreamt possibility, volume, space and the world itself are flexible, malleable.

It is on the last of these levels, though, that we cinematically veer between the banal handling of cross-dressing of Hugo Weaving’s character in The Dressmaker (2015) [even if, as Lili Elbe appears to have claimed, some may truly be drawn to something that they first come to experience for wholly other reasons ? (whereas, if Gerda does then need a model, she seems to manage perfectly well to produce several finished works of Lili without one)], and the more enigmatic challenges and mysteries of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (Stanley Kubrick, interpreting Arthur Schnitzler’s work Traumnovelle from 1926, the year in which The Danish Girl begins).

As mentioned⁴, despite the fact that the film concerns two artists, it is almost deliberately divorced from its milieu in art, literature, and music (in 1922 (before the film starts), Ulysses and ‘The Waste Land’ had both been published) - with the only variety of opinion and experiment that is shown, in telling short consultations, being in the spheres of medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. (In a visit to the library, we even touch upon referencing Philadelphia (1993), or Lorenzo’s Oil (1992).)


Whether that artificial limitation is effective must be a matter for the individual, and what he or she knows (or is prepared to forget) about that period. That said, and also as referred to³, the crux of the film’s success for a viewer may depend on whether he or she knows that there is basis in fact (even if it has been changed) for what we see in terms of what happens to Lili Elbe, and how we might relate that to experiences shown in a modern film such as 52 Tuesdays (2013). (From the psychological point of view, also, we seem dangerously close to invoking the diagnosis – more respected in the States than in the UK – of multiple personality disorder, beloved of Psycho (1960), not to mention Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but perhaps never better deployed, as a narrative tool, than with Kevin Spacey in K-PAX (2001) ?)

As with Cumberbatch / The Imitation Game, Redmayne (as Einar) seems given the character of a schoolboy to Vikander's much livelier vibrancy.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2016

End-notes

¹ At one point, at best, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) is calling on Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), and he ends the telephone call that is occupying him by saying that a Danish girl (woman ?) is waiting to see him (presumably, because he is not Danish). Gerda then swiftly acquaints him with her being the wife of Einar, a childhood friend. However or where exactly (Norway ?) Hans and Einar knew each other (and whether, as it seems, Hans is German), it is actually immaterial to what happens whether Einar was also Danish (as is the case).

It is now seen, in a review by a colleague at TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema), that David Ebershoff published a novel of this name in 2000 - though it remains unclear whether it and / or history are the film's basis.

² In transgender terms, what one does, or does not, pass for also seems to be highly relevant.

³ That said, the pitfall was that there were moments when one was caught by aspects of the seamlessness, and unhelpfully wrong-footed, supposing Oh, they must be back from Paris, then, only to realize that the person to whom Einar or Gerda is talking, thought to be in Denmark, is now in France, too... Maybe that was, in a film that was fairly sparing with overt challenges to mainstream cinematic conventions, not a useful feature, when simple use of establishing dialogue could have avoided the confusion ?

⁴ * Spoilers * If one had not read the words, on the publicity shot, Inspired by the extraordinary true story, the brief closing captions (white on black) do serve to bring around one’s notions of what the film depicts, and why it did so, and so confounding one’s beliefs as to what was medically possible when it is set (though the level of medical misunderstanding, and the barbarities that resulted from it, surprise less).

An article in The Daily Telegraph, from 8 December 2015, purports to talk about the question of the film’s rootedness in fact. Of course, having one’s assumptions challenged may be no bad thing, but, without wishing to say that The Danish Girl drags as such, the running-time of 120 minutes to get to that point is not a trim one, and it seems not unlikely both that it would fail to benefit from being at around 100 minutes, or that the reduction could only be achieved through unnecessary sacrifices.

⁵ Even if, in European art-historical terms alone, we had also seen Der Blaue Reiter, Cubism and Dada, and, to name but a few, this was the time of Surrealism, The Bauhaus, Futurism, and with Picasso going in and out of his ‘Blue Period’, let alone (as evidenced above) Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. But the film perhaps wisely keeps the art of Einar and Gerda (and what else we see) rather neutral and unadventurous (although, as shown in The Daily Telegraph, Gerda painted in Art Deco style) – just as, without intending disrespect to Alexandre Desplat (in a film in which much skilful use is made of silence), the score is of a fairly predictable nature (compared with what he has composed, for example, for Wes Anderson's films).


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Elixirs of youth, utilitarianism, and Sonmi-451

This is a partly completed review of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

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

This is a partly completed review – it will certainly spill over into another posting – of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

#JupiterAscending is a stunning sci-fi adventure and comes to cinemas TODAY! Book now: http://t.co/LDBOhFIEai pic.twitter.com/8IOwrcSnpV

— Warner Bros. UK (@WarnerBrosUK) February 6, 2015

5 February

Someone (whose Tweet cannot now be located) was replying to an invitation from BBC’s Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) for comment, and described Jupiter Ascending (2015) as ‘baffling’ and / or ‘confusing’ (in such a way that made clear that this / these description(s) was / were not commendations) :

Well, if one watches a film such as Father and Son (2003), and expects it all to be explained and tied up by the end, then that ‘just ain’t life’, so Screen 3 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) this afternoon at 4.30 would have been the wrong place to be (if one thinks that this film (or, say, Caché (Hidden) (2005)) should not baffle or confuse, even though life can and does)…

Before Jupiter Ascending (#JupiterAscending), Cloud Atlas (2012) was a long, hard look at repeating patterns, and the related potential for our kindnesses and cruelties to reverberate beyond our own time. (Although that is also, in The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the explicit message at the end of the trilogy – even if some resent even the existence of the two companion films to The Matrix (1999).)

Almost necessarily, Jupiter Ascending (2015) does not seek to cover that ground again, but trust, deceit and betrayal, and the nature of reality, have been integral parts of The Wachowskis’ screen-worlds since The Matrix, and they are here, too. We may tend to call what used to be ‘personnel’ by the name HR. If so, we overlook what these film-makers keep returning to, the behaviour (and morals) of those who see their fellow human-beings as ‘resources’ (thus, the earlier film has Jim Broadbent (as Timothy Cavendish) exploited by his family, and David Gyasi (Autua, a free man in slavery))…

Yes, The Wachowskis have 'delivered an action film', but what and where is the action, and what levels of reality (mirrored by different grading of CGI versus live action) are we meant to perceive ? :

Much muchmore of an action film than Cloud Atlas (2012), or even the intense parts of the Matrix films, but no worse for that, @BBCFilm2015
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2015

That said, the amount of undiluted action is far greater, and it as though the proportion of threat, pursuit, and rescue in the time-period of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) and Chang (Jim Sturgess) had expanded proportionally to fill out the rest of Cloud Atlas. One will have to come to the action (and the nature of what action depicts / denotes on a cinema screen) at a later date, but it is not as if Lana and Andy Wachowski, always wearing their cine-literacy easily, have deprived those less keen on it of plenty of other insights.

Some key references (not exclusively to this one film of theirs) are :

* Metropolis (1927)

* Carry on Cleo (1964)

* Brazil (1985)*

* Akira (1988)

* Looper (2012) (mixed with that scene from North by Northwest (1959))

* Platonic Ideals / ‘The Theory of Forms’ / οὐσία (or ‘ousia’)

* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) / The Makropulos Case (Leoš Janáček (based on Karel Čapek’s play)) / Bernard Williams’ essay of that name**

* Free will v. determinism / the craze for 'genetic screening'

* Etc., etc. – and one should not doubt, when The Matrix (1999) alluded to Lewis Carroll and The Wizard of Oz (1939), amongst others – that these references are any more than coincidental !


So what, also, about these possibilities (arising from that Film 2015 questioning / Tweeting) ? :

Sean Bean just compared Jupiter Ascending to Shakespeare...will Danny, Claudia and Ashley agree?
— Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) February 4, 2015

Equally, since Redmayne(or was it Bean ?) mentioned Shakespeare to @BBCFilm2015, there's also The Casket Scene in The Merchant of Venice...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2015

As to the film more than twenty-four hours later, it is still a fertile ground for reflection, because its makers’ knowingness should never be taken for granted.

Might need time to bed down, @BBCFilm2015 - though not taking itself seriously is an asset, and the grandiose use of cathedrals / museums !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2015

Yes, it's easy to mock Jupiter Ascending, but god bless the Wachowskisfor making it. It may be nonsense, but it's *progressive* nonsense!
— Simon Renshaw(@SiRenshaw) February 4, 2015

Then again, one does not please everyone... :

“It shifts from a shambles to a fiasco.” @PeterTravers skewers the new Wachowskis’ film #JupiterAscending: http://t.co/VXKUL3KuSe
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 5, 2015

More to come, but, for those who like spoilers, here are some Tweets in the meantime…

@PhildeSemlyen It used it so well though! (Genuinely impressed) *Goes home to clean the toilet and sell my eggs*
— Sam Clements (@sam_clements) February 4, 2015

Flying crocodiles. A toilet cleaning montage. A woman who can conduct bees. I implore you, see Jupiter Ascending as soon as you can.
— Simon Renshaw(@SiRenshaw) February 4, 2015

#Dippy goes out in style! Catch @NHM_London in #JupiterAscending, our Location of the Month: http://t.co/QlvZqpmfzS pic.twitter.com/AkIbxB9kjO
— Film London (@Film_London) February 5, 2015

End-notes

* With even a little cameo from its own Terry Gilliam, an influence to which The Double (2013) also nods*, with what it has become fashionable to call its steam-punk feel. [Also in Paddington (2014), though perhaps distilled through Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter films (numbers 1 and 7 ?).]

** Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, was also rather fond of opera...


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

A matinee with Marilyn

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 November

A piece that I read about My Week With Marilyn recently – it might have been a review, but I don’t recall that it said anything other than about Michelle Williams – reported that its writer had to keep reminding him- or herself that Williams was Marilyn Monroe.

Well, having had the reservation that the person playing MM only superficially resembled her, I thought that I would have the same problem, but what the piece went on to say, was that Williams nonetheless captured her essence (for me, in this performance, a mix of vulnerability, insecurity, playfulness, unawkward sexiness, and a kind of naturalness, when not undercut by self-doubt): not succeeding in putting the piece out of my mind, I only momentarily doubted, because I could see that she wasn’t, that Williams was Monroe.

The film would not have been a whit better if she had been made to resemble Marilyn more (or, for that matter, Kenneth Branagh more like Sir Laurence Olivier) – the passing resemblance was quite sufficient, for those who can enter into a story, and has left me wanting to know more about Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), his book The Prince, The Showgirl and Me, and the diaries on which the credits say that the film was based. (The ex-lawyer in me ended up thinking how meaningful a disclaimer it was at the end to say that there was a true basis, but that some events and characters had been fictionalized, since one would have no way or knowing what was what.)

The special MM temporary exhibition at the American Museum at The University of Bath, Claverton, had made me aware of the frustrations had by those working on set with her, and Branagh caught that attempt at charm, thinly disguising tetchiness and even anger very well: I shall revisit the programme from that exhibition, and also attempt to see The Prince and The Showgirl, on whose filming this work was based.

Williams, Branagh and Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), for whom I personally don’t usually have a lot of time, were all very strong, and those three characters in themselves caught the tensions, when Thorndike sticks up for Monroe against Olivier, one of just a series of tensions between those trying, Clark included, to understand Monroe best. Those triangles and other shapes worked very well to provide a background against which the central tension of the early days of Arthur Miller’s marriage to Monroe could operate, and which could in turn lead to the charming relationship with Clark, who twice rejects advice from others (maybe suspecting their envy, maybe just out of Old Etonian pride).

If there were any doubt, it is not that Clark, with his background, would have ‘run away to the circus’ of trying to get into the film world, but that he is such a decent specimen of humanity in spite of that education (of which we get two tasters): yet, as with Cyril Connolly, I need to be reminded that there the few who do not grow up cherishing the establishment, and they have become the Louis Malles of our world.

The snippets at the end didn’t say where Clark went next with his career, although it did with Some Like It Hot for Monroe and The Entertainer for Olivier, but only where he ended up, and how his book, in 1995, achieved international recognition. Yet I am under no illusions: I am interested in him (and also in what may survive of Olivier’s views) to know the roots of what I have seen in this film, and to witness that charm of which Williams has given such a full account in this well-scripted film, a fitting tribute to MM this year.



Just two quibbles, which in one case, if I am right, may be little more than a continuity error: when Clark is picked up at the studio by Roger Smith, Monroe's bodyguard (who has a hidden Marilyn), he necessarily leaves his car there, but I felt sure that it was shown driving from behind (unless it was the back of Roger's car) during their jaunt; the moment when Olivier is off with Clark for being invited to Monroe's house and wonders whether he could possibly make him a cup of tea before he goes makes a good contrast with an earlier scene, but, unless he is trying to make sure that Clark is on side, he is being far more friendly with him than seems likely in the wider scpe of things.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here