Showing posts with label Eyes Wide Shut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eyes Wide Shut. Show all posts

Monday, 6 July 2015

Report from York Early Music Festival 2015 : The Early Opera Company

This reviews Early Opera Company in Charpentier / Purcell, York Early Music Festival

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

6 July


This is a review of The Early Opera Company’s performances of
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Æneas at York Early Music Festival on Sunday 5 July 2015 at 6.30 p.m.


At The Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at The University of York (@UniOfYork) for York Early Music Festival (@yorkearlymusic), Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon was realised for two transverse flutes, viola da gamba, bass violin, theorbo, two violins, and harpsichord continuo (played by director Christian Curnyn). The introductory sections to the work had a melancholy tone, with restrained use of adornment : amongst them, were the brightly famous melody, and another that, part of the fluidity within moods, created one from repeated note-patterns.

The Scène première began urgently, and moved into and back out of reflectiveness, as Actéon (sung by Ed Lyon) engaged us in story-telling, his enthusiasm kept clean by very little vibrato, and with an instrumental ‘tail’ to this Scène. The next began with two dances, the first more lively, the second more measured.

Singing Diane (Sophie Junker), unforcedly understated her voice in a way that conveyed both substance and, through these more inward means, the evocation of desire, and which made the one large accentuation that she made all the more effective. The impression of the Scène was open and relaxed for the Chœur des Nimphes, with flutes and theorbo, before becoming more like a state occasion. The setting of the text was matched, nigh phrase for phrase, by the instrumentalists, the violinists leading our way, and into a delicate feel to Gardez vous, importuns amants, / D’en troubler les douceurs parfaites.

With a resemblance to a ground on the bass violin, as Arthébuze’s (Ciara Hendrick's) section alternated with that of the Chœur, and she used a different tone-colour when she came to the fore (partly achieved at the cost of swallowing the sound a little ?). As if bringing down an excited heartbeat, the instruments slowed slightly to a soft close.




In the Scène troisième, Actéon lyrically engages with his experience : the poetry is in the music, the music in the poetry, as he is hoist by the raptures of his own words, in S’il vient m’attaquer, […] Il verra ses projects se tourner en fumée, the verbal trap of setting himself up as a challenge to his [notion of] Dieu. Only too late does he rein himself in, with a slight hesitation in the final words, and, here, we are in the territory of Euripides (in a play such as The Bacchae), dramatizing those overweaning urges that we all are prey to, and making from this very familiar story our common experience :

Plaintive violin and theorbo bring out the bright resonance within these textures, and, as Actéon continued to boast his bluff naivety in the shorter block of verse about Liberté, the ensemble goes up tempo, and he – with all the meanings of the words – got simply ‘carried away’, fully as if he were William Harford (Tom Cruise) in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), embracing he knows not what dream, and with the enchantment first in the tones of theorbo and of Reiko Ichise’s [viola da] gamba, and then, with the flutes joining in, in Eligio Luis Quinteiro giving his playing a particularly plucked quality, as – so quickly – Actéon is seduced by the notion of cette route inconnue / M’offrira quelq’endroit propre à les [Diane et ses sœurs] écouter.


In the closing Chœur des nimphes, the writing is highly accented, and Charpentier reduces down to just the voices, to herald, at the start of Scène quatrième, extreme effects on the gamba (whose aesthetics endeared it this specific age, where it had its heighday ?), as Ed Lyon finds himself struggling to utter human sounds : the Ovidian transformation did not need staging to be fully real to us, a lightning disintegration of the kind that, in Die Winterreise’s much slower descent, takes us to the cold horror, beyond feeling, of the disintegration in and of Der Leiermann ? Actéon’s closing words, acknowledging l’estat ou je me voys and ma honte, show that he knows his fate, and we close with harpsichord and violin, then nothing.

Nothing, that is, until a theme couched in pain that will soon usher in the penultimate Scène, where, known but to us (as yet), the dramatic irony of words such as Un spectacle si doux ne s’offre pas deux foix, addressed to Actéon (imagined absent), will ring false and belie the sentiment (though, mimetically, one is ahead of one’s self : please see below). In the meantime, we have a tortured, suffering quality – and are we not inevitably a little reminded (though without, of course, redemption) of the tenor aria from Bach’s St John Passion ? :

Erwäge, wie sein
blutgefärbter Rücken
In allen Stücken
Den Himmel gleiche geht


This is the very nub of this music, what it has been written for, so that it would lead here : we heard this material alluded to in the instrumental introduction, we know the familiar story, and it was all preparing us for this point (not unlike, again, the Bach, although Charpentier died more than twenty years earlier ?), with its slide and Sul ponticello effects, which, in an interlude, give us very great subtlety of note-painting (Charpentier’s and this ensemble’s), and heartfelt feeling (albeit Actéon’s full plight is undercut by reverting to four vocal parts at the finish).

The Scène cinquième, prefigured above, comprises the Chœur des chasseurs alone, ironically with bright, female voices urging Quittez la resverie [Kubrick, again, with what is dreamt, what ‘real’... – though dream is eternal, older than Chaucer, and The Boke of The Duchess], but, with a recursion of the central section, male voices are becoming more evident :

Having said that the work had built up to Actéon’s despairing transformation, and the unknowing members of the hunt’s delight in seeing him cornered, the final Scène consolidates it all, starting with a difficult quality to Junon’s declaring and – in triumph – enjoying his death, delighting in his fate. Especially its manner (par ses chiens dévorés), as a lesson to les mortels odieux, the tone being set to Actéon’s retinue by the word ‘Ainsi’.

Risking we know not what wrath, they briefly dare plea for his worthiness, and her howl and leonine roar shout them down with passion : her reasoning, rooted in sharp jealousy and Hilary Summers’ real relish of this stage fury, turns out to be politics, and above all mortal issues of merit and justice (Gloucester has it in Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys’ ?). (Thankfully for them, one supposes, and their little moment of protest, someone has to survive to tell the tale, if there is to be deterrent…)


Quietly (as suitable for one subdued), the Chœur des Chasseurs revolves the final three sections of text – with Ed Lyon (who had been our Actéon) joining in with the male voices, after a while, before, at Faisons monter nos cris (which begins the central section), all gave voice for what is, at heart, another posture at defiance / more posturing (from a place of safety). Since the text is not just set once, it is not a final gesture, after all, when bass is added to the female singers and a tenor voice, and Charpentier instead revisits Faisons monter, feigning, with the violins accenting the last word, to end with Qu’ils pénètrent jusqu’aux enfers.

However, the female voices, leading all to sing with them, take us to the preceding section of text, where the taxing question, Quel cœur, à ce malheur, ne seroit pas sensible ?, separates off from the other lines, and – somehow – Charpentier even seems to make it right to conclude on a concord, and to very much applause at The Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall (about which there was no doubt !).




Some less-detailed impressions of Purcell's Dido and Æneas - noting throughout 45 minutes of drama, in Part I, leaves one just wanting to sit back for Part II...

As to both works given, this is living, breathing music, with an assurance to all aspects of the staging of the performance by The Early Opera Company under Curnyn, and there were almost religious sensations at play here, as if of litany.

It deserved a standing ovation. (But maybe they don’t do that at Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall… ?)


In instrumental terms (and with the addition of a viola, compared with Part I), Purcell had set out his stall of more complex grief and grieving in the very opening of the Overture to Dido and Æneas.

Emilie Renard*, as Dido, has a voice to describe whose qualities all of these characteristics are applicable : strength, uncomplication, clarity, immediacy, pliability. Opposite her, Callum Thorpe (as Æneas) had palpable directness, with power in his bass, projecting the words and feeling alike of the role.

When Renard’s colleagues Sophie Junker and Ciara Hendrick sang as a duo, working their voices together in pursuit of her character’s downfall, they did so with honeyed diction, and little vibrato – the former did so with particular ease.


Here, a link to a review (by James Whittle) in The York Press



End-notes

* Who had also been singing roles in Part I, but the credits appear incorrect in the programme :





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 23 January 2015

Hints of Schnitzler at Slapstick Festival

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924) with harp score from Elizabeth-Jane Baldry at Slapstick Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January (1 February, updated with commentary on the film / more of the introduction)

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924), as introduced at Slapstick Festival by Lucy Porter and screened with a new score from,
and performed by, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on Thursday 22 January 2015



The introduction
Lucy Porter’s rather scatty introduction – but we forgave her that for her enthusiasm for the film to come (with even an assurance of A raunchy sex-scene involving a boiled egg*) – conjured with names such as Warner Bros, Ernst Lubitsch and Marie Provost (who, as Lucy said, stole every scene)…




We learnt, also, that it was Ernst Lubitsch’s second feature, after having come to Hollywood at the behest of Mary Pickford. [The screenplay was ‘drafted’ – so the word has it in the credits – by Paul Bern, after the stage-play by Lothar Schmidt.] Adolphe Mejou (Professor Stock) was to become best known for Howard Hughes’ The Front Page (1931), and, for The Birth of a Nation (1915) [directed by one of Pickford’s fellow United Artists], actor Monte Blue (who gives us the smooth, if guileless, Dr Braun) had been a stuntman.

More curiously still, Lucy dispelled the story that Marie Prevost had committed suicide and been eaten by her dog : it appears that (a little as in >The Artist (2011) ? - please also see below), she had actually ‘piled on the pounds’, but then dieted to excess, and succumbed to malnutrition. As Lucy commented, an unusual piece of information to precede a comedy, but all was well, because, when Elizabeth-Jane Baldry had been enthusiastically welcomed, they quipped again about that moment with the boiled egg !



The score
Even more so than exponents of the guitar, those of the harp love the form that their instruments take. Yes, sax-players, too, will exhale breathily through their instruments, and also use the sound of their opening and closing keys, and the rods and key touches that operate them, but a concert harp is large (so is, in its way, a theorbo – with its long, free strings), and hence, for example, tapping, knocking or running one’s fingers along the soundboard or body all have much resonance to them.

Composer and harpist Elizabeth-Jane Baldry is acutely aware, in her film-scores for solo harp, that cinema is not only a visual, but also a tactile medium, and so she has given great thought to being ingenious with the production not of every sound-effect (for this is not [attempting to be] live foley, and the best accompaniment to silent film is more like poetry than absolute mimesis), but the ones that psychologically speak volumes** (in a highly Freudian film), amongst which are :

* The springs of Professor Josef Stock’s exercise-machine (in which, to the exclusion of his younger wife Mizzi (Marie Prevost), he seems overly interested)

* A shutting series of doors (there are many opening and closing doors in The Marriage Circle) as Dr Franz Braun leaves the Stocks’ apartment

* Mizzi’s shock, as she depresses a cluster of notes on the piano keyboard, when she realizes that she has already met Charlotte’s husband

* Chimes that reinforce the sense of urgency as Dr Braun realizes that he cannot afford to wait for another taxi

* Tense moments when the telephone jaggedly rings and is answered to significant effect




The film is a delight, but bring an intelligent piece of cinema alongside a score that has viewed the film with great intelligence and which is played with conviction and verve, and everything is enhanced, the knowingness of the screenplay and direction, the sharpness of the editing, and the depth of the acting :




The synergy has been demonstrated again and again, from (to name but two) Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) playing Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930) at Cambridge Film Festival / #CamFF 2014 (@camfilmfest) to Elizabeth-Jane with The Phantom of The Opera (1925, but revised 1929) at the curious St Bart’s Hospital Pathology Museum… !

To give just a flavour of Elizabeth-Jane’s skilled approach, because one really does need to hear it live, one can characterize the accompaniment to the opening titles as being suitably strophic, and then, in the opening scene (as Professor Stock (the hangdog Adolphe Menjou) considers the state of his socks), a hint of lullaby – odd, we think, because we soon realize that it is morning, not night, except that, yet the scene develops in such a way that Stock and his wife both take a turn to dive back under the covers !

And that is where Elizabeth-Jane weaves in what we probably realized, if at some subliminal level, was a calypso, contrasting with this scene in Vienna in 1923, but for a purpose. Later, comes tango, too, and what she usefully identified afterwards (since a name to put to it in the in-screen notes had been lacking) as the cha-cha-cha.

To those elements, often in varied form and more disguised than this description can suggest, she adds, then, a theme suggestive of displacement (as we switch from the perspective of the street to what turns out to be that of Stock), one of transformation (when Mizzi powders herself) and then re-engagement with the calypso (she drapes herself carefully on the chaise longue), and, just before it, captures the world-weariness of Dr Braun at his practice.

So, in using the exoticism of the calypso in particular, this lovely score gently let us in on the secret of a world that we can pretend to be exterior to, but with the frisson of interiority. If, as the film goes on to show us, Mizzi is careful about arranging many aspects of what she is about, even more so is Elizabeth-Jane, with her skilled performance evoking the shifting, sometimes playful, and always ironic world of the Vienna that we are shown :

Conveniently, of course, making palatable the infidelities and lascivious desires seem those of a libertine folk in another land (as, in its more patent way, does Menschen am Sonntag), and so enjoyable by licence, almost by proxy, as we might that suggestive moment, at breakfast, with a thick, dark coffee – and a boiled egg !


Now added : more commentary on the film itself

Nicely restored, and with only occasional use of segments from an inferior-quality print (or a few jumps within scenes in the latter part), what we were shown seemed a very complete survival*** of a film from ninety years ago : it was only those tiny technical imperfections that served to remind that it had such a provenance, because the film is so fresh.

By contrast, however much some may have talked of The Artist (2011) with the hope that its audience would be inspired to seek out films from the so-called silent era, this film and it have nothing in common : one can barely believe that anyone credited the latter as a modern silent film, or even as in genuine homage to the period. Indeed, the comparison is almost as little cogent as suggesting that Titanic (1997) was going to cultivate a real interest in marine engineering and / or biology.

So, for example, the contrasted, sparing use of inter-titles in The Marriage Circle, with some of them as ironic as There is more danger in dancing than in dining (and so serving another cause than reporting speech, or facts), has several implications : the film-makers expect an element of lip-reading (or of construing gestural language used for our benefit), and they throw us back both on our wits, and on taking as many cues as possible from the composition of shots, scenes and story, e.g. how light (literally and otherwise) is being used, and what it highlights or throws into relief.




When Charlotte is at Mozart Gasse 12, not so much plucking as wrenching roses on her balcony, the dropped bloom (brought out, in the score, by a downward glissando) is more weighty than the apparent lightness suggested by what is visible, as the inter-title has advised us… Likewise, in the case of Franz Braun’s earlier arrival (with the parcel that we saw him carrying earlier – and which turns out to be flowers for his wife Charlotte), the scene has been set up by her singing Grieg’s setting of Ich liebe dich**** (‘I love you’) when Mizzi comes to call on her.

It develops with Mizzi accompanying Charlotte (though she does not know to whom Charlotte is singing), and is then punctuated by our knowing response to the inter-title Did you ever see a man like him ?, which sets out her words to Mizzi. The moment when Mizzi powders herself has already been mentioned, and there is a wonderful freedom and delicacy to how this scene is lit, before, with the collusion of her maid, we then see her, in a very staged way, work out how to comport herself on the chaise-longue, ready to ring the doctor.

His ultimately purporting, caught in guiltiness, to reach for Mizzi’s pulse is done with such knowingness, but we do not even know the best of it yet – that, as this is Wien (Vienna, the home of psychoanalysis), his partner and he specialize in Nervöse Leiden, ‘nervous disorders’. For this is 1923, and, in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler was to write his Traumnovelle, on which Stanley Kubrick was to found the screenplay of his Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (also for Warner Brothers).




As Brief Encounter (1945) also suggests (or, since then, Vendredi soir (Friday Night) (2002) and Ficció (Fiction) (2006), for example), we may be willing an outcome, but the films have other ideas, and we can be caught short by finding what they are :

In the case of Ficció, the considerable tension that has been built up for much of the film, and how it resolves, is a work of sublime restraint. In The Marriage Circle, by contrast, the closing gesture, although daring, releases us more casually, and in a carefree spirit, later caught also by that of Some Like It Hot (1959) : although the daringness to question norms is there, we are swept away from contemplating it overly much beyond as caprice, as a light ending to a film that has challenged our morality (in the six weeks or so from 25 May to 5 July), and found us wanting what ?


End-notes

* Meret Oppenheim, eat your heart out !

** In Elizabeth-Jane’s score for The Phantom, we had the sound of the unusual alarm, which warned of intruders in the cavernous parts outside The Phantom’s dwelling.

*** However, information suggests that, when The Museum of Modern Art did so, with funds from The Film Foundation, it ran to 103 mins…

**** To a text by Hans Christian Andersen, though commonly sung in German translation.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 6 June 2014

Venus in Fur - or Martin Clunes naked ?

This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

5 June

This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (2013)



Once one has seen Mathieu Amalric look amazed – with boggle eyes – a few times, it ceases to be nearly as amazing. Just as his looking as perky to please as a spaniel, or a couple of other states evoked by the face, does not really effect a transition in what is a dramatically flat situation, of switching between a handful of modes. And, regrettably, Emmanuelle Seigner has to do much the same - a bit as if the full schema of Eric Berne’s Games People Play had been limited to toppling over between a few mood-states (not the whole gamut implied by the principles of transactional analysis) :

Though, for those who praise Locke (2013), the lack of anything going on is a virtue, and here, except for a fairly predictable game, nothing is (actually) of a game-changing nature. (If it were, Martin Clunes, say, would be out of a job in a film such as Staggered (1994) – for many a best man’s prank is many times more elaborate than what happens here.)




Yet what is of great relevance here is that what Polanski has directed feels little like a film, but a film of a play (as with August : Osage County, which (throughout) struggles a little more not just to be a series of interiors). We could even cut out David Ives altogether, as middleman (qua author of the play), and go to this seminal novel – if one did not suspect that its claims to importance are as overrated as those who say that Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a towering work of world literature… (Although one scarcely insists that a middling text cannot be transformed to make a dazzling screenplay, of course.)




By contrast with what, from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is called variously a novel and a novella (of uncertain length), what about the enterprise Stanley Kubrick embarked on (with Frederic Raphael) in what proved to be his play film – broadly adapting Arthur Schnitzler (Traumnovelle) in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ? Given what Polanski has given us, even what IMDb tells us about Venus in Furs (1969), in all truth, sounds as though it has more ‘going for it’ (currently rated 5.8, versus 7.2 for Polanski), if one forgets that the first and second sentences, together, seem confusing ! :

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death.




This is Méret Oppenheim’s classic, provocative piece, Object (1936), (which is owned by MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)


The very opening of the film, with the boulevard, the trees, the train, wanted to be promising, but even the conceit that followed straight after, as we veer right, was much more akin to Mary Poppins (1964) than anything to which we would ever give our heart or soul** – or maybe we would give it willingly to what might present as a patent French confection, such as Amélie (2001), but has actual depths.


Ultimately, one judges for oneself (by going to a screening, maybe staying to the end, although more wildly tempted than either of the characters, perhaps, just to leave), but the triangle of forces of Polanski, Amalric and Seigner have been brought to bear on the Ives text in such a way that even saying Putain de merde ! seems not quaint, but outlandish. And it is not that Vanda's (Seigner's) oscillation between ditzy initial presentation and divinity is not done with some force, some panache, but that is half the problem :

For Polanski too ostentatiously relies on Alexandre Desplat’s rather nasty score to add something that just is not there in the script, with the result that any attempt at dramatic irony (which, in any case, is rarely best employed as a sustained gambit ?) more closely resembles a strong sense of predictability – and also merges with one's not caring what happens.

As mentioned², the plot requires Thomas (Amalric) to be alone when Vanda arrives, but there is no sense at all that anyone else has ever been there, let alone a string of unpromising auditioners – and these two, by the direction in which one moves at the other’s direction, do not even know their stage left (as seen from the stage, facing front) from their audience left (as seen from the auditorium, facing front). Are they film actors, pretending to be actors, pretending to be, respectively, writer-turned-director³ and actor… ?


Or something more archetypal, more primal, though that notion vanishes as soon as one tries to rely on it too much, let alone when we have had thrust in the face of our credulity all the outfits and other tat that are suddenly brought into this place… ?

As already suggested, people drifting in and out of roles, and the resultant power-play, seems so stale, especially if it is Carnage (2011) again, but light on the (would-be) levity ?


End-notes

¹ Note that definite article – in French, one cannot just say Vénus à la fourrure, any more than, in Italian, one can have Grande Bellezza on its own (The Great Beauty (2013)).

² That film ends in reverse of its beginning, and so does this one – a well-worn way of symbolizing that the spell cast by The Prologue at the start of Henry V, or by Prospero, has been broken by or at the end.

But, one has to ask, to what effect use this device, and was it not, in all likelihood, just to tweak the play’s opening by being in Vanda's view-point as she enters, rather than her coming in and surprising Thomas, already there ?


³ Though, as Thomas labours the point, he has adapted, not written, the text for the play, so that we can sense – as if we do not abundantly – his pliant nature, poorly masked by inflexibility as a strategy…




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