Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].

If you thought that it was unlikely that a police department would have a badge in the shape of the state of Missouri, that is not the most implausible and / or unreal aspect of @3Billboards... pic.twitter.com/lqKUxN13HY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...

How 'How Three Billboards went from film fest darling to awards-season controversy' seems to miss the point, by talking about redemption, not about the world of the whole film... :https://t.co/qIji7AUUWb

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

Billboards that, moreover, are let out no sooner than they are found to exist, with no notion of what repair to them could be needed, and with the bill-posting itself mysteriously carried out well after nightfall ? Is any of this an invitation to believe it, outside of the film ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

So, having seen @3Billboards (2017), there's a sigh of relief, but forget the party-crowd, intent on laughing at anything that moves :

The humour is there, but not eliciting more than a snort, and the richness of it and the audacity are just not at the level of In Bruges (2008). pic.twitter.com/FVsWrczyxe

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 27, 2018

Some film-references :

* Calvary (2014)

* The Dressmaker (2015)

* The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)

As ever, Donald Clarke is well worth a read : 'Three Billboards’ is not suffering a backlash: some people just didn’t like it ~ https://t.co/sZfGzbTWLY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).


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

I always wished I was an orphan [Suzy] ~ I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about [Sam]

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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5 April

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) - sweet, but not saccharine

* Contains small spoilers *

It is not until the very end of the film – and then it is not really an explanation – that its title makes an appearance, as a description of a place where things seemed to be very sweet. (Moonrise Kingdom (2012) has a suitably quirky web-site, which may say more.) Except that life was going to catch up with the idea that it conjures up, that of getting away from it. For, as twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) confidently says to Suzy (Kara Hayward) (and, by now, we know that he paints) :

That sounds like poetry. Poems don't always have to rhyme, you know. They're just supposed to be creative.

Bob Balaban (familiar from a recent repeat viewing of Deconstructing Harry (1997), where he plays Richard) is credited as The Narrator. Garishly, even gnomishly dressed, he is perkily moved, by magic as a static figure, from scene to scene to paint the backdrop to what we will see in the course of the following three days : from his measurements (for his narration is an omniscient one, and – without the grandiosity, but with assurance – reminds of Hamm telling his story in Beckettt’s play Endgame), he makes us aware of what is to come. Nonetheless, it is a sort of surprise.

With Suzy and Sam, their secret correspondence and their desire to get away together illicitly, we may feel that the film is operating on one level : there are gentle ways in which they seem to be more adult than the adults (say, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as the Bishops, Suzy’s parents), so Sam has a pipe and that Heath Robinsonesque flair for designing mechanisms that we see featured in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Suzy is dressing to impress*, and hurt by the booklet that she has discovered her parents have, called ‘Coping With the Very Troubled Child’.

Yet the climax takes us beyond all these small things to the big question of what life is all about. Mr and Mrs Bishop, for example, think that it is a matter of asking how the other’s litigation went, but their formal manner shows that it is a duty to remember the detail and ask, by contrast with the commitment that Suzy and Sam have to each other. Their letters to each other may have been oddly matter of fact and have made us laugh or smile, but this belies the connection that they have made.

When we first saw where The Bishops lived, it was in elevation, but one that proved to be a decoration for one of the walls of their precise abode, a bit like a castle, as Wes Anderson has us scan it up and down and through, seeing, say, Mr Bishop both upstairs relaxing and downstairs about something less passive – however, it has an unreality to it, as fully as if it were Wemmick’s Castle in Great Expectations, or Kafka’s The Castle, a quality that it shares with The Grand Budapest.

Engaging both with Benjamin Britten’s music in a very impressive way, and also having the film scored by collaborator on Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Alexandre Desplat**, Anderson creates a scope for this film, building on the story and imagery of Noye’s Fludde (Britten’s Op. 59), that transcends its particulars. It feels, early on, a bit like a fable, and looks less like a cartoon than Budapest, but it has the impact of a Biblical account like that of The Flood :

The Khaki Scouts flee to St Jack’s Church, because it is high ground (smacks of Father Ted, as a feature that Anderson has given to New Penzance Island ?), which aptly seems to be where Sam first saw Suzy and talked to her – in the organ loft, two figures amongst those with masks are momentarily there, then gone. What unfolds is a stand-off, which provokes an offer from Captain Sharp (of the police, played by Bruce Willis in a fairly unaccustomed subdued style of role (Looper (2012) ?) that pacifies the embodiment of Social Services in Tilda Swinton***, complete with a stamp to certify that she has done her duty.

Setting the film in late September 1965 allows Anderson to take a sideswipe, from the seeming perspective of history, at the forces that would normalize (or, conversely, pathologize****) everyone and, if deemed necessary, do so with uncaring foster homes, and highly invasive treatment for those who do not fit in, and focus our attention on the couple.

Suzy, in Noye’s Fludde, is a raven, the first creature let out of the ark (Genesis 8 : 6–7), and probably usually forgotten because of the dove with that olive token. Suzy says of herself to Sam I like stories with magic powers in them. Either in kingdoms on Earth or on foreign planets. Usually I prefer a girl hero, but not always. Though the books that we see are fictitious (artists are credited with the cover images), and within a fictitious story in a fictitious place, Sam and she still have a lot to share with us in a film well worth watching more than once.


End-notes

* One is put in mind a little of the appearance and delivery of Emma Watson (as Nicki) in The Bling Ring (2013) (or one of the more feminine girls in Foxfire (2012).

** Who has scored some significant films, from Budapest to Philomena (2013), Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013) to Argo (2012).

*** It seems a little hard to credit that IMDb is right that Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons were considered first for the role (and offered the part)…

**** At the same time, the rise in diagnosis of – and shockingly adult treatments for – ADHD (see, for example, Benny in Bombay Beach (2011)), and the sizeable recent controversy in the UK about the classifications in DSM-V, the latest (fifth) edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual suggests Plus ça change…


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

Don’t play hide and seek with reality !*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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9 March

This is a review of a special screening (from 35mm) at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, of Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990), as presented as part of the series ‘Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories Season’ (http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org) by the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities)

The invited guests of CRASSH’s own Hugo Drochon, historian Tony Craig and film producer David Hickman, introduced the film and usefully put it in its political and cinematic context. That said, the film was made a quarter of a century ago, and what we might know now (assuming that Sinclair is right that there is a consensus) about the truth of claims that there was a Tory smear campaign against Harold Wilson may not have been available at the time of this film (and in 1998 – please see the title cited, below) – or not easily to director Ken Loach (or Jim Allen – please see below). (Hickman stated, both before and following the screening, that he thinks that Loach did believe the story about a smear.)  

Besides which, although Loach has close relationships with his writers, Jim Allen is solely credited with producing the script (i.e. not as a co-writer with Loach) : if, therefore, it were germane that talk in the film of a Wilson plot does not accord with the evidence that we have (for it may not be germane, if this is a fiction - please see below), Allen as well as Loach must presumably have ‘bought into’ that notion at the time, even if only enough to make it a part of the skeleton on which the piece is built.

And, historically verifiable accounts apart, the basic message remains : rubbishing others and their reputations can and has been used throughout history by those seeking power (or seeking it for others, e.g. from the US operations with various regimes in Central America to Julius Caesar and Ralph Fiennes' film Coriolanus (2011) (as based on Shakespeare)), irrespective of what are asserted as laudable reasons for so doing.

In other words, the film need not just revolve in its own world, but can be a paradigm for how power is sought, gained and held. This is probably what Loach means in his description of the film (quoted interviewed by Graham Fuller as part of the favoured Faber & Faber series on this blog, Loach on Loach**) :

I guess it’s best described as a fiction inspired by fact

Earlier, Loach talks to Fuller, the book’s editor, about the film’s critical reception, saying that :

You hope some of these notions [sc. about what British forces or public servants have done] linger with people in the audience, but in terms of public debate it’s very difficult to get anything started. One of the ongoing frustrations of film-making is that you try to put out a set of ideas or a piece of evidence in front of an audience, while being as gripping and as entertaining as you can, but critics never deal with the substance or follow up on the questions you’re asking in a film.

Is this why you regard most film criticism as decadent ?

I think so, yes. The critics will examine the brush strokes, but they won’t stand back and see the content of the painting. I don’t know why that is.

[Ibid., pp. 82–83]

Paradigm or not as the film may be intended to be, it is, as Hickman pointed out, beautifully lit, using available light – not strictly so, as he explained afterwards, but as near to it as could be, and a model that, he observed, has been taken over by Hollywood in the interim. (Regarding watching the print, Hickman observed how different the scene looks when Harris is partly in darkness, and then comes into the light, with which the DVD version does not compare.) In the introduction to the chapter in which he deals with, amongst other films, Hidden Agenda, Fuller explains where the film and Loach’s collaborations fit in with his career to date :

Following the critically acclaimed and appropriately controversial Hidden Agenda (1990), their [sc. Loach and Allen’s] initial film collaboration, they went on to make Raining Stones (1993) and Land and Freedom(1995).

[…] The third factor [in ‘this not unextraordinary renaissance’]*** was the teaming of Loach and Barry Ackroyd, who has photographed all of Loach’s features since Riff-Raff and has brought to them the kind of uncompromising visual rawness that had been lacking from Loach’s films in the Looks and Smiles era. Ackroyd’s cinematography restored to Loach’s and his writers’ world its aesthetic integrity. […]

[Ibid., pp. 78–79]

To contemporary viewers, Brian Cox and Maurice Roëves may be very familiar faces****, from which we can take some comfort in this sinister scenario, and both seem just right for their roles (supported, in the former case, by John Benfield (as Maxwell)) – even physically, Cox has the solidity to be a high-ranking policeman (which we believe will translate into moral and intellectual weightedness), Roëves the wiriness that fits a man on the run. The triangle of principals is completed by Frances McDormand, who shows singular self-determination and sheer spunk as Ingrid Jessner, the woman whose partner, with Harris, is at the (apparent) centre of matters. Unknown to her, and to Kerridge and Maxwell, everything about them has been researched, and they are less the investigators (she with a civil liberties group to which her partner and she belong, he to the police force) than the investigated.

We have high hopes, almost alongside Loach, that Kerridge will do the job with which he has been entrusted, and not worry about putting a few noses out of joint, as we see him happily doing for much of the film. The nub of the film is to lead us to understand how limited his room for manoeuvre is, hence the relevance to a season about conspiracy and the theories that postulate its existence : it is a moot point whether all who infer 'hands at work behind the scenes', and hence a hidden agenda, embrace the terms ‘conspiracy [theorists / theory]’ to describe themselves and what they believe happened or is happening, or whether it is a term of abuse***** from those who dismiss both theories and theorists. Not always from a position of power, such as that from which the film’s Sir Robert Neil (Bernard Archard) and Alec Nevin (Patrick Kavanagh) address Kerridge, but usually with derision.

As the film’s tension builds from that point, one wonders whether it is going to end, for Ingrid, as for a young-seeming Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983) – or for Harris… In the event, one is reminded of those shocking moments in other depictions when the ground has, stealthily and step by step, been taken out from someone... until the teetering denouement is, because of the physics of gravity, an inevitability – for want of a better analogy, a demise of the kind that David Carradine (as Bill), in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004), is unaware of facing.

Loach and Allen tell their story with care, and are, for example, content to show us Harris amongst the vividness and noise of the Orange Order parades, but without telling us till later who he is, because they trust that we will recall him and his behaviour. Kerridge and Ingrid are both intended to invoke our sympathies as seeking the truth, although they take different paths and end up diverging (which, of course, only adds to the drama).

This is a film that looks very good cinematically, and still has much to say, Sinclair’s objections as to its historicity apart (it is a document, of a sort, of its own time, however we judge Loach’s politics and where they have him lean) – both emotionally and as to how the world works. As to what Allen and he sought to weave together, perhaps the final word should be left to Loach (continuing the short quotation above) :

It’s very close in the depiction of the murders that were carried out by the RUC and in the corrupting effect of the British presence in Northern Ireland, but the whole issue of fact or fiction gets quite tricky at this point, and I’m not sure we solved it altogether satisfactorily – or the attempt to weave together the Stalker elements with the conspiracy against Wilson.

[Ibid., p. 84]

End-notes

* As Kerridge (Brian Cox) is told, before he is ultimately manipulated into accepting the reality propounded by the film’s conspirators (rather than exposing the reality behind it) : for, as they candidly tell him, they did what they did, it cannot be undone, and they did it – and still think it – ‘for the best’. (The old Machiavellian-style ends over means argument…)

** London, 1998, p. 84.

*** The second being sympathetic producers Rebecca O’Brien and Sally Hibbin.

**** Cox, for example, from Menenius in Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011) (as well as the voice of disembodied and recreated Alan Watts in Her (2013)), and Roëves from the Chief Inspector in Brighton Rock (2010) (or even Colonel Munro in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)).

***** Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3) has renamed its late-night arts programme Free Thinking, but there were times when to be called a freethinker was meant in a wholly derogatory way.


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