Overlooked in all the care

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (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)

19 August

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Presently, on Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1) (please see the note on screenings below)


This film concerns itself with the sort of overlooked type of person who does not – or fails to – make a full recovery.

In a very polished way, which never feels like imitation, it seems closest to the frailty and fragility of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) (in particular, the pale, almost monochrome shades, into which the significant colour in the film erupts). Yet we are in an underlying family ambience that (not just because of the three daughters that all three films share) more closely resembles that of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (but with maybe a hint of Dorrie’s (Charlotte Rampling’s) less-manic moments of insecurity from Stardust Memories (1980) to heighten the sororial bitchiness of Hannah (Mia Farrow)).

We quickly learn that Eugenia (Geni) had had a serious road-traffic accident around a year before the start of the film, and we were immediately placed in her world in the opening shot, with no mise-en-scène, as she walks through a door on the left of the screen into a plush ante-room. She asks, and is told that she can go straight in to see the doctor – then we are in there with her, and looking at her, with a full view of the doctor kept back from us.

Maybe Geni (Nora Navas) is actually on time for the appointment (and, as one goes off, she reports to the doctor that she is using alarms on her phone to tell her where she should be), but what we notice most is that she seems too serene, almost over-eager to please : from what happens later, just with the long slow sweep past the city through the taxi’s window as she slumps, it is clear that she had been pretending, and that the doctor does not seem to have looked behind appearances. (So, if Geni says that ‘The important thing is the knee’, that is what the doctor hears and has noted.)

Yet we will see her family require Geni to pretend according to their pattern (at which point, we are sharply reminded of the subjective element in the title’s What’s Best For Her), and we also see how uneasily their encouraging phrases, which aim to re-frame her experience, fit on her lips. So, as she repeats her husband Dani’s (Pau Durà’s) words, we feel them become as dust, or meal, in her mouth :

All this is non-negotiable

I must make… an effort


Compared with Rust and Bone (2012), another (but very different) film about what happens after a trauma (to Marion Cotillard as Stéphanie), it is a bourgeois life in which Geni is living (typified by the flat, and its easy interiors and choice in art). However, in terms of what she is experiencing, looking interestedly at advertising in the surgery for a medication that seems to be an anti-depressant (Happiness is in the little things), her problems seem out of place and unwelcome there (and they are arguably greater than those of Stéphanie) :

Geni’s world / family seems to have a work ethic that does not begin to understand duvet days, and it is one whose pressures, although not always explicit, are inescapable. The assumption, which is everyone’s starting-point (both for themselves and on the others’ behalf), is that you can get back what you had. Which includes, as we hear when Geni’s more similar sister suggests a thoughtful, individual exercise at New Year (to round off the previous twelve months for everyone), not only that her father expects a return on the therapy that he has bought for Geni's sister, but also, in how the exercise gets subverted, greater disrespect for what therapy says, does and is for.

You do not need to have a notion of the recovery model in UK mental health to notice the number of times people say to Geni that 'You used to...’, and, at such times, there is something about Navas’ mouth that registers a barely visible disquiet. (At other times, we see her disassociate from that with which she simply cannot cope.) Navas is on screen almost without a break, and looking properly at what her look says pays dividends for feeling the richness and depth of how the film explores this situation.

In the event, when Geni is trying to follow up a lead for a job via someone known to her other sister (whom everyone must think of as mature and responsible), we and she have suddenly have Mariana, waving and laughing at Geni in the interview. Afterwards, though, Geni closes down all of Mariana’s (Valeria Bertuccelli’s) suggestions for renewing contact, but it is about feelings from the past that the rest of the film’s short internal timescale addresses.

This is a powerful film, sharply edited and clearly shot. It has a different trajectory and premise from the highly honest Chilean film Gloria (2013), but it, too, shows a person looking for what matters, and causing us to admire – but also fear for – her.


This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


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

Found in her memories

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

7 November

90 = S : 14 / A : 16 / C : 12 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 15

A rating and review of Philomena (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)

Those who read my blog with any regularity - poor fools ! - may have found that I am 'not good around' Judi Dench, though I did enjoy (even if I should not have done) Billy Connolly and her in Mrs Brown (1997), and, for this reason, will not have discovered much reviewed that features her : something to do with not being able to forgive her spending her effort on series after series (nine, was it ?) of As Time Goes By...

In Philomena, where she is the title-character, all my doubts were overcome - just the close-ups alone, where one could feel the yearning in her eyes, and believe that she was transfixed by the images that were her past, were worth the whole film. (I must last have seen her in Skyfall (2012), as M, but there she has a different vulnerability to her, feeling under personal threat, and then facing a murderous Javier Bardem - at those moments when Philomena was vulnerable, for she could also be very resourceful and admirable in holding her position, she did not seem nearly so frail, but very touching.)

As with another film out now, Gloria (2013), the clue is in the title, i.e. that we are going to witness a portrait of that person, but this person (although she, too, has hurts and griefs) is very different from Gloria. Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan (who produced the film, and co-wrote it with Jeff Pope), thinks that Philomena is credulous (and says so to his editor), but, when he more or less tells her so (in what sort of desire to keep her sweet, one does not know), she very quickly tells him that God would think him a feckin' eejit. (No, it did not smack of Father Ted, but seemed a very genuine response to Martin's thoughtless atheistic baiting.)

When I consider that Coogan wrote this part for Dench, I am humbled. At The Lincoln Monument, after he has moved her around like a piece of meat to try to get a good pose, there is a very telling pair of lines :

Martin : I'm only going to tell the truth

Philomena : That's what I'm worried about


The lines encapsulate a polarity at the heart of the film. Philomena is a real person about whom Martin Sixsmith, the former BBC journalist and then adviser to the last government, wrote a book in 2009, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. The real Philomena (of whom a photo is shown in a closing montage) was presumably similarly torn about looking for the son whom she was forced to allow to be adopted, and the personal cost of her privacy in doing so.

Whatever the offscreen Sixsmith may be like (and Coogan does not use his ability for mimicry here), he must have allowed Coogan to portray as Martin a journalist who, when declining breakfast and asking for privacy in a supposedly polite way, has an abrasiveness to him that causes Philomena to rebuke him for rudeness. (His quick retreat into saying that he needs 'quiet time' felt like a sulk, the complementary side to beginning to correct her when she alludes to him 'going to Oxbridge' (because it is a contraction, not a place), and thereby ignoring the context in which said it, and what she was actually saying to him.)

What worries me a little about the film, from where I could judge the laughter to be coming from in Screen 2 (and of what quality), is that it veers close to the racist notion of being Irish equating with backwardness. Not specifically when an irritated Martin sums Philomena up as someone who has soaked up Reader's Digest and The Daily Mail (and one other publication), because he is not a million miles from being thoroughly conceited anyway (which, in characterizing a Sixsmith persona, Coogan must have enjoyed).

However, there are occasions when the timing of the editing does tend to make Philomena sound like a simpleton, for example when she does not get Martin's allusion to The Wizard of Oz, just after they have first met, and when she quotes the word 'titanium' in a single-word description of her new hip : it floats, as if she is foolishly saying things that she does not understand (whereas her job for thirty years suggests otherwise). Then, at the trademark salad-bar, it is clear that Martin does not know this sort of place to eat, and we are again left with space that makes it sound awkward that she is calling the croutons that she is adding to her salad 'bits of toast' (though croutons are really scarcely more than bits of toast).

As the film progressed, my perception is that a fair number in the audience were, in laughing, not being sympathetic - almost the old distinction of 'at' rather than 'with', although they might have been laughing, rather than bearing with Philomena. Perhaps they missed that Martin was not meant to be right in thinking her to soak up words and phrases to use without understanding, but that he - not unusually in the trajectory of such a film - was, as a graduate from Oxford, meant to learn things from her.

In the first scene at an airport (actually, identifiable as Stansted, from where they would not have been able to take that flight), Martin does not disguise that he has heard the plot of a cheap paperback on sufferance, quipping unkindly that he almost felt as though he had read it. When they are next at an airport, Martin has no answers for why they should not be, and we are left to congratulate ourselves when we hear Philomena articulate the reasons not to catch the flight that we thought of shortly before.

Fine as a plot device to make us think better of Philomena, and to watch Martin just go along with it when he had had no idea what to do, but there are perhaps too many other cases when we begin to wonder how sharp he really is, if he takes the step of going somewhere without having thought through what to do when he gets there. That is where the film seems weak, since we insufficiently have portrayed a Martin who is depressed, for whom some of what happens might no longer be grist to his mill.

This is also not a buddy film, but more of a Rain Man (1988) sort of film, in that Cruise's (Charlie's) position changes in relation to Hoffman's (Raymond's), and Martin ends up respecting Philomena, and making a gesture that shows respect for her views. The closing, rising shot is beautifully executed, and seems in no way forced in bringing an air of grandeur to the scene.

Alexandre Desplat's suitably unobtrusive score has achieved the same aim throughout, of being there, but not being so obvious that one feels it out of place (and, in this, he did as he did with Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)). The device of using footage, so that Philomena almost seems to be prescient in seeing what happens to her son, is an effective one, and roots Philomena in the memories of what she had.

If we excuse the black-and-whiteness of the depiction of the nuns (though, for all that I know, Sixmsith's book may record Sister Hildegard's views as shown), the cast as a whole is strong, but especial mention must go to Sophie Kennedy Clark for bringing a vitality to Philomena as a younger woman, and for showing us the origin of the hurt, the moment of separation, that inhabits the reflective older Philomena's gaze.


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

Dropping the mobile in his soup (mini-spoiler)

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

1 November (updated with rating, 2 November)


95 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16

A rating and review of Gloria (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)

Gloria (2013) is many positive things – it has more moods per fifteen minutes than many a film has in its entirety – and it most resembles, in this alone, Barbara (2012), for being an unwavering portrait of an independent and resilient woman, who knows what suits her, and how to make herself look and feel good.

Fleeting little touches of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in the informality of the family scenes, and even a little whiff of Alice (1990), but this film is its own model, eschewing redundant reaction-shots, unnecessary explanation (we are never really sure what Gloria’s (Paulina García’s) job is, or, until late on, that she lives in Santiago), and a development any more predictable than that of life : Fernando (Sergio Hernández) tries to explain how his daughters look to him, and how he felt abandoned at a party, but we do not really know whether his words will carry any weight with Gloria.

García takes a very unmannered approach to Gloria’s portrayal, which makes it easy to identify with her character as she sings along to ballads (even power ballads) as she drives, and with her expressions (a smile, passing across her face), or seeing her enjoying dancing : questions as to where she is, and whether she has formed relationships through dance before, become largely redundant, because we are in the immediacy of her coming to know Fernando, of the problems that her neighbour upstairs is causing for her.

Indulgent to Fernando wanting to keep his ex-wife’s and grown-up daughters’ demands away from affecting her, we yet see him allow a date be spoilt by a phone that he could have switched off, and, likewise a sensitive reading that moved Gloria, is not backed up by greater commitment, because he straight afterwards takes another invasive call.

That tentative relationship is just part of what the nicely composed film offers – as indicated, one should not expect to know where it is going, because, amongst other things, we see a mother who cannot help giving her son and daughter slightly too little space*, has sexual desires that she acts on, and a willingness to try new things and have fun, and a capacity to be forgiving, loving and responsive.

A tremendous performance from García and an excellent cast, with what appeared to be just a few technical issues in the shots where Gloria meets Ferndando to render our viewing less than perfect. Probably not inspired by the hit of the same name from the 1980s, but it could have been…


End-notes

* Pedro gives us a beautiful movement from Bach’s Partita in D Minor for Solo Violin (No. 2), but this is the same son at whose phone Gloria cannot help trying to peer to see who a message is for, or clearing away crumbs on his table.


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