Showing posts with label I've Loved You So Long. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I've Loved You So Long. Show all posts

Tuesday 8 April 2014

We’re all different on the inside

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

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


8 April (updated 9 April)

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

It was a very good thing not to have seen the poster for Starred Up (2013) before the screening, which is where the tag-line for this posting comes from – accepted that posters (and trailers) are to convey messages that their makers think will ‘sell’ the film, and those interests may be divergent from those who made the film, but still… Whatever intention there was to allude to psychological truth, the clanging impression was of a gaudy headline from The Sun !

There have been powerful films concerning prison in recent years : Cell 211 (Celda 211) (2009) has a relentless, driving energy (not unlike that of Drive (2011)) – even if it does not manage to disguise a fatal flaw at the centre of its plot ; Hunger (2008) has a very different raw strength, and a far greater one than that of 12 Years A Slave (2013) ; even Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein in I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime) (2008) evoke an experience of a prison that is never seen.


However, despite Starred trying to get us to believe that it is powerful by the incessant spitting out of words such as ‘cunt’ and its accompanying violence / brutality of a physical kind, it is not. As that tag-line suggests, it feels as though it has more in common not with, say, Steve McQueen’s vision in Hunger, but with t.v.’s long-running series Porridge (and that a comedy !).

Saying this goes against the trend of appreciation for this film (and / or its lead) (as it did with Slave), but one has to say what one saw, heard, felt, believed – just as much as with a concert in, say, not joining in those giving Sir John Eliot Gardiner an ovation for the Monteverdi Vespers (1610).

No one is Fletch[er] (Ronnie Narker – oops, Barker !) in this film, but the character of ‘Genial’ Harry Grout (menacingly played by Peter Vaughan in the series) has become the softer, cardigan-wearing Spencer (Peter Ferdinando, looking quite a bit as he did for Tony (2010) – sadly, unlike other reviewers, IMDb is not much help, as has been found before, for checking these things). (Probably he has his reasons for carrying respect and having the ear of Governor Hayes* (Sam Spruell), but they are not visible, unlike the trophies of doing so.)

With the Grout figure as Spencer, his interventions (or attempts at them) and / or those of Hayes apart, the film is essentially the triangular form of father (Neville Love), son (Eric Love) and therapist (Oliver), which seems like some secular form of The Trinity. Possessive love (Love !), telling people what to do, disobedience, helping others to help themselves, envy, corruption, adopting final solutions (ends, not means) – almost a catalogue of The Seven Deadly Sins (and the smallest hint of the Classical Virtues in the midst).

People say that Jack O’Connell (Eric) and Ben Mendelsohn (Neville) were strong, but probably the more impressive scenes were joint work, the complex interactions between those in Rupert Friend’s (Oliver’s) threatened group : amongst whom, IMDb seems to help find at least Anthony Welsh (Hassan) and David Ajala (Tyrone). Screenwriter Jonathan Asser is reported as having run such a group, so one is necessarily prevented from querying the credibility or the dynamics within the regime of such a venture (even though it could still be a rarity), yet, at the same time, one wants to disbelieve – depending on when this is meant to be set – that this initiative would happen in a prison, but not be (or not properly) supported by the authorities.

One also relies on Asser for a notion of prison life, but, as has been suggested above, the portrayal seems almost second hand, and not visceral to the core, but only superficially, in that it echoes with HMP Slade in a way that the exemplars cited do not. Yet, in Porridge, we are carefully introduced to slang such as ‘snout’ (because comedy does not work best if the audience is lost), whereas here almost too few concessions are made – fail to catch what being starred up means (which, it appears, Eric views as a badge of honour**), and there are no second chances.

In fact, it has been said that the DVD release will have, if not exactly subtitles, then some method for making the fleeting explicable – quite apart from the fact that the medium also allows the action to be paused and replayed. If that is correct***, then one must judge for oneself whether such a move suggests that there is an element of misjudging what a general viewer grasps, as against accustomed reviewers (though they may have the luxury, if not of a screening that allows them to revisit in this way, then a so-called screener, effectively an advance DVD).


* May be spoilers beyond this point *

The violence in the film convinces, as does the anger and all its forms of expression. The setting and the degradingly impersonal admission process (when we do not know who Eric is) speak volumes, and, if one’s duties have ever taken one to a prison as a visitor, the aural and tactile sense of door after door being unlocked****, gone through, and locked again (so that there is level after level hindering one’s return) is frighteningly real, almost as being lost in a labyrinth is.

@GavinMidgley's @TakeOneCFF review is well worth a read (he found 'stock characters' and 'stretched' credibility) : http://t.co/oit4AbfWDZ
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 9, 2014


It may just be individual taste whether Friend, Mendelsohn and Ferdinando seem persons or stereotypes, in writing, casting and demeanour. O’Connell, scripted as a loose cannon in Eric, is fine enough, but does it carry a whole film – and would Eric do things just because he can, yet listen to a different voice (of Oliver) and stop (and how different would this voice really be, or is it that he has heard other such voices before ?) ? Rational enough that Eric later imputes motives with which he is familiar to question the reason for what that voice / Oliver says, but why back off from brinkmanship ?

The rest of the film purports to explore this Eric to whom we have been introduced, but how much more do we actually see ? – and what could we have been shown… ?


End-notes

* Can IMDb really be right that there are two prison governors, because the person credited as Governor Cardew (Sian Breckin) clearly ‘pulls rank’ on him… ?

(Needless to say, pulling rank – or claiming that one has the rank to pull – is a large part of this film.) When it comes to the three main characters that are identified, IMDb does not even seem to know that the common surname is Love.


** * Contains some spoilery, detailed comments *

He by no means has the smallest ego in the piece, but – from what one can gather – the lack of contact between father and son spans at least a decade, and nothing much is given about his time between then and what brought him to the young offenders’ institution. (It is unknown whether relatives (Neville knows that Eric is there and who he is) would be incarcerated together generally, or as here – maybe Asser knows ?)

It remains to be judged whether this is right about the film, but, when a high percentage of the prison population has untreated (or even undiagnosed) mental-health conditions, it treats the people whom we see as Porridge might. So they have personalities and peccadillos, but mainly not problems of this kind.

In our focus, a select few get a group version of what is delivered on a one-to-one basis in films such as Good Will Hunting (1997) (other examples abound, before and since, of therapy and cinema), the others maybe nothing, and is that what – or only what – Eric needs ? (The counter-attack that he launches on someone whom he wrongly thinks is approaching with evil intent hints that there is more going on.)


*** In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw handily tells us :

The film's press pack came with a glossary explaining to reviewers some of the other code-words: "kanga" meaning officer; "tech" meaning mobile phone; "kick off back door" meaning anal sex, and "straightener", meaning pre-planned fight.


**** At the crucial time, however, conveniently no clanking and clunking, and more like Peter Gabriel’s ‘drawers that slide smooth’ (‘Mercy Street’, from the album Us).




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

Thursday 2 August 2012

KST / Bradshaw

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



This was meant to be a draft, for me to use to comment on what the great Messrs Bradshaw and French have 'made of' this film, but it seems to have gone live - whatever they have to say...


Philip French:

In Your Hands (aka Contre toi) is a subtle psychological thriller, the second full-length feature by the French writer-director Lola Doillon, but the first to be shown here. A claustrophobic virtual two-hander, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas as confident, childless divorcee Anna Cooper, a surgeon working in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a prison hospital, and Pio Marmaï as Yann, a wild young man.In Your HandsProduction year: 2012Country: FranceCert (UK): 15Runtime: 81 minsDirectors: Lola DoillonCast: Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, Kristin Scott Thomas, Pio MarmaiMore on this filmAt the beginning Anna appears distraught but carefully controlled, running from a shabby suburban house to her smart Parisian apartment. The movie doesn't leave us long to wonder about her conduct. She goes to the police to report her abduction, and in a tensely developed flashback we learn that she has been held in a cellar by Yann, the vengeful husband of a patient who died during a Caesarean operation carried out by Anna. In this first part there's an emotional ebb and flow, the threat of violence and some physical conflict, as the two discuss the case and its emotional ramifications.In the second part, a delayed instance of the Stockholm syndrome, some mixture of guilt and sympathy seems to draw Anna to seek out Yann. A passionate affair ensues that is in its way as dangerous as the period of incarceration, possibly more so. The end is abrupt and not entirely satisfactory, but it's a convincingly performed and constantly intriguing film


Kristin Scott Thomas gives us another movie in a distinctive genre that she has made her own: modern day, no makeup, speaking French, transgressive sex. It's an intense and claustrophobic two-hander, well acted – especially by her – but frankly a bit of a shaggy-dog story with a faintly unsatisfactory ending. Scott Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a single professional woman living on her own in Paris and a bit of a workaholic. The name signals that, though a fluent and idiomatic French speaker, she is British but otherwise there is no back story. At the beginning of a rare holiday, Anna comes into traumatic contact with an intense figure: Yann, played by Pio Marmaï, and their encounter becomes a terrifying ordeal. The film begins intriguingly and promises much, with an interesting flashback structure which initially conceals as much as it reveals. But in its third act, the movie runs out of ideas and has no more to tell us. Set alongside Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long (2008) and Catherine Corsini's Leaving (2009), In Your Hands showcases of one of this country's most remarkable screen performers, a vividly intelligent presence – but it does not quite work. PB