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)

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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)

Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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19 October (updated, with a 102-point rating, 20 October; Tweet added 1 January 2015)

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

I was waiting for something to happen - and it never did


Obviously, what is revealed about Jasmine (and to her) in the last ten or so minutes did not count for the person who made this comment - what sort of film was this meant to be in which this elusive 'something' might eventuate ?

Having seen Blue Jasmine (2013) exactly a month ago, on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival, I was pleased to have watched it again, and pleased for Woody Allen that Screen 2 this Saturday night was sold out. Do I vainly hope for some of those people to go back and see some of the fifty or so other Allen films, whether or not they missed them before ?


If so, I would commend, in addition to the well enough known Annie Hall and Manhattan, these personal favourites :


Interiors (1978)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love and Death (1975)



Back at the film, and the question posed, I have heard it suggested that Dr Flicker is the person closest to Allen himself (i.e. the parts that he writes for himself to play), and I watched him with that in mind. No, he is not Allen - Allen is, I think, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett).

Tuned to Allen, knowing almost all of his films, and having seen this one before, I could hear his cadences, his little excited rages in this role – not exactly, but Jasmine is the one who approaches his self-expression, his fluidity, his vocabulary and assurance. Listen for him, and I think that you will find his voice in Blanchett’s.

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

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Meanwhile, back at the nub, the film is not as dark as Interiors, but it is a drama, and I hope that it is being appreciated for that, though one with the humour that Interiors almost entirely lacks : there are themes in common here, and the Allen who cut up footage of Charlotte Rampling for a vivid portrayal of her distressed state of mind (as Dorrie) in hospital in Stardust has long had, if not themes of mental health, then hints at it, and I respect him immensely for that.

Blanchett almost cannot fail to win something big for this performance, because, for me, it is so easily convincing, so true to the psychology of her life (explored more here) and to the experiences that she has, but I am, if anything, even more delighted at a peach of a role like this for the tremendous Sally Hawkins, who really shows what a versatile actor she is at playing a character who has a capacity to delight in the smaller things and be radiant – Allen had cast her in Cassandra’s Dream, and this new part she carries off perfectly.

As to the story, no, there is no big something, and I did not have to absorb two previous films as at the time of the previous viewing, but I am very pleased to run this one through again and see how beautifully it holds together. When Allen crafts a screenplay, as in Hannah (or Harry, or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), there is nothing that one would change with it – when, for me, he does not, in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), it is hard to know where and how one would rescue it.

So my hope is for people to be patient with Jasmine’s story, and the choices that she has made – when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she clicks into a fantasy where she has always been called Jasmine, etc., etc., and I could see her entering into straightaway believing things, just because she was saying them and wanted them to be true. We can reach back into the story, and see how much – and, at the same time, how little – she knew about what was happening and what she was doing, and how, as we see her doing all along with prioritizing her needs, she hurts her stepson and husband.

I also hope that they will look out some other Allen, not Midnight in Paris (2011), really, but maybe some of the ones that I have listed; that Hawkins now has the recognition that she deserves; that Allen keeps on with his film every year; and that good film-making like this will be taken to people’s hearts, and cherished.

Where did the Blanche DuBois characterization in Blue Jasmine (2013) really originate... ? : https://t.co/grhg1tGL9g Bananas (1971)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2015

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

A good long look at Woody ?

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30 July

A documentary doesn’t that takes as its subject a person’s career does not have to mention every date, every detail. However, if he or she has been pictured with the first person whom he or she married, there might be merit in mentioning, by way of commentary, the fact of being divorced at the time of talking about the next marriage / relationship, e.g. X had divorced his / her first wife / husband m years earlier. (Or it could be mentioned at the time of introducing the failed marriage, e.g. This youthful marriage only lasted m years before ending in divorce.)

Whereas a feature film might give us information and expect us to hold it, or to be provisional about whether it is true, so, of course, can a documentary, if it wants to include some references to a person (or thing) for us to ponder before it is explained who (or what) it is. Otherwise, it is just clumsiness and /or bad editing if we have not been disabused that the marriage last mentioned is no longer continuing.

In this film, the longer version of the documentary about Woody Allen that was released at the cinema last year, it does not matter that we see Louise Lasser, in clips from Bananas (1971), before knowing that Allen had been married to her, too, and that they had made the film after their divorce, but no one had bothered to tell us, in the way suggested, that Allen's first marriage had ended. (On a similar theme, Part 2 touches upon the fact that Allen and Mia Farrow had adopted children, but lived separately, although so close that they could virtually wave to each other from their homes, but without specifying that they were not, and had not been, married.)

Anyway, Part 1 of does not cover a whole lot of new ground, but has more facts about Allen's family, dwells for somewhat longer on how Rollins and Joffe made Allen a household name and on his t.v. performances, and, after telling the story of What's New, Pussycat ?, has comments from Allen, but often enough others (such as Mariel Hemingway, Tracy in Manhattan (1979)), on the films up to and including Stardust Memories (1980).


In reviewing the single-film cinema version, I pointed out that what Father Robert Lauder observed, with reference to clips (all of which therefore took up some time), as an insight had actually been stated by Allen himself about his work in the useful volume Woody Allen on Woody Allen : Fr Robert is still here (for some reason*), but not that sequence. Part 1 had taken us to 1980 in some 116 minutes (looking at more or less every film), so by no means halfway through Allen’s film career, but Part 2 did not proceed in the same way, which, when it had done so in the cinema, seemed like a desperate and doomed attempt to continue a film-by-film survey.

Instead, it made much of the peculiarities of Allen’s way of casting, and of scripts being supplied to actors by courier for them to read whilst the courier waited to take them back. Tantalizing quotations from Allen’s personal notes to a number of actors were made, with the text (whether or not typed) whisked across the screen (unless, one imagines, one paused them), and letters or notes laid over each other. Whether Allen minded this, one did not know, but doubted, as he took the view that auditions were awful and awkward, and assumed that everyone else would feel the same.

I cannot say for sure whether much more was said by Allen about the Mia Farrow separation and court-case, but he was no longer heard to say (unless I am thinking of the mention in Allen on Allen in the chapter on Bullets over Broadway (1994)) that he would have been happy for Farrow to play the part with which, instead, Dianne Wiest initially struggled (though she was to win an Oscar), and that everyone else thought him crazy to consider casting Farrow, when he says that he just saw it as a role that she could play.


Josh Brolin was allowed to stand as a dissenting voice about Allen’s direction being good, but even offset by Brolin’s co-star in You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Naomi Watts, saying that she had decided that Allen was the best director with whom she had worked. As to the question of coming to film in London and elsewhere in Europe, that was partly glossed over, except to say how difficult it is to film in New York and that Allen had nowhere left that he had not shot, and we were told that the appeal of Midnight in Paris (2011) was the life of the city at night, and (by Owen Wilson) that the title (which he said had been hit upon before the film was written) was the root of the film’s success.

From what I have heard and read, it had become less easy for Allen to film (or film as he wanted), but that was not the whole of it – also, as clips showed, Allen had filmed in places such as Paris and Venice in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and, I believe, in Italy in Another Woman (1988). Culturally, his range of reference has always been very wide, and, as the film reminded us, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini were favourite directors, and that was surely no coincidence.


A surprising omission from talking about thirty-years of film-making in around 86 minutes (Part 2) was not to comment, in talking about Interiors (1978), how it marked the first film that Allen wrote and directed without appearing in it. In Allen on Allen, he said that he had never thought of casting himself in that film, but it appeared not to have occurred to director Bob Weide that, just as Allen did not fulfill his critics’ expectations with the type of film, they could not have failed to notice that he was not in it. No mention was also made of Allen’s appearances as an actor in others’ films, such as with Bette Midler in Scenes from a Mall (1991), which he had started doing in 1967 with the David Niven version of Casino Royale.

When Allen showed his lifelong typewriter and how he produces material, one could easily have missed his reference to having written all his articles in The New Yorker on it, not least if the viewer does not know the publication. In fact, Allen has published four collections of pieces, and also seven or eight of his screenplays have appeared (from Manhattan (1979) to Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Interiors). Early plays were talked about, but really as a way of introducing Diane Keaton, when it should have been possible, in a few sentences near the end, to mention books like Without Feathers**, the number of plays and film appearances, and, indeed, how many films Allen had made (and acted in).

Attention was given to the box-office successes of Match Point (2005) and Midnight in Paris, but the film lacked an overview and a structure in Part 2. So we were shown clips from Shadows and Fog (1991), but not in the context of saying anything about the film, almost just to illustrate a character’s way of being by not being able to relate to a God. Likewise, the account (again with clips) of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) did not even make clear that chance conversation between Allen (as Cliff Stern) and Martin Landau (playing Judah Rosenthal) was at the heart of the film. Space was given to Allen saying that he found the darker story more interesting, and wished that he had made it without the character of Stern, but the crux of their interaction in the film was omitted from comment.

That said, although everyone (Allen included) was shown saying the word ‘compartmentalize[d]’ about Allen and how he worked throughout the Farrow break-up, and the film had the merit of people such as Letty Aronson (or even, in footage that Allen made, his mother) telling the story without any real narration, it needed it sparingly instead of just using quotation by clip. As it was, what got told about Allen, and what did not, in a two-parter that ran to some ninety minutes longer relied on what Diane Keaton, as a key figure, maybe said, or was asked, or was prompted to say, whereas my feeling is that Weide did not always show his own mastery of the material or the subject in what we saw, and I am not sure that that failure can be accounted for merely by the difficulty of turning, no doubt, hours of footage into a documentary of manageable length.

However, some clips, particularly towards the end, were very telling, and one had a lump in one’s throat in admiring all that Allen had done and excelled at. My wish is that, for those who knew his career and work less well, they could have known about the books, the other plays, the other films : as it was, fascinating though it was to be told that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem had originated the dialogue in Spanish, translated it into English for the subtitles, and that Allen had had no idea at the time of shooting what they were talking about, giving a bit of time to the sheer body of Allen’s achievement would have said much more than showing that he trusted his actors.


End-notes

* I, for one, am far more interested in what Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe (his producers), Eric Lax (an Allen biographer), Richard Schickel (a film critic), Letty Aronson (Allen’s sister), and Dick Cavett (the well-known chat-show host and broadcaster) had to say, though I suspect that Cavett was given more opportunity in the cinema release.

** The omnibus The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, whose title was falsified by the appearance of Mere Anarchy, would scarcely have appeared without that being a significant part of what the public knows of his work.


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Inside the family

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19 September

* Contains spoilers *

Home for the Weekend (2012) (originally Was Bleibt) is not, for me, a film that bears comparison with Woody Allen’s Interiors, shot just before Manhattan. In the introduction, we were told that films do not often show the lives of the German upper middle-classes, and, although this film may do so, it does not, largely, do so in a novel way, as if what it shows were, in itself, enough.

Allen’s film, too, has a mother with a history of mental ill-health and siblings gathering at the family home, one of whom is more put upon by being local, but the highly-strung mother in his family has not simply stopped taking medication as Gitte has - which just seems forced in reinforcing the pat belief that the only problems are when people are not compliant. What, more importantly, is very unsympathetic is the language, typified by talking about Gitte going nuts, whereas my fantasy about Germany is that there is far more acceptance, not least within this class, of mental-health issues and how to support those with them than in Britain.

In this film, for all that the characters just react badly to the news that Gitte stopped her medication, none of them seems either to appreciate her not wanting to be drugged so that she has no feeling, or that their concern at what she has done lacks any obvious meaning if they then go on to reveal that they have just been humouring her. She already feels that they have been pretending, and that she has no important say in anything, but it makes little sense to confirm it at this time.

We see the brothers angry and physical with each other over who is to blame for their mother, but they ultimately move on quite quickly to fulfil themselves away from home, which, sadly, seems to send the message that Gitte had been holding them back, and she is remembered largely as a source of recrimination between father and son. Allen's three sisters seem a little less slow to forget...

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The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

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23 January

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

* Contains spoilers *

For sure, there's no easy way to do it, when:

* It can be hard to avoid trailers totally, which - whoever makes the things - dish up (as Percy Grainger described his arrangements of Bach) bits of the film (and maybe even bits that don't make it to the version that goes on general release and which you will see) in an often unrepresentative way¹ ;

* The man who can make Midnight in Paris (2011), no great masterpiece though it actually is², can also produce Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where, I believe, the point of interest is not Vicky or Cristina (whichever is which) and what they get up to, but very nearly the third named, if it weren't for the performance from Ms Cruz;

* Likewise, we were given Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by the director who followed it up with (?!) Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010);

* Not knowing Luc Besson's canon that well (except Subway (1985) [and also The Fifth Element (1997)]), but being well aware that it was not that / either type of film, The Lady (2011) still wasn't what I expected at all in the wake of 2010's Festival opener (which said a lot, but probably not too much, in its title), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec³ (2010);

* Even the publicity image used for The Future (2011), of much of the top half of Miranda July protruding diagonally from a sash-window (and dressed in a frilly white(ish) dress with black features), is a striking one. However, it actually captures a moment, for me, of utter inconsequence (save to demonstrate a write-up's description of audiences finding her work / acting either 'kooky or cute')⁴.


Which leads us, neatly or otherwise, on to Part 2 - to be found at The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 2)...



End-notes

¹ Trailers often enough create a longing to see where that moment fits in, what happens next, when it turns out not to be that interesting. (And, of course, they (distributors, directors, whoever) know that it's not that interesting, but they show it to you out of context to create an appetite that they know that they cannot satisfy.)

² Review to come, some time: it was started in the third week of its run, and unnecessarily long delayed, although oft picked at in the meantime.

³ Call it versatility (DVD, again), I guess, which is what one gets in the range of Woody Allen's work, from mock-documentary Zelig (1983) about Leonard Zelig, 'the human chameleon', to a fraught, but chilling, drama in Interiors (1978).

⁴ Except that, for what one could loosely call The Future's plot, it is part of the zany way in which (as writer) July chooses to set her character up with another man: he is being asked to say whether he can hear the shout that she is making - or about to make, or has just made - from said window, although, from what he has already told her (us) about where he is in LA, he is almost assuredly out of earshot.


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