It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards ~ Søren Kierkegaard

This is a Festival preview of Jean-François and The Meaning of Life (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 September

This is a Festival preview of Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Friday 26 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 8.00 p.m.,
and also on Sunday 28 October at 2.30 p.m. [at The Light Cinema]

It becomes an author generally to divide a book, as it does a butcher to joint his meat, for such assistance is of great help to both the reader and the carver

Henry Fielding ~ Joseph Andrews² (Book II, Chapter I)

The right book, at the right time, can change a life - and what makes it 'right' is the person whom it is trying to seek out (who could be thirteen - or thirty-three) :

Therefore, if (despite the fact that hearing Kafka's 'Die Verwandlung', read some years earlier, had made no impact) it was a reading aloud of his 'In der Strafkolonie' (from the same collection), then this Franz Kafka of Prague (as a book-title styles him) was to become an essential travelling-companion in life, along with his three novels (all unfinished), diaries, stories, fragments of ideas, even a play, and those highly curious letters written to Felice Bauer¹ (the woman whom he barely knew, but, although she was very different from him, to whom he was engaged to be married, until he withdrew from it)...

Containing many surprising adventures which Joseph Andrews met with on the road, scarce credible to those who have never travelled in a stage-coach

Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book I, Chapter XII]

It is this elasticity of Time's perspective (and there are further thoughts about Time below), in our living and travelling with (unknown to anyone else) the author whom we know that we - and only we - have discovered for the first time, that Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) celebrates : in this sense, our experience tells us that no one else read this book before, and so we have a personal right of audience with the writer, from which we obtain direct communication and insight.

Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'


It is natural, and not unhelpful, to think of Lea von Acken in the role of Maria in Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014) when first watching Jean-François : to give Jean-François his birth-name, Francesc Rubió is not French, but now must attend a school in France, and - as Maria does - is facing difficulties in fitting in.

In Kreuzweg, director Dietrich Brüggemann and his co-writer Anna Brüggemann's screenplay is very knowing, but also, as here, sympathetic to their subject without laying the film open to the charge that it is manipulative. The 'chapter' titles in Jean-François i el sentit de la vida - just as Kreuzweg is divided by the names of the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross [the title Kreuzweg translates as 'The Way of the Cross'] - assist in giving a level of detachment.

A scene of roasting, very nicely adapted to the present taste and times

Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book II, Chapter VII]

Almost like musical punctuation - or mile-stones (for this film is as Picaresque as Henry Fielding's novels, quotations from whose Joseph Andrews we have already read above²) ? - there is likewise the use of Neo-Baroque and other musical interludes in Gerard Pastor's fully-composed score, which, along with their individual tone, and how they have been positioned in editing the film, deny us the leisure to be able to dwell overlong always on what we have just seen. (We may, if mid-eighteenth century novels appeal to us, find them what some nowadays may call 'page-turners', but the art of the writing is in what Fielding tells us in 'Of divisions in authors' (as quoted above, and below), and pertinent to the art of film-making.)

The musical pastiche / parody has all the poise and self-awareness of the self-proclaimed Auto Mechanics, seen here re-creating The Anatomy Lesson (1632) by Rembrandt

As cited above (and towards the close of this preview), in Joseph Andrews² the novelist Henry Fielding (1707–1754) has self-referentially devoted ‘Of divisions in authors’ (the first chapter of Book II) to the question why authors divide their novels into chapters. (Fielding is probably better known as the author of the much longer and raunchier novel Tom Jones (which was published seven years later.)

In the conduct of this matter, I say, Molly so well played her part, that Jones attributed the conquest entirely to himself, and considered the young woman as one who had yielded to the violent attacks of his passion. He likewise imputed her yielding to the ungovernable force of her love towards him ; and this the reader will allow to have been a very natural and probable supposition, as we have more than once mentioned the uncommon comeliness of his person : and, indeed, he was one of the handsomest young fellows in the world.³

Henry Fielding also overlapped with the last half-century of Johann Sebastian Bach’s life (1685–1750), in whose musical world the older composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) and Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) were important figures : quite apart from anything else about the film, we hear in Gerard Pastor’s witty score pastiches of these and other composers of the time.

Since sundry details in the film, if we try to dwell on them, also defy us to be sure when exactly Portabella might have set his story, the musical dimension – along with the chapter-titles – would seem to be part of writer / director Sergi Portabella’s deliberate mechanism to evoke a multiplicity of other eras. All of these elements, maybe without our consciously realizing the fact, appear to have the disjunctive intent of adding an ironical or quizzical dimension to what we see⁴.

A very curious adventure, in which Mr. Adams gave a much greater instance of the honest simplicity of his heart, than of his experience in the ways of this world

Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book II, Chapter XVI]

Just as the disparate observations made in watching 'screeners' of these #CameraCatalonia films coalesce - one hopes - into a coherent whole in the process of writing previews such as this, so a film director's vision for how such elements as script, actors, hair and make-up, lighting, locations, cinematography, set-construction, etc., will come together is what causes Sergi Portabella to have Gerard Pastor write in the style of composers from the time of Fielding : one could swear, at one dramatic point, that one is hearing one of Bach's towering Orgelwerke.

Even if it is allegorically (though not just on the level of Golden Age thinking'), Midnight in Paris - as also referenced in the #UCFF preview for Miss Dali (2018) - suggests that one can be nostalgic about a time that was never one's own : Gil both desires to be a writer such as those whom he admires from Paris in the 1920s and so to have been there at that time (and accordingly - with no explanatory device⁵, and to this extent this is magical realism, finds himself able to be in Paris in the 1920s), where he meets and is captivated by Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Where else but in a locomotive-shed, at night and with its sounds, would Francesc Rubió meet Lluna in Jean-François and The Meaning of Life (2018) at @camfilmfest ? Could he be St Francis and she Sister Moon perhaps ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 25, 2018

Which some readers will think too short and others too long

Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book III, Chapter VIII]

However, which is the film's thrust, it is ironic that Adriana ultimately no more wants to be in her era, the 1920s, than Gil in his... and just as he realizes that he insufficiently wishes to marry Inez, so he has to admit that he insufficiently wants to be with Adriana to go with her to the time of [Henri de] Toulouse-Lautrec. We may see that something of this order, though not reducible to or in these terms, is going on for and with our young hero in Jean-François, because of entering the orbit and world of Albert Camus.

One might also be put in mind of a number of other films, such as are referred to in this Tweet :

Thanks to Ramon Lamarca for a preview of #CameraCatalonia at @camfilmfest that touches on :

* Kreuzweg (2014)

* Love and Death (1975)

* Inside Out (2015)

* 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

* Microbe et Gasoil (2015)

* À bout de souffle (1960)

* Nebraska (2013)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2018

Thus, for example, one may discern that, as well as the closing scene of Kreuzweg, the very opening of this film somehow partly reminds of the early Woody Allen / Diane Keaton collaboration that is Love and Death (as does a note of whimsy in what turns out to be a score that comprises pastiches). In essence, the adventurous, implausible and unpredictable elements of Michel Gondry's Microbe et Gasoil (2015) [Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) that year] are here turned into chapters, whose titles may prove not to be any less equivocal than some of Fielding's in Joseph Andrews (or Tom Jones).

Of which you are desired to read no more than you like

Fielding ~ ibid. [title to Book IV, Chapter VI]

And few things can be as misleading (not to say mischievous and wayward ?) as the man who called himself Laurence Sterne, and, after creating the character in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), called where he lived in North Yorkshire Shandy Hall (now a Sterne museum) - Sterne causes a black page to be printed, when his character Yorick dies, and leaves us a blank page so that we can conceive of our own description of a female character ! :

Arguably, Portabella imbues Jean-François and Jean-François with this spirit. And also with that of what Hemingway somewhere said (or wrote)⁶ :

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

A volume without any such places of rest resembles the opening of wilds or seas, which tires the eye and fatigues the spirit when entered upon.

Henry Fielding ~ ibid. (Book II, Chapter I)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Friday 26 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 8.00 p.m.,
and also on Sunday 28 October at 2.30 p.m. [at The Light Cinema]

End-notes :

¹ Are Kafka’s Letters to Felice even real, we might ask – or is it an epistolary novel, written essentially as if only ‘his’ letters survive ? When we watch Miss Dalí (2018) [the #UCFF preview is under way], during this year’s Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival, There are highly equivalent matters on which we may find ourselves reflecting about, say, what did happen when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí collaborated...

At any rate, they are certainly amongst those parts of The Kafka Myth that suggest that other people, especially Kafka’s father, did not ‘get’ him – whereas we do, So, Brief an den Vater [Letter to My Father] duly gets collected and published – almost certainly by Max Brod. (Maybe not wholly successfully, Alan Bennett seeks to examine some of these relations, and versions of them, in his ‘irreverent’ play Kafka’s Dick.)


² Joseph Andrews, as we call it, was published in 1742 : Fielding styles it 'The history of the adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote'.

Or - as expansively published in its first part in 1605, more than a century before Fielding's birth - in El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha of Miguel de Cervantes ? For example (from the Penguin Classics translation by J. M. Cohen) :

In which is related the device Sancho adopted to enchant the Lady Dulcinea, and other incidents as comical as they are true

[Second Part, Chapter X]

³ Quoted from Tom Jones, Book IV, Chapter 6.

⁴ On one level, Sergi Portabella is quietly asking us how much we ‘buy into’ / ‘invest in’ the knowing illusion that is cinema – although, of course, do we not remember arriving at the cinema, and that we had a ticket to present (which is our only proof of a right to occupy this seat, and see these projected images that we call a film) ?

As we find in Joseph Andrews, a chapter-title such as 'Of which you are desired to read no more than you like' [Book IV, Chapter VI] gives us what impulse to carry on reading regardless ? !


⁵ Such as is imperfectly invoked by Richard Curtis in About Time (2013)...

⁶ On this, there seems to be a consensus - so, in many ways, it is immaterial whether he did.


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

It's only in uncertainty that we're naked and alive ~ Peter Gabriel¹

This is a Festival preview of The Virus of Fear (El virus de la por) (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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16 October

This is a Festival preview of The Virus of Fear (El virus de la por) (2015) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2016)

Albert Ausellé (as Hèctor) and Diana Gómez (Laura)

Well meant, for those who do not look to film to be easy and entertaining, people will find this sharply-edited film provocatively claustrophobic, in the way that Arthur Miller's The Crucible² is (or Max Frich's Andorra - please see below). (Its effect is gripping as a Vimeo download on a laptop, so it should be wildly immersive in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse (APH / Festival Central), where it is programmed both times : please see below for the times, and for links to book seats.)

Rubén de Eguia as Jordi

(Rubén is expected as a Festival guest of Ramon Lamarca,
programmer of Camera Catalonia)

The Virus of Fear (El virus de la por) is a film that may turn out not to be ‘about’ what its subject is likely to seem to be. Not least if one guesses at its nature from the film's title, and from ways in which, sometimes largely figuratively, we have come to think what a virus is (rather than in the literal sense of Contagion (2011), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) in that year).

It's so twisted ~ Jordi

Yet it is does not follow from any such realization³ that anyone would be precluded from wanting to watch El virus de la por again straightaway, because knowing what happens may leave us wanting to know more closely how we got there⁴ – how the experience gained by seeing the film has been created. Though - unlike Mulholland Drive (2001) might cause us to feel - it is not that Ventura Pons' cinematic world, as director (and co-writer), involves rather bewildering sleights of hand - yet, at the same time (and in an apparently naturalistic setting), the unfamiliar does assuredly appear familiar (and vice versa, as considered further below).

An image from a review of Archimedes' Principle
The play and this film's screenplay developed in a coeval manner

It is rather that we may know that is going to be worth retracing the journey that we took with the film : as one may have found with the power in and of Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014) at the Festival in 2014, whose impact was even stronger on a second viewing - or with The Taste of Money (2012) [one of Fifteen fine festival films at the Festival, from 2011 to 2013].

The stage-play Archimedes’ Principle [does physics still, more long-windedly, talk of The Principle of Archimedes ?] and the screenplay for El virus de la por originated alongside each other, since playwright Josep Maria Miró (@josepmariamiro / http://www.josepmariamiro.cat/en) was working with director Ventura Pons to co-write the screenplay. As a review of Archimedes’ Principle put it two years ago, when it was playing at London’s Park Theatre : we jump around in time, playing and replaying scenes, which take on different meanings once an alternative position has been expressed.

I really enjoy playing with discontinuous narrative ~ Ventura Pons

If we have not seen El virus de la por, the description in the review may at first remind us of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal⁵, a play with starts backwards and forwards in time, which make us ever aware that nothing, after all that we have seen and heard in the opening scene and then straight afterwards, is what it seems. However, in terms of theatre, there are closer analogues to what we see, such as in Max Frisch’s Andorra, with clashes between fact, what people believe, and how they act, or in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos [the play gives us the quotation much used in translation, Hell is other people (L'enfer, c'est les autres)]. The link is to a t.v. production in English (in 1964), with Pinter himself, Jane Arden, and Catherine Woodville : in In Camera (as the title in French is rendered), there is no static presentation, but a camera that roams, and with a wide selection of angles and framing-shots...

Much of which, for a work of cinema, is perhaps significantly missing from the film Betrayal⁵ (1983) ? And yet was present in the way that Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe - as if, physically, they were sub-atomic particles - vividly seemed to relocate and rotate, at times, in a production of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen that came to The Arts Theatre, Cambridge (@camartstheatre) [Frayn was interviewed by The Stage (@TheStage), and starts by talking about the play].

Adapting a stage play for the screen is trickier than you might initially think. https://t.co/50v7TFtM1y

— Raindance Film Fest (@Raindance) October 18, 2016

If one reads what Edward Murray wrote (albeit in 1972), he does not disagree with what is said in the Tweet by Raindance Film Festival (@Raindance). (Chapters 7 and 20 of his book The Cinematic Imagination⁶ are critiques of, respectively, ‘the Cinematic Drama’ and ‘the Cinematic Novel’, and of present trends in each.) Even so, Murray goes further, raising serious doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise :

The immense majority of superior plays fail to survive the transfer from stage to screen ; while inferior plays ― though they ordinarily adapt better than major works ― hardly ever achieve the level of the most distinguished original screenplays.

The Cinematic Imagination⁶, pp. 101–102

Told later – by Ramon Lamarca, programmer of Camera Catalonia – that El virus de la por’s essential scenario also exists as a stage-play, this ‘clicked’, and made sense. However, because it is a very good collaboration, and does not even feel like a deliberately respectful adaptation of ‘a classic’ (such as is Sílvia Munt’s of Josep María de Sagarra in El Cafè de la Marina [Munt was interviewed, as reported here, and the film which screened at Cambridge Film Festival in 2015, with guest Vicky Luengo]), it is highly sympathetic to the medium, and immediately in tune with what Murray rightly says that we look to in such a screenplay :

When a play is brought to the screen, the audience has a right to expect a degree of cinematic technical complexity, and a level of thematic depth at least comparable to the original. There is no question here of literal fidelity to the source [emphasis added].

The Cinematic Imagination, p. 169

Reassure me that I don't have any reason to worry ~ Anna (Roser Batalla)

Unless one is highly adjusted to trailers and the work of excessive revelation that they usually perform, it is unideal to watch the film’s ‘making of’ first. That said, one does hear in it how director Ventura Pons and playwright Josep Maria Miró wrote the screenplay, and of the wider possibilities that it offered both – such as a real swimming-pool and water for Miró, and what Pons found when, breaking the habit of eight earlier adaptations, he worked with what were mainly stage-actors from the play’s original cast (from whom we also hear what they learnt by (adjusting to) being on a film-set, not just on a stage…).


This film is one whose opening gaze, an establishing shot from a vantage, and with the sound of the clock-display that we see clicking over, second by second, presents the time, is also located in time, and concerns itself with what happens within its chosen shifting timescale - for, including credits, we move from 7.45 a.m. to 3.09  p.m. within the first four minutes and thirty seconds :

By then, the seeds of everything have been sown, and yet everyone proves to know so little – we included – about how to protect all that we value. (Max Frisch – whose play Andorra was referred to above – famously sub-titled another of his plays (Biedermann und Die Brandstifter) ‘ein Lehrstück ohne Lehre’, which (although we might directly translate it as A lesson without teaching) effectively means that it is a parable.)


Maybe not for some a camera that is all too rigorous in obsessively looking at everything from every viewpoint. However, it has to be said that this film is ultimately not an extreme, practical lesson in moral relativism – those in tune with it will both find Pons’ directorial approach (and, of course, the cinematography of Andalu Vila-San-Juan) compelling, and then feel a sense of anxious reconsideration of the situation transmuted to embrace all of our own deepest feelings about what it means to be alive.

NB Potential spoiler (especially for those who like to go into a film 'blind')

The broad theme treated of in El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) might lead one to expect the same genre, mood and manner of development as in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten) (2012) [the link is to the entry on IMDb (@IMDb)].

Mads Mikkelsen as the hunted Lucas

So it needs to be said that all of those are very different here : if the latter is more like Contagion (2011) (mentioned above in passing, and also near that date of first release), El virus de la por is more like Sílvia Munt’s El Cafè de la Marina

End of spoiler...

* * * * *

There are two scheduled screenings of El virus de la por (2015) [the link is to the #CamFF web-page for the film] during Camera Catalonia (the links below are to the booking-pages for each screening) :

* Sunday 23 October at 3.30 p.m.

* Wednesday 26 October at 11.50 a.m.



End-notes :

¹ From Peter Gabriel's (@itspetergabriel's) ‘That Voice Again’ (on the album So (1986) (PG5)).

² Or even his own adapted screenplay, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, in 1996 ?

³ If one does find it right that the varying perspectives with which we find ourselves presented, as, within and between events, we move around spatially and temporally, at last coalesce into another dimension of life, taking on quite a different dimension, or even a changed Weltanschauung : if, from naturalistic presentation, we find ourselves entering a more symbolic realm, where we confront what our common humanity comprises (perhaps as in The Idiot (Idioot (2011), which screened in 2012).

⁴ Not uniquely (as, for example, audio-recordings can be exactly replayed), films can have this fascination about them – as some say that they found with Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (2013) – and one very clearly knows that one wants to watch them again.

⁵ Pinter gave it a fairly direct translation to film in his screenplay of Betrayal (1983), with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, and Patricia Hodge – a film that director Mar Coll, Festival guest at Camera Catalonia in 2014, in passing indicated not approving, when talking about her work on the play’s material with students of film-making.

⁶ Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination : Writers and the Motion Pictures. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York (1972). Leading up to Chapter 7, Murray has considered examples both of plays that try to be too cinematic, and ‘film versions [that] suffer from a bad case of staginess’. [In contemporary cinema, the latter still seems the case with August, Osage County (2013) or Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure (2013)].

Murray goes on to say that such staginess [in most film versions of plays] 'has not deterred the movie moguls from buying nearly every play ― good, bad, and indifferent ― in sight’ (p. 102), and to quote Eugene O’Neill (in 1960) (p. 105) :


Plays should never be written with … Hollywood in mind. This is a terrific handicap to an author, although few of them seem to realize it.

Quoted in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York, 1960), p. 858

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

Film Festival frenzy (#CamFF 2015)

Recollected in tranquillity : Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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27 July

Recollected in tranquillity :

The bustle that was Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)

Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) is just around the corner from putting on its big show again – amazing to think that, when one first attended screenings there, all the programming was for a one-screen cinema, and one almost took for granted getting to see the new Woody Allen early…

As the Festival gears up for the thirty-fifth time (that’s where, behind the scenes, the frenzy comes in !), no less, a little moment to reflect on last year…


* Well, one was seeking to promote the Camera Catalonia (Catalan) strand, by providing reviews ahead of the screenings : a double pleasure, first to do so, and then to see how – beyond the confines of 'a screener', watched on a laptop – the full potential of the image blossomed in proper screenings

Composer Ethan Lewis Maltby, on the far right, during the Q&A for Fill de Caín (Son of Cain) (2013) (with Ramon Lamarca next to him, and director Jesús Monllaó)

* Relatedly, meeting and interviewing three Catalan film directors – and happening to take two of them punting on the Cam (and even giving one a punting lesson)

Punt pupil (and film director), Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font

* Plus lovely Festival photography from Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides) and David Riley (@daveriley) ! (That as well as being with the winning team of Catalan curator Ramon Lamarca, and intern-cum-interpreter Cristina Roures)

Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central – image courtesy of Tom Catchesides

* The chance to watch both screenings of some Festival favourites at, and see especially how Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014) (but also Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy) (2013) repaid renewed attention

* The coffee, the chats, the news – in passing, as one dashed to different screenings – of other viewings, and the celebrated insanity of the TAKE ONE (@takeonecinema) crew (and of a Vine into which we were all cajoled, which was later banned (Not me, guv’ !)…)

* Meeting Dunstan Bruce (@dunstanbruce) for a fun, late-night TAKE ONE interview about A Curious Life (@a_curiouslife), his film on The Levellers (@the_levellers) (with a microphone-wielding editor in chief hiding under a table ?)

Dunstan Bruce

* With Screen 1 in gala mode, the warmth and energy in a film tribute to the late Tony Benn, Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)

* Warmth and energy of a different kind in, having guided one of the Catalan directors there, Festival regular Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand), with Jeff Davenport, playing to Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), an early picture credit for Billy Wilder

* And, of course, the expected preview of the new Woody Allen, Magic in the Moonlight (2014) (and the brief delight of a vocal from Ute Lemper) – a tetchy role for Colin Firth that also made some people unnecessarily sceptical of historical fact that men of his age married women of the age of Emma Stone ?

* Closing-night party ? No, sorry, one does not know anything about that !



See you at Cambridge Film Festival, daily during the eleven days from 3 to 13 September !


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

Henry James in Poland ? (Part II)

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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23 November (updated 25 November)

* Contains spoilers *

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

Some reviewers have made claims for the strength of the film’s cinematography*, and comment has already been made (in Part I) about how the monochrome makes the convent look and feel. Outside that setting, one hoped for uses of the medium that would match the power and rare presence of the landscapes in Nebraska (2013), but there are very few moments of such cinematic beauty (all of which feature trees, and two movement), and instead the film-makers choose to alter the aspect ratio, as if to suggest moments of ‘widening out’** :

* A misty rank of trees on the sky-line

* Leaves (which appear to have been added by CGI) falling in an avenue (which we come back to)

* Trees to the side of the moving car, which, through persistence of vision, create a pattern


In Nebraska, as in Frances Ha (2012) for that matter (and despite some banal critical assertions made about both films and other uses of monochrome), its use here felt integral to the project. In Ida, except when she is framed on a diagonal, or fellow novices and she are decorating Jesus (on a plinth) and then – through the snow (more CGI ?) – carry not so much their cross as his***, nothing remarkable is going on with the composition (one hoped for it - it was not there).

As to what the images in the heart of this film denote, unearthing past events – not least in the Nazi period (when motives and actions had necessarily been mixed) – is almost bound to be compelling (please see below), and doing so is with Wanda to the fore, again necessarily. Three times (before the cock crows three times ?), Ida absents herself from the scene of her aunt’s apparent endeavours on her behalf (we go with her) :

* To the cow-shed (with the parental stained glass) (during the interrogation)

* To bed in her habit (rather than go down to the jazz with Wanda – Wanda, Ida somehow thinks (so she says), cannot really be there to find out what happened, if she wants to dance)

* To the street (when Wanda starts breaking into the flat (of Szymon Skiba ?))


Discovering the fate of her own sister, Róża Lebenstein, is possibly too close to home and so what Wanda has been assiduously avoiding in the years when she was acted as a prosecutor and since : however Wanda survived the war, Ida’s own Jewishness seems to have either been disregarded or overlooked by her peers (although Mother Superior and the authorities must have known all along, if they now know Wanda ?), so maybe Wanda’s asserting that it is not there was part of her life, and has become essential to it.

After all, her first impulse is to greet her niece coolly with I know who you are, with facts about her history (We were from Lublin), and to brush Ida off quickly, after what she insultingly describes as ‘our little family reunion’. If the film really gave us space to contemplate Wanda’s position, her attitude to the past, and what it means to her, it would be good to feel that that one really could do so alongside Ida’s exploration of her equivalent of The Old World and its ways, which she can barely know.

When, for example, Wanda is asked on their travels Who are you ?, and replies I used to be someone once, it is not even as if, self-pityingly or otherwise, her response is really allowed to hang in the air. Yes, it is Wanda’s style to utter things casually and then act as if she did not say them, but, here, nothing stems from her comment, nothing depends on it, and, having had her say it, it is as if she makes (perfectly psychologically) as if the hurt is healed over :

Since we seem influenced to concentrate so much on Ida, since she lost the parents whom she was thus never to know (not only a sibling), and, just until now, her fate resulted from what happened to them (as Wanda’s patently did not). Granted, the film is in translation, and a Polish viewer might gain a different impression.

Even so, the film - named after Ida, after all - seems to have the flaw (unless that can be seen as a strength, of some sort ?) of placing us in alignment so often with her point of view (see above for the three points where we leave Wanda, going with Ida). In the shot in question, we are far more with Ida at the wayside shrine (than with Wanda in the car), looking – in those Jamesian terms – out from The New World at what is happening. These are not the casual religious observances that travellers on the road might make out of habit or ritual, but part of her life and / or identity.

As to Wanda's more uncertain identity, we learn that she is Wanda Gruz (Red Wanda is her nickname) and that she used to be a State prosecutor (so, until we learn that she is a judge, it is unclear what panel she still sits on, when we momentarily see her), and now her status still gets her released (after a delay, when they realize that, as she says, she is a judge) from an incident of drink driving that takes the car off the road. To try to find out the truth about her sister, she is aggressive, and threatens I can destroy you, whereas, when with Ida, she makes idle references (which will not be understood) such as to Gone with the Wind.

Then again, Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian, suggests that he knows more (but where, even if it is in the press-pack, is this information in the film ? - such layers of bogus description, posing as interpretation (if not vice versa), just obscure what is to be seen or heard) :

In @PeterBradshaw1's review of Ida (2013), he says that Wanda 'owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to [...] judging petty quarrels' - script?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 26, 2014

[...] Wanda Gruz, tremendously played Agata Kulesza: a worldly hard-drinking woman who lives on her own, and who is evidently something of an embarrassment to the authorities.

Wanda was once a high-flying state prosecutor and former zealot of the communist state who, owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to being a magistrate, judging petty quarrels between neighbours. [...]


That said, despite having determined that dancing is inconsistent with searching for (the truth about) her parents (the arbitrary law of the excluded middle), we still cannot much identify with whatever hang-ups Ida has about going down to listen to the music with Wanda – and the film, even in its own terms, then wants to have Ida assimilating jazz (by osmosis through Wanda's comment about the sax in the car ?) when she has never heard it before (irrespective of who is on alto).

Fortunately, the tune played, when Ida’s curiosity gets the better of her, is the Coltrane of ‘Naima’ (as she is told – his ‘Equinox’ is also used****), not Ascension, from three years later ! As to the authenticity, in Eastern Bloc Poland, of jazzers travelling around the countryside to gigs, one does wonder…

At its touching core, at the burial-place, we have Wanda and Ida united (just for now, anyway) : they have passed through trees that we are almost sure that we saw on their journey, one with headscarf, the other with the head-dress of her habit. All of which has been rooted in the ground of temptation, family-feeling, and discovering what people did in the recent past (but have so soon concealed, forgotten). Undeniable, powerful material, but does it sit that well with (let alone with Wanda's deeper motivations and thoughts) an exploration of the territory of The Last Temptation of Christ, taking as its seeming starting point this exchange (quoted in >Part I) [the last utterance is paraphrased] :

Wanda : Have you had impure thoughts ?

Ida: Yes.

Wanda : Carnal ?

Ida : No.

Wanda : That’s a shame. (Slight pause.) How do you know what you are giving up ?


Henry James writ large enough, but in a story that wants to yoke together not only a dichotomy of The New World / The Old World, but also guilt and retribution, what one did in the time of war and why, the lure of the alto sax, and even what makes life worth living. Realistically, too many calls on a run-time of around 80 minutes ?


End-notes

* For example, Linsey Satterthwaite for New Empress Magazine :

Ida […] is also one of the most stunningly shot films to emerge this year, very much to the credit of cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. Director Pawel Pawlikowski presents a masterclass in black and white imagery; each scene is assembled with mesmeric precision. Every shot looks like a piece of art, as Ida explores the outside world anew concealed in her habit, it is like a Vermeer painting has come to life.


Well, yes, the cutting between the different scenes, contexts and lighting conditions makes for an interesting montage of Ida, determinedly pressing on towards we know not what (though not art - and nothing but her head-dress to invoke Tracy Chevallier's wretched Girl with a Pearl Earring : as to whether she has anything to 'explore' is doubtful, since she is just crossing rural terrain, back-roads and the like).

Everything else being equal, it would seem like a good place to part from her, leaving us at last in doubt about what she intends, after a couple of all-too-human minor reversals of action - yet is it now a cop-out, suggesting that more has emotionally been captured in Ida than bears rational examination ?

Would we even think such things, if this were not 'evocative' monochrome ? Just compare this with the resolution and conclusion found with Bruce Dern in Nebraska...


** The format is variable, between nigh square to rectangular.

*** Even here, the symbolism felt a little heavy handed, let alone when we explored our Jamesian dichotomy (please see Part I) of ‘being in, but not of, the world’. Compare this with the limitation of an entirely static camera in all but three of the fourteen scenes of Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg), which might sound wholly artificial and sterile as an idea. However, the effect of this limitation was very and surprisingly full – quite apart from the riches of the script and performances.

**** As are, prominently, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’) and Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 639 (from Das Orgelbüchlein) – beloved of Tarkovsky ?


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

Stigmata and sacrifice

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

4 September


* Contains spoilers *

RewatchingStations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) (2014), tears again - but earlier, knowing each scene's context in the whole... #CamFF
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2014

Can one put one’s finger on what is so affecting about this film ? A young girl, Maria, just at confirmation age, who idolizes Bernadette, the au pair, and who is being pushed in certain directions by her family and the church :

We see Maria objecting to the rather tame music that the sympathetic PE teacher is playing – seemingly not for the first time – to accompany her class’ exercise on the hoof on the basis that it contains ‘satanic rhythms’. Just before, we have seen her urged in confession, and with similar descriptions of music characterized by Fr. Weber, to denounce it. Whose life is she leading that she should want to sacrifice the landscape, or her own life to heal her younger brother Johannes ?

The chill is in the zeal with which Maria’s mother, at the undertaker’s, talks of seeking canonization for her daughter – almost as if she sees past her daughter to a saint, although we have seen her treat Maria abusively for her selfish ill-will on at least three occasions. Kein Wunder that her husband leaves the table and goes aside to stand in quiet thought – and the mother finally breaks down in proper tears…

Is the mapping of Maria’s last days on the elements of The Stations of The Cross something that is partly imposed, from the mother’s eye view, after the event ? – although, theologically, one knows the injunction to Take up one’s cross daily, and that identification with Jesus is the stuff of The Imitation of Christ.

But does she, in the tears, finally realize that the contented smile that she had in the car, after she has humiliated her daughter and, by stopping in traffic with a provocative ultimatum, secured her compliance by sheer power-play is just another aspect of the domination of Maria's life and memory that she craves now ? Perhaps.

Yet, although one wonders that, at the third hour (by the hospital clock) and as Maria’s heart fails, Johannes finally speaks, at the age of four, to call her name and to ask Wo ist Maria ?, we are emotionally with Bernadette in the preceding scene, not wanting her to refuse food and make ready to sacrifice her life. The horrible liturgical humbug is, though, that Maria’s mother says that the sacrament of communion is received when the wafer touches the lips (although Maria chokes on it, and it has to be unceremoniously whipped out of her mouth by a nurse) :

Unnoticed by us, we connect with the first scene, and Fr. Weber’s dogmatic assertion that life begins not, as suggested by one of the confirmation class, at birth, but at conception. Here, we are at the other end of life, and, in urging this hypocritical beatification of her daughter, Whatever one may think of the pro-life position (and choosing an age in weeks up to which a pregnancy can be lawfully terminated does seem somewhat arbitrary), Maria’s mother is invoking similar clear-cut definitions of life and death, right and wrong, holy and impure.

The key thing to notice (third stumble) is that Bernadette, not Maria’s mother, is her sponsor for confirmation, and how, even so feverish and ill, what is on Maria’s mind to pour out to Bernadette is how she believes that he mother does not love her, and to feel responsible for what she sees as a lack of love.

The film is a masterpiece. It is so powerful, second time around and as one tries to link each station of the cross to the tableau in hand, that it deserves a much greater audience than it had at either screening at Festival Central : this time, no laughter at the hard-liners in church and family, no treating of this as some sort of risible entertainment at the expense of real people who do have such faith and dogma.

And a profound emotion for Maria, believing that she is doing as she should for her mute brother’s sake…


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