How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth ?*

This is a review of Macbeth (2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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3 October (End-note / Tweets added, 4 October)

This is a review of Macbeth (2015)

With Tweets added, and owning that Paddy C. is better than Marion C. than Michael F., a review of Macbeth (2015) : http://t.co/O7wKA6jMOg

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2015

Some of the inventive ways in which the Shakespeare play has been transmuted in this film simply will not have people seeking out the original, because they probably will not conceive that the play (in the form, at any rate, in which it has come down to us) has here been (in places) very much abridged, or that material has been relocated within it (sometimes within an immediate context, sometimes scarcely so, and even to the extent of introducing repetition) : at other times, it will be clear that, under licence, painting with images or with poetry are part of this endeavour. (This will be evident without anyone needing to know that it is those who have edited Shakespeare, over the centuries (and by a process of inference and deduction), who have given us both scene-locations and some of the usual printed stage-directions (e.g. as to who is on stage during a scene, and when he or she enters or exits), and thus that a licence to do something different, if it were needed even in the theatre, can be claimed.)

Of Macbeth (2015), @FilmDivider says : It’s the curse [...] that the audience [spend...] time considering [how] the source has been adapted

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 4, 2015

Where many are most likely to come unstuck, however familiar they may be with the text that we have from the so-called First Folio of 1623, is with the bewilderment that is the film’s ending : none, almost needless to say, of the pat wrapping-up, in however mournful rhyming-couplets (which we might also recall from the close of Lear), but instead much confusion of image and action – of thought, word and dream.

Thereby pursuing, relentlessly and acceleratingly, the blurring of sleeping and waking that builds across the film : just as the verse-speaking, simply gorgeous at the start (and therefore bringing tears at its beauty), becomes more and more degraded by fury, frenzy, and fire. Just, likewise, as Jed Kurzel’s score**, which began with so much heart-breaking keening and Celtic intonation, ends – through partway beginning to incorporate electronica – in quite another mood, and place. [He is sure some relation to director Justin Kurzel, being credited with scoring his Snowtown (2011) (amongst others) ?]).

Initially, battle-scenes in Macbeth (2015) reminded of Mel Gibson as Wallace, but much more like the immersive visuals at @N_T_S Culloden ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2015

On all of these levels, then, Macbeth (2015) both is and mimetically embodies a journey into night, and it slips further and further into it, whereas Shakespeare’s protagonist will have it that sleep has become elusive to his ambitious quest :

Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'

Act II, Scene II, 40–42

Except that, in fact, what distinction is there between whatever ‘reality’ is and the distracted snatches of the world that come to us as part of and, to some significant extent, filtered through the medium of Macbeth’s mind, mood, and soul ? (Which makes the screenplay, and its approach to the text itself, quite sympathetic (as, with some musical instruments, ‘sympathetic strings’ are), in wanting to make interpolations and transpositions within it.) Nonetheless, the direction may have strayed, by trying too hard to give us a visible basis for others’ opinion, such as reported here (as well as co-opted from Macbeth’s attempts at self-diagnosis), in the form of montage ? :

Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies.
Some say he's mad ; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury

Act V, Scene II, 12–14

With some material, such as the case of merely truncating the interchange between Ross and Macduff (at the end of Act IV) to concentrate on one principal topic, the screenwriters give us Macbeth pretty straight ; with other parts, they bend them very much more to their will, and for a broad variety of purposes, such as :

* In the opening (crimson) captions, as well as explicating the origins and significance of - and forces behind - the conflict that we see, even naming a battle (that of Ellon)

* To clarify how it is that Macbeth becomes / expects to become king (which, it is arguable, is not the strongest element in the idea of eliminating Duncan / committing regicide)

* In doing so, and almost certainly on no naturalistic level (but rather on that of will (again***)), characterizing Malcolm’s impulse to flee – which is exemplified in the text, and at its peak, at the moment when Macbeth puts the witches under obligation****

* To expand Lady Macbeth’s familiar scene with the doctor into the general theme of sleep-walking into the future (which not a few ages have liked as an idiom), and thereby dis-locate time and space****

* In a linked way, to widen the scope and role of the witches so that they permeate the totality : in their two-handed Macbeth (in the building in Cambridge that is known as The Leper Chapel), Richard Spaul and Bella Stewart of in:situ made enchantment and being bewitched central to the production

Is there danger in the fog of intense screenings at Cannes, and could @FilmDivider's review have gestated longer ? : http://t.co/rJFwZwUab8

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 4, 2015

End-notes

* Quoting the title of the essay by L. C. Knights, ’How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth ? : An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism’ (Explorations, New York University Press, 1964, 15-54).

** It would be so useful to pause the credits (during which so many others, blocking the screen and chattering, leave), because there are also ones for improvisation...

*** Endlessly shown in train, in literature and religious writing (which, from Paddy Considine’s Banquo, one feels that he well knows), from the Cabbalistic tradition of The Golem, and the creation of Adam, to that of Svengali and Trilby (in Trilby), or Frankenstein.

Macbeth (2015) is at its / his most interesting when seen through the prism of Banquo's life - which he then seeks to break, and splinter...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2015

**** We do not directly, audibly witness these words in the film, but perhaps we already know that Macbeth demands information (openly calling it a form of conjuration), even at the cost of chaos – which is what the film, by other means, has us see, sense, and feel :

I conjure you, by that which you profess,
Howe'er you come to know it, answer me :
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches ; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up ;
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down ;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads ;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations ; though the treasure
Of Nature's germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you.
Act IV, Scene I, 50–61


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

Building her up - for her*

This is a follow-up piece to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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19 September

This is a follow-up piece to this blog’s review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

* Contains spoilers – best read if you have watched the film *

To those who think that depression – unlike a broken leg – is invisible, just watch Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014) : the makers of this film have not just ‘observed’ depression well, they have understood it !

As the earlier review said, Sandra (or, as her boss Dumont invariably calls her, Mme Bya) shows low mood in her gait, posture, demeanour, expression. When we first see her, she has escaped into dreams, woken on the second attempt by her mobile, and throughout we see that tendency, characteristic of negative thinking, to retire out of it all to bed (or to sleep). When Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) arrives home, there is an uncertainty with which he calls out Sandra ? that hints that we have been here before**, not just that Juliette, Sandra’s colleague, has called him after speaking to Sandra (because she could not face meeting Dumont).

When Juliette and she do confront Dumont, Sandra experiences panic / a panic-attack, and the sort of freezing within that paralyses – to Juliette’s (Catherine Salée’s) concern, maybe because she does not know this in Sandra. After Sandra’s reluctance at home, the editing likewise surprises us by suddenly having us there, seeing Juliette’s car approach and pull into the car-park at Solwal (where they both work). Perhaps after that, and whilst most members of the family work on finding addresses for her other colleagues, we hear from her that she has declined an offer from Robert, her other supporter, to drive her around when Manu is at work (until noon on Saturday morning).

However, although Sandra clearly wanted to be alone to try to canvass her fellow employees, she is also obviously agoraphobic on the bus, and, as the day progresses (in no sort of descriptive order within the film) we see her confused, drying up / choking, using a stereotyped approach / rehearsed speech to broach the topic of the bonus and her being laid off, and maybe even mildly hyperventilating.

Have charities such as @MindCharity / @otrbristol / @CharitySANE taken note of Two Days, One Night (2014) for its understanding depression ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 18, 2014

Yet, for those who credit psychiatric diagnosis over ‘the social model’ of mental distress or formulation, what the film really, and subtly, shows is bullying in the workplace, pressures that have weighed on Sandra, who resists when (on the stairs) Manu is urging her not to retire to bed (and encouraging her to stand up for her job), and cites the tensions at work – she had expected to return there, but why, when she now has to face up to every single one of them if she is to overturn the vote of 14 for the bonus, 2 for her return to work, would she not be reminded of what was hard and painful ?

At the end of the film, we appreciate that it must be Dumont’s acquiescence in Jean-Marc’s divisive foremanship that has hurt her (this was felt very strongly on the second time of viewing). Dumont offers her the job back in September, when he will have not renewed the fixed-term contract of one of her colleagues (if he can be trusted that she will not just be laid off*** without any return to work), but, when she challenges him that he is ‘laying off’ others in her place, Dumont hides behind the legality that he would merely not be continuing their posts, which are specified to be time limited, rather than dismissing them (same difference ?).

The film is deliberately vague, but it appears that only on Friday (on the eve of Sandra being due to return to work – on Monday ?) has a vote has been taken (by a show of hands – and sprung on the workforce ?) that sets receiving the bonus against Sandra coming back. Cruel brinkmanship, almost calculated to make Sandra crumble at the fact that (frightened into it) almost everyone has chosen the former over her – which we can easily attribute to Jean-Marc’s chicanery (after all, if he stops her returning to work, he shows everyone his authority and power) and Dumont’s pliability…


In the closing shot, we see Sandra calling Manu and smile, having parted earlier from her former colleagues, cleared her locker and been promised a visit after work by Juliette, not just because (which she says that she will never forget) she has seen those eight people care for and vote for her (but eight still vote for the bonus), but also because she has been able to stand up to Jean-Marc, feeling presumably nothing to lose, and tell him that she knows how he has lied and cheated against her.

Julien :
May I speak to you frankly ? (Sandra agrees.) My wife and I were both [saying]. You can’t ask me.
[…]
Sandra (winding up the stressful conversation about the bonus) : We’ll see.


There have been other little hints (which come together well on a second viewing) during the previous part of the film :

* To Juliette, when Sandra and she have spoken to Dumont (but when – because she ‘froze inside’ (not her exact words) – she has failed to say what is on her heart, namely that she is well and able to come back to work), she says It’s the emotion of being back here and seeing Dumont

* Timur, on the edge of the football pitch (a rail significantly between them), reminds himself of Sandra’s kindness to him in taking the blame when he had broken some cells, and Jean-Marc had said that it had not been a very good example for Sandra to set to Timur (probably not believing it, and saving it up for retribution later ?) – Sandra’s smile, walking away, at having his support seems tinged (Timur says I’m really glad that you came), maybe with being reminded of a difficult time for both Timur and her

* To Anne, regarding Nadine, She could have told me herself, where, when earlier Nadine had pretended not to be in, but could be heard on the intercom, Sandra is hurt because of their apparent close relationship (and, by now, she has already heard a little of Jean-Marc’s intimidation of Nadine and the others from Juliette)

* To Manu, she exclaims It can’t start [up] again ! (referring to Jean-Marc’s tactics ?), and, as mentioned above, Sandra has reservations, when she thinks about a return like this, because of the tensions that already existed at work

* The fight that erupts where Yvon is knocked out is an indication of the tensions and pressures that people are under, quite apart from the abuse that Sandra is given (which erupts again on Monday morning)

* To Alphonse, in the launderette, You’re like me, you’re afraid of Jean-Marc

* All these phrases : You preferred to lay off Sandra / We can’t afford both [sc. bonus and keeping Sandra] (Jean-Marc ?) / Does he think it best I am fired ?


Some other little hints and references :

* The track that Manu turns off in the car, and first brings a smile from Sandra (when he puts it back on, and she then turns it right up) is La nuit n’en finit plus, with lyrics at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb-wQusuraY

* When Sandra is having ice-cream cornets with Manu, she says that she wishes she could be L’oiseau qui chante là – maybe Annie Lennox’s ‘Little Bird’ (from the album Diva (1992)) ?

* Two or three times, we hear the colourful, concise word chômage, so much more onomatopoeic than our ‘[on] the dole’… ?

* Sclessin (whose Rue Côte D’Or is mentioned as a colleague’s address) is a suburb of Liège (Belgium)

* The indications of need (the Eurozone / the recession) in those who are / seem to be ‘working on the black’ (travail sur le noir) :

Willy (met with his wife ) : Salvaging tiles in their back yard, and their daughter needs 500 per month (600 with room) – 1,000 both is and is not a large amount in relation to it ?

Of Juliette : Said that ‘her guy’ is doing up cars ‘on the black’ (which is also what Yvon is doing ?)

Hicham : Working in the shop sur le noir


End-notes

* Although Sandra doubts, at different times in the film, not that Manu pities her (he says that he does not as such), but whether he loves her, and whether they will stay together (saying that they have not slept together for four months and does that bother him), we see him giving her the encouragement that she needs to do what she does – she ends the film intending to look for another job, and early on had baulked at the task ahead, saying that they can go back into social housing.

Giving another perspective, asking why people have said what they did (i.e. what their motive is, e.g. to put her off so that they can keep their bonus), is a form of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for Sandra at this taxing time (because she wants to say As if I don’t exist, I’ll look like a beggar, and, after Anne’s husband has shouted at her (and using his words), that she does not want to piss anyone else off) :

Manu does, for Sandra, what the pressure causes her not to be able to do, not to think negatively, and we sense (and then see vividly, in the hospital) that he does love her, and that he is doing it for the good that it will be to her. No doubt she could now do with finding ‘a purpose in a project’, but this one is too personal for her to cope with, when she seems to be doing so well with her children and family.

** Maybe that disquiet is for reasons that connect with her later attempt at suicide… ? Manu tries to tell Sandra that the doctor told to stop taking Xanax, but she replies that she needs them.

*** Not an exact term, because the subtitles use it interchangeably to refer to dismissal, whereas (in England & Wales) a lay-off is temporarily requiring employees to cease work, but without dismissing them (e.g. in a downturn, say, yet in expectation of gaining new orders for products).


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

Two Days Plus Xanax

This is a spoilery follow-up to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)

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

31 August

This is a spoilery follow-up to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)

(Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

* Contains spoilers *

L'enfer, c'est les autres

Huis Clos ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This quotation was chosen, because, in the film (if not in the play), it is Sandra’s thoughts about herself and about what others, including her husband, may be thinking about her that are now at the root of being off work.

That and the inhuman approach that Sandra’s boss, Dumont, has cooked up with the connivance of the foreman, Jean-Marc, of requiring her fellow employees to say whether they would rather receive a bonus of 10,000 Euros than for her to return to work (when sixteen have done the work of seventeen during her absence, albeit by doing three hours’ overtime, and when Jean-Marc prejudges the issue, by saying that Sandra is no longer up to the job).

‘Bonus’ has been used to translate the French word prime, which, in practice, can serve to mean, when qualified, terms as diverse as ‘severance pay’ (prime de liceniciement) and ‘productivity bonus’ (prime de rendement), so Il a eu une prime en récompense de son travail (‘He received a bonus for his work’). Despite how some of the colleagues talk of spending ma prime, it does seem to be in the nature of a one-off payment, of which there is no future guarantee, and not a pay-rise (for which there is the separate word une augmentation - as, at least, the term is used in France).

As Sandra is forced to approach each of her colleagues, she hears their reasons why they have already spent what, for all that we know, they only recently knew that they would be getting, and have not yet received. It is almost un fait accompli. The deviltry is in making it seem as if they decide, when Dumont (with Jean-Marc) has (as emerges late on) arbitrarily set one against the other (sc. the bonus against her returning to work), and two main questions arise in consequence :
(1) The overdose that Sandra takes in despair – is it so unrealistic, as two matriarchs were tutting after the screening, that she could be out and approaching the last few employees that night ?

(2) If Sandra wanted recourse in employment law, what claim is open to her (in the UK, as against Belgium, this would be unfair dismissal) - though, when so many of her colleagues have to work au noir, could they risk being involved ? 


(1) Well, Xanax, which is used to treat anxiety, is one of the few medications that states (in the patient information leaflet) :

'If you forget to take a dose, take it as soon as you remember unless it is time for your next dose.
Do not take a double dose to make up for a missed dose.'

The article linked here talks about the risks of overdose, including having to take 975 times the maximum human dose to reproduce the cardiopulmonary collapse that is found in rats at this level : it lists, as manifestations of overdose, ones that include somnolence, confusion, impaired coordination, diminished reflexes, and coma.

Although death has been reported as an outcome of overdose, since Sandra said as soon as she had taken the tablets what she has done, and Manú starts by trying to induce vomiting when the ambulance is being called, it does not seem improbable that Sandra could escape severe symptoms, and be able to discharge herself quite quickly.

(2) As to employers' practices in the field of mental health, they may be harder on our attempts to make a recovery : we see Sandra buoyed by how many support her, but understandably does not wish to betray colleagues on fixed-term contracts by accepting the offer, as it is put to her, of reinstatement in her post.

Dumont’s folly, if he actually values Sandra after all (rather than is trying to manipulate her to do as she does), is to think that she sees things as casually as he does, and to say that he will instead not renew the contract of someone working on a fixed term : although he is technically right that this is not a dismissal, she has been represented as having had no protection from being dismissed anyway herself, in a world where employees can vote against someone ready to return from illness…

Whether that is possible in employment law in Belgium does not much matter, for the film – without being over-specific that it is set in one country rather than another – asks us to accept that it is so (or effectively so*).


End-notes

* In fact, a briefing on employment law in Belgium from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer suggests that, for dismissals made before 1 April 2014, it was open for blue-collar workers to ‘claim that their dismissal was not based on their performance or attitude, or on economic reasons and, if the employer could not prove otherwise, they were entitled to an extra six months’ indemnity’.

In the law operative for service since 1 January 2014, there now appears to be no (or less) distinction between white- and blue-collar workers, and for it to be open to all to require written reasons for dismissal within two months (as well as to receive a specified minimum notice).

In conclusion, it does not appear, in Belgium of recent date, that an employer could succeed (except for the reasons stated) in lawfully seeking to dismiss Sandra in this way in these circumstances.


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

Tu existes, Sandra !

This is a review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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26 August

This is a review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

L'enfer, c'est les autres

Huis Clos ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This film has all the qualities of 12 Angry Men (1957), i.e. self-interest meeting a desire for justice, but, to paraphrase what people still say, this time the struggle is personal. (It turns out that that reference is one also made by Peter Bradshaw (in his five-star review for The Guardian).)

Whether the premise of Two Days, One Night (2014) holds together in EU-influenced employment law is immaterial : it is an intelligent film
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2014

Cleverly mixed with that personal importance is an element of impersonality, introduced by the documentary style of the blocking and shooting, which naturally makes us incline – much of the time – to sensing ourselves an observer to what Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is doing and reacting to. And so the moment when we have first have a smile from her is very effective – it has built upon the opening shot when she is sleeping, and then on our seeing her tension, feeling her tortured breathing, and witnessing her reliance on Xanax to cope with anxiety.

That smile is amongst several important moments in the car, where the intimacy of the space, because we have been out and about so much with Sandra (and with her husband Manú (Fabrizio Rongione)), gives us gives far more engagement with Sandra than we ever have with Tom Hardy’s shut-in Locke (2013) (even if that, too, is deliberate) : here, it is not that we are shut out, but that the arc of the film keeps us waiting until Sandra speaks to Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev), and we can confront his raw nakedness, guiltily recalling her past kindness to him (which even Sandra cannot quite have expected, or cope with).

Until then, there has been perfect politeness, even in refusals to help, and the spoken French has that polish much of the time, so that, when there is an eruption, it is there, too, in the language. When that moment with Timur – and the smile – comes, the restraint that has been upon us floods us with emotion at the same time, and the film-making has effectively, by its distancing and delay, caused us to have an experience of what the worst of depression can be like : as if removed from one’s own life, and with one’s capacity to relate to one’s family and situation suppressed.

In Rust and Bone (2012) (directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes numbered amongst its co-producers), Cotillard gave us one sort of rehabilitation, where mental adjustment to a huge change in life is part of the picture : here, the mind (and its vulnerabilities) is at the centre of things, with doubts whether someone can come back and do the same job as before, let alone how others’ words and negativity – however unintended – can undermine one’s feeling of worth and one’s belief in the point of what needs to be done.

When Sandra is woken by the phone and talks to her colleague Juliette, she is, from the start, trying to talk herself into an attitude towards what is happening (which some will recognize in We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013) - screening at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 / #CamFF), though the position in which Sandra finds herself only becomes visible to us with time. In the meanwhile, we guess at what she has been through, though her demeanour, gait and posture are indicative…

The film has much to show us : tell people that they can have something, and see how quickly that influences them – just as it does Henry Fonda’s fellow jurors to want to wind up their deliberations quickly, because establishing the truth is costly of their time. Without didacticism in the writing, because there is a wealth of responses to Sandra, we see that there can be this tendency, even when people have not yet got what was promised, and might well ask themselves at what cost (or what it says about them that they so readily make what they did not have before indispensable).

The additional dimension here, revealed fully towards the end, is that of some players who have been keeping their cards close to their chests, and seeking to get what they can. The film helps us to value qualities that have emerged in Sandra and her colleagues learning about each other, and from which she can take comfort. Ultimately, it offers no easy solutions, but it asks us the things that we can countenance for our convenience, an ending that takes us close to Robert Guédiguian's The Snows of Kilimanjaro Les Neiges de Kilimandjaro) (2011)(from Cambridge Film Festival 2012).

If you wish to read more, there is now a new piece about employment rights and Xanax...




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

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)

Paul : The distinction of being not just a bore, but a boor

This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

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

This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

People have, apparently, likened this film to Manhattan (1979), which they mean in a back-handed way, as saying that Allen has returned to form, but this view is wrong on two counts: Allen may have made occasional recent films (e.g. Match Point (2005)) that do not work (or only work clunkily), but he has never lost his form; and Midnight has almost nothing, opening montage excepted, in common with Manhattan (or, for that matter, Annie Hall (1977), the other chosen point of comparison – why choose two films made more than thirty years ago ?).

Taking each point in turn, there is nothing to be apologetic about in either Whatever Works (2009), perfectly suiting Larry David, or You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), although probably less successful for reasons of plot – Midnight is not a welcome recovery, but simply surpasses them both.

The wide situational and character sweep of Midnight is also nothing like that of Annie or Manhattan, which are arguably more like chamber music than this piece, which, if not a symphony, has clear claims on being a concerto.

In addition, it is not as if Paris has not been the backdrop before, unless people have already forgotten Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and it is common knowledge that Allen is truly American in feeling the French capital’s charm and attraction – just as he does London’s very different pull.


Midnight is not perfect, either, but there are some very good elements to it, some of which look back in the canon: for example, the lead character, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), has definite similarities, not just in mannerisms and pacing, with Kenneth Branagh as fellow writer Lee Simon in Celebrity (1998). Such figures, if not Allen-substitutes per se in the films in which he does not (choose to) cast himself, function in the same pivotal sort of way, and often have the pick of the lines. Taking that further, Lee, as does Gil, finds himself in an exciting new world that he does not know, but it is one of elitism and opportunity – Gil has opportunity, perhaps, but of a different kind..

The film feels very close to Allen’s short stories, and he very casually has Gil enter the world of the 1920s by being offered a lift, when he is lost, by a group of revellers in a vintage Peugeot: nothing overt in this transition, except for the bubbles in the champagne that they insist that Gil join them in drinking, and he is taken he and we know not where.

Thankfully, we can get away from regarding the scenario as magical realism (whatever it may be, though it little matters). For Gil not only gives us the benefit (probably partly because he is tired after an evening of wine-tasting, in which he favoured quantity over quality) of letting us be several steps ahead, but also because, just because of the dramatic irony, we can watch his reactions of disbelief more closely. (As the film goes on, they may, however, do Allen fewer favours : how few even know that Eliot’s initials stand for Thomas Stearns, let alone would blurt out the names ?)

Yes, it is just a given that this travel to the earlier decade happens, and that, although Gil can repeat the experience, he cannot explain it to anyone in his own time. (As is usual, e.g. Lucy first visiting Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Yet it is never just a shared magical assumption about the nature of the world, unless one includes the viewer.

The feel of the era is good, which, when this is not an art-historical recreation, is what matters, but Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) could still have had a chance to shine more with a less functional role (which may have fallen prey to editing): after all, Stein herself was no mere editor or midwife to other’s creations, and was just as much a character as Hemingway and Dalí, in particular, are shown to be. (As to whether she would have called them ‘crazy Surrealists’, one is less sure.)

With Adriana (Marion Cotillard), one is less sure whether it is that she gives Gil attention (which Inez (Rachel McAdams), though she is also sexy, seems less keen to do), as that she can claim Modigliani and Braque as lovers (in this film, at least), that draw him to her company : let alone the t.v. series, Goodnight, Sweetheart dealing with such a theme, it is at the centre of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Allen’s early story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’ (first collected in Side Effects).

As a parable of what one can and cannot have, Paris of the 1920s may be where Gil would have himself be, but he has not foreseen that it might not be everyone’s choice, and he finds himself making other choices for the future instead.

Where the film really does not work is with facts about the contemporary literary and artistic circles, and, if one were the ‘pseudo-intellectual’ whom Gil dubs the very irritating character of Paul (who is of a type whom Allen likes creating, and does so well*), one would have had them to hand in the screening :

Not that it matters, because it may be that all this is Gil’s imagination, and that he is capable of being confused about facts as even Paul (who apparently confounds the figures of Rodin’s wife and mistress, and then insists that the guide is wrong**): if so, then, as with a dream, or as with psychosis (the explanation offered by Inez for Gil’s behaviour and utterances), what he experiences is the product of his will and mind.

In a dream, it is just as much we who are in the dream, creating the people whom we meet, be they Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or Papa Hemingway (obviously not then called that, but that is how Gil relates to the man whom he has met). One curiosity is that, except for the party to which Gil is first taken, everyone is dressed much more casually than photographs show was usual at that time. Another is that, when it comes to Buñuel, Allen has made him a rather sullen character, and with no suggestion, around the table, that Dalí and he are – or are to be – film-makers together (in Un Chien Andalou (1929). Largely as a private joke, because few might know the reference, Allen has Gil give Buñuel the essential details of the plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) (which are also supposed to be dealt with in a scene within L’Age d’Or), but Buñuel rebuff him with very unreceptive questions about why that would or would not happen – as if he has not got a Surrealist bone in his body.

This does not seem to suggest that we believe that Gil is dreaming, even if what he experiences is a deep wish on his part, but rather that too much licence has been taken with showing this period, probably in an attempt not to confront an audience with the truth, that the free and easy Surrealists and other artists of the time were to be found in suit and tie.



End-notes


* E.g. Alan Alda as Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). (Alda is also in Everyone Says.)


** However, it seems that Rodin did nothing as bourgeois as intending that either woman – let alone any of the others ! – could contemporaneously claim to be married to him: it was only after knowing Rose Beuret for 53 years that, in 1917, the year in which they both died (she just two weeks afterwards), they married.

By then, Camille Claudel, the other woman, had already been confined to a psychiatric unit for more than twenty years, following a breakdown when Rodin and she split up in 1898, and died there in 1943.


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

Call me Ishmael…

This is a review of Blackfish (2013)

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

7 August (update in 2017, on the death of Tilikum)

This is a review of Blackfish (2013)

* Contains a wealth of spoilers - and is immensely long at 2,200 words !*


STOP PRESS :

Tilikum, Orca from #Blackfish, passes away - so says @Dogwoof news...

Film with odd, hidden ideas of genetics ? :https://t.co/O0XBywcgYg

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

* General assertions about inhumanity of capturing young orcas, etc. - Yes

* Specifically, that this and captivity traumatize Tilikum - Yes https://t.co/oSLarHjFLG

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

From there to whether *breeding from Tilikum* [artificial insemination], with charts of siring, etc., is prudent :

What genetic mechanism ? https://t.co/Ur1XLMMSBW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

We were told that onshore fishermen call orcas (otherwise known as killer whales) blackfish*, and this term gives this 2013 Dogwoof film its title.

In fact, orcas, although largely black, are also white, and this film has a mixture of light and shadow, although, as far as the construction is concerned, it does steer us to put the SeaWorld organization (one which declined to contribute to the film, despite ‘repeated requests’) in the Tenth Circle of Dante’s Inferno : Blackfish (2013) could scarcely close with footage of four of the main former SeaWorld trainers putting out from land to see orcas in the wild without endorsing their message that that is where they belong and, accordingly, where they behave non-aggressively.

However, these are the same people who, by and large, say how a visit to a show at one of the organization’s sites (or that of some similar operator) inspired them to do what they did, become trainers. Bewilderingly, one of them queries to camera, as if it were strange, why the organization did not tell them of the 70 or so incidents involving trainers being wounded or even killed with the involvement of orcas, as if it were likely to have done so and successfully recruited her.

The organization is then pitted against the former employees, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (unhelpfully referred to by pronouncing the initials OHSA with American accents, but without saying what they stand for), a neuroscientist (who tells us that orcas’ brains have parts that even human ones lack, which indicate a capacity for highly emotive responses), and others who have studied orca behaviour at sea.

It would seem to be a question of whom we believe, but it is more loaded than that, because Kelly Clark, the organization’s head trainer (represented by outline in a stylized court-room, since OHSA had sued SeaWorld), is reported as having likened orcas as being as capable of attacking humans as all men are of committing rape, and similar selected infelicities (the judge had this one struck from the record, so clearly someone had been in court).

Two questions arise : does the US justice system have a notion of sub judice that makes a matter not fair game for comment until all appeals have been exhausted – and what does it mean to strike something from the record, if a documentary can then include it ? In essence, whatever the answers are, the film-makers are clearly not unbiased, to my mind.

Those who haunt the cinema may also recall Rust and Bone (2012), and might, with me, wonder whether the phoniness of what one of the former trainers called an ‘industry’ might not have been patent from it : the false confidence that the orcas like doing – or want to do – what they are trained to do, the assumption that a bond has been built between creature and trainer that mitigates the risk of attack, and the staged, circus-ring nature of the show.

Stéphanie (played by Marion Cotillard) loses the lower part of her legs, and that film does not dwell on the how so much as the what, and on how her life develops : a major feature that has the same theme, and not so much as a mention. However, the makers of Blackfish also do not seem to have considered how much showing a catalogue of incident after incident from contemporaneous footage could harrow the audience :

Therefore, in a sense, this approach seemed as inhumane to those viewers who might not have wanted to see all this as the claimed training methods of SeaWorld were to the captive orcas, not to speak of domestic arrangements at times when the sites are closed. This documentary proof of what happened might be far more relevant to OHSA’s legal action (and one trusts that it was available to OHSA) than to our appreciation of the issues – after the point had been established, by waving a list and showing some real examples, I certainly did not need to see more people being maimed or killed, and rather resented seeing it.

I resented it, because (as is evident) the orcas had a right to their freedom before they were netted and transported, and the people in these clips had a right to respect for what happened to them in the moment of their wounding (or worse). Screening the clips was no doubt done with the consent of relatives, keen to publicize what had happened, but the line between showing enough and too much is not really that fine, and I am sure that Blackfish was on the wrong side of it.

Couple the fact that the narrative of the film left relatively opaque why we were making a call to The Canaries regarding another orca set-up, Loro Parque, and the seemingly avoidable death of another trainer, and I struggled to see why, beyond piling up the viewing misery*, we needed to know that orcas had been transported there from the States**. The effect was really to question the integrity of Clark, because the court-reporting format had her disowning in her evidence that SeaWorld had links with Loro Parque.


Overall, I found the messages that the documentary gave were sometimes confused. These, however, were clear :

1. That the wisdom that visitors to Orlando and like places receive is to the tune that orcas live longer in captivity (we were given three or more sound-bites of staff saying this), whereas the film advanced evidence that they have a human lifespan at sea, double the number of years being said on video.

2. Likewise, they (and some of the staff) are told that the orcas that they see are related to each other, and it is stressed how positive everything is in terms of orcas’ relations between each other and with the trainers, but the documentary challenged this. With both of these points, there was no doubt that it seemed to have been established that SeaWorld misrepresented the facts, because trainers stated that orcas were moved from one SeaWorld centre to another, and that it had acquired orcas (including Tilikum, the large male (or bull orca) who had brought about the death of Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld in 2011 and which led to court action) from a park run by Sealand when it closed.

3. As to training methods, the trainers (though, of course, SeaWorld might well claim that they had an axe to grind) told us that food deprivation was used, not just in the sense that there would only be a reward if a task were performed right (and, hence, not if not), but by way of making the orcas docile enough to go to their overnight tanks by only feeding them afterwards.

We were told about, and shown shots, of the tanks at the Sealand venue from which Tilikum came, which were grim in themselves, and not just for how long the orcas were kept with no space or stimulation overnight : the whole venue, as given to us in image and word, was cramped. Loro Parque and the SeaWorld park at Orlando were better, but (from that starting-point) it would not have been difficult for them to be better.


Where the confusion set in arises from these presented facts :

1. There had been a fatal incident at the Sealand park that involved Tilikum and a man whose naked body was found (please see below).


2. Relatively little was known to the trainers and other staff who would be working with Tilikum at SeaWorld. (As I have already said, one trainer thought that a place such as SeaWorld would actually tell her about difficulties, incidents, injuries or deaths at the outset.)


3. One of the experts whom we saw said that the conditions at Sealand, let alone the fact that Tilikum was being bullied and lacerated by two females (apparently, orcas have matriarchal communities), could have made him, as he put it, ‘psychotic’. What has to be borne in mind is that the usage of the word in the States means, not delusional (as used by psychiatry and its patients in the UK), but psychopathic – for a film shown around the globe, that should have been clarified somehow, as there is a world of difference between someone being in a delusional state and being a psychopath.

In essence, someone is almost (at some point) by definition dangerous if he or she is a psychopath, whereas a person experiencing psychosis by no means need not be, and might not be having any more than a temporary episode (because medication and / or the natural course of the psychosis brings it to an end).


4. The film then – with no obvious linkage, or recognition of the contradiction – showed how many orcas Tilikum had fathered (by artificial insemination). Obviously, as he is a very big orca (accordingly impressive and likely to pull the crowds), SeaWorld would want to try to pass on genes that had led to his size (nothing told us whether it had succeeded in this aspect of its breeding programme).

The flaw is : if one wants to say that Tilikum’s alleged psychopathology resulted from treatment at the hands of humans and fellow orcas, how could that possibly be a heritable characteristic ? At best, a heritable disposition, if treated in that way, to develop psychologically in the way ascribed to him – as we really do not know these things (i.e. the genetic role and its significance) very well in humans.

The state of UK mental-health services and how they are funded and run apart, all a bit tenuous as a concern about SeaWorld’s approach to breeding…


5. Trainers said several times that there was a sort of get back in the water attitude to any incident or injury (which is sort of consistent with not being told about fatalities – or their not seeking to find out, if they believed what they were told). They at least implied that they feared for their jobs, if they did not.

Frankly, a bit inconsistent with one trainer saying that he wanted to leave, but that he feared for what would happen to Tilikum, if he did. Either people are queuing up to be trainers (perhaps because they saw a show in their youth, and longed to do it when adult) – or they are not, and who could possibly replace Trainer X, unless Trainer X mistakenly conceives that no one else can do the job.


The main thing that I was left with was not the fact that (self evidently) orcas belong in the wild, and that the level of training takes them far beyond the caged drudgery of most zoos to being money-making big performers / attractions, by drenching a pleased audience with their vigorous tail, but by the pervading feeling of naivety.

If you look at the Loro Parque entry, it reports that there have been 40 million visitors, i.e. more than half of the UK’s population : how much can many of these people have been bothered to think about the orcas or their care or well-being ?

With respect to the former trainers, for some reason both they and the OHSA seemed to believe a story that said that the man had brought about his own death by stripping off to be in the water with the orcas : I cannot now give the story the twist that somehow blamed the man, because it has been lost to me in all the other material. However, nothing seems to suggest that this death, or the catalogue of other near-misses, injuries or deaths, was taken seriously.


Is it really so easy just to claim, as was done, that Dawn Brancheau should not have had her pony-tail down (but up in a bun) and / or that what she was doing with the orca in question led to her being pulled to the bottom – and therefore that all that ensued was her fault ? Seemingly not, given the case that the OHSA has brought (and which SeaWorld is seeking to appeal). However, from what I gather, it appears that whoever is the equivalent of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the RSPCA (the American Humane Association ?), and coroners / district attorneys have not been strikingly assiduous in the past.

For why did it take a fatality as recently as two years ago to bring about the present ruling (being appealed) that trainers in the water are to be separated from, and not in contact with, the orcas ? I have no idea of the OHSA’s remit, but a loss of a limb (as in Rust and Bone) is an unacceptable workplace injury, whereas the film leaves me with no notion of criminal investigations, proceedings and penalties. Maybe the OHSA case has to precede all that, maybe not.


In conclusion, the film has actually left more significant questions open than it has answered – an elephant, a parrot, an orca must be better off where they were brought from, and, even if bred from, they are bred without liberty, so I have no doubt that any creature that will get 40 million visitors through the door is bound to be exploited. Those visitors are possibly too complacent with their holiday memories and their own wish-fulfilment dreams of swimming with orcas (or dolphins – nothing against dolphins !) to notice a film like Blackfish, certainly in the cinema, I would suspect.

As to why nothing seems to have been done before (nothing is reported in the film), again I just do not know. Yet I am actually quite disappointed with employees who were told stories, did not think to question them (even when they could see how these orcas lived, and could imagine their hurt, if they really felt that they had a personal bond with them), and who may not have spoken out at the right time.

I simply cannot tell whether they did, because the featured ones were shown on the media and seemed to be in relation to the OHSA court case. Then again, I have no idea – and they, cannily, did not say – what forces might have been brought to bear if, at any other point, they had put their head above the parapet. That said, having watched another Dogwoof film, Fredrik Gertten’s Big Boys Gone Bananas (2011)***, I can imagine that it might tell those who cannot guess…


End-notes

* A seaman had earlier on told us how very shocked he was when young orcas had been separated from their mothers, and he and two others had to deal with the remains of three whales that had been killed in the operation, which he said had been illegal.

** The Wikipedia® item for Loro Parque talks about this, and what it says the status of the orcas is. Such transportation, if the trainers and Wikipedia® are right, is also scarcely in accord with the notion that the orcas in shows are an organic community.

*** At Cambridge Film Festival 2012, the documentary voted best film by audiences.


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