Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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30 November

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

It is almost as though The Dressmaker has been pinned to fit around this one fact : Sunset Blvd. (1950) premiered in Australia, on 25 August 1950.

-> Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is also highly relevant, for a created world / excavating the past, but just much better...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 22, 2015

For want of a better word, the film is set in Dungatar, in 1951, but nothing in the flash of music, the gestures, the stance, remotely desires more than to draw our attention to the fact that there is unfinished business in this implausible, symbolic place – symbolic, because its very set-up is pat in the way that that of films such as High Noon (1952) always was, so that there can be nothing behind its implausibility, if not symbolism. (Here, the paraphernalia of the wild west, and all the stock sights and spectacles of the age’s saloon-bars, have been rolled into one figure.)

Symbolism, but not of any subtle or interesting kind, because it wants to revisit an earlier time of colourless grey, bit by irritatingly nagging bit. As if picking the skin of forgetfulness off an obliging old tangerine, and miraculously penetrating to – although with no means to do so beyond being back there – what had been misremembered, misunderstood, misrepresented. At best, Kate Winslet, in the person of Myrtle Dunnage (‘Tilly’), says to her mother (‘Mad’ Molly, played by Judy Davis) : I need you to remember me, mum, so I can remember.

Glad that someone else picked up the Britten / Peter Grimes overtones in The Dressmaker (2015) - Matt Wolf : https://t.co/p2XXhBSrFP

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 1, 2015

That, too, is just a gesture in the direction of a symbolic level for the rehabilitation and restitution of Tilly’s mother (and, a few times, Molly duly disbelieves why her daughter is there). By contrast, in the best of Ibsen, this notion of what really happened can be revelatory, electrifying, and rarely for good, and many a time Hitchcock made true film capital through showing us something on screen that, although it was not the mind’s obfuscations in dream, desire or trauma, mimicked them (e.g. Spellbound (1945), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964) :

Here it is just entertainment, with an audience of would-be psychic explorers, but in titters at Hugo Weaving’s again wearing women’s clothes : he did so devastatingly as Nurse Noakes in Cloud Atlas (2012), and without either exploiting or mocking, as this role does, those who share this interest. The likely audience for The Dressmaker will be unlikely to gravitate towards Dogville (2003), or to do so to their taste, whereas those who missed it and have only witnessed the work of Lars von Trier in more recent works of excess such as Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) and Vol. II (2013), can seek a worthier film there.


This is a film that never tries to do what Dogville does, but really feels like [it wants to be] Wes Anderson, but without Wes, and which is definitely written in a way that wishes that it could be even bad Wodehouse, but which just never will be : it desires to have older people ‘behave badly’, but does so in that stock way that Ronald Harwood uses for Billy Connolly’s character, when he adapts his stage-play as Quartet (2012), rather than is done more inventively, for Judi Dench, in Philomena (2013).

Whatever Rosalie Ham’s novel may be, it seems newly published (in paperback, but there is evidence of an audio-book on CD from 2003...), and does not appear in hardback until April next year.


Some reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) :

Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1), for The Guardian, gave it one star, and closes his review by saying Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.

For Little White Lies (@LWLies, where they score things differently), the marks are not much kinder, and the review by David Jenkins (@DaveyJenkins) is headed 'This lop-sided couture western staggers on long past what should've been a short, sharp run time'.


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

Henry James comes to Poland ? (Part I)

This is a Festival review of Ida (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)

22 November

This is a Festival review of Ida (2013)
(because it should have been seen on Day 3 of Cambridge Film Festival)

Some narratives [some really just do not care that one is awake enough to ask] need to be able to answer the question Why this – why now ? It is convenient enough that, before making a commitment (and so that there is a film), Anna is given knowledge that she has not had before : that, for all the time that she has been in the convent, she has had a living relative, whom she is now being sent to meet.

Understandably, as a good convent girl, she accepts what has happened, and does not seem angry or bitter, but, when she meets Wanda Gruz and learns that her real name is Ida*, she does still ask Wanda why she did not have her to live with her. Ida gets a good enough, and candid answer : maybe the candour actually goes over her head (or she has learnt much despite her upbringing), but she gives the impression of somehow being unshockable.

People will praise Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida) for her performance, imagining that age is a factor to allow for and that the interpretation can be attributed to her, but Agata Kulesza (Wanda) is the one to be impressed by, for her emotional energy and depth, and her integrity.

In any case, there is a sort of reason behind her deciding to get interested in her niece, when we see Wanda sitting on a tribunal panel, but, because she is never asked this quite obvious question, the film and she only obliquely answer it – if what she determines to do now with Ida matters, why is she only doing it now ?


In the opening part, before Ida meets Wanda, film-making gives us an example of how using monochrome can neatly lend visual severity to scenes in a convent. However, unlike the painful, extended treatment of this kind of setting, in colour in Beyond the Hills** (Dupa dealuri) (2012), here it feels gratuitous to use colour-deprivation – almost as if it is employing the potential of the aesthetics of asceticism to mislead.

Yet, although this is not an equivalent religious regime to that shown in Romania (and so that is not the point being made), giving an appearance of being austere chooses to suggest to us what might be – along with, later, showing prostate, cruciform candidates for taking orders, which might be straight out of Luis Buñuel at his most anti-clerical.

The convent is no doubt run strictly, with a seeming rule of silence at meals (and it is a nod that advises Anna to see Mother Superior), and the story-telling here is crisp, neat, orderly. However, what director Pawel Pawlikowski is really about here, in a film set in 1962 (according to IMDb), is setting up a dichotomy, which for Henry James’ characters was between The New World and The Old World (e.g. in novels such as The Ambassadors, or The Golden Bowl) – hence this review’s title.

In James, the dichotomy becomes embodied by, and so takes place within, the visitors from the States, who bring their preconceptions and imagination, but hamper them by not using their perceptions. Ida, summoned on the verge of taking orders, is told to go to stay with her aunt ‘for as long as is necessary’ (which is sufficiently vague to allow it to further the plot).

It may not the only dichotomy in the film, but it is summed up in this exchange – in the car – between Ida and her aunt [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 ?


To look further at the film requires a further posting and being spoilery…

Suffice for now to say that the working out of dichotomies here is fairly predictable. Which one would not expect of the director of The Woman in the Fifth (La femme du Vème) (2011), and is also lacking the subtleties of the various Jamesian texts that have been so successfully adapted cinematically.


End-notes

* Pronounced, whatever one may think, in the film Eh-dah.

** Or even in Philomena (2013).


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

Really shot in Wyoming !

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

7 December

89 = S : 14 / A : 15 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 13 / F : 15

A rating and review of Nebraska (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

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



* Contains spoilers *

It may not only be true of lesser films (well, not true of The Third Man (1949)), but Bel Ami (2012) fails at attempting to pass off London as Paris, and On the Road (2012) is a film that, as this one does, features landscape - just nowhere near, reading the credits, where the various journeys were supposed to be happening.

It is an interesting choice to present this film in black and white, because it really adds almost nothing to what we see except the views of the scenery, which are faultless. With Frances Ha (2013), it worked, it did enhance the film's cinematic qualities, but here - apart from the obvious suggestion that much of life in states such as Montana and Nebraska is being presented as lacking a dimension - it was only the fleeting longer shots in transit that benefited, but, then, so much that I would not have had the film any other way.

And this is a film that says something about acceptance, though that does not mean that I have to accept this highly inaccurate account of it from IMDb :

An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize


I see no evidence that David Grant (also unwillingly known as Davie / Davey, and played by Will Forte) is estranged from his father Woody (short for Woodrow, and acted by Bruce Dern), and it is he, rather than his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who comes for him when he has been picked up by the police at the start. The other descriptions beg the question : what life has Woody led that he is as he is, and can his wife Kate (June Squibb) exculpate herself ?

The course of the film takes us to Hawthorne, where Woody grew up, and where there were at least two women in his life. One, sympathetically and with great naturalness brought off by Angela McEwan, is Peg, whose humanity is evident, and says that Woody knew that she 'would not let him touch all the bases' - by implication, the highly judgemental Kate, his wife (Squibb with great ease makes us dislike her), would. (There is a grim scene in the Lutheran graveyard (Kate is nominally a Catholic), where she calls a dead member of Woody's family a whore for having had sex from the age of fifteen.)

It is here that, bit by bit, we can piece together the influences that have worked on Woody, such as the death of a brother with whom he shared a room, being shot down in Korea when being transferred, and the age at which he and two other men from the town were sent to war, and how he returned from it. The laughter at Woody's expense seemed to have died down by this stage (and, in this respect, the film has the pattern of Philomena (2013)), but where it laid things on a little too thickly was with the vacant relatives, who, for example, are querying the journey-time from Billings, Montana, and even infect David with it, who asks Ross how he travelled over.

At Mount Rushmore (another place that Woody did not wish to see), in what he has to say about the monument not looking finished (which. with his critique, it did not), we are given the insight that how he relates to the world does not mean that he is ignorant and foolish, and, in his way, he just as much speaks the truth as he sees it as Kate does. (Indeed, we hear him dub other drivers idiots, and tell a mechanic that he is using the wrong wrench.)

I think that the script suitably covers objections to some of the things that happen for the purposes of the plot and which get us on the road, and that it works well enough as an exploration of the goals that we set, or expectations that we all have, without needing Woody's background and circumstances - the things that we think that we must have, when really something else (or lesser) might do.

In emotional terms, rather than those symbolic of setting out on a quest (and feeling that compulsion), the film resolves itself - and rights some wrongs - right at the end (even if we do not quite know how it can be done, and maybe it is a bit too pat). What is clear is that David has also been in need of healing from the childhood that he had where he is likened to a girl or a prince, and called beautiful - to assert himself, not least as he does, albeit with a fist, with Woody's former business partner Ed Pegram, and to believe in his worth.

The quest itself turned out to have to be completed, even if it was just to be told that it had not garnered anything except an ironic cap, but probably for other reasons by then. As for having to live with the disparaging Kate, nothing had changed that, and her threats of putting Woody in a home, and she had only defended him out of self-interest, both not to have relatives clamour for money, and to have him as her own victim - except that David certainly has more respect for his father, and in that there is hope...


As for the review on IMDb (by Steven Leibson) that calls this a hilarious comedy, well...

However, I quite liked Mark Kermode's review in The Guardian, so here it is (or gu.com/p/3yvcg/tf, if you wish to share).


There is now a little follow-up piece here...


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

Found in her memories

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

7 November

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

A rating and review of Philomena (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

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

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

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

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

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

Martin : I'm only going to tell the truth

Philomena : That's what I'm worried about


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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