Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

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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)

He’s the daddy ! : Colin Currie DJs at Saffron Hall (Part I)

This reviews Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich concert at Saffron Hall (Part I)

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23 June

This is Part I of a review of The Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich programme, with Synergy Vocals (in Part II), at Saffron Hall on Sunday 26 April at 7.30 p.m.

The review is in two Parts : Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976) is here

Music for Pieces of Wood (1973)

The Colin Currie Group (@ColinCurrieGrp), led by Colin Currie (@colincurrieperc), opened the gig with a piece that echoed (though not literally) Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) interior furnishing or appointment, Music for Pieces of Wood (1973).


By analogy, as each player joined in with a tock-tock sound, one felt that one could be listening to, and through, the line- and clause-breaks of John Milton’s verse in Paradise Lost, with its accentuated language of intonation : it was all there in these pitched instruments, and their cross-rhythms and overtones. (Colin Currie came in third, and there was a thudding, almost dully brutal quality to the timbre and pitch of his instrument, compared to those struck by his peers, and of whom we became less and less aware that they were beating different patterns.)

As we got used to the shape of the piece, we could hear the clear acclimatization of the fourth voice, and ourselves became acclimatized, as it began falling into rhythm (or step) with its neighbours, and speeding up its pace (this video may just confuse, but purports to let one visualize what happens with the various patterns). With all five players introduced and bedded in, and after a small crescendo (at 3 : 04 in the video), the iteration wound down, with beats dropping out, until we were back to the unceasing first two players.

Maybe we were just waiting, maybe expecting for Currie to join in again, but we could be more free this time around (if it was, exactly, another time around**), and just absorb the experience – at times, feeling as though we were trotting with the percussionists, or as though it was the cream of the fringe-effects of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds (composed the year before, in 1972).

At any rate, the effect was persuasive and impelling, one that must have been intense within the sound on stage. Its cessation, when the final iteration was through**, was met with a roar of approval.



Quartet (2009)

As the programme-notes told us, Quartet (2009) had been commissioned by the CC Group, but only first performed in 2014. They go on to quote Reich as calling it one of the more complex of his compositions.

It was the major work, in terms of length (but still as a balance to a bigger second half), but, as one might imagine, not a quartet in the sense of strings*** (although two instruments rely on them) :

Two concert grands, facing each other, and, likewise, two vibraphones, in a work marked Fast / Slow / Fast – a form that, as Reich comments, is not only played without pause, but is also one familiar throughout history (from publishers Boosey & Hawkes web-page for the work).


Fast turned out not to be all that fast, in a movement that was joyous, but restrained, and where the players laid easily on the beat. It was distinguished by the gorgeous tone of the instruments, and the use of accents and rubato. At one point, very near the end, we were brought down in scale to a softness of some subtlety, and then up to a dynamic high, before a pause brought in a four-beat close.


The slow movement that succeeded it had the feeling of being at night, but not in any way like that of Béla Bartók’s famous movements with an ‘inner’ shadow, and rather by of Reich moving on from what went before, using open chords (as well as discords, later) to give the sense of introductory material. From there, it moved with delicacy, and with the sense of sounds precisely being placed in the air (fully as much by the score as by the playing).

The central part employed the resonant qualities of these forces, making use of a jazzy riff, spread-chords (which had a querulous, questioning tone to them), and what were nearly chimes (but without overplaying any notion of Night). On, though, we went, with further discord that led to full-throttle reverberation, but it proved to be words such as ‘rubato’ and ‘restraint’ that characterized the moment on which we ended.


There, strangely, more words, by the same amount again, for Slow than for Fast… And here, maybe reflecting that the second Fast built upon – and ‘wrapped up’ up – what it followed, some short comments :

The movement had a quality that seemed to be of assured urbanity, maybe evoking a city like New York. It, too, left chords in the air, again not quite chimes (because they were unresolved in the bass-notes of the piano), and, as it approached the intensity of its conclusion, one was keenly aware of all the methods of, and need for, clear and close communications between Colin Currie and the three others.

As if Quartet's grand pianos weren't enough, Music for 18 Musicians, with @ColinCurrieGrp @SaffronHallSW, deployed two more, plus marimbas !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 27, 2015

Part II of the review (Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976)) is here



End-notes

* Which, if one studies recorded performances, can be seen to be signalled by a nod (as is the moment of dissipation down to two musicians), as here (at 9 : 36). (Or one can see performers, unlike these or those of the Colin Currie Group, using non-cylindrical, actual and rough pieces of wood.)

** The programme-notes tell us that the time-signature tightens, each time, from 6 / 4, to 4 / 4, to 3 / 4, but maybe even the trained ear prefers to get lost in the changing impressions : as mentioned above, this video purports to let one visualize what happens with the various patterns...

*** Publishers Boosey & Hawkes' web-page for the work, giving Reich’s Composer’s Notes, has him observe : Quartet, when mentioned in the context of concert music, is generally assumed to mean string quartet.


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

So great that you're quitting ? : A review of Les beaux jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

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24 April

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

So great that you’re quitting

Bright Days Ahead (an uneven translation of Les Beaux Jours*) (2013) is in French, but, however well made, it has more of the sensibility of Hope Springs (2012) than of the best of French cinema : when the producer of Hope came to Cambridge Film Festival, he said that Meryl Streep had suggested making the footage at the end, and, although it had not been planned, it was then found possible to do it. The ending of this film strongly reminds one of it, though with very little feeling that matters have been resolved.

The reason being that Hope shares with this film the topic of healing the damage caused by one’s partner’s behaviour – though here the damage seemed to have been skin deep**, whereas in Tommy Lee Jones’ (Arnold’s) case (and contrary to the optimism in the title’s fictitious place name) it brooded over Meryl Streep (Kay) for almost the entire film. Hope is not a great film, and one can be cynical about the motives behind making it, but it still moves Days Ahead out of the brightness, and into the shade.

Another point of contact is a coastal location. Places in New England became the title resort in Hope, and, at least when we are outside and in it (when we are inside, it could be anywhere), the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is a vivid backdrop to Days Ahead, right from the title sequence, which is made to appear written onto the black of a bascule bridge. Straightaway, it is apparent that getting around is dependent on avoiding the times when tides make it favourable for vessels to navigate the channels and the bridge swings up. In no way apparent, for all the amenity of the location, is why Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and Philippe (Patrick Chesnais) are there at all.

In any case, despite Le Week-End (2013)’s reliance on the deus ex machina of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) to get Hanif Kureishi’s lumbering plot to go anywhere, once it has established the characters of Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) (but with no real prospect of development***), it shows far more about relationships and those near retirement than Days Ahead even thinks to do. For it goes straight for showing an affair, but often half-heartedly, so that one can care too little whether it survives, and too much how toxic its effects might be.

The real moment when there is everything is the illicit possibility of penetrative sex in Caroline’s car, and where, however close we seem to get, the windows are ever interposed between them and us – when that idea is shied away from, we suddenly step back and see where we had got lost from in awareness, the car in plain view and with people about their business.

Ageing the lead actress Ardant backwards is a well-worn trick, and even passionate moments seen in the store-room (to bolster up the notion of romantic rejuvenation) simply do not make for sustaining the conviction of amour fou such as KST’s in Leaving (2009) (or even of her bit-part as Virginie Rousset in Bel Ami (2012), where she, too, glows and visibly unfolds from knowing the favours of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson)) : here, the feeling on both sides is too tepid, even to the extent of stating to one’s lover that the preference is for sleep rather than continuing the time together, and Julien (Laurent Lafitte), too, is just beautified over time to suggest his strengthening appeal.

Throw in ‘getting to know’ the members of the Les Beaux Jours club in a way that is managed hardly better than in Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his superior stage-play as Quartet (2012). In Days Ahead, there are stock follies such as a wine-tasting where someone takes snorters or people unused to potting are let loose on a wheel and produce a deformed piece of clay, and the cheery message that we are invited to share that sniffy Caroline comes to value her new friends might give some a sense of warmth. Yet it is essentially a diversion from the fact that nothing is really going on, except at the level of cliché, and, whilst that may be fine for Fanny Chesnel’s novel, it is too thin for a film that seeks our approval.

Ultimately, the plot throws us back on Philippe and who he really is in relation to Caroline, but sadly the action has concentrated so much on her both that we do not know, and also that we cannot credit what, in the circumstances, would cause him to accommodate her needs. Hope, whatever we may think of its insights, does at least focus on that question, rather than trying to tack it on at the end.


That said, New Empress Magazine's reviewer found more going on here, and more of merit, but making none of these references


End-notes

* Surely not meant to resonate with the title that Beckettt gave to his play Happy Days when he translated it into French… ?

** And, to be susceptible to rapid repair thanks to a few jokes at the expense of a hotel run by a budget brand, and – at the cost of incredulity as to how Philippe got there, and what happened to Caroline’s car – to hitching a lift as the young Dylan or Kerouac might have done.

*** What does happen at the end smacks less of ‘going Godard’ than of the fantasy Paris of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).




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

The quartet that wasn't

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15 January

By way of explanation : I offered to write a review of Quartet (2012), since I had already written about it here, for the on-line content of New Empress Magazine (@NewEmpress), and I was asked to provide it by the end of the week.

Although I had no doubt what I wanted to say, limiting oneself to 350 words is not always liberating, but sometimes disabling of one's inspiration. However, I pressed on, and submitted well in advance, though I forgot to give a rating (1 to 5 'Torches of Truth' [sic]).

Remembering the rating had not been provided, I said 3, but then got back a request from the acting On-Line Editor (Martyn Conterio) to revise the 3, because the review had been negative*. As I said in replying, I do not like a 5-point scale, but said, in that case, 2, because 2.5 was probably nearer the truth (although 3 suited me).

I was then told in a most perfunctory way that my review would not appear**, but here it is...


Ronald Harwood’s play Quartet premiered thirteen years ago. Many will gather that the film, too, centres on achieving a performance of a four-part Verdi aria (a pièce de résistance in Rigoletto, Act 3), the retired singers being Pauline Collins, Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, and Billy Connolly.

So far so good (or maybe raised eyebrows about plausibility, e.g. Connolly a tenor, and Collins as mezzo ?), but why mention the play, when it’s Sir Ronald’s own screenplay ? Simply because it is such a different beast that I believe that Harwood has virtually destroyed it to produce a film of lesser interest.

The play’s cast is just the four singers, so we only hear, say, of Jean Horton’s (Dame Maggie’s) rival, Anne Langley. A film cannot easily do that (Anne is played here by singer Dame Gwyneth Jones), and the cinematic medium cannot reproduce dialogue. However, the casualty is losing the sparse effectiveness, not seeing anyone else.

Instead, real interiors, peopled by people such as resident impresario Michael Gambon, in full loudmouth mode, and Sheridan Smith, an unlikely managerial role. For me, the play’s intimacy is overdiluted by staff and residents, and what remains is an imaginary portrait of a musicians’ retirement home – not the four, of whom only Jean looks like she might really have sung opera.

So why did Harwood bother reworking Quartet for cinema ? Our readers will know that a gala screening, followed by a Q&A, took place last month, in which he participated: not unusually, the evening’s host absorbed most of the available time, and no one even asked Harwood why he wrote the screenplay.

Well, Giuseppe Verdi was born on 10 October 1813, which Radio 3 is already marking by broadcasting all his operas in 2013. The film is from BBC Films. So no tie-in there, then !

Call me cynical, but the facts – and seeing the play transferred to the screen – make me wonder whether Harwood’s heart was in the work, or it was a job that paid. Promoting films is tacky, but the tag-line ‘Four friends looking for a little harmony’ is appalling !


ENDS


QED



End-notes

* 'I'm not quite sure about the reasoning behind the 3 Torches rating given it's a fairly negative review. Can you revise.'

** 'Given the current schedule and with the Quartet competition ending tomorrow, I am unable to use your Quartet review. Thank you for submitting. I cannot be drawn into any reasons for my decision, above those mentioned, and I hope you accept my apology.'


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Better as it was…

This is a review of Quartet (2012)

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14 December (Tweet added, 3 December 2014)

This is a review of Quartet (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Ronald Harwood, in the Q&A that followed the gala screening of Quartet (2012) to support the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, did not really explain why he had written a film-script based on his stage-play (though I imagine that he had preferred to do so himself) - and, because it was by live relay from Leicester Square or the like, I did not have the means to ask.

Quartet : Not Ronald Harwood's film for the Verdi centenary (http://t.co/je1Kdj2jgH), but the play at @camartstheatre pic.twitter.com/MAXJgsx7BT
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 3, 2014

Tweeted, the cover of the programme from Cambridge's Arts Theatre (@camartstheatre)...

I need to check, but I believe that Sir Ronald confirmed what I recollected, that the play just has the four characters, two men, two women, who constitute the quartet [now checked - correct (please see image above)]. By contrast, the film is busy with people, the residents and staff of a fictional (so we were told) Beecham House, which was located in a property near Taplow*, Hedsor House.

For me, that (unavoidable**) creation of an atmosphere in which the foursome of Jean (Maggie Smith), Cissy (Pauline Collins), Wilf (Billy Connolly) and Reg(gie) (Tom Courtenay) can play out their drama did not enhance, but diluted the play’s strength: not quite in the way that some people find their favourite novel pictured awry on the screen, because I had no real notion of what the four were or – should be – like, but simply in terms of how the staging (in the production that I had seen) deliberately minimized the extraneous. With this film, it was as if Harwood were reinventing the depiction of a musicians’ retirement home, which he had hinted at and so, I believe, portrayed more effectively by its absence on stage***.

One of the biggest inventions, the larger-than-life impresario Cedric (played by Michael Gambon in finest Poliakoff-style excess), on his own swallows up the intimate nature of Harwood’s theatre, let alone the whole machinery of employees and their head, the – for me – implausible Dr Cogan, because, whatever she is a doctor of, Sheridan Smith did not seem to be it, evincing just a sweet feeling of being nice as the one in charge of the home, not of being capable of managing, whether domestic or medical.

For every minute that Cedric was bawling at people and posturing, though we were being given a classic Gambonesque treatment, we were not advancing the scenario of the original, but, perhaps unnecessarily, having demonstrated how a cock will rule the roost, and, therefore, steal the show from almost everyone except Dame Maggie. The quartet itself was, in consequence, diminished, rather than built up as the plausible class act that would close the proceedings.

In fact, director Dustin Hoffman's team filmed and recorded our quartet of British stars for two days, and then decided that we would not see that footage, but rather just their rapturous reception to the stage. In the Q&A, we were reminded that the play had the quartet miming to a recording, but that had been decided against, as was - in the event - the quartet’s bid to sing, in favour of a cut-away reverse-out of the lit-up Beecham House with a slow fade and a celebrated recording.

Would I have felt differently about this film, if Connolly had been nearly as funny as Wilf as he was in the Q&A ? Maybe, but he still would never have made me believe that he’d been in a legendary production of Rigoletto, any more than Courtenay or Collins did. Put against a real opera singer, Dame Gwyneth Jones as everyone’s pet-hate (especially Jean’s), Anne Langley, no one came close to resembling any opera-singer I’ve ever heard speak except Smith herself.

(Even looked at on the publicity flyer****, only Courtenay's anguished look and muffler come anywhere near to creating a feel of a tenor, supposing that Connolly is meant to be the bass - which is, though, unlikely to be the case, as Connolly's voice tends to the shrill, and the tenor is, of course, always the clown.)

The quartet number had to end the film, had to be the star turn in which I didn’t believe (or in the paucity of instrumentalists to provide the accompaniment, quite apart from whether accommodating an audience barely more than a handful could make any financial difference to the continued running of the place). And so the film felt as though it failed in its own terms - even though it sought to have the four's performance come out of the muddle and mess of life in the home as some sort of pleasing crowning glory : I can remember, with the version on stage, that one was almost willing them on to their triumph, which I truly lacked feeling here.

It could not have been different, however Harwood had cut the cake, and in writing an unexceptional film he has ruined any posterity for a perfectly good play : probably he put it on the screen because its life has run, but I do wish that he had just turned his energies to something, like The Dresser (1983), that transferred to film with less loss of concentration. If, though, I am wrong, and what I have already suggested was his motivation, to work over a piece with which he could no longer rest content, then I feel little different, that, in trying to breathe life into it, he has effectively buried it.


End-notes

* There is now no such retirement home for musicians, though there may have been, but there is one for actors, to which this fictional one owes some detail, we were told. (Rather irrelevantly, perhaps, Taplow is the name of the schoolboy in The Browning Version (Rattigan).)

** Cinema that just reproduces a play is, for me, a waste of the medium – the film had to give the backdrop in a way that the literal backdrop of a stage does not require.

*** That said, maybe Harwood was writing for cinema out of a dissatisfaction, at some point, with his stage work : if it was out of that impulse, to give the richness here that a realization on stage could not do (except with some elaborate cast and machinery more redolent of the big musical, when the play is a chamber work), I sense it as a clash with, not as a complement to, the quartet and that the pared-down was more eloquent.

**** Even assuming that he may not have approved it, how can Harwood not squirm at the tag-line ? : Four friends looking for a little harmony.


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