Showing posts with label Ralph Fiennes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ralph Fiennes. Show all posts

Wednesday, 12 August 2020

Outline for a proposed film 2.1 [corrected / with casting ideas] : Primavera [or Dario ?] - or The Mandrake Serenade

Outline for a proposed film 2.1 : Primavera [or Dario ?] - or The Mandrake Serenade

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 July

Outline for a proposed film 2.1 [corrected / with casting ideas] :
Primavera [or Dario ?] - or The Mandrake Serenade

'Reap what ye shall sow'



For Rosy and Brent



1. Lucia Argenta and Michael Hope meet at a performance of Verdi's Otello, and, talking during the interval, become friends : he is in Milan for a year during his degree (Italian and French), and she is older. (Despite the name, Michael is unaware that Lucia married date-rape Carlo Argenta when young, who killed himself in guilt that he had shaken her and she then miscarried.) She did not go to university, but has already established herself in business, buying and selling rare recordings [as Dischi Mandragora]

2. They are close, but never lovers - something holds him off, even at romantic operas at La Scala, and he never quite trusts Vincenzo, Lucia's father [Vincenzo, from the old Italian Mandragora family], who was widowed early, during the birth of Lucia's younger sister, Primavera (who is away, in Manchester, at Royal Northern)

3. Michael and Lucia write to each other when he returns to the family home in Lancashire (where he sings in a church choir, led by Nancy Kadmuss), before completing his degree
4. A year or so on, Lucia is visiting Primavera in Manchester (who chose to stay there, despite giving up on becoming a professional singer) and, to see Lucia again, Michael (who has never met Primavera) is invited to a party that Primavera is throwing in Lucia's honour

5. Primavera works there in music publishing, and Michael works for a company that makes travel arrangements for musicians

6. Unknown to him (and of which Primavera is also unaware), Lucia and Vincenzo (who is also visiting, but not in evidence at the party) contrive for Michael and Primavera to meet early on at the party, and have bewitched them both with love-potions

7. The effect is such that they abandon their wontedly cautious behaviour and disappear to the roof-garden, where they kiss and pet heavily, then return to the party separately

8. As the party continues, so does the effect of the love-philtres, and Primavera (having told Lucia how struck she is on Michael) manages to suggest privately that Michael should stay the night, who, without his usual level of reserve, agrees

9. One of the last to leave, Lucia had earlier seemed to slip out of the party and to have brought back a chilled bottle of a quality Italian sparkling wine for Primavera (and Michael), but, in fact, she gets the bottle from Vincenzo, and lets him in (to hide in the roof-garden ?), when she returns, as the bottle will knock Primavera and Michael out soon after they take it to bed, and, when Vincenzo has seen that they are unconscious, he will let Lucia back in, who rapes Michael to orgasm while he watches / listens next door, afterwards emptying away all but a small residue in each glass (and leaving the empty bottle, as if the couple had consumed its contents)

10. FF through a montage or other telling of Primavera's being mortified that she does not remember the vigorous love-making, without protection, that proves to have made her pregnant, and that, although Michael also does not have any conscious memory of that first time, he seems never to find her or her love-making exciting, and yet they marry and stay together because of their son, Dario, with only the distant attentions of his grandfather and apparent aunt, except for family visits

11. The suggestion that, although they are a couple out of duty, they do not even find themselves blessed by Dario (or vice versa), and that - not just through teething, etc. - they have never been able to rely on undisturbed sleep, and have moved to detached property (where tensions with neighbours no longer arise), and near Michael's parents. George and Anne (who can give support with childcare)

12. Yet tensions repeatedly happen, when Dario pesters and pesters to be allowed to play in the garden, but invariably wreaks 'destructive wonders' on the planting, etc., as soon as anyone's back is turned (which behaviourally mirrors their life with him in microcosm), so that Primavera finally asks Michael to fence off the garden and gives Dario his own patch of the garden near the house, where nothing that he plants he does not soon uproot or trample on - until three seeds are given to him by Nancy, Michael's old choir-mistress, as part of Dario's Christmas present, all of which, now oddly assiduous, he feeds and waters into vigorous life, as he approaches his seventh birthday

13. Dario's screams and rages at night have finally subsided, but Michael and Primavera, driven mad by a shrieking of unidentifiable origin when they tried to sleep, have resorted to heavy-duty ear-plugs, which means that they are unaware that, after arriving on Dario's birthday, and on an early flight, Lucia and Vincenzo have been greeted at the door by Dario, and proudly shown his three established plants - which so repulse and horrify Vincenzo, at some gut level, that he wrenches them out of the ground, unaware of their shrieks, and that first Lucia, and then Dario, fall down dead behind him, and we see him - as if at the end of Mozart's Don Giovanni - reached for by arms and pulled down, through the patch of soil, and into [???]


ENDS

© Copyright Belston Night Works 2020


Preliminary ideas for casting :

Michael Hope ~ George MacKay

Lucia Argenta ~ Saoirse Ronan

Primavera ~ Florence Pugh

Vincenzo Mandragora ~ Ralph Fiennes

Nancy Kadmuss ~ Carl Peck (or, also, Fiennes (in the vein of Alec Guinness) ?)

Dario ~ Timothée Chalamet [by CGI, made to seem a child of four to nearly seven] ?

George Hope ~ Also Fiennes

Anne Hope ~ KST




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)`
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Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Tweeting about Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Ran (1985)

Some Tweets with comparisons of Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Ran (1985)


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 May
These Tweets contain some casual observations, finding parallels between the various worlds of Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) (1988) (for Studio Ghibli) and Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985)


Ran screened at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, at 1.00 p.m. on Sunday 22 May 2016 (as a Sunday Classic), and Grave of the Fireflies at 9.00 p.m. on Wednesday 25 May (as part of Studio Ghibli Forever)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 14 July 2014

You need a Grand Budapest sticker to go abroad...

This is a follow-up piece to a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (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)

14 July (updated, 30 November 2021)




Isn't he superb, @WaterbabyFlower @Saffronscreen ! My second time, but his own timing is grand, and Anderson's script / detail nigh perfect
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014


This follow-up piece to a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) was written on watching it again at Saffron Screen (@SaffronScreen) : it is less in the nature of a second review, than a rumination on the film's themes and ultimate import



That deft substitution, of a clean ashtray for a dirty one, is only a moment, but it says what's at the heart of The Grand Budapest Hotel ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014


The ashtray is mentioned because, at the bottom of the fresh ashtray, we see – which were effaced by butts, ash, soot¹ (if only as temporary deposits) in the dirty one – the essentials of The Grand Budapest Hotel : the crest, and the ‘GB’ within its swirls, its initials.

-> That moment and when GustaveH. trivializes Zero as a migrant, before realizing what he fled as a refugee and apologizing in remorse / GB
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014

Throughout the film, we are reminded that Gustave H. (personified by the words, manner and decorum of Ralph Fiennes – abruptly swearing like a trooper, but with a heart and caring attitude of gold) is a creature of the past, a man who wants to preserve the things that not only matter to him, but which he also believes do (or, at any rate, should) matter in absolute terms². Yet, as he travels both to, and back from, Schloß Lutz with Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), he realizes that the future is coming, and, rather than intending to keep the utterly fictitious³ Boy with Apple for the rest of his life (as he first states), he quickly revises his plan to have them sell it and run away to The Maltese Riviera.

Gustave H. offers a share in this to Zero, who tries to haggle before they agree on a deal, which (as an element in Anderson’s mockery of legality during the film⁴), he dictates to Zero, as if something noted on the back of a cocktail menu suffices for a binding contract – as such a man of his word might, if only to safeguard the interests of the other party (who need only, if memory fails, produce the memorandum of agreement (as, with good reason, such a document is called)).

The deal is to include inheriting from Gustave H., but it is only later – at the other crucial Tweeted moment – that they come to see each other as brothers. More interestingly still, they become equals, with Gustave deferring to Zero with his proposal to escape on the motorbike (just after Zero has saved his life), for which the trigger was Gustave’s heartfelt remorse, having realized how he has maligned Zero by imagining insulting reasons for his originally leaving his homeland. (And, if we are honest, we have all allowed ourselves, through disappointment, envy and the like, to judge wrongly by appearances – we trusted that we know the story from what we [thought that we] saw, only to be proved quite wrong.) :

The second time, near the end of our nest of stories, that Gustave sticks up for Zero, there is a different feel to the confrontation that we see. Which is not just because the ZZ militia are menacing⁵, on whose black uniform Gustave commented unfavourably just before (and which we can easily construe as the SS, with the formerly independent Zubrowka (the brand-name of a Polish vodka), maybe masquerading for The Sudetenland, if not more likely for Austro-Hungary, hence Budapest ? – there is further consideration, below, in an Epilogue).

The two other elements in this scene, which are intimately related to each other, are how close our awareness is of the point of view of the narrator, older Zero (having dinner with the younger Author (Jude Law)), which is on the surface of the story at around this point, and also the much greater esteem in which Zero, travelling with his bride Agatha, is held by Gustave, and vice versa (as long as Gustave does not flirt with Agatha !). Gustave is no longer instinctively protecting Zero as a lobby-boy (in training), but altogether as a friend, brother, and former refugee from violence (and we maybe sense that Gustave himself could be the last of these, too).

We know quite clearly that Gustave has his foibles, such as self-interestedly courting and bedding the wealthy female guests, but it is humanity, and his charming mix of naivety and streetwise cunning, that shines through. Right at the outset, with just baldly calling Author the person through whose words and eyes, as Tom Wilkinson (and then Jude Law), Wes Anderson wildly abstracts the story, and thus he challenges us as to whether we are going to believe all this.

Of course, by the end, Gustave and the whole cast is indelible (with Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and others taking star turns), even if refracted through Zero, and through him as he ages, and what (according to older Author) older Zero then tells younger Author – of course, none of this ever happened (as we may sense with Stefan Zweig’s writings), but it feels as though it could have done, on some level - where Mendl’s is a make of cake (apparently, the principal confection is a Courtesan au Chocolat).

Is the film just Andersonian entertainment, or is it saying more to us amongst the sight-gags (such as that cheeky Schiele painting, or the rib-tickling skiing / sledding sequence) ? As with Moonrise Kingdom (2012), there are patent depths amongst the humour – the pairs of young lovers have the same frank awkwardness (e.g. Zero giving Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) the gift, in which we have another ‘Z’, with his having dedicated it ‘From Z to A’), which in no way detracts from their love, but the sense of doom that is in the earlier film (and lifts (somewhat)) only enters in earnest with the ZZ. At the same time, the trigger-happy firefight with the ZZ set off by Dmitri (Adrien Brody) reminds of easy-spirited boneheaded moments in films such as Westerns from the 1960s, or skits on them by the likes of Mel Brooks or Woody Allen (all looking back to the era of The Keystone Cops / Kops), and is part of making this grand hotel seem utterly real (with that shot of the glass ceiling, amazingly unscathed by gunfire !).

The hotel, though, and the other-worldly, old-fashioned decency and good manners of its concierge, what about them… ? When older Zero says, effectively, that Gustave had been, even then, fighting a rear-guard action for such principles, are we not reminded a little by the initials GB in that ashtray of our own Great Britain ? Billy Bragg, on the album England, Half English (especially in the song ‘Take Down The Union Jack’), certainly wants to pose questions about the ‘greatness’ of Britain (and such honours as Orders of the British Empire), but is it possible that Anderson is being as political with this film – that his ‘bloody immigrant’, as Gustave first really sees Zero, is our refugee, our asylum-seeker, condemned for years by an element of the British press, and mocked along with human rights ?

Well, Anderson’s non-specific / generic ‘Author’ is British, and his younger self, at the end (and as if ashamed of himself, and how he came by the basis for writing a book called The Grand Budapest Hotel, which we see at the beginning with the Author's young fan), relates how he did not ever see Zero again (after nerving himself to ask, through curiosity, what he thinks an impolite question, just before M. Moustafa and he part that night), and how he continued ‘his cure’ for a long time elsewhere in the world – whereupon the layers of narration promptly unwind again.

Put crudely, he came to this hotel that smacks of The Eastern Bloc, and, having what he wants (and which gets a statue erected to him in due course, and admiring hotel-key-bearing fans), casually absents himself : at times, M. Moustafa feels as though he has told too much, whereas, for young Author, it is the standard British mode (more so perhaps in that era than now) of getting away from feelings that are ‘near the knuckle’ by just suddenly closing down.

Anderson would hardly be the first writer / director to get our attention on issues such as what makes a refugee by setting the film / play / novel somewhere else : we see it in Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s Jimmy’s Hall (2014), just as we did in the former’s Land and Freedom (1995) (collaborating with screenwriter Jim Allen), and we equally see it in Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, tackling in Philomena (2013) issues that are not unique to that time or that Irish setting. (It is perhaps, there, too easy to get riled and identify with the fictionalized reactions of Steve Coogan as Sixsmith, whereas the film, as The Railway Man (2013) also desires, seeks for us to identify with the response that Philomena, and Eric Lomax, find within them.)


But, of course, the fantastic Fiennes is overflowing with lusciously camp aristocratic British manners, yet breaking into hilarious coarseness when he cannot quite see the point of maintaining the illusion : Anderson’s gives him, and us, hope in The Order of The Cross Keys, which embraces everyone, and is a lifeline that feeds both the plot (with the elaborate arrangements to meet doomed Serge (Mathieu Amalric – an actor with a perpetual look of surprise)), and restores Gustave’s bonhomie, aided by puffs of his precious Air de Panache (the joke / clue is in the name) – as he said to Zero at the sewage-exit and with mortified self-disgust, I smell ! (and Zero, with a sniff, concurs).

Perhaps an appeal to the fair-mindedness that once mattered about being British. For, in this film, if Gustave had not saved Zero, Zero could not, in return, have saved him – and been around to tell the tale… In Gustave H., and despite the brilliant humour and wonderful high jinks, cannot Anderson be seen to be asking the British (amongst others) a question ? :

Gustave, in his decency and striving to put people at his ease, embodies a notion of Britishness that, if not gone already, is soon to disappear – are we happy to lose it, if we do not look beyond our stereotypes of immigrants, and our ostrich-like (it-is-not-my-business) failure to stand up for our fellow human-beings when we can (as we also see exemplified in Loach and Laverty’s portrayal of the real-life Jimmy Gralton…) ?






Epilogue

Finally, it is mentioned above that Zubrowka, which is clearly stated to be an independent republic (so there is an act of war by the invading ZZ forces), shares its name with that of a brand of Polish vodka.

Here, Anderson is certainly playing with us, just as he is by ending with a grand sequence for balalaika orchestra over the closing credits (he usually dispenses with opening ones) – which suggests, despite all the Germanic names, that maybe we are further into Eastern Europe – and likewise by having Vivaldi transposed for mandolins as a stately musical accompaniment to when we are ‘getting to know’ the GB.

To close, here are some hints at what is recollected of a few other ways in which Anderson has laid little jokes or clues (beyond such running jokes as Gustave quite casually saying Uh-huh every time that he is asked if he is who he is, until he finally and superbly loses his rag and magnificently swears in exasperation !) :

* The resort where the GB is appears to be called Nebelstadt, which crudely translates as Fogtown – we see the fog at the observatory, and earlier when the stag-statue is introduced with the first sight of the hotel's façade

* Why are we stopping by a barley-field ?, asks Gustave on the train to Lutz (also called fucking Lutz) : which begs the question how, when the ground is covered with snow, Gustave knows what sort of field it is, or calls it that :

Well, die Gerste is German for ‘barley’, so a field might be Gerstenfeld – or, as der Acker also means ‘field’ (our word 'acre', plural die Äcker), one might be reminded of Gerstäcker, a character who is part of K.’s maddening experience in Kafka’s unfinished novel Das Schloß (The Castle - a link here for those to whom it is unfamiliar, despite Michael Haneke’s excellent film), as well as the fascinating life of Friedrich Gerstäcker, one-time proprietor of a hotel in Louisiana during his first travels in the States.

* Made by Mendl’s, though Gustave has little time for Mendl himself, we see a confection that is at the root of much gleeful mischief, as cakes bribe Agatha’s - then Zero and Gustave’s - way into anything (despite an iron-heeled regime, whose forces just end up shooting at each other), and also provide the way out of confinement, too, as well as being a soft landing for Agatha and Zero (just as, in Moonrise, Suzy and Sam are faced with plummeting, but spared) :

The friar Gregor Mendel is the most famous bearer of the name, as the man who experimented with pea plants and discovered something about inheritance between different generations – the contraction to Mendl is a habit of alpine regions (amongst other places), and so the name itself appears to be a diminutive of die Mandel, meaning ‘almond’ (a significant ingredient in marzipan, of course)

* We go to a Schloß, Schloß Lutz, where Gustave pays his respects to an Anderson regular in Tilda Swinton (the embodiment of the functional and largely soulless Social Services in Moonrise, pushing papers, etc., and just doing a job) :

The jokes at the coffin (and on the train to Lutz) aside, Swinton is splendid as this 84-year-old with zest – maybe that name Lutz reminds us, deep down of the jump in figure-skating of that name, and thus prepares us for the snowy antics / acrobatics to come (as we are unlikely to see it as a short-form of Ludwig, with the connection to Ludwig of Bavaria’s fairytale Rhineland castles, of which the GB is, of course, reminiscent) ?

* Last, we have Gabelmeister's Peak, which translates as Forkmaster's, since the place-setting in German is das Messer (knife), die Gabel (fork), and der Löffel (spoon) (one of each gender)


As if all that were not enough, there is an interesting piece about the film's locations from The National Geographic...



End-notes

¹ As we know, through having seen it, crushing the cigarette to extinguish it produces the former, and with it, that sooty residue, unlike true grey ash.



² A film such as The Way Way Back (2013), through Sam Rockwell as the attractive Owen, shows a similarly encouraging father-figure to a slightly younger equivalent of Zero in Duncan (Liam James). Or The Book Thief (2013) has Hans Hubermann (Geoffrey Rush) as a new, kind father to the very much younger Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). (One could go on and on, with ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Color of Money (1986), or Pacino as Lt Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992), etc.)

³ Model and artist are named (separately), as those who stay to read credits – and therefore see and hear the balalaikas (one with a boar within a boar, another people by chimneys of industry) – will know… This state of affairs is quite as we would expect of an Anderson film, and of this world, because of what he created in and for Moonrise Kingdom (2012), but employing the just as real Noye’s Fludde (Benjamin Britten, Op. 59) (and many other Britten works), alongside (as here) a score by Alexandre Desplat : the Wikipedia® entry for the film says more about why Britten is important to Anderson...

⁴ Both in the person of Jeff Goldblum as Deputy Kovacs, with the attempts that makes to get Dmitri (Adrien Brody) to come to heel (the second of which is more costly), and when, for example, Gustave insists on interviewing not only Zero (a sly little echo of Beckettt’s Endgame with all those zeroes ?), but also Agatha - or when he tries to tell the same thuggish Dmitri that the legal nicety is that his mother’s house is not his until after probate.

⁵ This, though, without the physical brutality – and the first pair of bloody noses – of the earlier encounter with authority (until Henckels, played by Edward Norton, intervenes, which he does on Gustave’s customary personal level of grace, courtesy, and gratitude).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 3 March 2014

My lobby boy !

This is a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

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

3 March

This is a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

One of the few films that not only understands the difference between an immigrant and a refugee, but will make you laugh, about it – and much else :



Maybe one should not be surprised, but Fiennes (Gustave H.) brings such poise to this role that we happily accept all the absurdity, and embrace this ludicrous confection of an edifice (of the striking pinkness of a battenberg), with all its bygone airs and attitudes, themselves a passing metaphor for life. Set in some fictitious mountainous region with insistent balalaikas, but place-names in German, the film frolics through the confusion arising from the death of a regular guest – I sleep with all my friends, says Gustave H. disarmingly (though to his cost) at the assembly of the relatives hearing her last wishes.

The old saying goes Where there’s a will, there are relatives, and many a Bond villain had less of a henchman than the deceased’s (Tilda Swinton’s, as Madame D.) offspring do in Willem Dafoe (Jopling), who casually throws the executor attorney Deputy Kovacs’ (Jeff Goldblum’s) prized possession out of the window (he, like Llewyn Davis, even likes to travel with it). The name of her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) keeps up this tenuous Russian connection, but avoiding much imputation that his real wickedness is any more than heightened avarice, since real misdeeds are always best delegated.

The film is a romp, with, amongst other things, a deliberately over-complicated series of frames*, a series of sight-gags (for example, the old one of knocking on a huge door, and a small door opens), and crisply composed shots of alpine-type absurdities** (such as lifts and gantries that allow one access to a statue of a stag rampant). With many big names taking cameos, and a carefully crafted script, the film soars because of how Fiennes embodies Gustave H. and has comic timing that many on the stand-up circuit would die for :

F. Murray Abraham and Jude Law in their capacities* do the job, but the sheer lightness and deftness of touch of Fiennes is matchless. Of course, they are foils for him, as Tony Revolori is as young Zero (though not without his own visual expressiveness, and the running joke of telling Fiennes to stop flirting with his fiancée), but that in no way detracts from his achievement here, for the film would fall flat without the ebullience, charm and flair of Gustave H. The comparison is inexact, but imagine Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) without the bubbliness of Julie Andrews…


End-notes

* Tom Wilkinson is a revered writer (credited as Author), with a bizarre monument seen visited by a woman with a copy of his Hotel book (no author’s name on it), whose younger self (Jude Law as Young Writer) stays at the hotel and talks to and hears the story of the older Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham), whose younger self (Tony Revolori) is a lobby boy at the hotel, in training under Fiennes.

** Ralph Fiennes, in the Q&A for The Invisible Woman, described himself as ‘obsessive’ – in this world that Wes Anderson has created, the attention to detail is minute.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 24 February 2014

Dickens in Love

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

24 February

* Contains spoilers *

This is a follow-up piece to a review of The Invisible Woman (2013), and a question asked of actor / director Ralph Fiennes, partly about Dickens’ wife Catherine’s motives.

In Manchester, during the after-play party near the start of the film, Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones) is sitting next to Catherine Dickens (Joanna Scanlan), and the former says how she had not expected anything to be so lasting in her memory as Bleak House, but is finding a rival in what she is now reading [David Copperfield ?]. One must judge with what motive, but the latter retorts ‘Tis a fiction, designed to entertain, with which opinion Nelly briefly, but strenuously, states her disagreement.



When the women meet again, Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) has sent his wife to Nelly’s mother’s house, and she asks Nelly if she is fond of Dickens. She scarcely allows Nelly to answer before she intervenes to say Silly question – he is Mr Charles Dickens !. The question arises (as it did in the Q&A with Fiennes) whether what she goes on to say to Nelly is out of any sort of envy or desire to put her off, or just from the simple motive of telling the truth, how it is with Dickens and her :

Essentially, she reports her own experience, that Dickens has an extra-marital devotion to his readership / audience that makes her uncertain to say which he cares more for, them or her. In saying what she does, she suggests that it is not easy to find his affections divided, and that may merely be a statement of fact.

But why express it to Nelly ? Out of sheer feminine feeling and a desire to be helpful ? The context is as follows :


* Some time before at the Dickens' home, Charles expresses his defiance in the garden at what his sister-in-law and Catherine are urging about the rumours, and declares that he will not stop seeing Nelly* – he then goes back to playing with the children

* At some other point that summer, it is Nelly's twentieth birthday, and we are at the Ternans' house – this is when Catherine calls, with the redirected present from Charles

* When, later that day, Charles and Wilkie (Tom Hollander) whisk Nelly away to Wilkie's home, and she leaves, she confronts Charles on the steps of her family home (just before a policeman intervenes), criticizing him for sending the mother of his children to her – he says that he wanted Catherine to see what he sees in Nelly, and says that Catherine has no understanding

* There is the ambiguous scene of proximity indoors, then the next thing is the boarding-up to partition the Dickens house, a very quick scene

* After the awkward meeting between Charles and Nelly and Charley, Charley reads the letter in The Times about the separation to Catherine


It indicates what Catherine thinks of Charles, he of her, in these clues : as early as sending Catherine around with the gift that he had intended to have delivered to Nelly, he wanted Catherine to see that it was over between her and him, and why (he tells Nelly so that day). Catherine is not stupid. She knows herself to have been humiliated by being told to call on Nelly, but she can use the call to her advantage :

Doubtless, there is truth in what she says about Charles being torn away from her by his public, and that one will never know which he cares for more, but, if one watches the scene closely, she has a subtle way of laying it on thick, and does hope to discourage Nelly, if she cannot discourage Charles, but with the subtext I've seen it all before, and let me tell you, as a friend, how it is....


What Catherine does not reckon on is that ambiguous scene of near-kisses, and that Nelly then seeks out advice from her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and from Wilkie, before making an entry, dressed and framed as a Pre-Raphaelite subject, in Charles' rooms. There, she gets close to him, in an energetic meeting of minds over the galley-proofs, through the closing chapters to Great Expectations – until then, taken to see Wilkie living unmarried with a woman, she thinks that Charles sees her as his whore.


Catherine had her own agenda, but was prudent enough to act the part of the woman on the way out looking after the new one.

At the end of the film, hurt and anxious Nelly uses the words shadow / parting / haunting to describe being separated from Charles in the life that she lives now, where she cannot admit how she knew him. As her husband says :

The memories of a child, Nelly


Or, then again, 180 years since Charles Dickens sneezed publicly in Cardiff - to great acclaim...


End-notes :

* Catherine says 'More gossip in The London Diary', as Dickens sits down with the newspaper. After comments around the table about not having kept it a secret, and denying it, she says 'You must stop this', to which Dickens replies, 'What if I do not wish to ?'. She retorts, 'Do not be foolish - you cannot keep her a secret', and a challenge to which - then and later - he rises.





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 7 February 2014

Lit by Saul Leiter

This report is from a special preview screening of The Invisible Woman (2013)

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

6 February

* Contains spoilers *

This report is from a special preview screening of The Invisible Woman (2013) at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) on 1 February, followed by a Q&A with director and lead actor, Ralph Fiennes



The time of the film is clearly the nineteenth century, but labels are largely given to places, not to dates. Charles Dickens died in June 1870, and an important scene has him showing Nelly (Felicity Jones) the galley-proofs of what would have been chapter 59 of Great Expectations, which was being published in instalments between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861.

The title-character really has to be Nelly, but, when Catherine Dickens (Joanna Scanlan) visits her with a gift that the jeweller wrongly had delivered to Catherine, she says what the following question, asked of Fiennes (during the Q&A in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse), summarizes :

Mrs Dickens, probably out of envy, warns that her husband is drawn to his audience as well as to her. Is the challenge that Nelly faces to know Dickens not as a writer, but as a man*?

Catherine does not appear to have wanted herself the acclaim that Charles receives, from other things, at public readings, so she presumably allowed herself to be relatively in his shadow : after such a reading, Nelly’s mother, Frances Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas), expresses regret that Catherine could not have been there (and Charles gives some reason why she is not there), which means that she is unlike a royal consort, and is free not to do what he chooses to do.

(If she is envious (see more here), maybe it is of Nelly that she can see Charles as a writer, for a comment early in the film (when The Ternans, mother and daughters, have travelled to Manchester to the production of Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep (published in 1856), which Dickens is mounting with Collins) suggests that she does not personally view the novels as more than entertainment (‘Tis a fiction, designed to entertain), at which Nelly, expressing her surprise, says what she sees in them. So, in Manchester, Catherine was with Wilkie and Charles, but she later appears to withdraw from that role.)

In Collins, we have the example of a man co-habiting since 1858 (with Caroline Graves (Michelle Fairley) and her daughter Harriet (known as ‘The Butler’)), but perhaps at the expense of the greater reception of his writing** ? If so, he compromised greater success and not living with Graves (they were only apart for two years, when she married another man), and with spending part of his time with her and with Martha Rudd, a woman whom he met as a nineteen-year-old when researching Armadale. The family arrangements that we know so well from The Pre-Raphaelite Brethren (founded in 1848, and initially secretively operating under the initials PRB) and from Dickens in this film (based on Claire Tomalin’s book of the same name) were actually closer with those of Collins than we might have imagined.



It is for those such as Tomalin to explain and speculate why Dickens felt himself different from his friend Collins, in not being able to copy an arrangement that was less complicated than his own would have been. It was not until a century later that our present divorce laws were enacted, but it appears that an informal separation, such as Dickens is quoted as announcing to his family in The Times, might have been an acceptable position, whereas an affair with Nelly being known of during it clearly would not. Only such reading can shed light on this question…

Back at reviewing the film, Abi Morgan had written a script that sounded as though it might have been spoken 150 years ago, but without drawing attention to its age :



The emphasis is on the spoken words resembling speech. Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) reports that the dialogue in Slave sounds as it does, because it is taken directly from Solomon Northup’s book, which can easily be believed : it satisfies her that it should be, but, to some, that might seem a cop-out… (After all, Northup wrote his memoir, with the help of a writer, during the course of three months, and he is in, in this way, writing dialogue that could have occurred ten years earlier, so it can scarcely be verbatim.)

This is not one of Andrew Davies’ celebrated adaptations of Dickens or of other classic novelists, but giving a plausible voice to Dickens the man. It is a voice that is strengthened by the judicious use of very effective music by Ilan Eshkeri (who scored Fiennes debut as director, Coriolanus (2011)) – more detail will have to wait until another time, when (furniture-shifting for) the Q&A (and the consequent lack of detail about musicians on IMDb) does not obtrude reading the credits…

None of that would be worth a candle without Fiennes, who brought to the figure, familiar through Simon Callow (and even Doctor Who), a conviction and a humanity – it was not for nothing that Dickens was amongst those who campaigned for sanitary conditions for all, and we see him here at a benefit for The Hospital for Sick Children, and also hear him privately speak poignantly of his father’s and his family’s plight in poverty***.

A character very different either from Fiennes’ last Dickensian film role, as Magwitch, or his self-directed part as Caius Martius Coriolanus (let alone in Potter), and there we find his compelling versatility. To Dickens, a man shown to be not without tetchiness or anger, Fiennes seemed to bring some of the qualities that his character Stephen Tulloch had in his sister Martha Fiennes’ writer / director feature Chromophobia (2005) : despite that film’s fate in history, nothing is wasted.



Opening with a gorgeous expanse of the coast at what we are told is Margate, and, with Nelly’s introduction, anxious, quick cutting, and one wants to know what drives her there, what her anguish is. We know of a connection with Dickens, but has she just come from him**** ? Nelly is a true Wilkie-Collins-type heroine, in her black against the washed-out sand (in more senses than one), and this could be The Shifting Sands, and some source of mystery.

Both within the dynamic of a scene, and from one to the next, the film is paced beautifully : once we have seen a later Felicity Jones in a Dickens-laden situation where she is unable to say what she knows, it unfolds with her in an almost Becketttean way, seeming to revolve it all, and without a friend to turn to*****. Nelly has been out too long, yet she knows what she must do, and straightaway does it, throwing herself into the rehearsal of Collins and Dickens’ No Thoroughfare.

Perhaps they are her memories, or maybe it is purely by the medium of cinema, but the play connects with the event of arriving in Manchester on a foul day, and first meeting our two writers in another collaboration. Nothing is over-explained, with ambiguity to keep us involved (Is the young man called Charley with the umbrella somehow the young Dickens … ?).

It is a fairly dark rehearsal space, and the polarity between so many interiors to come and the luminescence of views such as that beach at Margate is one of the themes of the film : the interiors are shot, by Rob Hardy, in a way that Fiennes told us came out of finding that Hardy and he had a common interest in the photography of Saul Leiter, and with Hardy’s eye for composition, but using Leiter’s effects and aesthetic. The effect, and the result of shooting on film, is gorgeous and inviting.

We guess at what has happened between Nelly and Charles, but it is only when Wilkie and he take her to the former’s home that it becomes clear that the state of affairs is more fragile, this coming hard on the heels of Catherine’s visit that day. In fact, it is apparent that Charles does not seem to know what he seeks, although he enjoys Nelly’s company, his writing, and appearing in public, but that more has been claimed in the press.

In all of this, Kristin Scott Thomas, as Nelly’s mother Frances, has been more apt than any to see what is happening early on, and to raise her concerns about Nelly with Charles – hers is a modest part, but, along with that of Wilkie (Tom Hollander), central to what unfolds, and both convincingly portray a circle of those close to Nelly, which later she seems to lack. A reflective and poignant film, which will repay watching again.


End-notes

* Fiennes, although questioning Catherine's envy, did indicate that Jones had followed such a path in preparing her role with him. The way in which what Catherine says to Nelly about Charles' public is structured does, however, suggest not only that she is sharing her experience of Charles to benefit Nelly, but also that she may hope to put her off by it.

** Having said that, Collins wrote four novels in ten years, which allowed him to give others financial support : The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone.

*** Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dogson (1832 – 1898), i.e. Lewis Carroll courted social danger in this same century not only by going to the theatre, whether to see, say, the celebrated Ellen Terry perform, or his child-actor friends, but also by his association with Terry, such as seeing her backstage, or keeping up a correspondence. (In Carroll’s case, that might partly have been because the theatre was not thought a fit place at which a member of the clergy should be seen.)

As the opening scene of the film wisely avoids making clear (because having due regard to class and social distinctions would have complicated the story : Rev. Benham’s (John Kavanagh’s) admiration for Dickens’ works and seeming interest in theatrical matters), the theatre was frowned upon often enough, and there would have been an attitude towards Mrs Ternan and her daughters for the way that they supported themselves, and the film does not disguise their lack of means at home, and so why they act.

**** We are told that it is 1883, but the year might not register (not least because of the stunning view of the shore), unless one knows Dickens’ era well.

***** We do not know what has befallen her mother and sisters, but she is the youngest.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 21 January 2013

Fuckin' Bruges

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 January

* Contains spoilers *

I don’t know whether In Bruges (2008) made the city even more attractive to tourists, but it was so well shot by Eigil Bryld – even the set-pieces from the typical guide-book – that it should have done.

For this was certainly not a film that did as that year’s Woody Allen’s Barcelona-titled work (as it had funding to be filmed in that city¹) and just treated us to a picture-show (however nicely), but one that embedded Bruges in the development of the film right from the opening to the closing shots (as Allen’s Paris- and Rome-centred films then did three and four years later, although it may be fanciful, just by virtue of the comparison, to suggest that Allen learnt from what Martin McDonagh’s picture does).

I did not see the film when it was released, but was aware of it at the time of Brendan Gleeson’s excellent performance in The Guard (2011), and then at the recent run of Seven Psychopaths (2012), in the light of finding which dire a friend lent me his DVD, so I know why people expected better from McDonagh writing / directing again.

In truth, though, what seemed like an under-par performance from common link Colin Farrell (as Ray) threatened to have me stop watching (either because it was too close to the use to which he was put in Psychopaths, or, perhaps, because I had thought more of him in another Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream (2007)), which makes it less implausible that Allen had seen this other Farrell film. I am glad that I did not quit, because, around the time that Ken (Gleeson) goes to see Yuri to get a gun, the film picked up for me.

Until then, possibly because I like the place, I had been rather irritated by Ray’s opening condemnation of Bruges as a shit-hole, his refusal to join in with Ken’s spirit of making the best of being sent there, including a smart-arsed comparison with Dublin, and even by his baiting some overweight Americans into chasing him : most of those things came back to haunt, as does the accidental killing that has led Ken to bring Ray to Bruges, and make the ending powerfully effective. Yes, the final theme does owe something to the t.v. series Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), and maybe even to the feeling of The Truman Show (1998), but I did not see it coming.

Early on, there had been palpable references to the exchanges between Gogo and Didi from Beckettt’s Waiting for Godot, to the situation in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter** (and, for good measure, to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as Ken is flustered and cannot remember which of the two aliases used is his), and I wrongly wondered how original the writing was going to be, before realizing that they were probably passing mentions (almost inevitable in a work with buddies).

Equally fleeting appeared the echoes of Dante in the theological chat, both in front of the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Last Judgement², of which we are shown details from the centre panel, at the art gallery, and on the bench afterwards. (Giving a message to Death, anatomy lessons involving human dissection, and gruesome, if miraculous, saints’ lives had all preceded the Bosch scenes, and pricked Ray’s sensibility (and conscience ?).)

Stepping back a bit, the film opens with these words, narrated over night-time shots by an unseen Ray :

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: Get the fuck out of London, you’s dumb fucks – get to Bruges ! [quotation truncated]


However, we may not have fully caught these words, and, because of hearing the voice saying that he did not know where Bruges was (and so momentarily feeling superior ?), may not later spot a mismatch. This occurs when a boy with adults, whom Ray sees walking across a square, gives rise to a flashback, at the end of which Ray is dragged (seemingly by Ken) from the scene where a priest and a boy lie dead (re-enter Pinter ?).

At the end, as Ray is being put on a stretcher, and, from Ray’s point of view, we see an oxygen-mask being lowered (shades of John Simm as Sam Tyler, and Beckettt’s doubt-filled trilogy ?), we hear him narrate again, as the stretcher slides inside an ambulance :

[…] And I thought, if I survive all this, I’ll go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison, death – it didn’t matter. Cos, at least in prison, and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me, and I realized. Fuck, man - maybe that’s what Hell is : the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges ! And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die…


We have followed Ken and Ray thus far, latterly with their boss Harry Waters (another stunning role for Ralph Fiennes, that champion scene-stealer), as the triangle has been brought together by principle, betrayal, disobedience and sacrifice, centring in Bruges (words that unforcedly ring through the screenplay). Harry, who had professed a boyhood wonder for the place when he speaks to Ken, stalks through it, so fixed on his quarry that he scarcely seems to see it and its Christmas magic, which we, too, then feel less with the tense - turning to pounding and grinding - music of the chase, reminiscent of that of The Matrix (1999).

Both Ken and Ray still have life in them when, by rights (though I do not have the knowledge of the Flemish anatomists shown earlier) one might have thought that they should be dead. It is Ken’s bid to save Ray (just as it was when Ken, about to kill, stopped Ray shooting himself and put him on a train) that elevates matters above one killer (Ken himself) and whether he kills or is killed by another killer (Harry), although we are not really drawn to take sides (but cannot take the extreme behaviour of the ticket-seller of the belfry as reason for what Harry does in reprisal – one for McDonagh’s later tally of psychopaths !). (Stoppardian logic with the scene atop the belfry.)

Unknown to Ray, Harry has apparently wanted him to enjoy Bruges before being executed, but, from first to last, excepting that Chloe lives there (and, even so, he has to insult the city on their date), he never gives it a chance, whereas Ken has been soaking in the sights and experiences. Are there subterranean glimpses, here, of a meaning beyond the superficial, that Ken may be a Clarence to Ray’s George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) – after all, there is Ray’s attempt on his own life, from which Ken, appointed to kill him, saved him (more Stoppardian logic), and, for example, when Ken encourages Ray to look at something during their canal-boat trip, he is hunched in his coat and does not even raise his head ?

Is Ken actually real, or no more so to anyone else than, say, Charles is to John Nash (A Beautiful Mind (2001), or Harvey to Elwood (Harvey (1950), although Harvey is, in fact, visible to others), because, of course, Ray is narrating the story and we only see what he envisages ? Enough in this film, I think, to give us pause whether Ray, like Sam Tyler, may be talking to us and / or himself from a coma, because of the horrific injuries from Harry’s dum-dum bullets (we have seen what one did to the head of Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), dressed as a schoolboy). If Ken is Ray's guide, is he a sort of Virgil to Ray's Dante ?

At the end of the film, the location of the film that is being made⁴ (on which Ray met Chloe) is peopled by some Bosch-like creatures, one of whom knocks Ray to the ground with his beak, and, somehow, Marie from the hotel is there, as well as Chloe (so even a bit of a feel of The Game (1997) or maybe 8½ (1963)).

When, after Chloe and Ray kissed (during which we saw Harry, intend on business with Ken, walk straight past, and Chloe said, of herself, ‘The most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in all of your stupid life’ as a reason for what Ray has to stay for), they took a romantic drink together. When Jimmy came over, he said about his character and that night’s shoot that ‘the psycho-dork turns out to be some loveable schoolboy and it’s all some Boschian nightmare’.

Stephen, in Joyce’s Ulysses, says the much-quoted words History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In this film (with Ray’s past of an accidental shot that killed a praying boy, whose prayers, clutched in his hand, Ray reads), Ray says of history, as a retort to Ken’s interest in it – just before, at the hotel, Ken was reading The Death of Capone – I used to hate history, didn’t you ? It’s all just a load of stuff that’s already happened !, and immediately rushes off, because there are ‘midgets being filmed’.

At that moment, Ray isn’t trying to awake from history, but avoid it, by chatting up (the willing) Chloe, and hearing about the dream-sequence that is being filmed, which, she tells him, is neither a pastiche of, nor an homage to, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), but an overhead : the belfry and all the buildings do not interest him, but Chloe and Jimmy and the film do, and he is drawn to them.

He almost so wants to be part of the film-world that it is no surprise that he ends up on location again in the finale. Chloe had talked about site security, and Ray says that he evaded it, but there is certainly no evidence of any now. Does Ray have a little feel about him of Bill Harford from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (taken from a short story by Schnitzler) ?

However we interpret this film, there are a couple of constants – Ray’s lively, beetling brows (into which Farrell channels much of his acting), and his decorative shirt, which would seem to be the only one that he has (despite the fact that Ken and he are both shouldering bags when they arrive in the city). There are some shots where one can get a closer view of this shirt, and realize that what decorates it, which I took for music for a long time (trying to confirm which detracted from the action and drew attention to what seemed Farrell’s apparent one-dimensionality), is something else.

It cannot really be made out, but could resemble wild-card characters from an ASCII set together with a paper-trace-type pattern (when programs and data were fed in on paper-tape), or, put another way, the ones accessed from a font such as Symbol. Is that it ? Is Ray’s shirt a symbol – is it, as with the letters and numbers that, if one can see them, make up the world of The Matrix, an indication that he is – whether because he is really in a coma or in Hell (or Purgatory) – a piece of source-code amongst all this imagined reality, where Marie, Eirik, and Chloe are all somehow there to see his wounded body carried away ?


Post-script

Whatever Ray may say about Bruges, acting as a dismissive gobshite, when Ken alludes to what has brought him there, he is figuratively on his knees, as he is in front of the vivid depictions in The Groeninge Museum. Although, as dinner with Chloe shows, he is capable of violence in defence of that image, it does not seem to be his inner nature, which is to be fascinated by Jimmy (because he is 'a midget' - a childish state of wonder), to talk blarney to Chloe, to be reduced to the fear and trembling of a schoolboy facing his doom.

As Ray lies wounded, probably likely to die, and is thinking, these parts of him combine in deriving an eschatology where being in Hell equates to being in Bruges : the part of him that hopes, though founded on this extreme aversion, does not want to die and end up there eternally, but, with his wounds, living will necessarily be at the cost of being there for quite a while. If, that is, the whole foregoing has not been confused by his near-death state and he has confused and deluded himself...


There is a little more information and comment here...



End-notes

¹ For a screenplay apparently originally set in LA.

² The play is a big clue as to what instructions can eventually be expected. (The likeness to Father Ted, where Ken is an amalgam of Ted and Dougal, and Ray a more benign Jack, is less helpful.)

³ The work is a triptych, with the other two panels painted on the inside of doors that are hinged to meet in the middle, which, I gather, was a common method at the time for keeping the main painting concealed and protected when not required for devotional purposes.

Unusually for films, the work is where it is said to be, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, although the opening sequence had, which is why I have checked, made me wonder whether all the gargoyles, statues, moons and the like had been shot on location (as well as whether the topography is fairly represented in the depiction of the scenes).


⁴ Psychopaths tries to repeat this, and other elements of Bruges (e.g. the Harry Waters character is mirrored by Charlie Brooker), with a film within a film, but it just doesn’t work.


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Saturday, 8 December 2012

What the dickens !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 December

* Contains spoilers *



This remains my view of Great Expectations (2012), and I thought that Jason Flemyng was equally strong as Joe Gargery, but without the effect of stealing the scene. As for Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, I was more impressed by him than I would have expected, whereas I had heard criticism that Helena Bonham Carter was too young as Miss Havisham, which - without having consulted the text - I am inclined to think right.

With the exception of little moments such as Pip’s sister, which Sally Hawkins was required to play as a grotesque, as a caricature amongst others at her Christmas meal (principally, Mr Pumblechook (David Walliams)), much was really rather naturalistic (though that is more true of this novel than others), which then set off well touches such as Wemmick and his castle, the Finch dining-club (foppish to the extent of resembling an amalgam of Mods and Teddy Boys), and Fiennes’ explosion onto the screen at the outset, with his Hannibal Lecterish tale.


As for the overall impact of the film, I Tweeted this


The book remains the book, and this is an approach at telling its story, where what has been changed is essentially in the realm of detail and emphasis : it gives me the feeling that I should like to make room to reacquaint myself with what Dickens wrote, partly because much of the dialogue had been invented, but not in a way that an Andrew Davies does it with his adaptations.

However Dickens did describe the marshes, the combination of wide horizons and skilled cinematography gave a beautiful sense of space and of tranquility, only interrupted by the man-hunt (and by Joe’s wife calling out two miles away !). That said, the contrast with London, which seemed unnecessarily full of mud and offal (as if better arrangements would not – they may not have been in the book – have been made for Pip’s reception and conveyance to his lodgings), seemed a little contrived, as if the local market town would have been any different, except in scale. (We only see the inside of Pumblechook’s premises, not how Pip got there, nor, for that matter, have we much notion of where Miss H. and Estella are, in relation to anywhere else, at Satis House.)

As to the ending, well, it is suitably uncertain to pass, but that, and Estella’s story, is what I could most easily check. Whatever feels changed does not leave me unhappy, but there is that feeling, with ‘a classic’, that some of what one could happily have imagined were better not presented for examination and consideration, and that the more quiet ebb and flow of the story became more tidal. That said, it would still be with the invention of dialogue that I felt most out of sorts.


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