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


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

Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

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

3 October

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

* May contain spoilers *

Piper (unclear why she is called that, but played, somewhat precociously, by Harley Bird) says the title words to this posting to Daisy* (Saiorse Ronan), who, rather clumsily / unconvincingly tries to reassure her that there is not a connection between her mother not being there and eating chocolate : as we may well know, in cases of a separation, children can look for an explanation and end up blaming themselves, finding a causal connection and a regret, e.g. If I hadn’t eaten chocolate, mum wouldn’t have gone. (Daisy probably blames herself for her own mother’s departure : her mother, we are told, loved this location, and we see a photo of her by a sundial, later seen atop a hill.)

Pure observational / empirical psychology. Later, Daisy talks about chocolate, too, saying what she thought she was doing by not eating it, but, much more than that, her depiction as a person with intrusive commands in her head, and who describes herself more than once as a curse, suggest that she may be meant to have (touches of) obsessive-compulsive disorder (better known as OCD). It is not merely that she is fastidious (calling the contents of the fridge ‘gross’, and claiming that cheese is ‘a lump of solidified cows’ mucus’), but that she believes that something dreadful will happen, if she does not do certain things, and we hear what is in her head, compelling her.

Certainly, Edmond (Eddie, played by George MacKay) knows that Daisy has an inner conflict, and seeks to encourage her that she does not have to do what she is telling herself, after he has toppled her, fully clothed, into the plashing current of the family watering-hole, and thereby makes a further connection with her**.

Shortly before, he has whispered the herd of cows away that puts Daisy off proceeding, and, when she clumsily climbs a gate with barbed wire on, heals her hand, magic elements no doubt from the novel, and which enliven a fairly inert story, which would otherwise be of type ‘upheaval plus making a dangerous journey to be with loved ones’***, e.g. The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003), etc.

Anyway, back at the OCD, we hear Daisy talking about the change in her way of thinking that she has found herself making during the course of the film, and we have long since seen her doing things that would have made the earlier Daisy squirm or scream. I doubt that this ‘progress’ is anything other than symbolic, although, with psychological treatment, people can learn to do things that would otherwise overwhelm them with disgust, but I do not know what it is meant to mean on a figurative level, as some may be confused by what she does and hears anyway

As, considered differently, a story about insurrection or war, there are brutal moments, such as the enforced ‘evacuation’ (though less harrowing, because of the sheer violence, than an equivalent scene in Sarah’s Key (2010), and later parts of the film leave one wondering, from the available evidence, what need there could have been for splitting up the family) and when Piper is under threat from two men, as well as sudden detonations and overflights of aircraft.

Such things apart, there is a fairly static presentation of military conflict by means of low-frequency notes in the score and shots of burnt-out cars or the debris of an airliner (although there is the failure to appreciate that a box of chocolates might not be so pristine that it even has a tag on it (a tag to play on Piper’s mind ?)). The strife, then, seems too staged, almost as if it might only be happening in Daisy’s mind…

That may be the answer to it. When we knew that Daisy was with the family for a summer, it all seemed a bit My Summer of Love (2004), and the representatives of (full) adulthood being largely absent in a rather Narnia way, until the trees shook (in Tarkovsky vein, or that of Looper (2012) maybe) and Something Happened (again, a bit Narnia). Fairport Convention performing Tam Lin, about a magical abduction, has already paved the way ?

If it is all symbolic, then the ending can be reinterpreted as seen from knowing the beginning, as the ending voice-over invites us to do. Probably a comparison with Beckettt’s novel Molloy is pretentious, but his fastidious character Moran makes a punishing journey (in more sense than one ?) and ends up transformed. Moran opened his part of the book with ‘It is midnight. It is raining’, and closes it with ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’. (Here, maybe that means that the end condition does not differ much from the starting condition, and maybe Eddie is no more than another aspect of Daisy's own personality, as there are certainly touches of A Beautiful Mind (2001), suggesting as much.)

With this film, it is all (for good reason) reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, too, with another dramatic transformation. That said, it is the words spoken over by Ronan that make one think that anything is significant, since the ‘journey home’ with Piper seems hare brained, succeeds against all the odds, and sees Daisy using excessive force and threats to protect her – unlike in Lore (2012), there is no great sense of something that needs to be done except in terms of telepathy and / or dream, or of Daisy being / becoming a different person because of what happens.

Coupled with the fact that the film, even at only 101 minutes, seems to drag, all of this makes me think that it will not do very well, as comments that I heard were that it was like Twilight, and at least they had had a free ticket…


End-notes

* Daisy is really Elizabeth, but has chosen this name for herself (although using both to introduce herself to her aunt) : not surprisingly, such renaming is not often unassociated with some turmoil about identity.

** Previously, she had declared, rather abruptly, that she did not fish, did not swim, but then decides to go along for the ride.

*** Of which, I take The Road to be another such.


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