More Haneke than Buñuel ?

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5 December

Jeune et Jolie (2013) was screened at The Little Theatre as part of Bath Film Festival 2013


How many reviews of Jeune et Jolie (2013) am I going to have to read where its uninspired writer references the completely irrelevant Belle de Jour (1967), just because - whatever the fit - it is the only film that, in each case, he or she can think of where a woman works as a prostitute ?

* Tim Robey* in The Telegraph

* Ian Freer in Empire

* James Mottram in Total Film

* Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times

* Andrew Nickolds at TAKE ONE

And so on...


Have they never seen Natalie (2003) or even Sleeping Beauty (2011), which have far more in common for how the topos is treated ? What, in fact, does a married woman with sadomasochistic fantasies have to do with a seventeen-year-old, who has just uncomfortably lost her virginity ?

Sooner that, though, than being smugly dismissive (Mark Kermode in The Observer) or claiming that Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) is indisputably better (Brian Viner, Mail Online : Viner says that Jeune et Jolie 'is in no way a match for' the other film, but they are very different films, no more capable of being compared than Superman and Bambi just because both (of J&J and Blue) feature sex.


Reviewers tediously also want a motivation for what Isabelle does. As i** carps :

Ozon's motives in making this film are as inscrutable as those of his teenage heroine Isabelle (Marine Vacth) [...] who, for reasons Ozon doesn't even begin to make clear, decided to embark on a part-time career as a teenage prostitute

They see (as the quotation shows) the fact that no motivation is stated is a flaw, which it might be in a world of perfect rationality, but that is not our world. So, Nigel Floyd (for Film4) reports :

“I didn't really try and understand psychologically who [Isabelle] was," Vacth has said. "I wasn't interested in knowing exactly. And anyway I couldn't, because François didn't tell me anything about her psychology.” The second half of this statement is more revealing than the first. Given that their creative collaboration was so one-sided, it's not surprising that the film suffers from an atmosphere of uncontrolled, unrevealing salaciousness.


Has Floyd even seen the film, if he thinks it salacious, one might wonder.

All this business about motivation is ultimately a dead end, a red herring, and would have one interrogate Amour (2012), when Michael Haneke is on record here, and in relation to other films, that it is up to us how we view them, and there is no one way.

What more do we want, and why, than what the films tells us : that Isabelle's friend Claire and she were approached in the street (Claire previously alludes to this encounter in talking to Isabelle), and the man said his number. Do we need spelt out what impulse led Isabelle to follow up a man interested in her ? Obviously, most girls of her age would do nothing with it, but why should she not register the number and act on it ?


In fact, an answer to why she did is utterly boring, when the fact is that she did, and we see her approaching room 6598 where not her first client awaits her, but Georges, with nothing of what preceded. There is something seriously wrong with the idea of cinema-going if that does not suffice, and critics are unhappy not to be told more.


End-notes

* At least Robey goes on to make this (necessary) observation : 'The film makes more sense if you see it as a companion piece to Ozon’s last one, In the House, which had a 16-year-old male schemer insinuating himself into a series of power plays'.

** In the edition on 29 November 2013.


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

That's a classy address !

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

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15 September 2013

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

What the connotations were, in 1950, of an address in Sunset Boulevard, I do not know, but I am sure that Billy Wilder knew what his audience would think, and what specifically it signified to have one in the early ten thousands...

Both as Norma Desmond and in real life (Gloria Swanson was then the age of the former actress whom she plays), the end of what is often called The Silent Era partly caused a wane in her popularity in the 1930s. Here, though, Swanson – and Wilder with her – is capitalizing on her name, and I suspect that the photographs with which she decorates her still lavish home are from that home.

With Wilder’s amusing script, we have all the elements for us to be more knowing than William Holden, as Joe Gillis, and for the spooky Max, played delightfully by Erich von Stroheim, to put the wind up him – whether or not one believes that the corpse of Gillis is literally telling the story, or that we somehow hear what he has to say from his perspective, including narrating Desmond’s descent under the direction of Max, is neither here no there.

The strength of what we see unfold is how it is rooted in the fabric and how it brings the characters to life – as Gillis is beckoned into the palazzo, having symbolically lodged, without asking, his pride-and-joy white motor in one of its garages, his mind is already thinking of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. By contrast, the house comes alive, out of a slumber as if he is a Prince Charming to her Sleeping Beauty, and yet the lavishness of what is bestowed on him is not unlike what Pip thinks that he seeks after.

Here, the benefactress needs no guessing at, only how she could have preserved her wealth, and Gillis is no more grateful or moderate with what he is bought by her than Pip is with the attempts to make him a gentleman – in neither case does it prove what is really desired.

Whether we believe that the room over the garage becoming inoccupable is just convenient, or the house having its way with Gillis, it comes back to life with him there, and provides the means for what happens to unfold, even including Miss Desmond’s own vehicle, which Max seemingly effortlessly gets back on the road – the pool would not be there without Gillis, and Miss Desmond would not have a life outside the house without him.
In this house without locks, the doors come to resemble pairs of eyes (as Beckettt was later to play with in Film (1965), and even to ask Buster Keaton to play another serious role), and yet there are secrets, from turning, from Miss Desmond, by turning off the lights of the car when Gillis goes out in it.

What Pip turns out to want is Estella, and Gillis wants is Betty Schaefer and to work with her on a script. In Gillis’ case, he is not big enough to accept her gracious willingness to forget all that he has told her (although maybe he believes that she would not be able to do so, and that she is better off without him), but still thinks that he can give the relatively ageing star ‘the go-by’, after all that he has thrown in her face as fantasy.

The cameras and the lights show who is mistaken in thinking that she is still a star, as Gillis is forced to admit…


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

Another The Hunter

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9 July

* Contains spoilers *

This is one with Willem Dafoe, not Rafi Pitts (The Hunter (2010)), though there may be similarities.

We are shown, early on, that Dafoe's character, Martin David, is supposed to have traits of what is understood in film circles (e.g. As Good as it Gets (1997)) to be OCD. (I know someone about whom another thought that the acronym stood for her Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.) Thankfully, by now, Channel 4 - in its Channel 4 Goes Mad season - might have cleared that up.

Therefore we should not be surprised that, when he flies to Hobart and arrives at his base for his mission (the chaotic home of Lucy (Frances O'Connor) and her two children, near the settlement of Cascade), he is horrified by the state of the bath - and, suitably armed from the stores, blitzes it with feeling.

Moment of truth: As if Martin would choose to work where, all over the world, he is roughing it in the wild and not have come across similar squalor in the bases with which he is provided, but perhaps not have had any readily available means of clearing it up. (The novel from which this is taken might have explained, but it was written by Julia Leigh, the same Leigh who brought us what, for me, was a sterile experience in Sleeping Beauty (2011)...)

What is almost better is that the way in which the film is directed, much of the time, fails to spell things out (the link with The Hunter (2010)) , but then it does feel it necessary to leave hefty clues in mental-health territory (and this is a film all about Territory, a redeeming feature):

For example, an unmissable packet of Xanax on Lucy's bedside table, or her later* telling Martin about her missing husband's busy mental-life, and that she believed that her husband believed in what he was frightened of. That in addition to what we have been shown about a neurotically fastidious Martin, and the unspeaking Jamie** (Finn Woodlock), who, for some reason, was silent in the language of words, but not really (more later, when he does talk).

That said, Lucy's daughter, Katie (Sass, at just one point, but credited under that name by IMDb, and played energetically by Morgana Davies) and Jamie / Bike have informed Martin that there is an outside dunny, so God knows how he ever does deal with that! For he is shown, when first entering the bar (after the shock of the house and then seeking a room there instead), going there to use the toilet, but being required to pay for the first of two non-thirst-quenching drinks, which is so because he is greeted by the logger rednecks, champing to bulldoze down the forest.

Whatever Martin does to satisfy his bodily needs, during and between his twelve-day forays (in the latter times, he returns to Julia’s house (bungalow?). Katie and Jamie initially encounter Martin when he has just opened the door of Julia’s room, and found her prone and asleep: at this moment, because of the time of day, it is clear enough that this is going to turn out to be the sleep of escape, and that Julia will be experiencing some mental-health issue.

They then regularly walk into his room without knocking, call his choral or operatic choices of music shouting, and nose around and ask questions. Love at first sight, in another moment of truth, as Martin comes to value Julia's family and family life. The fastidiousness seems somehow gone (submerged?), and we are meant to view this hardened loner as softened up - a Damascus moment, which informs the rest of the trajectory, but without any obvious road to it, or, otherwise put, any impelling reason to think that any of this can really be new, unlessgenuinely the scales have dropped.


This film, to be palatable, does rely heavily on the very well-done cinematography of beautiful landscapes, which distract us from the fact that we are otherwise just in Tasmanian forest and wilderness with Dafoe, and the little that he really gets up to is honestly not all that interesting (possibly because, unlike Bear Grylls, pretending to be alone, and telling us what 'you would' do, if you chose to be in the ridiculous scrapes with which he is involved, he has no need to tell anyone why he sets this or that trap, etc.).

Early on, he shoots a kangaroo, but doing so turns out not to be for food, however, as he throws the carcass away, and we then see what I took to be two of the Tasmanian Devils - which he is supposedly there, as his cover story, to study - eating it. Maybe he wanted them to eat that meat rather than his. (Later, we see him bait traps with parts of the organs from when he gutted the creature.) Somehow, though, the disparate acts do not match one's notion of a man surviving in the wild by his own wits - for all the haunted looks and stalking around, it was as if some alienation effect deliberately brought me back to the fact that this was Willem, not Martin.

As to Dafoe eating, we have a moment or two of him consuming something unidentifiable from a billy-can, but only forty minutes in. We know, actually, very little about his eating other than in one meal cooked by Julia, and one seemingly cooked by him, and it is not possible to say what he eats of what is on his plate. It is also not that he does not drink, as he twice orders non-beneficial beer (and it is impossible to say why he braves the loggers again to order the second one, except to set up a confrontation), but he refuses the Shiraz that Julia offers, and Katie says that Martin drinks tea.

All in all, for all that his principal, Redleaf (too much like red bush?), is made out to seem shadowy, what Martin does all the time seems patently mercenary, and Redleaf seems no more like a player behind the scenes than he a hunter than what he is searching for real. Again, all at a remove - maybe a clever remove, because, with Leigh's direction (and screenplay), I was bored to tears, but that is belied by sentimentality (not leastleading to and at the end):

Yes, predictably, Martin has one of those moments of hesitation. Unfortunately, because (in the implausible way in which such plots all too often unfold) he is (really for the first time, like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks?), at the age of 55+, in a situation where he can no longer believe in what he has been hired to do...

Watch out for a blue flask and see it, if you can, as a totem, a sacramental vessel, a memory, but maybe just another bright visual cliché (you know the sort, if you try), which is actually a rather lazy linkage, meant to tie things up when the corresponding facts suggest more a Drive-type You can run, but you can't hide! form of resolution.

End-notes

* When Martin has cured her by the expedient (he's just off hunting again for the best part of two weeks) of instructing the children that she does not need this (and two other pill-boxes, whose contents remain unknown, but, just possibly, a sleeping tablet)).

** Or is his 'real' name Bike, as the credits suggest?

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Wakeful in an eternity of emptiness

This is a review of Sleeping Beauty (2011)

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25 September

This is a review of Sleeping Beauty (2011)

When, in Sleeping Beauty, an elderly man with a white beard (whom we have seen before, and know that he is a pining widower) starts a story that is, frankly, of little real interest, but just an attempt (where others throughout the film may have failed) to be weighty, I nearly did decide to take my eyes off his face and just listen - in the hope, even, that sleep might come (of which Macbeth’s character speak so highly, if not Hamlet’s, likening death to it in ‘what dreams may come’, etc.).

Would that I had either given into that temptation or of making this film the fifth thing that I did not see through to the end in this Festival, because Sleepless in Seattle almost has more to say about life, and without being so needlessly portentous (maybe even, with the same crew, You’ve Got Mail). Whatever journey someone thought that this film was taking the viewer on was not, as far as I am concerned, worth the shoe-leather.

A series of things was presented that were probably intended to make one more feel uncomfortable (although the word ‘series’ might suggest a progression, or some intelligence behind aching voids of silence, slow fades, the blackness before the next scene, etc., which were like forces pulling in contrary directions) – oh, and some of them do, as certain forms of self-willed violence or appropriation almost always will, but, if they do, it might help if there were some basis for them.

I really do not think that the essential premise is tenable, when, whatever the poster might suggest, Emily Browning (as Lucy (Melissa?)) is no pre-Raphaelite beauty (except in terms of hair colour, but certainly not stature, poise or demeanour), makes a noisy job of pouring wine or a brusque one of offering brandy, and does not even seem – although a few books and papers are strewn around in a scene towards the end – very convincing as a student.

And as a student of what – is what we are shown in the lecture-room (analysis of a game of go, and some incomplete notation that is being chalked on the board earlier on) founded on some sort of notion of what games theory or the mathematics behind it is like?

Lucy’s motivation to do what she does is clear enough – she can, she wants to, and she needs money, although, rather slowly, she begins to wonder what she is doing. I begin to wonder what Clara is doing, too, if where she gives various men free rein, but with a fairly arbitrary (and irrelevant) restriction, really is her home – she is supposed to be running some sort of comprehensive ring of young women like Lucy, but that aspect quickly appears more or less forgotten about, I suspect, because she is really needed to bolster the lack of engagement and energy in the role (and playing) of Lucy, and so has to give her personal attention.

However, attention given to Lucy and Clara’s antics will not, I fear, be repaid.


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