Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right ! ~ Rose Dorfman

This is a response to, more than a review of, Café Society (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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2 September

This is more of a response to, than a review of, Woody Allen's latest cinematic release, Café Society (2016)

There are, in Café Society (2016), quite a few familiar Allen(esque) themes (or concerns - a non-exhaustive list is assembling below), but is this a summation of them, and could it even (but one hopes that it does not !) serve as a swansong – in the way that, although Midnight in Paris (2011) was Woody Allen’s tribute to that city (and its past literary, artistic and social life), it was excessively lauded, and would hardly be a fit note to go out on… ?

For The Observer (in @guardian), Wendy Ide gives @cafesocietyfilm 3*, but is that mean ? :https://t.co/W3uT6elD24https://t.co/Ib2gVX0fXP

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2016

After all, Midnight in Paris is not a film that dreams this much, with Gil’s (Owen Wilson’s) entry into another world proving as easy as waiting for an old cab with T. S. Eliot in it¹, and its ending, which settles for finding love in the ‘here and now’, not with a former lover of – was it ? – Picasso’s, who herself hankers for an earlier time still. Rather, it is a direction that was perhaps indicated by Magic in the Moonlight (2014), an Allen film that was unnecessarily disesteemed, and wrongly criticized for what is also an element here – even though that is what happened in the films’ common era – i.e. a younger woman marrying a man at least twice her age².

(Though equally, in Blue Jasmine, both Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) retreat into – whilst they last – blissful forms of dreaming impossibly for, respectively, what cannot be sustained, and what is too good to be true, or there are the brothers³ in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), who realise a dream at the start, but one whose consequences almost inexorably take them further and further from it.)

However, reading a summation of a career in film into Café Society is based on what... - as if Allen were the fictional director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (La giovinezza) (2015), but envisaging, if not desiring leaving, his testament in making film-within-a-film Life’s Last Day ? Apart, of course, from the allusiveness⁴ of the line, quoted from Bobby's mother in the title to this posting, Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right !, nothing more than the work itself, and its feel. (Yet, at the same time, Allen just cannot resist telling us – alongside the film’s ambiguous interpretations of the observation that Dreams are… dreams – about dreams as we know that he sees them, putting in a plug for those centred on NYC (East Coast ‘chic’) over ones about LA (a West Coast illusion, which Bobby, unimpressed by its film industry, describes as a ‘boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog’ existence).



Interlude - An alphabetical selection (some spoilery ?) of concerns (or themes) familiar from the Allen filmography :


* Affairs: many examples, from the hilarious parody of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ in Love and Death (1975), to Husbands and Wives (1992) or Deconstructing Harry (1997)

* Central Park : Passim, but not least Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* Confession being overheard by someone who should not know : Another Woman (1988), Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

* Dodgy relatives : Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) [by no means the only point of contact between Cassandra and Crimes (sadly, via Match Point (2005))]

* Family : Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987)

* Financial advice, (possibly) untrustworthy : Celebrity (1998) [as well as the funniest scene ever with a banana !], Blue Jasmine (2013)

* Gangsters : Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

* Jewish gangsters : John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (2013), in which Allen plays opposite Turturro - though, with Jewish gangsters, the primary reference must be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

* Jewishness : Stardust Memories (1980) , Oedipus Wrecks (in New York Stories (1989), with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola)

* Night-clubs : Stardust Memories (1980), Radio Days (1987)

* Religious conversion : Love and Death (1975), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Just as in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and the tales told around the table about Danny (Allen himself) that frame it (or in Radio Days (1987), in which - as in other cases - Allen narrates, but does not appear), an infectious dream of life inhabits Café Society, i.e. the film itself and in its microcosm in the night-club that Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) agrees to help [Ben] run as its manager (but is somehow guilelessly unaware of how it is run⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), until he comes to be able to change its name from Hangover to Les Tropiques).

Allen very deliberately gives us the fiction of the film itself, both how it is told to us visually (such that we know that it must all be there – all that information about the family, and who is who – for a reason, as yet unrevealed), and in the manner and style of his own narration, casual and urbane, and which even seems to make light of state or informal executions as if ‘one of those things’ that happen in life (the camera also does not dwell). (By contrast, Irrational Man (2015) had been in a different place altogether, and employed voice-overs by its interlocked principals, Emma Stone (Jill Pollard) and Joaquin Phoenix (Abe Lucas).)

Left to right : Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest

One can instructively look back to the effect of Allen’s voice-overs as Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), partly when narrating his existential crisis (and how, by happenstance, The Marx Brothers came to resolve it) to Holly (Dianne Wiest) - with whom former relations, as one of Hannah’s said sisters, had been stormy and unpromising : because they had been, both of them (as here), where they were, and who they were, at the time. In Café Society, Allen uses the voice-over as our relation to a cinematic world that allows us to enter into the sheer dramatic contrivance that a man can choose to unburden himself to his younger relative about what, initially unbeknownst to either, also touches him the other – which feels awkward enough in itself, and yet it is only when, artlessly, the other passes on that story (although told in confidence) that the set-up fully unfolds, and, as a situation that it is to be repeated, we see a fight to maintain composure…

Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

Quite apart from letting us see him use the cast as an ensemble (please see below), a more recent film, To Rome With Love (2012), is another that deserves more attention than it received, not just for being very good fun (and good natured, as Café Society is, and not Irrational Man (2015)), but also to be credited for being what it is – the work of a director who had the versatility, after Annie Hall (1977), to make Interiors (1978) (with all the brickbats that Allen got for it), and then make Manhattan, but also Stardust Memories (1980) (again, unjustly criticized). (To Rome with Love came before Blue Jasmine (2013) took people’s attention again (after Allen, for some reason, had it with Midnight in Paris).)

Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

In To Rome with Love, Allen has Alec Baldwin maybe trying to help the younger man that he once was (again, Jesse Eisenberg) not make, amongst other mistakes, that of being seduced when he thought that he was seducing : it is one strand, amongst four, of wonder, which are presented with a tacitly agreed impossibility, but with none on its own asking us to credit it with the whole film. Nor exactly does Café Society, but not likewise, because it coheres around its elements in the way that Hannah and Her Sisters does (though with a different note on which to finish...).

As The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) did [which was claimed by Allen, at the time of the first edition of Woody Allen on Woody Allen, to be the film of his with which he was most pleased], Café Society revolves the question of the connectedness of image and substance – as well as the related one, both seen here and in others of his films (especially Blue Jasmine), of looking the other way as to where wealth comes from⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), or regarding the person from whom one wishes to acquire it.

Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine

Perhaps the main sense, in Café Society, of a summation (if not of a conclusion) of a career inheres in a characteristic that it shares with that then-disliked film from 1980, Stardust Memories ? A strong sense of Allenesque couples who, though not exactly feeling regret, wonder What if... ?


And cause us to wonder deeply - when we might, instead, wonder about ourselves ?

Time passes… Life moves on… People change…

End-notes :

¹ Of course, on another level, dream is transmuted literally into wish-fulfilment for Gil, presenting as real the history that helped bring him to Paris – and overlook Inez’ own infidelity – until he realizes that he is chasing rainbows.

² It was there in Manhattan (1979) – which people usually forget was co-written with Marshall Brickman (as was Annie Hall (1977), not to omit the hilarity and foresight that is Sleeper (1973)) – and, from there (via Husbands and Wives (1992)), right up to Irrational Man (2015).

³ As it happens, Ginger and Jasmine are sisters by adoption, but not Cassandra's Terry (Farrell) and Ian (McGregor) - who, in Tom Wilkinson, have an Uncle Howard - with his line in calling in family favours...

⁴ Although, naturally one cannot go far in Allen's canon without hearing words that echo our mortality – even here, with Bobby's sister Evelyn's husband Leonard (Stephen Kunken), i.e. his brother-in-law, also talking - in the puzzled, but semi-humorous, way that his characters do - about Socrates and 'the life examined'…

⁵ Put another way, as in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (or Match Point (2005)), getting what one wants - but at what cost ?

NB Possible spoiler : And one could ask – and will ask on a re-watching – why again, exactly, was it that Bobby went to see his uncle, Phil Stern, in LA (given that, back in NYC, Bobby is given a warning that Ben should consider disappear to Florida – which maybe Bobby 'forgot' to pass on ?)… Florida is also where Ben (Corey Stoll) was also heard urging Bobby's and his parents to go, just after Bobby has arrived in LA : as if form's sake, his mother, Rose Dorfman (Jeannie Berlin), superficially is concerned where Ben's money comes from, but then seems satisfied with some casual excuse ?


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I have to believe everything in order to make things up ~ Mick Boyle¹

This is a review of Youth (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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30 January (link substituted, 19 May)

This is a review of Youth (La giovinezza) (2015)

The film is dedicated to director Francesco Rosi (who died on 10 January 2015)

The list of key-words below had probably been noted before, in white capitals, the title Youth appeared [above a division of the screen, as if in a colour-field painting, comprising the colour of a low partition-wall, its rail, and the wall behind it], and then the sky, above an Alpine view (which, one estimates, was 10-15 minutes in – it was not quick, because, by the time that it arrived, one had forgotten not having seen the film’s name [the BBFC (@BBFC) certificate does not count]) :

* Light = use of, and our awareness of, light [Luca Bigazzi is Sorrentino's cinematographer again²]
* Fluidity, of the image, and how it changed with the camera’s movement
* Composition, i.e. of shots, and the Viewpoint from which they were taken
* Transition between shots
* Tactility, in that (as did its predecessor²) it has and conveys a keen sense of our physicality / our corporeality

All of these impressed one with the film’s quality, and the care of its making : as one expected², and hoped would be so.

Is Michael Caine really far superior in Youth (2015) to how he was in Interstellar (2014) [or Little Voice (1998)] ? pic.twitter.com/ZJRpAxUGyj

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2016

Points of cinematic comparison are, sadly, not hard to find, even at this time of the year, i.e. despite what worth it might be reasonable to assume that nominations for awards recognize, whereas films Based on a true story seem sufficient unto themselves (as with Tim Burton's Big Eyes (2014), at this time last year), without speech, for example, seemingly needing to sound as if anyone might have uttered it :

After hearing dialogue from @TrumboMovieUK's trailer [one averts one's eyes, just in case], it isn't greatly going to do more than irritate.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 30, 2016

* This paragraph contains Spoilers (if intending to watch Trumbo) *
The choice of film is not irrelevant (even if the relevance was in someone else’s mind, in devising the trailers to show) in that Youth (La giovinezza) (2015) has Harvey Keitel as a writer / director (Mick Boyle), whereas Trumbo (2015) purports to save us the trouble of finding out why Dalton Trumbo was not credited, say, with the screenplay for Roman Holiday (1953) (and it was only forty years later that the Academy Award for ‘Best Writing, Motion Picture Story’ was credited to him). (Whereas, in 2 hrs 4 mins, one could watch Roman Holiday instead, and, on IMDb (@IMDb), there is what seems a very full biography of Trumbo (it is staggeringly longer than usual), just for the reading.)

But #Youth isn't underwhelming, @TeddyCutler - it fizzes and sizzles with its inventive homages (8½, Grand Budapest) https://t.co/70ruV348Cm

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 30, 2016

Youth most clearly does reference both 8½ (1963) and, more fleetingly, both The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and even Metropolis (1927). However, director Paolo Sorrentino is not being derivative of Federico Fellini, Wes Anderson, Fritz Lang ; rather, he is showing us his reverence for these films and, albeit with playfulness, asking us to share his appreciation. (Likewise, Stardust Memories (1980) - which Sorrentino clearly values - is a massive tribute to European cinema, hardly least also to 8½ [Fellini is an acknowledged inspiration to Woody Allen and his work], but it sees those films / that film through another director’s eyes (but as if through the eyes of his character, Sandy Bates). (It is sad [dare one say, simplistic on their part ?] that contemporary critics and audiences, feeling insulted, insultingly mistook Sandy Bates, and his opinions, for Allen and his.))

When it comes to The Lobster (2015), a film that achieves far less, but with far more effort, the link between Lanthimos’ film and Sorrentino’s is, as well as in the type of location (and in a first film scripted in English), in the person of Rachel Weisz : here, Fred Ballinger’s (Michael Caine’s) daughter Lena ; there as a form of emotional outlaw, without a name (but, significantly, narrating the story, one has to feel - please see the next paragraph). (If the films were, more than superficially, so irremediably different, one might have asked in whose film Weisz seemed ‘a spy in the camp’ (for, according to Wikipedia® (citing dates in Cineuropa and ScreenDaily, respectively), principal photography for The Lobster ‘began on 24 March 2014, and concluded on 9 May 2014’, and that for Youth started in Flims, Switzerland, in May [also according to Wikipedia®].)


The true point of connection is in Rachel Weisz’s very distinctive voice and the rhythms of her way of speaking. Here, she makes a striking speech as to whose status, immediately afterwards, we are (or should be) uncertain : for, literally from the first visuals to the last (and not just when it is patent), this feeling of uncertainty is built into the fabric of the film - as with Allen in Stardust Memories (or, equally, with Deconstructing Harry (1997)), or Fellini, whom Allen had used as his model. It is suggested that, in The Lobster (as has been argued at the conclusion of the review on these pages), we ought to have been watching throughout with a view to what this use of the device of a voice-over actually signifies (and not just take it for granted). (Are we meant, say, to take that element simply as read in American Beauty (1999), or even Sunset Blvd. (1950)?)

Grand Hotel Waldhaus Flims

But the connection with where Sorrentino filmed proves to be a quite different one, in that Wikipedia® tells us that the primary location was the nineteenth-century five-star Grand Hotel Waldhaus Flims, but that filming also took place in Davos (in Switzlerland), particularly at The Hotel Schatzalp - where the novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) is set. That novel is is highly relevant to a setting in a spa (although its characters are more unwell, e.g. tuberculosis), but it is also a link with another novel by Thomas Mann, which one thereby sees confirmed as having been in Sorrentino’s mind, Dr Faustus (published in 1947, more than twenty years later). This later work is more allusive and, even though it is considerably shorter, its subject-matter makes it feel more dense : albeit an extreme one, Mann’s composer-character Adrian Leverkühn seems a perfect reference for a character-type such as Fred Ballinger’s (Michael Caine’s)³.

Some comments about Youth (2015) are creeping into 'Why would one *want* to wait for a film's end-credits ?'... :https://t.co/m5A07lELgL

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 31, 2016

Having had a prominent piece at the opening of La grande bellezza, David Lang scored Youth, and, amongst his work (particularly ‘just’), we hear such musical touch-stones as, three or four times over, excerpts from Triste et lent (number 6 from Book I of Debussy’s Préludes [the occurrences are considered further in another posting), and the Berceuse from Stravinsky’s The Firebird, with their clear associations for those who know them. With other allusions, there is a set-piece, which is reminiscent of the ‘friendly’ and wholly ‘well-meant’ honesty of Arsinoé towards Célimène (and then vice versa) in Molière’s Le misanthrope (which has been described as a ‘a fencing-match’ (of sorts)), between Keitel and Jane Fonda⁴.


Of course, we know, on the surface, that there is a film within a film, and that, as with the scene with flamingos on the balcony (for example) in La grande bellezza, there is another dimension to reality. (In fact, there is more than one film, but Paul Dano, as Jimmy Tree (developing his film-character), amounts to a sub-plot (if a major one).) In the development of the main film (the relevance of whose title cannot be overlooked, but which is not stated within this review), with Harvey Keitel (Mick Boyle) and his collaborators, Boyle demonstrates, as an analogy for Time, how a telescope (depending on at which end one looks into it) can make objects look nearer or farther :

Does that second film not seem to zoom in on the first (in which Caine and Keitel exist, and the second film is a project), right in the closing shot⁵... ? [That question is now considered, at length, in another posting.]


End-notes

¹ When trying to recall the name of Harvey Keitel's character (a film-maker), one was not totally erroneously led to the name Frank Boyle...

² Having seen La grande bellezza (2013) three times [which it seems better to translate not as The Great Beauty, but as Immense Beauty] :

Youth (2015), just watched, is at least the equal of the excellent predecessor, #LaGrandeBellezza, @BFI ! https://t.co/TK57CFUFRv

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 30, 2016

In Youth, we not only hear the line You understand everything with your hands, don’t you ? (spoken to a young masseuse [with whom we recurrently spend moments off duty]), but it also (as Albrecht Dürer or Godfrey Reggio may do in Visitors (2013), or some of the films that Youth references) reminds of the very tangible nature of our mortal form.

³ As does that of Daniel Auteuil’s Stéphane in Un Cœur en Hiver (1992).

⁴ * Contains spoilers ? * Finally appearing as Brenda Morel, after audaciously referred to for much screen-time – not unlike the very slow appearance of the film’s title, perhaps willing us to forget that Fonda is still absent ? (As Barry Norman once said about Henry Fonda, in The Hollywood Greats : Fonda made the heart grow absent.)

⁵ * Contains spoilers * After we have been put much in mind of the opening of Stardust Memories, with (again referencing 8½) what we initially see turning out to be in a screening-room - where the end of Sandy Bates’ film, much to his dismay, has been outrageously changed by the studio without his knowledge so that the characters all end up in Jazz Heaven...


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Why would one want to wait for a film's end-credits ? (work in progress)

Reasons to stay until the film's end-credits have rolled

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

Reasons for even those who are not intending / supposed to review a film to stay until the end-credits have rolled

As a guest at BAFTA last year, one was told by the inviting member of BAFTA (@BAFTA) that it is forbidden to do anything else – of which prohibition there indeed appeared to be highly persuasive evidence, even in a packed evening screening of The Martian (2015).

Despite the disruption, usual elsewhere, of almost everyone else trying to leave, and not infrequently doing so noisily and clumsily (as if their lives depended on not staying for two or three minutes longer¹ - which then means that one must often shuffle into the aisle to let them out and so that one can best see what is visible on the screen around people's heads), there is a rationale behind staying until the credits are through. [Effectively, this is a companion-piece to some comments, made about what people often enough do during a film, when also writing about The Tree (Drevo) (2014).]


The elements of that rationale are given here, in no particular order, and to justify, Milton like², this approach to those who - since they are in the majority - clearly do not appreciate them (or who may even, if one has not watched a film with them before, think that they have grounds for teasing about such ‘a quaint practice’) :


1. Seeing archive material that amplifies what the film showed (whether or not its story, or just its setting, was factually based), e.g. as shown within the credits for The Railway Man (2013), or what is best called The Harbour Bar (El Cafè de la Marina) (2014)

2. To hear reprised principal elements of the score, which acts as a summation of what one heard en route, and so of what one saw at each point, and is rarely unrewarding (despite people milling past) - particularly worthwhile, say, with that of films such as The Matrix (1999)

3. Occasionally, there is extra footage of another kind (whether right at the end of the credits, or inserted in the sequence), and which often gives some new dimension (depending on the film) : maybe just a final laugh [not recalling with certainty, but one suspects so – and of an insightful nature – for Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) and / or The Trip to Italy (2014)], or even a different take on the film and what it meant, of which The Great Beauty (2013) (La grande bellezza / #LaGrandeBellezza) is an excellent example, with both a long sequence along The River Tiber embedded in the credits³, and a reprise of the score (please see point 2, above)

4. An important closing track, not used in the film, but just played over part of the credits, and (if one were there to hear it…) actually the aural equivalent of footage in the credits (please see point 3, above) in making part of the feel of the film as a whole : probably so with Hope Springs (2012), and almost always true of Woody Allen’s films, e.g. Stardust Memories (1980)

5. Of course, not everyone will be bothered about the pieces of music that are used (as against the original score⁴), but, if one is, it may be one’s only chance to find out easily what that song / piece was called, and / or who wrote / performed it, unless one buys the soundtrack or DVD, etc., because even IMDb (@IMDb) is, as noted previously, certainly not without its faults, and largely does not extend to giving complete music-credits (here is what it lists for Youth (2015), and here, despite the credits that one saw roll, it gives none for the person who translated the screenplay) - so one’s easiest way to confirm, say, the singer or the name of some song has gone, when one leaves the cinema-screen too early to read the answer

6. Or one might want to know where that building was, and whether the interior was from the same one as shown as its exterior : the first clue [assuming, again, that one does not try to set about the task after leaving the cinema (and, even with the DVD and a large t.v. screen, the credits can end up minuscule] is to see the members of different units, e.g. Italy Unit or France Unit. It does depend much on the choices made by the film itself what information it then gives about locations, and also where it is to be found, so one’s eyes need to be nimble, because the credits will not always state Filmed on location at xyz, but there may just be mention of the premises in a list of thanks (or special thanks)


[...]


End-notes

¹ Maybe people did not have respect for Macbeth (2015), and it must necessarily be taken for granted that they have little for those who choose to watch the credits (who also, willy-nilly, had to hear their curt pronouncements) : however, despite the very thoughtful atmosphere at the conclusion of the film, their desire to be out was just as strong as it must have been to be there, in the first place, in one of the first screenings in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse).

² I.e. stated, early in Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton's aim to justifie the ways of God to men (on the question whether he did so, a writer in The Guardian (@guardian) dilated in 2011...).

³ In The Great Beauty (probably better thought of as Immense Beauty), the whole titles ran over the beauty and calm of Rome in the closing sequence, whereas, with writer / director Paolo Sorrentino’s new release, Youth (2015), it is just the main name-credits (through to and Jane Fonda, though we have flitted, for a while, to another venue by the time that her name appears). Then over the remaining end-credits, conventionally presented, an affecting reprise of David Lang’s ‘just (after song of songs)’ (which we do not hear in full (it runs to fifteen minutes), but Lang has, after his impressive contribution to the previous film, scored the film.

⁴ Whereas with, say, The Danish Girl (2015), one can very easily find out afterwards (if that theme is stil haunting) that Alexandre Desplat wrote the score and / or what other films he composed for : for one, it is there in the IMDb (@IMDb) listing for the film, and thence from Desplat’s entry.


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The Izzie Poems (Part IV*)

This is : A Poem for Iggy II

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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4 May

A Poem for Iggy II

Stardust sounds so much fun,
Unlike, dear Iggy,
Major Tom, dutiful,
The protein-pill man,
Making all the grades


Louis chirp-states Stardust,
Before throatily
Drawling – with scat notes –
Out the melody’s
Lines, lovingly so


Even when Stéphane
Sends smiles through the song***,
Stardust is more dust, still,
Than Star-Shine Bright,
From another world



© Belston Night Works 2015


End-notes

* These are the other Parts : Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V.

On @YouTube, though, StéphaneGrappelligives us another take on Stardust : http://t.co/hjfc37HWXM

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 4, 2015


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Don’t take my advice – I’m a major eccentric !

This is a review of Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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28 August

This is a review of Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

(one of Cambridge Film Festival 2014's Opening Films)

Woody Allen can never resist giving all the good lines to one character, and this time it is to Colin Firth (as Stanley Crawford), whom others close to him describe as a rationalist and caustic : sounding on Firth’s lips, the egotism of some characters that Allen has written for himself (e.g. Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry (1997)), and their disparaging or grudging excuses or views of others, seem refreshingly new.

The plot is not a complex one, and it would not easily hold off a fan of who-dunnits, but it plays with the familiar Allen type of a man whose (intellectual) opinion of himself gets in the way of his real enjoyment, a theme that goes right back to Love and Death (1975). Here, the tone is light, though calling it whimsical (as some have done) is not perhaps catching the right tone – and better describes To Rome with Love (2012) - but it benefits from the quality of having been caught on film (and cinematographer Darius Khondji has been working with Allen as early as Anything Else (2003)*), as crucially with the effect of day- as of moonlight.

Allen regularly revolves certain themes that mean something to him, such as magic (from Stardust Memories (1980) and earlier (and Radio Days (1987)? ) to The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Scoop (2006)) and a disbelief in clairvoyance (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)) or anything beyond the rational, and those come together here, with magician Crawford’s distrust of the powers of Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), egged on by his friend Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney).

Crawford is a sort of Benedict to Baker, as Firth was famously as Mr Darcy to Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet, and Firth carries this off perfectly, so much so at times (and with the film maybe a shade too long) that he is a little in danger of putting the others in the dark, even to some extent the redoubtable Eileen Atkins as Aunt Vanessa, let alone Baker : when we hear him discussed by members of the family where he is staying is not only a momentary absence from the screen, but also reinforces his nihilistic attitude (described as depression).

Nonetheless, we sense that he convinces himself more than others that he knows his own mind, and, in this sense, is a true Allen leading man, clinging to rationalism in order not to be adrift in the world – as we hear him, off guard, confessing to Baker his boyhood awe at the night sky. Criticize Allen, if one likes, for where the story is heading, but one would not be watching a film with such a title if not for it, and he gets us there with an ego more or less intact, as well as many a smile and an occasional hearty laugh along the way…


End-notes

* For which Carlo Di Palma, coming out of retirement, failed a medical, and so could not be insured by the studio.


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

Overlooked in all the care

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 August

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Presently, on Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1) (please see the note on screenings below)


This film concerns itself with the sort of overlooked type of person who does not – or fails to – make a full recovery.

In a very polished way, which never feels like imitation, it seems closest to the frailty and fragility of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) (in particular, the pale, almost monochrome shades, into which the significant colour in the film erupts). Yet we are in an underlying family ambience that (not just because of the three daughters that all three films share) more closely resembles that of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (but with maybe a hint of Dorrie’s (Charlotte Rampling’s) less-manic moments of insecurity from Stardust Memories (1980) to heighten the sororial bitchiness of Hannah (Mia Farrow)).

We quickly learn that Eugenia (Geni) had had a serious road-traffic accident around a year before the start of the film, and we were immediately placed in her world in the opening shot, with no mise-en-scène, as she walks through a door on the left of the screen into a plush ante-room. She asks, and is told that she can go straight in to see the doctor – then we are in there with her, and looking at her, with a full view of the doctor kept back from us.

Maybe Geni (Nora Navas) is actually on time for the appointment (and, as one goes off, she reports to the doctor that she is using alarms on her phone to tell her where she should be), but what we notice most is that she seems too serene, almost over-eager to please : from what happens later, just with the long slow sweep past the city through the taxi’s window as she slumps, it is clear that she had been pretending, and that the doctor does not seem to have looked behind appearances. (So, if Geni says that ‘The important thing is the knee’, that is what the doctor hears and has noted.)

Yet we will see her family require Geni to pretend according to their pattern (at which point, we are sharply reminded of the subjective element in the title’s What’s Best For Her), and we also see how uneasily their encouraging phrases, which aim to re-frame her experience, fit on her lips. So, as she repeats her husband Dani’s (Pau Durà’s) words, we feel them become as dust, or meal, in her mouth :

All this is non-negotiable

I must make… an effort


Compared with Rust and Bone (2012), another (but very different) film about what happens after a trauma (to Marion Cotillard as Stéphanie), it is a bourgeois life in which Geni is living (typified by the flat, and its easy interiors and choice in art). However, in terms of what she is experiencing, looking interestedly at advertising in the surgery for a medication that seems to be an anti-depressant (Happiness is in the little things), her problems seem out of place and unwelcome there (and they are arguably greater than those of Stéphanie) :

Geni’s world / family seems to have a work ethic that does not begin to understand duvet days, and it is one whose pressures, although not always explicit, are inescapable. The assumption, which is everyone’s starting-point (both for themselves and on the others’ behalf), is that you can get back what you had. Which includes, as we hear when Geni’s more similar sister suggests a thoughtful, individual exercise at New Year (to round off the previous twelve months for everyone), not only that her father expects a return on the therapy that he has bought for Geni's sister, but also, in how the exercise gets subverted, greater disrespect for what therapy says, does and is for.

You do not need to have a notion of the recovery model in UK mental health to notice the number of times people say to Geni that 'You used to...’, and, at such times, there is something about Navas’ mouth that registers a barely visible disquiet. (At other times, we see her disassociate from that with which she simply cannot cope.) Navas is on screen almost without a break, and looking properly at what her look says pays dividends for feeling the richness and depth of how the film explores this situation.

In the event, when Geni is trying to follow up a lead for a job via someone known to her other sister (whom everyone must think of as mature and responsible), we and she have suddenly have Mariana, waving and laughing at Geni in the interview. Afterwards, though, Geni closes down all of Mariana’s (Valeria Bertuccelli’s) suggestions for renewing contact, but it is about feelings from the past that the rest of the film’s short internal timescale addresses.

This is a powerful film, sharply edited and clearly shot. It has a different trajectory and premise from the highly honest Chilean film Gloria (2013), but it, too, shows a person looking for what matters, and causing us to admire – but also fear for – her.


This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


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

He’s bad at taking off clothes ; she wants it fast and for her to be passive

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 April (updated 4 May)

* Contains some spoilers - major ones are marked in advance *

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

Exhibition (2013) is centred on Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine, and, respectively, they are called H and D (for some reason). Only once, when she calls out to him from the other side of a locked door, do we seem to hear her say ‘Aitch’, and when she is later addressed by others, as she passes by the wine merchants or bar outside which they are standing, one could swear that they call her Lynn…

No matter (even if their label is maybe intended to tell us as much as if one were M, the other S). Albertine has no real history of appearing on film – and it shows. That said, it may partly be an encouragement from director / writer Joanna Hogg that is responsible for the fact that she is rarely convincing except when we are concentrating on her physicality : it is fictionalizing again, but maybe it is Hogg’s attempt to make raw and real a life together that, in this place*, has gone on for eighteen years.

We first see Albertine lying on a shelf (the pane frosted by her breath, maybe pretending to be a cat), then, at the end, around the corner of the room, and under the table, as a child might hide behind what overhangs. In between, there is acting, there is the certain kind of incoherence that comes with a ultra-realistic depiction and / or with shooting improvised scenes, and there is being a plausible artist : taking these in reverse order, it is fair enough that, as we are observing D, we should observe her doing a sketch of herself in the mirror, where the mirror becomes more and more central to the frame, and we never see the sketch. Yet, just as On the Road (2012) largely failed to establish Sal (Sam Riley) as a writer just by his saying that he was one, there has to be some basis for believing that D could have some sort of creativity to be an artist (whereas it is not almost until the end that we learn what sort of artist, and can feed that back into what has been shown).

As to improvisation, the scene, for example, where she does not want H to go out conveys only through elements of the dialogue why she is saying in a repeated, but largely ineffectual way, that it is too late** for him to go. One may be intended to infer more about her passivity from that (a passivity that has her, humorously fake a faint as a way of getting away from visiting friends – H and she almost seem to have no other friends, and she seems, from what he says, to have no other way of getting out of stifling situations – and which is the stuff of late nineteenth-century Russian literature, rather than twenty-first century Knightsbridge and Chelsea), but that is rather working, once the closing titles have rolled, to do the film’s job for it, when one could just as easily put it down to someone’s lack of experience (or ability).

In any case, the broadest difference between D and H, other than that she is all stripes (with a change of them, albeit limited) to his wearing black, is essentially that they have arrived in a none-too-unfamiliar rut of not being able to initiate sexual contact, and which they nevertheless try to do by buzzing each other on the intercom feature of the phone : at one point, she is seeking reassurance of his love, another time he is, unasked, offering it, but they seem to be out of sequence with each other.

Similar enough that they can have lived so long in this place (and both almost always wearing black sandals, even to go to their friends’ place), in this way, but at what cost ? Made similar to fit in, but it is his true nature to be excessively angry that someone has parked in his ‘private’ space, to the extent that he becomes Basil Fawlty and says that he should erect railings with a big sign on them saying ‘FUCK OFF’ – hers, whilst all this is happening, is to stay, but not really meaningfully interpose another viewpoint, and leave us with the impression of not much. (After all, if someone could cope with taking leave of friends early, he or she would not resort to pretending to have been unconscious.)

The crux of it all is where they live. Forgetting the little yellow vehicle, where he goes to, why, and for how long, and just concentrating on H’s words to D to ‘Enjoy it whilst you still can’, one interpretation might be that he has gone off for good to do whatever it is that he previously said that they should sell the house to do now that they can. He scarcely seems to have been anywhere more than overnight, and her almost petrified patrol around the place, making sure that all is locked, maybe leave us in doubt whether she is more afraid of him coming back in some state late at night than any other intruder : maybe she is like this at all such times, but it seems as though she does not know this experience (over-acting ?).

Very proud to reveal the UK poster for Exhibition, the new film from Joanna Hogg - in cinemas & on demand 25 April. pic.twitter.com/fat0HNbWf0
— Artificial Eye (@ArtificialEye) April 4, 2014

It is the closely observed feeling herself through the slot in the stool, inverting it, finding a way to rub her crotch on it that Albertine’s contribution has life – in its own way, and given that Nymphomaniac (2013) was meant to tease with its sterile sex (except really when Stacy Martin meets Jamie Bell), Exhibition is far more erotic. We may have to invent an explanation for how elements of D’s sexual apparatus are handily by the bed (unless H knows, and watches, if awake), and what they evoke if not pornographic imagery where the women, whatever else they wear, always wear heels, but there is no doubting the power of that scene.

The ultimate interpretation is that, for all that D tells a friend on a video-link that the couple who lived in the property before (the designers ?) lived there till they were eighty, she is not going to do anything to oppose H directing them to a sale (and just saying that she could not be there – obviously, the estate agents can – when people are talking about making changes is a last-ditch piece of passive resistance).

We will never know what the sale is for, just that the only things that she preserves are sex on her terms (even if it means physically offering herself to him when he desires it, but with the turn-off of not being mentally or spiritually present), and likewise talking to him about her work. The scene, real or dreamt, at The National Gallery nicely imitates Woody Allen, in such films as Stardust Memories (1980), with H trying to interview her on a stage, but she will only allow him to be a companion, my companion. At the same time, she watches them both from the audience, where the film, all too rarely, breaks out of the mould of depicting trivial action and inert interaction, showing them together in symbolic form.


* Interpretative spoiler *

As to an under-text, perhaps D has never wanted children (and has just been unable to conceive anyway), and sees herself in relation to fetishism, embodying a role in performance, and being observed. H certainly alludes to the fact that they have no children, not without some emphasis.

Perhaps pushing the sale through, as Lopakhin ‘saves’ the cherry orchard by having it cut down, is a bittersweet way of revenging himself on whichever it is of her involuntary childlessness, or choosing her career in art***. Certainly, an element of seeing the outside from the inside, complete with a manufactured soundscape that has some troubling elements (alongside bells that suggest a Sunday morning), stresses the presence of the property, and inevitably, as with the Chekhov, makes one wonder what life will / can be like without it - even if D has been offered an exhibition (about which H both tries to reassure and say that he knows best)...


End-notes

* It may not exist, but just be an amalgam of an exterior view (also seemingly seen from inside out), various interiors, and other looks out of windows. It suffices that it exists for and to us.

** * Contains spoilers * Perhaps not a recollection of a psychotic episode, but certainly reliving the fear of violence and / or the involvement of the emergency services.

Probably not unrelated to H's angry conversation with the man who has left his car in H's parking space - and how D relates to it. In her own difficult moments, she extricates herself by fainting, the exact opposite of his head-on attack. Keeping / selling the house is their time of testing ?

*** Their friends, horrified as they contemplate the house for themselves, say that they are artists, and it is a house for artists, but it is largely unclear what H’s art could even be.


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

Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

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

19 October (updated, with a 102-point rating, 20 October; Tweet added 1 January 2015)

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

I was waiting for something to happen - and it never did


Obviously, what is revealed about Jasmine (and to her) in the last ten or so minutes did not count for the person who made this comment - what sort of film was this meant to be in which this elusive 'something' might eventuate ?

Having seen Blue Jasmine (2013) exactly a month ago, on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival, I was pleased to have watched it again, and pleased for Woody Allen that Screen 2 this Saturday night was sold out. Do I vainly hope for some of those people to go back and see some of the fifty or so other Allen films, whether or not they missed them before ?


If so, I would commend, in addition to the well enough known Annie Hall and Manhattan, these personal favourites :


Interiors (1978)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love and Death (1975)



Back at the film, and the question posed, I have heard it suggested that Dr Flicker is the person closest to Allen himself (i.e. the parts that he writes for himself to play), and I watched him with that in mind. No, he is not Allen - Allen is, I think, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett).

Tuned to Allen, knowing almost all of his films, and having seen this one before, I could hear his cadences, his little excited rages in this role – not exactly, but Jasmine is the one who approaches his self-expression, his fluidity, his vocabulary and assurance. Listen for him, and I think that you will find his voice in Blanchett’s.

97 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

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


Meanwhile, back at the nub, the film is not as dark as Interiors, but it is a drama, and I hope that it is being appreciated for that, though one with the humour that Interiors almost entirely lacks : there are themes in common here, and the Allen who cut up footage of Charlotte Rampling for a vivid portrayal of her distressed state of mind (as Dorrie) in hospital in Stardust has long had, if not themes of mental health, then hints at it, and I respect him immensely for that.

Blanchett almost cannot fail to win something big for this performance, because, for me, it is so easily convincing, so true to the psychology of her life (explored more here) and to the experiences that she has, but I am, if anything, even more delighted at a peach of a role like this for the tremendous Sally Hawkins, who really shows what a versatile actor she is at playing a character who has a capacity to delight in the smaller things and be radiant – Allen had cast her in Cassandra’s Dream, and this new part she carries off perfectly.

As to the story, no, there is no big something, and I did not have to absorb two previous films as at the time of the previous viewing, but I am very pleased to run this one through again and see how beautifully it holds together. When Allen crafts a screenplay, as in Hannah (or Harry, or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), there is nothing that one would change with it – when, for me, he does not, in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), it is hard to know where and how one would rescue it.

So my hope is for people to be patient with Jasmine’s story, and the choices that she has made – when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she clicks into a fantasy where she has always been called Jasmine, etc., etc., and I could see her entering into straightaway believing things, just because she was saying them and wanted them to be true. We can reach back into the story, and see how much – and, at the same time, how little – she knew about what was happening and what she was doing, and how, as we see her doing all along with prioritizing her needs, she hurts her stepson and husband.

I also hope that they will look out some other Allen, not Midnight in Paris (2011), really, but maybe some of the ones that I have listed; that Hawkins now has the recognition that she deserves; that Allen keeps on with his film every year; and that good film-making like this will be taken to people’s hearts, and cherished.

Where did the Blanche DuBois characterization in Blue Jasmine (2013) really originate... ? : https://t.co/grhg1tGL9g Bananas (1971)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2015

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