It's dangerous to think too much ~ Lydia

This is a Festival preview of The One-Eyed King (2016) (for CamFF 2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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13 October

This is a Festival preview of El reí borni (The One-Eyed King) (2016)
(for Cambridge Film Festival 2017)

The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here

Screens on Sunday 22 October at 3.00 p.m.

The opening-titles to El reí borni (The One-Eyed King) (2016) are vivid, inventively deploying shapes and colour to present the credits - in, perhaps, a way that is reminiscent of the title sequence of Bond films (and other films of that era) such as Dr. No. (1962)... (As to the title-music used¹, it is subtly energized, using cushioned percussive beats and fuzzy electronics, which underpin a quickly enlarging full sound - the titles are through in only a minute.)

With its origins in the director Marc Crehuet’s own stage-play, the film both feels like ‘a slice of life’, but at the same time is representative of differing opinions about what lawful government is, and what lawful opposition and demonstration : all highly relevant to present-day Catalunya (Catalonia). The film feels very like chamber music, and Crehuet employs writing for chamber forces in the music that we hear² :

The (apparent) solidity of the interior that has been created (Lydia and David’s flat) contrasts with the intangibility of ideas and of the characters’ beliefs – and what they might wish to change, and why. So it is that incongruous conversations during dinner together (always overlooked by an eye-shaped mirror³), and incongruous expectations of willingness to initiate sex in the face of affront, are just part of Lydia and David's compromised married life - Lydia (Betsy Tùrnez) wants to mask the fact, by considering the soup recipe⁴, that David is talking about his job (Controlling the masses).

Though the time-scale remains - to some extent - indeterminate and only relative, at the dinner-party, which is near the opening of the film, Lydia is insistent that Sandra 'disappeared' (which Sandra keeps denying), and David (Alain Hernández) equally so that he knows Ignacio (as turns out to be the case), and he seems happy to describe himself, to him and to Sandra, in ways that prudence and dramatic irony both suggest that he ought not to pursue...

During and after which, much comedy (albeit of a somewhat uncomfortable kind - as when Fawlty Towers did not make one cringe so much that one could no longer watch ? !), where we – fortunate to be on the outside of the four principals' lives – have the privilege of laughing at their utterances and beliefs. Which is partly mediated by the incredulity with which Ignacio (Miki Esparbé) meets them, and then also we experience his heart-break as drawn into his personal life as the title-character.

Having heard how he has withdrawn from social contact (and being able to infer lowered mood and self-esteem), can we, with him, credit some of the pragmatism that is uttered about what has happened - or some of the ways in which his partner Sandra (Ruth Llopis) behaves, whether telling him that her dreams tell her what he, she, or they should do, or initially 'going along with' what Lydia says about ethnic minorities ?

Exotic cuisine, globalization, and the legitimacy of acts of opposition collide in El reí borni (The One-Eyed King) (2016)#CameraCatalonia

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2017

At the centre of the film is a shock that reminds of the various tellings of the fate of the 'turbulent priest' Thomas à Becket (or of the turn that the film adaptation (partly by Ariel Dorfman himself) of his stage-play takes in Death and The Maiden (1994), as Sigourney Weaver begins to confront Stuart Wilson's and her guest, Ben Kingsley) : the same effect of misinterpreting the political and emotional situation in an act that otherwise seen can only seem desperate and deeply mistaken. Even so, the similarities here are not even as strong as to Taxi Driver (1976), and the questions that Martin Scorsese poses there in someone whose actions, despite his real motivations, appear exonerated for incidental reasons⁵.

Alain Hernández as David

At the end of it all – when David breaks the so-called fourth wall (or, at any rate, in continuation of his earlier near-hallucinations⁶) – he directs to us, as hitherto complacent viewers, If they can see everything, they must have the answers. For, in watching a film, maybe we do feel that we have the answers - but less so when put on the spot, and asked to identify directly with what we have been watching ?

By the time of the end-credits, our concentration will (more so than at the start) be on 'Some things we do', the closing song - which may sum up the mood at the end of the film, where David's losing his other certainties, even if they were mistaken, feels to have been regretted.

Screens on Sunday 22 October at 3.00 p.m.

End-notes :

¹ The track is taken from Ben Frost's 'Venter' (not, despite the order of the music-credits, from 'Guardian at the Door' by Valgeir Sigurðsson**).

² Apparently, we hear five in all of Valgeir Sigurðsson's pieces played for the soundtrack. And also, for example, Nico Muhly's Drones & Viola.

³ We may not be aware how it is part of the cast, by showing us things on the table that would not otherwise be visible, and that it is one of the things that David makes sure to smash...

⁴ She also prefers to remember being proud at how good he looks in his uniform, and how to her (when he was speaking after his training) It was just as if you'd been to university.

⁵ As, later, with The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), where it may seem that we are intended to enjoy the misdemeanours and escapades with which Scorsese's version of the real Jordan Belfort is involved...

⁶ Not unlike, as earlier in the film, the internal world of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ?

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

Who is this film about ?

This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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22 January

* Contains spoilers *

This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Maybe it’s the season of empty films – they have content and length, but all that they tell you is that : humankind can survive adversity; given long enough someone can be suckered in a huge way; and people can believe that they have rights over another person and his or her life [and that is not only slavery] : they are virtually the plot of platitude.

When it comes to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), we think that Martin Scorsese might mix things up a bit and confuse, but he gives us Jordan Belfort (Leonardo diCaprio), a character whom, we might remember, we have no more reason to believe than when he tells us that, with the $5,000’s worth of stock that he is offering, we will kill ourselves that we did not buy more : we even have reality change before our eyes, as he tells us that his car was that model, but in white, not red, adjusting the pictures to what he says happened. (Yes, there is a tie to reality, because the credits tell us that the film is based on Belfort’s book, but that never means very much.)

If we skip that opening sequence, when Belfort is adjusting live action to accord with what he says happened, we are simply ‘buying’ what he tells us, occasionally by voice-over, but largely by people, things, events just being on the screen, and Scorese surely gives us a big clue that we should reserve judgement. If not, it is just Jordan’s way, all the way. Think about his first day at work : the film does not dwell on his being told that he is pond life, but instead on a man who can pull rank on the person using that description and, rather improbably, invite Belfort to a bizarre lunch on the strength of the fact that Belfort did something unusual to get noticed in his application. Is this objective reality, or the world of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973)?

The time between then (and the advice given at lunch, including to have hookers, snort cocaine, and jerk off twice per day) and Belfort becoming a broker is passed over, but with the big thump of 1987’s Black Monday to bring him down, though not for long. And then there is the core of people with whom he surrounds himself, one (Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff) for little better reason as to whether he could sell parasols in Spain than that he provides Belfort with a really good high – yes, natural enough that Belfort should want to set up his own concern, but why with these people, foisted on us as his characters ?

Think back thirty years to Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – or earlier films about the world of organized crime – and that same coterie of those trusted with the innermost details. Scorsese does not just want us to watch what is happening and lap it all up – is that the approach that he intends with Taxi Driver (1976), just that we should go with what happens and think that the actions of Travis Bickle deserve to be celebrated ?

We have Belfort talk shaven pubic hair with his father (and the older man wish that he were younger, although he likes ‘the bush’), and we are suckered if we take him snorting cocaine off a girl’s rear as any more than a parody of possibility, of maybe what did happen all so often in the world of brokerage, but is not told us to prove that it could and did happen, but what it meant that it happened.

At the same time, Scorsese is playing with us, if we want to feel respect for Belfort for once giving a cheque for $25,000 to a woman now working for him who needed the money, if we want to be energized by Shakespeare’s Henry V, the speech that Kenneth Branagh lionized to stir and inspire his troops, or if we want to feel that there is humour in the scene where he learns that his phone is bugged (in fact, nothing comes of that) and, having ingested some arcane substance shared by Azoff and him (for reasons that are unclear), drives home to get Azoff off the phone.

Belfort is not a (submerged) narrator who tells everything to his advantage (e.g. reversing the car with his young daughter in it into a post in an effort to get her away from his wife, who wants a divorce and the children), but the broad thrust of things is how we wants to tell them, such as (seemingly spontaneously) not doing a deal that will remove him for his company, but ending up doing those who work for it far more harm as a consequence so that he ends up with just thirty-six months’ incarceration – grand, impulsive gestures, but just because he can, out of some sense of freedom, of who he is.

Amidst the glitz, the sex, the drug-taking, the nudity, taking what one can when one can*, ripping someone off because one can talk them into what, with reflection, they would never do, does one seek for something else, or feel that one might as well have done the same, if everyone else was doing so ? So is it a film about Belfort’s character-type, or about all of us, if we could, if we dared, if we admitted that we wanted to ? If we have just watched it on the surface, the answer is there : we have dreamed and lived the life with Belfont, and what is the challenge to being implicated ?
Maybe the whole film is a plea in mitigation to the judge, saying how he had never heard such language before he started working on the trading-floor, and showing how his behaviour became provocative, coarse, abrasive?


Post-script

According to Matthew Toomey's review :

Brought to the screen by iconic director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Departed), The Wolf Of Wall Street has generated controversy. Detractors believe that the film glorifies Belfort’s actions given its many comedic scenes and its lack of a moralistic conclusion. That was certainly not Scorsese’s intention. He didn’t want audiences to leave the cinema feeling better and thinking that the problem has been solved. He “wanted them to feel like they’d been slapped into recognising that this behaviour has been encouraged.” The film’s final scene is haunting in that regard.


See here what others reviews say...



End-notes

* And yet Belfort, until Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) unequivocally offers herself to him in sex that he pulls no punches in saying lasted only eleven seconds (until he had something in reserve), is on the verge of going home to his wife).


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

Stale old arguments about Scorsese

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10 January

The Times (in an article entitled Cathedral defends showing ‘debauched film of Christ’s life’) reports as follows regarding Bath Film Festival's (@BathFilm's) screening of director Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis (and with score by Peter Gabriel) :

Members of the congregation have protested that the 12th-century Gothic Cathedral is to be used for an “appalling film” that “tackles the theme of debauchery”


Are they thinking, maybe, of another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, which certainly does 'tackle' that theme, and appals in its literal sense (from Old French appalir to turn pale) ? Have they seen it, or are they like the protesters (placards saying 'Down with this sort of thing') penned by Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan in Father Ted, who made more popular, through interest and intrigue, a film that they had not watched, The Passion of St Tibulus from 1995 ?

The appendix of the 1996 edition of Scorsese on Scorsese* (one in a Faber & Faber series to which The Agent is addicted) is devoted to the film. Here are some quotations from a statement that Scorsese made at a press conference :

When I read Kazantzakis's book, I didn't have the feeling that it would be deeply offensive to anyone, especially because I know of my own intent.

[...]

Among the boys who I knew when I was in the seminary, one is now the head of an order in Chicago called the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, and happens to be a great fan of Kazantzakis's book. And I know that the book is used in seminaries as a parable to argue about and discuss. This is how I hoped the film would be received.

[...]

A black minister wrote a letter to the New York Daily News, saying he loved the film, was going to use it as a study guide in discussion groups, and that he felt most of the people talking about the film had not seen it. He said they adhered very much to the word of the Gospel, but not to the spirit.


After the event, read more here about it and the film, if you wish...


End-notes

* Faber & Faber, London, 1996.


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

When we still had icebergs…

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5 October


This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek


The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.

Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.

One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).

Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).

Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.

Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.

Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.

Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.

Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.

No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.

Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.


End-notes

* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.

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

Short films at Festival Central (5) - The Ellington Kid (2012)

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2 December

Director / Writer : Dan Sully

This short was almost the envy of Chris Croucher, writer / producer of Friend Request Pending (2011), in its brevity: Dan Sully and he were in agreement that some shorts are, as this one is, in the nature of – this wasn’t the language in which they discussed it – dealing with just conceit with a punch or knock-out line.

What it exemplifies is how easily, when a character is talking (in this case, Nathan (Charlie G. Hawkins) speaking to Beefy (Hammed Animashaun)), we can slip into adopting the images that accompany his or her words, as if the images – which is what cinema does – acquire a status of credibility, authenticity, by being shown. Yet we do not do that (at least, I hope not) when it is the same old VW ‘see film differently’ clips that purport to tell us how an aspect of Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) came into being : they are being knowing in a different way, sharing the joke with us as it goes along that we might credit what is presented.

As writer / director in a shoot of, as I recollect, two days, Sully achieves a tight narrative in which we are totally sucked into what Nathan says, only to feel as foolish as Beefy when the ground is pulled from underneath him. (Or is it? There is a nice little hint at the end that there might have been some murderous truth in what he has been told.) As to the specific assertion that Nathan makes, I had anticipated it, then thrown it away – so much the better !


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