Empty sex is better than no sex, right ? ~ Stardust Memories (1980)

This is a review of The Square (2017)

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

This is a review of The Square (2017)

Art has - though in no way uniquely - spent more than a century in both learning from itself and oftentimes rejecting its previous practices or cosy beliefs about what art is or is for.

In an imaginary 2020, The Square (2017) is squarely and falsely predicated on the notion that the director of a gallery and his or her board typically could have decided to put on an exhibition (we see it being mounted), but without knowing why it would be of interest or how 'to sell it'. Contrary to which, in the last sixty years the so-called art-world has rarely not understood - though there have been some notable mistakes - how to publicize its practitioners and to encourage viewers into all sorts of galleries to see their work.

How well does writer / director Ruben Östlund show that he understands and has observed the world of galleries and their ways of operating ? - probably as well as IMDb has, in giving us this one-liner about the film :

A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit

If that sounds like Guido Anselmi, trying – as the phrase used to have it – ‘to wing it’ in Fellini’s 8½ (1963), then that is exactly what Christian Jules Nielsen* (Claes Bang) evokes, rehearsing in the toilet – so we realize – pretending to abandon his printed speech and speak impromptu. Other film-references early on are, patently, La grande bellezza** (The Great Beauty) (2013) and, arguably, Holy Motors (2012) - for its ending, and its nature as episodes, very loosely strung together ?

This is fine, because (although this can be overplayed, and is not exclusively so) film is meant to be referential in its nature - except that The Square never seems to have anything of its own to say, other than this small idea of a show that is being installed, but without clear ideas of promoting it (enter what IMDb calls 'PR Guys', Daniel Hallberg and Martin Sööder, in the mode of the destructive duo in Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997)) :

The film is not about those who work with art***, but it feels as little close to showing them as Elisabeth Moss' (Anne's) vacuous interview with Christian (for which he is woken from a nap), or the equally vapid interior of the head of Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) in Nocturnal Animals (2016)...

And when I love thee not

Chaos is come again

Othello (Act III, Scene 3)

If this is satire (please see below), rather than the naivety of insulting the viewership with a weak premise (and the latter can sometimes be passed off as the former), then it is a shame that it does not have the conviction of Roy Andersson. Except, that is, in the attention-grabbing, 'stand-alone' scene with Terry Notary that is made into the film-poster : even so, it is a high-energy episode that depicts another débâcle for Christian****, but without troubling to relate it to ‘the main action’ – unless generously seen as a depiction of the reign of Chaos, or an unannounced dream-sequence [and so more in the vein of 8½ than the explicable exactitudes of divine wrath that Lorgos Yanthimos would treat of in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)].

Now Playing Antonio Salieri, Enrico Fissore - Prima la Musica, Poi ... #antoniosalieri, #enricofissore https://t.co/0vMXLsr20T

— BBC Radio3 Music Bot (@BBCR3MusicBot) March 21, 2018

On the other hand, no one would take the premise of this entertainment of Antonio Salieri’s at face value – we are not meant to engage on a literal level with the fact that the poet is required to write a libretto in four days, and for an opera whose music has already been composed, and no one could seriously so construe the intentions of Salieri and his own librettist, Battista Casti. Yet, on this sort of construction (as with Amy Adams as Susan Morrow in Nocturnal Animals, managing, but significantly not making, art), it no more matters that Ruben Östlund has written real things that happened to him and to others into the setting of, say, a traditional three-ring circus (almost inevitably, back to Guido as circus-master in 8½), or of a cheese-shop with no cheese (Monty Python).

Cabaret (1972), comsummate, acerbic satire, does something useful with the conceit of a sort of circus-master, but the lack of credibility about the art at Morrow’s gallery, when she is supposed to be successful (an issue that writer / director Tom Ford misjudges, by making the work with the film's artistic team), sadly means that it boots nothing to show her as shallow and uncreative in relation to her ex-husband’s novel. However, it is Python that is closest to The Square, not for cramming more names of cheeses into one sketch than a stick can be shaken at, but perhaps for the haphazard way that (according to The Pythons Autiobiography by The Pythons) The Meaning of Life (1983) came into being.

The difference is that, amongst other things, the best sketches from that film – it is, essentially, a sketch-film (though not as is And Now For Something Completely Different (1971)) – and from four t.v. series have stood the test of time. Whoever Elisabeth Moss is meant to be (other than someone called Anne, who conducts a brief interview), it is unlikely that we will find her repeatedly saying the word Cunt !, or the bedroom tussle, on our mind next year, let alone amusing us.

Or even wanting to hear the trite question asked of her whether picking up her handbag and putting it in the gallery-space would make it art – trite, in terms of a century of debate about what art is, not least with Duchamp’s ‘ready mades’ such as Fountain (1917) (if, that is, he really was the R. Mutt who signed the original work (now lost)).


[...]



Even so, the biggest debt (not nearly repaid) is to Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), and to obsessively trying to figure out how and why one has been wronged, countless of the cost.




Film-references and others :

* Caché (Hidden) (2005)

* Funny Games (1997)

* Holy Motors (2012)

* Nocturnal Animals (2016)

* [ ] Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen) (2000)

* The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

* Intouchables (Untouchable) (2011)


Nude descending a staircase ~ Duchamp




End-notes :

* To IMDb, he is just Christian, because it can rarely give you detail that is in the body of the film – or tell you better than [ ] watching the closing credits what that piece of music used was (so IMDb does not mention the most obvious thing that we hear, i.e. Gounod, arranging Bach, in ‘Ave Maria’…)

** What a shame not to be re-watching, in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse, the immense beauty of Paolo Sorrentino's clever, insightful and thoughtful film instead ! The flamingos, Jep Gambardella effortlessly taking down artistic pretension, La scala sancta...

*** Gerry Fox does such an excellent job with that in Marc Quinn : Making Waves (2014).

**** A regular @CamPicturehouse interlocutor, who contributed in this way to the (incomplete) #UCFF review of Certain Women (2016) and saw The Square during @camfilmfest 2017, had found this episode both realistic – in terms of having experience of happenings or performance art – and fun, and suggested that Ruben Östlund had placed it in his film (he had said so, apparently) because he could : which, if so [it was also agreed that it might denote Christian's having a nervous breakdown, i.e. Fellini's Guido again], definitely seems the approach of Holy Motors of Never mind the quality, feel the width ?

Please, please, please ! Of course, there is so much very obvious hypocrisy in the film (at which self-contented people in the screening happily laughed, but - awful realization - don't say that, as he is 'Christian', that this is some sort of re-working of Pilgrim's Progress... !


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

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

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

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

* Versus : The Life and Films of Ken Loach (2016)

* Ivan's Childhood (1962)

* Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015)

* Youth (2015)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2016

* Stalker (1979)

* 'Immense Beauty' (The Great Beauty) (2013)

* Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015)

That's ten (last 2 mid-December)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2016

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

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

Splashes of beauty

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

Just realized : One of my favourite recent films, #LaGrandeBellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013) to-morrow at @CamPicturehouse at 1.00...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 2, 2015

Revisiting this film, and finding little that Peter Bradshaw (in the handed-out text of his review) says to illuminate it (although, at least, he just waffles, without wasting time telling the story), one is struck by the amount of death, as well as of life, in it (and by the unnecessary literalness with which it may have been viewed before) : death breaks through and, falsifying Jep Gambardella’s (Toni Servillo’s) standard, cynical take on funerals, forces him to feel something, and shows him doing so to Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli). Dream also breaks in*, and whereas it may have seemed discrete during previous viewings, there is probably more of a blurred, intermediate quality to much of what is shown, which may extend to whether flamingos really do flock and rest on Gambardella’s balcony, and a nun, said to be 104 years old and about to be sanctified, really does fall asleep on his floor ?

Likewise this conversation between her and Gambardella :

Sa perché mangio sempre radici ?

No. Perché ?

Perché le radici sono importanti.


[Does he know why she always eats roots (40 grammes per day, we are told, when she is in Mali) – because roots are important.]


In narration, Gambardella tells us that he has already, just after his sixty-fifth birthday, realized that he is no longer going to spend time on what he does not need to do – so, he disappears before Orietta can show him her photographs of herself, in which he had perhaps felt himself drawn to feign interest. What he seems to show genuine interest in, and to be moved by, is a photographic installation in an architectural space – instinctively, we may sense that what we see of the installation may have been virtually imposed on the space, but, as we track across the images, we can feel Gambardella’s connection with this theme (even if it might link with Orietta’s self-obsessed Facebook-oriented one ?), and its relation to the past.

Seeing a film of this quality again is itself an unfolding against one’s uncertain recollections of what comes next (just as Gambardella falters, trying to recall a precious memory), and we have our own Where does that scene fit in with… ? and When does Santa Maria appear… ?, partly tempered by what one remembers the central message to have been, and whether it seems different this time : does it all fit in, or is it only re-emerging in response to one’s memory ? Perhaps losing momentum only momentarily with the child-artist (which, this time around, is maybe one parody too far ?), and what had previously seemed magical in Stefano’s possessing, as a trustworthy person, keys to view Rome’s treasures by night, but which now seems part of Gambardella’s gift to the younger woman, to engage with her, and to show her his life.

Rome has really disappointed me ~ Romano

Whether one wants to see the ending of the film as looping on the beginning, and having (as Bradshaw suggests) teller converge on tale (as if Gambardella finally follows up his novel[ette] The Human Apparatus), seems immaterial, because we have seen hard-bitten Gambardella come to a realization about himself. We have been with him when he tracked down a man, Ramona's father, who had been kind to him, and seen him remember his formative moments and what matters (so that the past enters the present in a bar, and Romano, who says that Gambardella is the only person from whom he sees the need to take his leave on his departure, finds him just before a giraffe is made to vanish), and the coda, silent of speech, remains as strong and significant as before, coasting up to and past Castel Sant’Angelo.

Alongside and within all of this, the principal, gracious thematic material by Lele Marchitelli (which first colours the night-time tour of the palaces), and the use of Arvo Pärt’s My Heart’s in the Highlands and John Tavener’s The Lamb. These pieces of music are an immediate and necessary part of the conception of the whole : in those two settings (of Burns and Blake, respectively) – as well as opening the film a capella with David Lang's ‘I Lie’ (whose work we also hear in Sorrentino's Youth (2015)) – the voices cut through with rawness and intensity, and flood our hearts and souls with feeling.


End-notes

The most exquisite, dream-like image, partly because Gambardella's writerly life-style has him awake in the night, is an uncredited cameo-role for Fanny Ardant : he recognizes her personage as she passes, speaks her name, and she fleetingly acknowledges him, before passing on and away.

A serenity and poise at quite the other end of the scale from the vulgarity of the vibrant birthday-party, after which Gambardella asks not to be woken till 3.00 p.m., and from the Martini sign, which usurps both the sun's place, by rising over the remains of the party (and his editor's slumped form, who seems to have been overlooked, since she tries to alert people that she is there), and that of the moon, by looming over the head of the boulevard that he descends...


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

Immense beauty ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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7 September


I believe that a viewer who approaches The Great Beauty (2013) as narration, not meditation, is missing its best qualities

Humbert Humbert

Or

Un bel homme au charme irrésistible malgré les premiers signes de la vieillesse

AlloCiné

Film-titles are problematic.

The title of The Way Way Back (2013) is meant to be provocative, so 'the problem' is systemically desirable from the point of view of the film-makers, their supporters, distributors, etc.

On my understanding, the original Italian title of La Grande Bellezza just means something like immense beauty*, or maybe, more loosely, very beautiful - and the film exquisitely, almost hyper-realistically, is beautifully composed, shot, edited.

Talking about the film in English under the name 'The Great Beauty' makes one think that someone of the kind of Claudia Cardinale is its unattainable star - if there is such an unattainable star, it is, as one will surely appreciate in and through the filming, Rome.

Yes, The Eternal City - and, yes, Una Grande Attrice, starring above all others in cinema from Roman Holiday (1953) to To Rome With Love (2012)**, with La Dolce Vita (1960) and others in between. But, most of all, Fellini’s Roma (1972) for an insight into Sorrentino’s vision for what this film could (or should) be / mean.


Who knows whether it is a riposte in any way to Allen’s opera-singing, showering undertaker, or his Cruz-realized cheery prostitute, but the worlds are worlds apart : they are, in fact, more the mainly well-heeled world of another Fellini, 8½ (1963), and Federico’s Guido Anselmi is a puzzler in the vein of Paolo’s Jep Gambardella. Whether he puzzles us is not the real issue, but how what he / life / Rome is puzzles him is his real – and our proper – concern.

Jep is not easily impressed, but we both see him cry, and reduce another to the need to escape the company in which he has just, so perfectly, so mercilessly, delivered humiliation. (For a moment, we think that she will outface him / them and stay. What does Jep expect, in this cruel attack on pretension and pompous self-inflation ?)

What he cries at, along with the daydreams, reveries, fantasies that he shares with Guido is at the heart of this film. Akin to Marcello Mastroianni’s mastery, Jep is brought to us to a tee by Toni Servillo as this man who is just as capable of demolishing as building up, a restless individual of talent, but little direction. He is not a Citizen Kane, but his roots do lie deep in what he cannot forget, and maybe few others know about - unlike Kane, Jep is alive, and he makes a confession to himself about how he lives – has chosen to live – at the conclusion of the film.


Comparisons with Warsaw Bridge (1990), screened in the Festival’s lovely Catalan strand in 2012, are also not inappropriate, would that overload had not stripped many memories of watching it – the nuances, the humour, the shallowness of society were all, I nevertheless know, all reminiscent. But Fellini informs so much more, and the man whom Jep has forced his novelette-authoring soul to embrace being is, although quite alien to him, all that he is left with when he cannot be other than he is (nothing to do with his age ?) :

He can hurt, but he can also heal. Perhaps we here see Jep attracted to what he is not able to be, and vice versa, because in some Jungian archetypical way they are complementary personalities, two sides of one coin…

The film is not an easy ride, but it is a phlegmatic one, not one that relies on linearity, literality, logic – just a shame that, as my Italian source confirms, the sub-titles are a poor reflection of the dialogue, on which, and not on whose rendering, I shall attempt to turn my attention next time around.


End-notes

* After writing that, I secured agreement from a convenient and friendly person with Italian credentials. (I have few.)

** I make no apologies for rating that film on a par with Midnight in Paris (2011), because the former is not that weak, nor the latter that strong, despite what is claimed about both.

*** Amazingly turned into Nine (2009) with the participation of the late Anthony Minghella.


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