Showing posts with label The Past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Past. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

There are homecomings, and there are homecomings...

Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April
Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018), as seen at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden, on Monday 8 April 2019 at 8.00 p.m.









Epilogue :




Or, to give the closing words to @everyfilmneil, from the final sentences of his review (at www.everyfilm.co.uk) :

 Farhadi has built a reputation through movies such as A Separation, The Salesman and my favourite of his films, The Past. Everybody Knows keeps up his tradition of keenly observed, tense drama. It helps that his most established cast to date are on great form.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 10 April 2014

Sir, what are you doing in my house ?*

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

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

10 April (updated 13 April)

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)




If Xavier Dolan had done so, then his work might not have been in vain (unless he had taken another stage-work, August : Osage County** (2013), as a starting-point – though, by contrast, Dolan fully succeeds in not making Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) feel like a play***)…

For, whatever the play by (Michel Marc Bouchard) may have been, Dolan tries to make Tom a sub-Lynchian piece with a horrific undertow, with a vibration set off with Gabriel Yared’s high-frequency string-writing (and the start of a composed soundtrack that seems intrusive to the point of perversity), piccolo even, when nothing is on the screen that gives rise to spookiness, as Tom, arriving at the farm, explores it on his own – cows in a stall, barns and machinery do not resonate with fear, unless, perhaps, they are frightening in their otherness****. However, if one looks at the synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, it claims that Tom is in the grip of grief and depression.

Maybe… Yet, contrary to many people’s belief that it is invisible (Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !), it can be traced in look, posture, demeanour (as was just being written about yesterday in reviewing the superb film The Past (Le passé) (2013)), and Dolan shows no signs, except smiling inappropriately, and a certain clumsiness in conversational pleasantries – which comes across just as a somewhat implausible gaucheness, given that he says that he has a significant role in advertising (of course, that may be a lie).

Not unreasonable for him to be feeling as IMDb describes, but a film should stand for itself, and not rely on any external data to the viewer, and the only fitting account for how Tom appears is that it could be a form of psychotic depression. Clues abound that there is more to what we see than is evident, from a car on a poster with Real Deal as the caption, to the name of the bar (sadly not caught in French (which is in the plural), but something of the kind The Real Thing, to Tom’s hosts disappearing (as if they had never been there), with no sign that they had ever been there.


Suffice to say that, if the whole film is to be interpreted as delusion, induced by a massive natural high, then we are nowhere near the journey from and back to the office in After Hours (1985) (with its inspired dazzling ending, though not the first thoughts for it). We do not even have the resonance of Julianne Nicholson (Ivy), departing from the farm. No, it is then as with The Truman Show (1998) – a paranoid idea about the world blown up into a screenplay, whereas Tom has pretensions of being another Sunset Boulevard [or, originally, Blvd.] (1950) (although actually, if not in its exact scenario, it smacks of Pinter's The Homecoming, with its brooding awkwardness).

One skips to the end, because, with Tom in Tom, one really only cares about – and then relatively little, in fact – what happens to him, which brings us inevitably to the status of what we have seen happening. Is it the psychiatric equivalent of a very bad trip – a Funny Games (1997) without the consequences or implications – and then do we have any reason to be interested… ?


To come, when time and strength permit, a spoilery posting that deals with the rest of the plot, failing which...


End-notes

* A touch of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ – not really built upon in any obvious or coherent way, although Tom has such golden hair…

** Also set in a remote location in North America, and with some challenging family interactions, if of a different kind.

*** Spoiler alert Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily, agrees about the music, but comments instead about the adaptation :

Based on a stage play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who co-wrote the script with Dolan, Tom At The Farm betrays its origins in some overly pretty dialogue and a few scenes (like a tango dance in a barn) where you can practically read the stage directions.


**** Town Mouse and Country Mouse, maybe – given the contrasting setting at the end (apparently an amalgam) ?

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 9 April 2014

Secrets and lies – behind glass

This is a review of The Past (2013)

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

9 April

This is a review of The Past (2013)

The beautifully crafted script of The Past (Le passé) (2013), from its director Asghar Farhadi, reminds of so many strands of literature of the best kind, and all in a very good way (which is because the themes have rung down the ages on account of the issues that our lives together throw up).

Amongst them are : Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (and probably Ghosts), Chekhov in Uncle Vanya (or aspects of The Cherry Orchard, Death and the Maiden (1994) (adapted from Ariel Dorfman’s play), much of Michael Haneke’s cinematic work (not least Hidden (Caché) (2005), or Amour (2012)), to name some principal ones. (And it is only in the title that it bears any relation to Miranda July’s The Future (2011) (even if that film tried something of this kind*) !)

Casting, delivery, posture, gesture, editing – there is nothing to fault here, and the latter, with the other ingredients, means that there is never a moment slack at the wrong time, but, equally, we will be lingeringly with two men who have nothing to say to each other, and keenly, if awkwardly, wonder which will break by uttering something first, or abandoning the stage.

Marie-Anne (or Marie) is a far worthier role for Bérénice Bejo than that of Peppy Miller in The Artist (2011), and one where she can play a part that does not seem a caricature of itself. The Past also has Ali Mosaffa (Ahmad) and Tahar Rahim (Samir) along the other two sides of what is its often triangular heart, which is true all the time, because the centre of what we see is a form whose shape and structure change with time.

The presentation may be linear, but only in the way that, say, one of those Ibsen plays is. Thus, from the first moment when Marie spots Ahmad the other side of a glass partition that separates Arrivals from Baggage Reclamation and tries to attach his attention (before tellingly speaking to him through the transparent obstacle), we find that the past is an all-too-visible barrier in the reactions that are evoked.

In reacting to those three in this film who are sixteen or younger, it could be that acceptable discipline is viewed differently in France, but the way in which Marie and (to a lesser extent) Samir behave towards them in some scenes will shock. When, straight afterwards, Samir takes the time to listen to his son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) and hear what he says, he comes to a better understanding in a very moving moment together, and Fouad and he have then dynamically changed their positions in relation to each other (and, therefore, regarding the others).

Léa (Jeanne Jestin), who seems younger, has less of a role, but, when she challenges Fouad about the account of things that he gave to Marie earlier, the truth of their positions resonates. Likewise, Marie’s fury towards Lucie (Pauline Burlet, whose plausibility as Marie’s elder (16-year-old) daughter is undoubted) abates, as Ahmad knew that it would, but, as in a game of chess – where a player moving a piece can ‘reveal’ an attacking capability of another piece on his or her side, one answered question leads to another – much as steps in a dance (though, in literal terms, this is a piece of cinema that is refreshingly sparing in its score).

In The Past, there are references to depression, but they are no mere tokenistic ones, showing another experience in life that can drastically separate those having it from the world and from loved ones – which is not helped if family, friends, employers, and so on do not understand its capacity for suppression of feeling, even to the extent that nothing reaches through it or at all matters. For Farhadi’s dialogue shows that he knows what he is talking about, and includes scenes both when Marie reminds Ahmad of how it had been for him, and then when he, having remembered that time, talks to Lucie about what depression is like.

Depression is in this screenplay as an integral reflection of our lives, and so Ahmad’s restaurateur friend Shahryar (Babak Karimi), recognizing the pressures on Ahmad, points out to him that he does not belong in this place (he flew in from Tehran days before), here where the other barriers that, in a complex way, the film revolves are doubt, delusion and dilemmas.

Very subtly, without overplaying differences between West and East, Farhadi has Ahmad show that he can come alongside the others, relate to them, and help them to articulate and approach the fears that torment and threaten to overwhelm them. They kick and scream, and he may not always be right (mainly when talking about himself), but there is an empowering that they receive without necessarily appreciating that it came from outside them. However, as the ironic face of one of the impulses that can bring on (or heighten) depression, he is the sort of help to them that one senses that he could never be to himself when still in France.

Here, when Marie and he got soaked walking to the car, he does the right thing and offers to dry the hair at the back for her. However, he is distracted, and maybe he only offered because he thought that he should, and so ends up holding the drier in one place and burns her head – throughout, there are instances of people doing or saying something on the basis that it is expected (with Fouad a largely welcome change). Farhadi permits, amidst a narrative that takes us by surprise, these gentle moments of dramatic irony, when we momentarily see the course of things and smile, or snort with amusement.

This is a stunningly strong film and, agonize as one might that, under it all, it would fall apart and betray its promise, it disappoints in no respect. In short :





End-notes

* Another film that tried and, in other ways, spectacularly misjudged was the histrionic Dust on our Hearts (Staub auf unseren Herzen) (2012), complete with its own scene with paint...



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