Showing posts with label Uma Thurman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uma Thurman. Show all posts

Monday, 22 July 2019

Stop trying to hit me - and hit me ! ~ Morpheus

A response to re-watching Kill Bill : Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004)

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

22 July

A response to re-watching, but on a cinema-screen, Kill Bill :
Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004)


For Jim 'TAKE ONE' Ross






In Kill Bill, Tarantino has set himself not only making a revenge story into a film, but also one where he has delayed addressing what happened that gave rise to it at least until the beginning of Vol. 2 (2004) - even if he does not completely do so until Beatrix Kiddo ('The Bride' / Uma Thurman) has tracked down and confronted Bill (David Carradine), whom we do not even see until Vol. 2.



Suspending the full account for what we have seen for around four hours (since Vol. 1 (2003) is very nearly two hours, and Vol. 2 is longer) puts an especial need to represent the 'chapters' of the film (and parts of them) in a way that makes them varied and discrete, because Tarantino has to maintain our interest in what we see, without our really knowing why we are seeing it.



In Vol. 1, Tarantino cannot resist the bloody fountains that are loosed by decapitation (Boss Tanaka / Jun Kunimura) or severing an arm (Sofie Fatale / Julie Dreyfus), and, whatever anatomical truth there may be in such depictions, he knows that he needs to keep the imagery fresh : so, for example, he switches into monochrome during the onslaught by The Crazy 88s ; when O-Ren Ishii first witnesses killing, he has it rendered in anime ; and The Bride’s first meeting with Hattori Hanzo¹ is quirkily in the style of a picture-story.


There is humour here (as well as passion), but there is more in Vol. 2, and it is more overt - for example, Gordon Liu (who headed The Crazy 88s in Vol. 1) as the amusingly tetchy Kung Fu Master Pai Mei. What remains covert and unexplained – and just as a given (apart from when alluded to in the edgily hilarious stand-off with Karen (Helen Kim) and the pregnancy-test) – is the exact purpose of Bill's having, at his disposal, the killers of The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad : because Tarantino wisely does not flesh it out, and Bill appears both a dilettante and fairly irrational, it seems to operate not as a commercial venture, but a vanity-project. (Which seems quite fitting.)


 When, as if to make a statement by their full deployment (though, for the reasons given, it is unclear what that statement would be²), they attack The Bride and her wedding-party, the squad comprises three other women and Bill’s brother, Budd (Michael Madsen). By the time of the opening of Vol. 1, two remain active (O-Ren (Lucy Liu) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah)), so it is not as if this is an outfit that one can never leave, because Budd (Michael Madsen) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) are in forms of domesticity, and, in Vol. 1, The Bride indeed meets (and kills) the latter in a stage of motherhood that is consistent with having quit from working for Bill soon afterwards.


We all deserve to die ~ Budd
[before he qualifies his utterance]


As we would expect with Tarantino, by Vol. 2 we have looped around on ourselves in this respect, and dialogue has forearmed us, at least, that The Bride’s daughter also survived the shooting (now called B.B., and played by Perla Haney-Jardine). (We know no more than that, or how Bill brought about the current state of affairs, but it must have been the influence of money - as in Chinatown (1974), a film-reference that has greater relevance below.)


Even without knowing the film itself, we may well doubt whether Bill’s influence as a parent is for good when we hear that one of those from which B.B. makes a choice, when she asks if her mother will watch a video with her, is Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi’s Shogun Assassin (1980) : at the same time as Tarantino also appears to be evoking the dubious battle, in Chinatown, for Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway’s) daughter Katherine, born to her own father (Noah Cross), he somehow satisfies us, at the end of the film(s), that The Bride and Bill have wholly different motivations, and that her motherhood will be very different from his fatherhood.

John Huston, James Hong, and Belinda Palmer in Chinatown (1974)

For all the deceptions that Evelyn Mulwray practises on J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), and his indulgence of them (not patiently borne), perhaps we have good reason similarly to believe that she would have been kinder to her daughter than Noah Cross will be…






As co-creator with Tarantino of the character of The Bride, Uma Thurman carries us along with her.


Not unusually for the genre of revenge in film (or for its motives unfolding slowly and backwards), this story of a suffering figure, whom we see bloody and beaten, resembles the opposite of hagiography, or of the purpose of an allegory such as that of Constance in Chaucer's Clerk's tale in (The Canterbury Tales), because The Bride expressly endures to kill those who would have killed her and for that motivation :


She is identified strongly with motherhood only towards the end of Vol. 2, and, despite her having a daughter, killed Vernita Green (albeit not as intended) in Vol. 1. Vernita talks of somewhere else to go for a fight (as, later, Bill does), but means it only as a distraction from their murderous plans, whereas, in moonlight and unexpectedly fallen snow, O-Ren provides another an unexpected venue for their fight to the death (although, as she admits, she expected to have tired The Bride out indoors, with The Crazy 88s).



Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest, and, like a forest, it’s easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in ~ Hattori Hanzo


Ashen when, Christ like, The Bride defeats the grave and cheats death, but still slogs it barefoot to rendezvous with Budd and Elle, she stands for some different force : driven by retribution, and, although she is calm, her serenity does not resemble that of The Annunciation from the predella of an altarpiece by Veneziano³, but the bloodiness and brutal energy of the deeds in A Miracle of St Zenobius, which, accompanying the former, helped form part of one whole :



For the life of the flesh is in the blood : and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls ~ Leviticus 17 : 11a [KJV]


As if abiding by some code of honour (and in a scene that involves too much screeching⁴), we have seen Bill persuade Elle not to kill The Bride in her sleep. Yet, as we find at the close of Vol. 2, it is not, except on his terms, a sense of fairness such as suits him (as does her being in a coma, and the humiliations to which it subjects her ?).

The familiar Orwellian allusion will not escape us when we see that Bill is in Room 101 in the complex where The Bride finds him - just as, by firing a dart at her, he does not allow her to escape saying that she did not believe that marrying Tommy Plympton would actually work out.


Although the immobility of The Bride's bottom half is alluded to by Buck (during his coarse briefing to the sex-client who wants to sleep with her), she is arbitrarily still accorded use of her arms and torso. Having freed herself from Buck, she is seen exerting herself to retire to the back-seats of his Pussy Wagon, and willing strength to exist and make itself manifest in her lower body - a scene that Tarantino and Thurman's characterization has given such emphasis (through voice-over and her repeated injunction to her big toe) that we know, and should keep recalling, how extraordinary are the powers, now and later, with which she gains control of her physical body.



Talking to The Bride at the close of Kill Bill, as well as saying – an understatement ! – that he over-reacted when she disappeared, Bill claims that motherhood was not going to change her nature as a killer.


By the incidental bite of a mosquito (as she is a form of Sleeping Beauty), The Bride woke to a full and vivid awareness of the enormity of the horror of what happened to put her in a coma⁵. We have since seen her screw her energies to kill all those who denied her motherhood and would have stood in her way, as it turns out, of getting not only to Bill, but to her daughter.



The conundrum that the film poses is whether, by doing all that she did, she has actually proved him right.






Epilogue :



There is an entry for Kill Bill : Vol. 3 on IMDb, but, unless you have guessed, you might not wish to know what it tells you...


End-notes :

¹ It is just ‘one of these things’ about Kill Bill that The Bride is so easily able to enlist the services of Hattori Hanzo (Shin’ichi Chiba (Sonny Chiba), who also tutored the cast) just by alluding to the debt that he owes because of his former disciple (whom Hanzo himself readily identifies as Bill) – presumably, this is why he went into retirement, and breaks a sacred vow to come out of it (Bill, yet only through expedience, is surprised that he did).

² Beyond, that is, the impact in the internal world of the film(s), although voice-over tells us that, in news-reports, the killings went by at least two names – despite hearing the police chief’s pronouncements at the scene, we are simply not invited to consider in any detail what it would actually have looked like for four weapons to be used against less than a dozen unsuspecting people.

In the first film, we not only see the devastation, but also the plea from The Bride to Bill ; in the other, after the two have talked, the camera retires to a safe distance, up and to the left of the chapel, when the four assassins are entering, so that the episode becomes aural, not visual (as we have already seen, what was to be seen).


 ³ Domenico Veneziano (Domenico di Bartolomeo da Venezia) (1400-1461) ; painter ; Italian artist. Church of Sta. Lucia dei Magnoli, Florence : both panels are now in The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

 ⁴ The 'marked-on' nature of Daryl Hannah's attire signifies more than it may seem. She may come good in her last couple of minutes on screen, but otherwise, unless Tarantino saw something in her in The Tie That Binds (1995) (or her role as Morticia Addams), she both seems an odd choice (as Sean O'Hagan put it, in The Observer, Tarantino's latest chosen candidate for career resurrection), and nearly did not carry it off. (Nonetheless, Kill Bill may have led on to other things for her.)

⁵ Although Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (Hable con ella) (2002) may look more like coma-care ?




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 28 February 2014

From my London case-book

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


28 February

This is a review of Nymphomaniac Vol. I (followed up with a review of Vol. II)

For a minute or two, the screen is dark, but with noises of what sounds like a railway, running water, a creak – which is what cinema is until we come to interpret it, the things with which we are presented and what they might mean. Will we even believe what we are shown, if someone is telling a story ?

Then, in what does not seem like an actual crooked alleyway, a woman lying (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a man who has no reason to go there to find her (Stellan Skarsgård) : establishing that she does not intend to stay there, if he goes for help, a request for a cup of tea with milk leads directly to her propped up in bed, in his pyjamas, in a room with dingy, peeling wallpaper, almost out of place and time. (She gets tea, but without milk.)

As is what little we see of the exterior world, which is supposed to be Britain, but the interiors have a continental feel to them, and – even if the ticket-collector does have a British Railways badge – did trains ever seem so German in recent times ? These things aside, another bargain between Joe and Seligman, that she will explain why she thinks herself so bad, if he promises to listen to everything. A narrative that begins I discovered my cunt at the age of two is self-consciously a Freudian case-study, whatever else it might be.



The director may have tied Seligman into the bargain, but around two hours is only half the story, and does he risk half his audience not caring to come back for the rest ? So far, the mix includes resentment at an invited deflowering by an older boy, a game of conquests with a friend, an attempt to adhere to one-night stands, a little of The Dice Man thrown in for good measure, a monochrome sequence in a hospital unlike any that it seems to be supposed to resemble, and coincidences that have Seligman wondering whether the line that is being spun belongs, where we started, with The Compleat Angler.

Do we understand, or want to understand, the younger Joe (played by Stacy Martin) whom we see ? Are the increasing analogies that are being used, which twice pop up on the screen in big white letters the words Cantus firmus when Seligman is explaining how a work of Bach’s is put together, interposing layers of irritation, even if Joe thinks that it explains the parts to what she wants from three lovers ? In terms of the film, it is just taking time to display the three lovers separately, and together, in bands when, if it means anything to her, it is not a visual concept.

Amongst other things, the diagrams of streams, of layers of water within them, of the physics of parallel parking, and of the Fibonacci series and how succeeding terms are calculated, von Trier plants all these on the screen, but he would not need to, if his characters were adequately equipped to express themselves (or could be relied on)* ? Who Seligman is and what he has done, we do not know, but he tells Joe, a former medical student, about delirium tremens, as if she would not know, he likens her sex-games to angling – is this to avoid relating to what he is actually being told, as we would think, if someone did it to us, saying that it was just like x ?

Try as he might to be a sympathetic listener, always trying to find some ground for Joe to think better of herself than she does (or for him not to think badly of her), there is a clinicality that hangs over this film, which not even the gaspingly absurd nature of some of the recollected interchanges can dispel. One minute, never really having had proper duties working for Jerôme, Joe has lost it, the next we hear of work is that she somehow has a full-time job. An entertaining extended scene with Uma Thurman (Mrs H.), from which there is no going on, gives way to the one in the hospital, seemingly as much as a displacement as anything.

The way in which, at some level, Seligman is drawn in hints that whether, complete with diagrams, this is a shaggy-dog story or a fish on the hook he may regret taking care of this bruised stranger (it all looks pretty superficial, and there is no suggestion that she is caught by pain in all of this time - not at all consistent with what we will come to be shown has happened to her). Volume II alone will tell…




End-notes

* Then again, he shows a Greek temple with its façade enclosed in a rectangle, but there is no explanation that the ratio between height and width is that, as the series develops, between successive terms, known as The Golden Section, which was considered most visually pleasing.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 17 March 2012

Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (3)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 March

* Contains some spoilers *

The most ludicrous claim* that I have read about this film (from the Arts Picturehouse's programme booklet, which I didn't look at before my viewing):

[Robert] Pattinson plays the seductive scoundrel with unbounded pomp and a voraciousness that oozes star quality, outshining a top-notch supporting cast that includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas.


Nothing to do with being unclear which of the phrases is 'oozing', although I saw no ooze, but the belief that, albeit Pattinson is on screen almost all of the time, that means that he outshines anyone is seriously misguided - just physically, and in poise, tone and demeanour, Uma Thurman, for example, is radiant as Madeleine, and she is the part, whereas Pattinson never quite seems to know what his part is, let alone plausibly play it.

But then, nor do the directors or the writers of the screenplay, which is part of the problem...


As to things elsewhere, I see that Philip French has one of his rather terse 'reviews' in The Guradian*, of which this long sentence (which looks longer in columns, and is as chaotic as mine) constitutes almost one-third (without talking about the film in hand at all!):

In 1947 the former English professor, drama critic and leading MGM producer Albert Lewin wrote and directed a fascinating version of Maupassant's 1885 novel Bel Ami about the upward progress of the charming, untalented journalist Duroy (nicknamed "Bel Ami") in a corrupt late-19th-century Paris where the press are in cahoots with the politicians.


Yet, whenever anyone talks about this novel by Maupassant (and, often enough, reviews or synopses of films that adapt something for the first time often enough skate over the origins entirely), why do I get that impression that no one has actually read the thing...?


End-notes

* Less absurd, but no less bad, is this account (from a free paper's cinema section):

Based on the classic Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name [the poster for the film handily points out 'this fact', though I have no conception whether it is a classic, or why it's not having been called Mr Bean's Revenge matters]. A charming but manipulative Parisien [which, in the film, he isn't since, as he points out to Madeleine (Thurman), they didn't go to where he was brought up when they got married] makes his way up the rungs of the social ladder by bedding the most beautiful and influential women in the city [Ricci, as Clotilde, is beautiful, but not influential; the husbands of the other two are both important, one (Charles) in the newspaper that the other owns, but the women and they are just - and only - the people whom he meets when he is invited to dinner by Charles]. Uncertain and awkward in the beginning [does that change?], he learns quickly [ditto] as he conquers - and breaks - hearts [but only having been lavishly and unequivocally tipped off how to conquer those hearts - and why].

** SOme such!


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Thursday, 15 March 2012

Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 March

A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...


1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?

They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:

It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)

Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.

How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!


2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!

Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.

We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.

He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...


NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'


3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud

World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:

They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:

* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)

* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him

* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)


You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.

How? asks Georges.

Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...


End-notes

* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...

** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.


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Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (1)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 March

* Contains a splashing of spoilers *

I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.

As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.

As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.

So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)

Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).

There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.

Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).

This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.

Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)

I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)


So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.

Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)

Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.

Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).

There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.

Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.

Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.


PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).

All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)


For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...


End-notes

* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.

** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.

*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).

**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)

***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.

****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.

******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!


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