Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

We’re all different on the inside

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

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8 April (updated 9 April)

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

It was a very good thing not to have seen the poster for Starred Up (2013) before the screening, which is where the tag-line for this posting comes from – accepted that posters (and trailers) are to convey messages that their makers think will ‘sell’ the film, and those interests may be divergent from those who made the film, but still… Whatever intention there was to allude to psychological truth, the clanging impression was of a gaudy headline from The Sun !

There have been powerful films concerning prison in recent years : Cell 211 (Celda 211) (2009) has a relentless, driving energy (not unlike that of Drive (2011)) – even if it does not manage to disguise a fatal flaw at the centre of its plot ; Hunger (2008) has a very different raw strength, and a far greater one than that of 12 Years A Slave (2013) ; even Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein in I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime) (2008) evoke an experience of a prison that is never seen.


However, despite Starred trying to get us to believe that it is powerful by the incessant spitting out of words such as ‘cunt’ and its accompanying violence / brutality of a physical kind, it is not. As that tag-line suggests, it feels as though it has more in common not with, say, Steve McQueen’s vision in Hunger, but with t.v.’s long-running series Porridge (and that a comedy !).

Saying this goes against the trend of appreciation for this film (and / or its lead) (as it did with Slave), but one has to say what one saw, heard, felt, believed – just as much as with a concert in, say, not joining in those giving Sir John Eliot Gardiner an ovation for the Monteverdi Vespers (1610).

No one is Fletch[er] (Ronnie Narker – oops, Barker !) in this film, but the character of ‘Genial’ Harry Grout (menacingly played by Peter Vaughan in the series) has become the softer, cardigan-wearing Spencer (Peter Ferdinando, looking quite a bit as he did for Tony (2010) – sadly, unlike other reviewers, IMDb is not much help, as has been found before, for checking these things). (Probably he has his reasons for carrying respect and having the ear of Governor Hayes* (Sam Spruell), but they are not visible, unlike the trophies of doing so.)

With the Grout figure as Spencer, his interventions (or attempts at them) and / or those of Hayes apart, the film is essentially the triangular form of father (Neville Love), son (Eric Love) and therapist (Oliver), which seems like some secular form of The Trinity. Possessive love (Love !), telling people what to do, disobedience, helping others to help themselves, envy, corruption, adopting final solutions (ends, not means) – almost a catalogue of The Seven Deadly Sins (and the smallest hint of the Classical Virtues in the midst).

People say that Jack O’Connell (Eric) and Ben Mendelsohn (Neville) were strong, but probably the more impressive scenes were joint work, the complex interactions between those in Rupert Friend’s (Oliver’s) threatened group : amongst whom, IMDb seems to help find at least Anthony Welsh (Hassan) and David Ajala (Tyrone). Screenwriter Jonathan Asser is reported as having run such a group, so one is necessarily prevented from querying the credibility or the dynamics within the regime of such a venture (even though it could still be a rarity), yet, at the same time, one wants to disbelieve – depending on when this is meant to be set – that this initiative would happen in a prison, but not be (or not properly) supported by the authorities.

One also relies on Asser for a notion of prison life, but, as has been suggested above, the portrayal seems almost second hand, and not visceral to the core, but only superficially, in that it echoes with HMP Slade in a way that the exemplars cited do not. Yet, in Porridge, we are carefully introduced to slang such as ‘snout’ (because comedy does not work best if the audience is lost), whereas here almost too few concessions are made – fail to catch what being starred up means (which, it appears, Eric views as a badge of honour**), and there are no second chances.

In fact, it has been said that the DVD release will have, if not exactly subtitles, then some method for making the fleeting explicable – quite apart from the fact that the medium also allows the action to be paused and replayed. If that is correct***, then one must judge for oneself whether such a move suggests that there is an element of misjudging what a general viewer grasps, as against accustomed reviewers (though they may have the luxury, if not of a screening that allows them to revisit in this way, then a so-called screener, effectively an advance DVD).


* May be spoilers beyond this point *

The violence in the film convinces, as does the anger and all its forms of expression. The setting and the degradingly impersonal admission process (when we do not know who Eric is) speak volumes, and, if one’s duties have ever taken one to a prison as a visitor, the aural and tactile sense of door after door being unlocked****, gone through, and locked again (so that there is level after level hindering one’s return) is frighteningly real, almost as being lost in a labyrinth is.

@GavinMidgley's @TakeOneCFF review is well worth a read (he found 'stock characters' and 'stretched' credibility) : http://t.co/oit4AbfWDZ
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 9, 2014


It may just be individual taste whether Friend, Mendelsohn and Ferdinando seem persons or stereotypes, in writing, casting and demeanour. O’Connell, scripted as a loose cannon in Eric, is fine enough, but does it carry a whole film – and would Eric do things just because he can, yet listen to a different voice (of Oliver) and stop (and how different would this voice really be, or is it that he has heard other such voices before ?) ? Rational enough that Eric later imputes motives with which he is familiar to question the reason for what that voice / Oliver says, but why back off from brinkmanship ?

The rest of the film purports to explore this Eric to whom we have been introduced, but how much more do we actually see ? – and what could we have been shown… ?


End-notes

* Can IMDb really be right that there are two prison governors, because the person credited as Governor Cardew (Sian Breckin) clearly ‘pulls rank’ on him… ?

(Needless to say, pulling rank – or claiming that one has the rank to pull – is a large part of this film.) When it comes to the three main characters that are identified, IMDb does not even seem to know that the common surname is Love.


** * Contains some spoilery, detailed comments *

He by no means has the smallest ego in the piece, but – from what one can gather – the lack of contact between father and son spans at least a decade, and nothing much is given about his time between then and what brought him to the young offenders’ institution. (It is unknown whether relatives (Neville knows that Eric is there and who he is) would be incarcerated together generally, or as here – maybe Asser knows ?)

It remains to be judged whether this is right about the film, but, when a high percentage of the prison population has untreated (or even undiagnosed) mental-health conditions, it treats the people whom we see as Porridge might. So they have personalities and peccadillos, but mainly not problems of this kind.

In our focus, a select few get a group version of what is delivered on a one-to-one basis in films such as Good Will Hunting (1997) (other examples abound, before and since, of therapy and cinema), the others maybe nothing, and is that what – or only what – Eric needs ? (The counter-attack that he launches on someone whom he wrongly thinks is approaching with evil intent hints that there is more going on.)


*** In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw handily tells us :

The film's press pack came with a glossary explaining to reviewers some of the other code-words: "kanga" meaning officer; "tech" meaning mobile phone; "kick off back door" meaning anal sex, and "straightener", meaning pre-planned fight.


**** At the crucial time, however, conveniently no clanking and clunking, and more like Peter Gabriel’s ‘drawers that slide smooth’ (‘Mercy Street’, from the album Us).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 6 March 2014

Review by Tweet of events on the evening of 5 March 2014

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6 March (updated, with some credits, 8 March)
































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Tuesday, 4 March 2014

Patricia Kopatchinskaja directs

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4 March

A review of a concert given at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), Cambridge, by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, directing Britten Sinfonia on Monday 3 March




From the pre-concert talk, where Patricia Kopatchinskaya (@PatKopViolin) was interviewed by the chief executive of Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), David Butcher, it seemed that she might have curated this concert with the ensemble’s strings. Certainly, she was keen that we should hear the work by Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian (Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra No. 2, Four Serious Songs), and, when asked what he hoped that we would take away, that we should listen with the heart.


Brahms (1833–1897) (arr. Angerer (b. 1927))
In any case, as one would expect from a Sinfonia concert, sensitive programming was by no means the least part of the evening, which opened with a group of pieces (a selection from Brahms’ Choral Preludes, Op. 122 (from 1896), as arranged by Paul Angerer) that spoke with direct, condensed spirituality, but in a variety of moods. The first, O Gott, du frommer Gott, had a very full string sound, and it was only gradually that it became apparent that there was a presence of a voice amongst the texture because a few players, such as leader Thomas Gould, were actually holding their instruments and vocalizing – a very subtle and aetherial effect, which was used in one other of the preludes.

In Herzlich tut mich erfreuen, a prelude that opened with viola and cello, there was an impression of disembodied spirits swaying, whereas, in Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen, there was a more weighty feel, as of a force that is in a flow, but resisting it. With Mein Jesu, der du mich, the writing seemed fugal, but lighter in quality, until, that is, the final entry of the basses, which felt to be sounding the depths – a haunting number, which had a relatively sudden end. The final prelude, O Welt, ich muss dich lassen, alternated tutti with a small group of the principals, and had the air, if not the exact theme, of Bach’s St Matthew passion, closing with a heartfelt pianissimo, one of the Sinfonia’s specialities.


Tigran Mansurian (b. 1939)
The link with Brahms was that, in the form of his Four Serious Songs, he gave rise to Tigran Mansurian’s Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra No. 2 – their texts and spirit provided the genesis for a new work, from 2006, which opens with an Andante con moto and the use of harmonics in its introduction, and a slide-effect that resembled keening. In the solo part, where Kopatchinskaja was sometimes dramatically left as an extremely chromatic lone voice and with material that revolved around various types of scale and silence, she played with great expressiveness.

Perhaps significantly, the movement closed following a prominent rising scale, given that texts from Brahms’ original settings ranged from the Book of Ecclesiastes to the celebrated passages in the first letter to the Corinthians, which ends the greatest of these is love. It was followed by another movement marked Andante, but this time qualified by mosso agitato, which was evidenced in some tempestuous currents, which then died away and led to a hesitant solo. When the orchestra re-entered and combined with the lyricism of the solo part, it felt like a prayer. Tension then built dramatically, as a piano passage crescendoed, culminating in an abrupt gesture, after which what seemed like a pianissimo possibile was highly effective : the violin sounded like a pleading voice, and the writing again made use of a scale. Reminiscent of the words in the Book of Isaiah, a smoldering wick he will not quench, the movement closed like a faltering flame.

Next came an Allegro vivace, which had a vivid melody, but with interruptions, and then gave way to another version, this time with harmonics, before resuming. A piece of simple gestures, and again exploiting the quality of being very quiet. To conclude, a movement marked Con moto, molto semplice, which, although coming last, felt like the heart of the work in the form of a culmination, and started with a rocking theme, as of a lullaby, but leading to some very violent writing for the cello section. In the solo part, the material seemed very embellished, and the movement continued with outbursts, before drawing to a close in what seemed an organic way. Though not a work that was necessarily easy on a first hearing, it clearly spoke to the Cambridge audience, as mediated by Kopatchinskaja, and was well received.


Bartók (1881–1945)
In the final work of the first half, the Bartók Romanian Folk Dances from 1915, Kopatchinskaja did not exactly take liberties with what typical recordings do with them*, but she made them feel as a musician in the folk tradition might treat them, fitting the rendition / performance to the occasion, and alive to how it is being received. In the few minutes that the group of dances last, we ran a whole gamut from vigorous playing and slide-notes, performed with feeling, to a sense of restraint, coupled with squeaks and teasing from the soloist. There was also a gypsy strain to the solo violin early on, and, later, a very idiomatic quality to the violin, with the set of dances being brought to a close with immense energy and a strong sensation of joy, evidently conveyed to those present, to judge from the applause.


Janáček (1854–1928) (arr. Tognetti (b. 1965))
Returned from the interval, the audience was in the world of Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 from 1923 (nicknamed or subtitled The Kreutzer Sonata). (There was a fascinating note about the composer's struggle for recognition in the (ever useful) Sinfonia programme.) This time, however, it was the quartet as interpreted for string ensemble by Richard Tognetti. Without in any way disputing the choice of repertoire from a couple of seasons ago, this was, unlike Mahler’s of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (alias Death and the Maiden), an arrangement that really added to one’s appreciation of the original, rather than merely having it writ large :

It felt unforced throughout, and not like those orchestrations that try to change the scale of a work. In the opening Adagio, the strings had a luminosity to them, striving, as the movement developed, to achieve serenity from a sense of anxiety. Then, in the first of three movements marked Con moto, a suspenseful atmosphere, where things felt sharp, and, although broken by an edgily sunny interlude, one that intensified. Under Kopatchinskaja, the Sinfonia played with immense delicacy and poise, with a delicious bass and a figure that kept repeating, as if unable not to.

The very familiar third movement, with its vivid change of tempi, communicated one central message amidst its reference to Beethoven’s sonata and sometimes wistful, sometimes agitated beauty, that of a gesture of trying to erase something – as of Lady Macbeth compulsively washing her hands, over and again. In the finale, with phrasing that felt like a bird trying to fly, despite some ensnarement, the musicality of Kopatchinskaja was supremely evident. Heightened tension in the pizzicato passages and a racing movement in the cello section seemed to lead inevitably to the turbulent close of this work, with what came across as a mood of resignation. All in all, a lovely way to hear this music, which has thankfully become better known in the last decade or so.


Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Finally, a youthful work from Mendelssohn for violin and strings, which Kopatchinskaja had told us that she likes better than his famous concerto. In three movements, it began with an Allegro, and we were soon brought to the tender heart of the theme. From there, the soloist was called upon to execute a series of runs, and then a moment of stasis, with a sustained note, became the springboard for yet more – the writing and playing were both virtuosic, and the latter brought freedom to the former, with Kopatchinskaja giving the impression of improvising cadenzas.

In that part of the concerto, Mendelssohn seemed to be enjoying himself with a recurrent motif, whereas, in the central Andante, he brought us an exquisitely beautiful theme, which Kopatchinskaja made soar and sway with ease – it seemed almost to have the sweetness of birdsong, with the Sinfonia’s ensemble sensitive to the mood, and the movement closed quiescently. With a lively dance tune in the Allegro finale, Kopatchinskaja and Mendelssohn’s sense of playfulness were in their element, and brought the programme to a triumphant finish.


Ligeti (1923–2006)
Not quite, though, for leader Thomas Gould and Kopatchinskaja gave a duo of Ligeti as an encore : the Ballade had the feeling of a Gaelic air, as against the boisterously spirited Danse, and were much appreciated as a closing gesture.




Judge for yourself : here is Hewitt's review...


All in all, a very pleasurable chance to hear this artist, and this Tweet may sum up many a reaction :



Asked what longer work she would bring if she came back, she had said that, depending on with whom else she was playing, she would choose :

* One of the Sonatas for Violin and Piano

* The Sonata for Solo Violin

* The Violin Concerto No. 2, or one of the Rhapsodies



End-notes

* It had been quite clear from what she said in the pre-concert talk that she had been most reluctantly persuaded of the importance to developing her career of making CDs, which she had rebelled against because their unfree nature, as fixed in and for all time, which goes quite counter to her spirit of intuition and innovation.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 2 March 2014

You’ve fucked thousands of men !

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2 March

This is a review of Nymphomaniac Vol. II (2013), and follows on from a review of Vol. I



In the catalogue of sexual possibilities*, Vol. II leaves an obvious one unexplored till late, and, even if it did not end as it does (its blackout over imagined action mirrors the opening), it would be hard to conceive (pun intended !) that a night of confession would lead to a radical resolve on Joe’s part, despite the alleged merits of a problem shared.

There are certainly plays that have us believe in the redemptive possibilities of talking till dawn or the like (and, equally, there is Chekhov and works such as Uncle Vanya), and enough of the dialogue even smacks of the stage (both now, between Joe and Seligman, and between Joe and others in her recollection) : whatever therapy goes on here, with what Joe calls Seligman’s digressions (and, as the review of Vol. I identifies in him, her accusing him of not listening), seems like Long Day’s Journey into Night.

The credits confirm that the films were shot in continental Europe, Nordrhein-Westfalen (in Germany) and in Belgium (Ghent ?), despite the ostentatious show of modern-day fivers, and the one-pound notes that ceased circulation in the early 1980s and their predecessors, whereas all that establishes the possibility of Britain is Stacy Martin’s RP way of being matter of fact as younger Joe, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s very obviously British – if less class-ridden – tones.

Perhaps Lars von Trier seriously intends by these means to pass off other countries as the UK, but the whimsicality of the currency is matched by having Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) see a conflagration that he does not know about or which Joe has yet to put in context : it is on the screen, and it is as if he reads it from Joe’s mind, just as he does when he decodes her secular transfiguration with The Whore of Babylon and the promiscuous wife of a Roman Emperor. Finding meanings, interpreting things, he seems to live in his head, whereas Joe, if not in her heart, then in her body and its sensations.

In fact, she seems to go to the opposite extreme from being bookish and knowing what everything is, and in her Martin incarnation especially sounds often not so much ironic, as maybe she is meant to be in a ‘cute’ sort of way, as vacuous. Yet in this film we are meant to believe that she is earning at a level where she can make a payment of £1,000 per month beyond the cost of living – or maybe that just sounded a good sum to von Trier, and he does not realize what her salary would have to be…

The film likes to run the gamut of filmic techniques, perhaps just in case we are getting stale, so stock footage of nature is used, which is just before the scene of levitation when Joe has her revelation, and another chapter is edgily hand-held, whereas the two-person scenes with Seligman and Joe have them occupy the space from all angles. Something that Joe says about the number of permutations of the leads of an eight-cylinder engine suggests that trying everything every way seems to be a drive that she shares with von Trier.

It certainly leads to films whose combined running time is a minute more than four hours, but it felt much longer than a night’s worth of narration** :



However long it ran, how was this film going to end, when all the talking was done ? With what might seem a cheap comment about what men really think about promiscuous women, not worthy of a typical man, let alone one of apparent education – and which then justified, after the fact, suspicions that all Seligman’s acceptance of Joe’s past actions had been insincere and for other reasons (and he, not Joe, is the predator with his lair and trap) ? What did that leave other than a shattered framing-device for a story of a woman who would say Fill my holes, but maybe had not much else to say, maybe was not always / ever telling the truth… ?

Cynically, if Seligman did not comprehend the nature of consensual sex and take what she said seriously, he had seemed as good a person as any to do so – or was the catharsis of just telling it all sufficient for this therapy to be of lasting value, despite the outcome ? Though the truth is that von Trier wanted to show us this, and chose the device of Joe telling it to Seligman (not her telling us) for its clear advantages, even at the risk of losing part of the audience (no doubt the less worthy part) for this second film.


Post-script

Lars von Trier thanks Andrei Tarkovsky in the credits : is this an acknowledgement, as seems to be the case, that the Bach work for organ that he uses was employed to such effect in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986) ?


End-notes

* Seen or mentioned are anal sex, masturbation, sadomasochism, lesbian sex, oral sex, double penetration, inter-racial sex, rape, dice sex, masturbating in public, and even intercourse.

** Apparently, the present films originate in response to an edit down to just 90 minutes.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 14 February 2014

Britten Sinfonia Voices : life, song and wine

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14 February

A concert given by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 11 February


This concert comprised three compositions by baritone Roderick Williams (two of which had received their World premiere at the Sinfonia’s concert in Norwich the previous week), four-part songs by Schubert and Schumann, and a Lied by the latter.

It started with Williams’ Red Herring Blues for clarinet and piano (from 1994), which opened with a jaunty solo from the former, played by Joy Farrall. Tom Poster then joined in, but with similar material that yet sounded different on a different instrument. As it developed, there were some violent gestures from the piano, reminiscent of moments in Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus when some powerful chords are struck, and even of that composer’s birdsong. A short, meditative piece, it ended with what seemed like a quotation from the first bars of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Next, the four members of Britten Sinfonia Voices (Susan Gilmour Bailey, Alexandra Gibson, Nicholas Mulroy, and Eamonn Dougan) gave two multipart Lieder of Schubert, Der Tanz (D. 826) from 1825, and then the earlier (1816) An die Sonne (D. 439), the second much longer than the first, which gave a taste of the operatic quality of these voices, which happily reached right to the back of the auditorium, and with very clear German diction. An die Sonne allowed us to hear what good voices they are individually, before blending them again so well.

Whereas the other Lied contrasted the despondency and infirmity of age with the energy and dancing of youth, this writer, Johann Peter, turns to weightier things : the poet’s persona enjoying creation in the immediate moment, even praising it, but suddenly realizes the truth of his mortality along with it. The line-ending of the final stanza, Staub (dust, in the phrase ‘Return to dust !’) is followed by a somewhat creepy tone from Mulroy’s tenor, but, as the stanza is reprised, resolving into a happier conception (via the word Laub, meaning ‘foliage’).

The first of Williams’ two commissions by the Sinfonia and Wigmore Hall was The last house on the river, for all forces, and had an eerie quality to its opening, and hints of Boulez’ writing for piano, before we heard from the clarinet in its chalumeau register. The work went round in cycles of Williams responded to by the singers in close-harmony style, and with regular instrumental intermissons.

Karen Hayes’ highly poetic text (she is the librettist for both works) is deftly set by Williams, and the very English sound of the group of four anchored this very specific evocation of time and place, with the intensity of the what is perceived picked out by the almost improvisatory feel of the clarinet writing. An enthusiastic round of applause met this new work, and the sensation in West Road Concert Hall was that there was appreciation for a well-conceived and performed programme of music by and sung by Williams and his colleagues.

A solo Schumann Lied followed, Auf einer Burg (from Liederkreis, Op. 39, setting Joseph von Eichendorff), where Williams’ mastery of his vocal resources, and of telling a story with his intonation and phrasing, were to the fore. As with the earlier Lieder, where there was a movement from a joyous state to – or to contemplating – a state of decline, this Lied leads us up, through all the surrounding circumstance, to a wedding, but the final image is that the beautiful bride (die schöne Braut) is crying.

Staying with Schumann, Britten Sinfonia Voices brought us Mondnacht, from 1840, which had a feeling of floating, of calm, with a change of mood as it ended just with piano. Then Schubert again, Schicksalsenker (D. 763) from eighteen years earlier, which began with tenor voice, and gave the feeling of being taken back in time, partly in the restraint with which the quartet sang, and partly in the repetition of the word from the title (Fate’s Anchor). The link is that there is a feeling of transcendence, of the soul stretching wide its wings (Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus), and of a world where every pain has escaped far away (Fern entfoh’n ist jeder Schmerz).

The feeling of Gemütlichkeit in the Trinklied (D. 183) from 1815 set the mood for this final group of works, with even a table and drinks of some sort as the Stammtisch of the Voices, as they gave us this drinking song, praising friendship and wine, and with variants of the sentiment of Ohne Freunde, ohne Wein, / ich nicht im Leben sein (‘Without friends, without wine, I should not like to be alive’) as the closing couplet to each verse.

Next, the second Williams’ commission In His Cups (again setting Karen Hayes), so one could see why it was keeping company with this Schubert genre. For this piece, Joy Farrall played off stage in a piece that evoked a Britten-like sort of Englishness, of a village pub, and of secular and church life in small communities in an earlier decade, and with outbursts from the piano. The diction and syntax of Hayes’ poetry takes one beyond John Clare and ‘The Deserted Village’ even to Shakespeare : But in his cups he’d thought her beautiful could evoke the topers in Twelfth Night, and Williams had carefully matched his setting to a pastoral of yesteryear, such as might parallel an inland Peter Grimes.

The final two short songs, both by Schubert (Lebenslust(D. 609) from 1818, and another Trinklied (D. 75) from 1813), ended the recital, and both stir up the notions of friendship. In the first, we have allein sein ist öde, wer kann sich da freu’n (‘To be alone is bleak, who could enjoy being there ?’), and the delivery was both crisp and emotional. The second had a clarinet line added to the scoring for tenor, chorus and piano, so it was a rousing close to the proceedings, with even a Schiller-like invocation of the spirit of brotherhood in Laßt uns all Brüder sein ! (‘Let us all be brothers !’) – perhaps the correct context of the ‘Ode to Joy’ is the pub ?!

A recital that delivered many flavours and juxtapositions, all of which seemed to enrich each other.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Ain't misbehavin'

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

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12 February

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

Just hearing the dialogue of the trailer, it had been clear that this film was a mess, and not a very appealing one. Still, though one chose not to face it in the case of Polanski’s Carnage (2011), some tasks cannot be ducked.


Quite apart from the fact that this film is not very cinematic in nature, sometimes it is just inadequately or even poorly shot – opening shots of landscape to set the scene do not, of course, have to be vibrantly beautiful, but these were mediocre, whereas a different unit, later in the film, produced some very nice work in and around the lake, and another ambiently showed when Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch) is met by from the coach by his father, Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper).

Inside the house, another sequence of Barbara (Julia Roberts) lying, rising, going out through the screen-door, and birds flying was all nicely filmed. Compare that with the distracting variable focus around the infamous lunch table, and no doubt some of the time the back of the chair was sharp so that Violet (Meryl Streep) was in soft focus, but other times her wrinkles were crisp, and there seemed no rhyme or reason as to what the camera was most on from one shot to the next. In this respect, this must take some beating as an entirely arbitrary approach that acts against concentrating on the swordplay.



Some of the lighting and composition of shots was not much better. No, not every shot need be composed so that it gives one an aesthetic thrill, but the sequence after the three sisters come out of the conservatory, and Violet tells her tale about the boots, is clunkiness itself, worse than many a holiday snap – if you have a visual medium, you cannot just offend the eye to feed the ear with dialogue and a faltering speech, as you might on the stage.

Tracy Letts is credited with the screenplay from her own stage-work, but, in the translation, she has in no way freed it just because there are cars (overtaking cars, even), a gathering at the Baptist church, and a few other moments outdoors. Some might say that the paucity of life outside the restless confines of the house throws one back on its claustrophobic quality and intensifies it, but, equally, it could have the effect of stressing the stage-bound nature of the writing, conception and direction.

Streep and Roberts are both nominated for awards, which seems to send the message that people who shout, say ‘fuck’ a lot, and declare that they are in charge are the best at acting. As to whether the repetitive lines given to Roberts, urging Streep ‘to eat the fish, bitch’, represent the heights of dramatic inspiration or its nadir may divide opinion, but it all seems to be about to set off the fuse off another lunch scene when, starting with Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), three plates of fish are dashed to the ground :

Which is the essential message, If you smash your food on the floor, I’m damned if I’m not going to do the same, more loudly and messily, if possible. Against all this rebellion, the best speech from Aiken was when he tells his wife, Violet’s sister, that they will not make it to their thirty-ninth anniversary unless she changes. Which begs, of course, the question how he ever made it to the thirty-eighth, and Violet’s husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) survived as long, because, at the rate at which emotional and relational ammunition is being fired off in the compass of the film, even the grass that is supposed to get Aiken through would have worn thin.

The plot tries to be like an Ibsen play, with secrets from the distant past back to haunt, let alone like Chekhov (Violet being in the position of Firs in The Cherry Orchard ?), and all this ‘truth-telling’ that Violet indulges in makes the stressful wedding reception in Melancholia (2011) seem like a walk in the park, except that one ultimately does not much care, because the film frankly does not, whether she is like it because of abusing psychiatric medication, because of any actual psychiatric condition and / or whether the abuse has made it worse, and / or because it is just in her nature.

Yet what all that says is that it has all happened in the past, because we are told both that Beverly has disappeared before and Violet has been in rehabilitation, so nothing is different now, but we are expected to believe that severe home-truths, which could not be unsaid, are being told for the first time. Apart from a fleeting suggestion that Violet might be a Lear-like figure to Barbara’s suddenly tyrannical Regan / Goneril, which might have been interesting, some more actually powerful moments than the fireworks around the table are :

* When Ivy tells Barbara and Karen (Juliette Lewis) that they have both left her to it, but she is going to New York (Three Sisters meets Uncle Vanya ?)

* Earlier, Karen’s monologue, overpowering Barbara in the car, and into the house

* Charlie meeting Little Charlie (as mentioned above)

* Ivy joining Little Charlie to watch t.v.


In this world, Lewis for turning herself into Karen, and Nicholson for a very nuanced performance, go unnoticed in the shade of the nominations, but not on this blog…




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Saturday, 1 February 2014

I like beating people !

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

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

1 February

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

One cannot help wondering whether writs (US) or claim forms (England & Wales)* will be flying over Alex Gibney’s film The Armstrong Lie (2013) (which takes its title from the headline of an article in L’Equipe [in English, The Team], ‘Le Mensonge Armstrong’).

The reason is given both by Armstrong’s litigious history, and the fact that, for example, accusations are made (even if made elsewhere before) about the connivance of the governing body’s officials with Armstrong about test-results that should have concerned them (more), the suggestion being that they gave those such as Armstrong a generous chance to come up with an explanation for positive findings : the film not only shows Armstrong presenting the cover-story that he had been prescribed a cream for saddle-sores whose use had caused him to register for steroids, but also how it is claimed, by those working with him, that, after hearing of the problem, they had trawled for a plausible excuse and found one in the cream (after which, presumably, a prescription being made out, as if on the relevant date, was the least of anyone’s worries).

Is though, in fact, the title The Armstrong Lie a partial misnomer, for, at least in part, the film revolves around (but never, maybe, centres on ?) all Armstrong’s denial that he doped, and on how he presented matters in a way favourable to him, as well maintaining the status quo, by such means as suing into submission those who spoke out ? Maybe reprehensible for a sportsman, who seems to have sacrificed friends Frankie and Betsy Andreu to defending his position, but all perfectly normal PR work of seeking to limit damage, one might cynically say, even if it does concern the emotive world of sport and the legendary feat of endurance that is Le Tour.

In fact, one could wager that the handling of what we might cause ‘the issue’ of illegal performance-enhancing drugs and even mid-race blood transfusions is probably textbook for the world of PR, and to place all the blame / responsibility on Armstrong, when, clearly, he had legal and medical advisers and so was not going to be short of the means and nous to employ advisers who could manipulate the media – the truth even – is short sighted. (In fact, as advisers, they would probably have urged on him such likely consequences, if he did not (and did not pay them for helping), as bans and litigation to recover payments that had been made, which the close of the film neutrally uses words on the screen (not, say, Gibney’s voice) to convey to us.

Imagine that this film were on an adjoining screen (as it probably was) to that showing the morally somewhat ambiguous portrayal of the world of the real Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (or, for that matter, the fraudulent activity of American Hustle (2013), another film recently in this very Screen 3, and which more definitely makes entertainment out of a true story). About Wolf, a presumably responsible critic of the calibre of Peter Bradshaw (writing in The Guardian) wants to say :

The Wolf of Wall Street does not quite have the subtlety and richness of Scorsese's very best work, but what an incredibly exhilarating film: a deafening and sustained howl of depravity.


What is the moral relativism operative here ? The narrative of the exploits of a man (Belfort) who happily sold people with nothing to speak of (other than their savings – and some greed) stock of whose worth he had no concerns to claw his way back after the 1987 crash is being lauded for depravity**. Whereas Armstrong is castigated for what seems like having gone in too deep and with no way back (except that no one seems to have made him go in for the Tour de France again in 2009, when Gibney was making a film about him, a film that, despite / because of Armstrong’s coming third (and what then unfolded), had to be put on hold for four years).

Of course, Lance Armstrong is no Macbeth, but the words of Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play have a certain resonance [Macbeth has just had his friend Banquo killed by men to whom he lied about who had kept them in lowly positions (he claims that it had been Banquo) – what about Armstrong, as we were told, only agreeing to interviews with Frankie Andreu, of all people (see below, following the quoted Tweet), during the 2009 Tour and then making him wait every time as another chilling way of abusing a (former) friendship and rubbing it in Andreu’s face ?) :

[…] I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.




Never mind Andreu, though. Gibney makes it quite clear in his commentary that he was personally affronted at how he felt treated that Armstrong denied doping to him – as if Armstrong were honestly going to do anything else, when he had weathered such storms as The Andreus’ depositions (in front of whom they said that he told the truth about his treatments to the doctor with care of him), and then employed people who did not care what means they used to destroy their credibility (they did not know whether the doctor in the room at the time was male or female, what the room was like, etc.).

On the view that Armstrong was in so deep that he felt / was told that he had to continue denial, damaging testimony is heard in court, and a legal mind for hire will be used to defeat it, so Gibney was not going to be let into the truth. Equally clearly, from what he said, he felt that he should have known, so out of what motive has he made his film ?

As to the quality of the film itself, the best documentaries do not tell a story for effect in a distorted way, even if one acknowledges that they typically have scores of hours of footage to distil into 90 to 120 minutes – ‘a good bit’ simply has to be left out if it does not tell the story, not inserted with a shoe-horn, and it does not help to have too many strands to it. Here, Gibney seems to have been desperate not to lose too many of ‘the good bits’ from what he shot in 2009, before the film was interrupted, and so he has combined them with what came from 2013, but not necessarily to good effect.

Not necessarily, because one often enough cannot tell whether it is from the earlier or the later period that he is showing footage. When it comes to narrating / telling the route to the come-back Tour of 2009, it seems clear enough that Armstrong has had cancer at some point between 2005 (around the time of his seventh win) and the decision to race again. (This seemed to have been the testicular cancer that Armstrong describes ?) But Gibney does not trouble himself, in the structure and content of his film, to distinguish this period of having cancer from an earlier one, which, when one learns of it, makes one doubt whether one might have misunderstood why Armstrong had been out of competition from 2005 to 2009. Wrong-footing the viewer in that way achieves little.

A simple telling of the key facts and dates in Armstrong’s life would certainly have helped. Perhaps not everyone knew very much about Armstrong, so it might have included where and when he was born, because we only went to the footage of Armstrong as a sixteen-year-old in Texas quite a bit later on (when, in the words that head this review, he boasted his competitive and athletic nature)…

Of course, no film need be linear, but there is not a lot of point, for example, in editing one’s film in such a way that the concept of ‘the yellow jersey’ (le maillot jaune) is explained when it has already been introduced once or twice (and, at the time, with the seeming assumption that viewers knew what it meant) : as with editing text, defining something when it is first mentioned is the rule of thumb (unless, of course, one wishes to keep one’s audience waiting for a purpose). As to the substance EPO, perhaps we did not need a structure diagram on the screen or to have spelt out what it stands for (which Michele Ferrari could surely have done), but it was as nebulous as the jersey : eventually, the film told us that Armstrong and others, under Ferrari’s direction, were having injections, but Gibney was not that careful, again, to tell us enough about it before he came to the involvement of Ferrari, when it may have been too late.

How feature films are put together will be quite different, but there will be the same journey, in editing, of finding that a scene ‘does not work’ or has to be put later / earlier than envisaged, and, unless someone is to remain ambiguous as to identity, introduced in such a way that the viewer will remember who he or she is / what his or her name is. Makers of documentaries tend to imagine that, despite what else is going on in the soundtrack or on the screen, it suffices to say in a caption who someone is the first time that we see him or her. However, if I do not know that Bicycling is a magazine, defining the person on the screen in relation to it by its title does not tell me that he or she is a journalist in the field of cycling.

Along with the fact that the caption will only, at most, be visible for the length of the clip, this may not be enough for the audience not to be in doubt that they have seen this person before, but not to recall his or her significance in the story. The point is of general application to documentaries, but also relevant here : a happy medium between giving the person a caption every time (which is overkill), and also bearing in mind how and how frequently voice-over is to be used.

At root, one wonders a little why Gibney came back to this project. Even saying that, three hours after Armstrong’s appearance in interview with Oprah Winfrey, he was in front of Gibney’s equipment (according to a caption). Did he expect something from Gibney, and what did Gibney hope for ? As one could only tell from whether the content had to be pre- or post-Oprah, it was hard to place when Gibney had filmed him, and this constituted another part of the cloudiness of the story-telling – nothing against a story that throws out clues that cohere to explain something at 40 minutes in that was unclear after only 10, but this did not have the air of being that sort of film-making : it just was unclear what Armstrong said to Gibney, or did not say, three hours after appearing on t.v.

The film did have (thanks to Ben Bloodwell’s work) astonishingly beautiful ways of photographing cycling, whether a group of riders, at a distance, ascending an incline before a wondrous ridge, or some really inventive shots from closer to the action, and, for those not familiar with the madcap world of Le Tour and its carnival, it had these people unbelievably posting themselves in the cyclists’ way to get a picture (and no one stopping them doing it) ! What it did not have, despite these strong points, was an idea of where it was going and how the viewer would be taken along :

The film does not know whether it is a film about a man who doped, a man and his colleagues who decided to dope when everyone else was doping, a man who let a film-maker down, a man who betrayed friends and kept up his denial as long as possible, or even about cycling. If Gibney ever asked Armstrong why he risked exploding everything by going back in 2009, he shows no answer in the film, but (even in hindsight) it seems the key question to have put forward.

The only explanation that we have why, in the face of the allegations of the kind made L’Equipe (which even seemed to have changed its tune about Armstrong come 2009) and The Andreus, no one told the truth for so long is in simple, mantra-like repetition of the word omertà, which is not properly translated or put in context by Gibney’s film. On a literal understanding of that word of defiance, federal agents or police officers should not have broken ‘the code of silence’, whereas, in this film, of course they trumped it.

In conclusion, perhaps there, too, Gibney took for granted that his film and what he showed in it made sense and fitted together as a whole. It does not, and, along with the desire of the score to extract anxiety from moments too often and for too long, misjudges its effect just as directly as when a writer tries to proof his own work and is too easily satisfied that what he or she intended to write is what is actually being read, overlooking the typos, the missing or repeated words, or an edit of a sentence that leaves it incoherent.


End-notes

* The writ (or its County Court equivalent, the summons) has not existed for two decades, although the media still like to use the word : they misguidedly think that it sounds more stylish to say Z has issued a writ against B.

** Surely, part of the effect that Scorsese was seeking – after all, there was no way that, although he also makes documentaries, he was going to throw away the doubtful / would-be glamour and glitz that only treatment in a feature could give to the story.




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Monday, 6 January 2014

Torching one's dreams ?

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

13 August

This is a review of Foxfire (2012)
 

* Contains spoilers *

The flaws in this film, if they are flaws, are few and slight (and listed below), and do not detract from its narrative power : it runs to longer than one thinks that it has done, and does so almost easelessly, without ever letting one acquiesce in a view.

As to that observation, those who expect a film to let them know where they are have a sense of being uncomfortable in the unsettled feelings that the film engenders, because they are strong ones – nothing to do with a moral compass (a phrase for which there should be scant time in the cinema), but rather that films are not sermons, and it is questionable whether one should look to the former for what an effective example of the latter might make clearer.

Some things are uncertain – and remain so for most, or all, of the film. Our toe-hold is the town of Hammond (Mammond, as I slipped Freudianly on the keyboard…) in the mid-1950s, which does not seem have much to commend it to anyone much, let alone spirited teenage girls who had more than an element of what I am told* is called misandry, the complement to (if that makes sense) misogyny. Small wonder, if an uncle seeking not only to sell an old Underwood (which he had left out to be collected), but also to get more money for it and sex, too (from Maddy (Katie Coseni)), had been typical male exploitation in and of their lives !

That said, in branding themselves (in more sense than one) Foxfire, they came to stand for a sort of purist attitude towards men that meant that, when - late in the film - Rita (Madeleine Bisson) dated a man and was seen in the cinema with him, it was an expellable act from their commune / refuge. Maybe they had had that stance all along (although initially flirting when buying ice-cream did not seem prohibited, and it was also clear, from some stings,& when the joehad been pitied, not despised). However, Margaret** (Raven Adamson) called her father's girlfriend, who seemed a steady one, a slut, and then one was unsure what was going on - was it a reverse Oedipus complex, where the mother had been loved / sainted / abused, or just a resentment at being landed with grandma, 100 miles away*** ?

(Grandma certainly seems to have been given a tongue-lashing, if we think that Margaret is a reliable historian. In fact, all the hints are that no one can be such in this life, in particular the magic of the closing moment, which surprises and undercuts the narrative. At times, this narration was grating, but I can conceive that it was meant to be, and thus to distance from too close a connection.)

At any rate, without seeming didactic, literary analogues such as Orwell's Animal Farm, and Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, are enrichened by the properly shocking story that Foxfire tells...


The Agent’s bit of nit-picking

Court-room
Was ever a judge and a court scene such as this - but who is telling the story ?

Having a car
Even if it was normal and likely, was it necessary and affordable ?

Letting
Margaret upsets and deliberately spoils the expectations against how the letting will be carried out, for her vision of what the shared home will be, but maybe not plausibly to the lessor's agents...

Records
How do the type-written records and they typewriter end up where they do ?

Register
Was everything really accurate for what was said, and where it was said, in its time ?



End-notes

* Thanks to @MarkOneinFour.

** For unknown reasons, known as Legs (unless as a corny joke to reflect the fact that she was relatively short, whereas one would have thought, if so, that a name that drew attention to 'ideal' female body-image was hardly consistent).

*** Conceivably, Legs might have originated in the fact of her walking from grandma's back to Hammond, after Margaret's father had sought to exile her there... It matters little that the film does not explain, and it is probably a virtue.




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The panther in our head

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)

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29 December (watched on DVD)

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)


94 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

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

Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.

It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)

Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!


In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)

The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.

It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.

Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...

At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.


End-notes

* In 'To a Louse'.




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