Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

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3 October

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

* May contain spoilers *

Piper (unclear why she is called that, but played, somewhat precociously, by Harley Bird) says the title words to this posting to Daisy* (Saiorse Ronan), who, rather clumsily / unconvincingly tries to reassure her that there is not a connection between her mother not being there and eating chocolate : as we may well know, in cases of a separation, children can look for an explanation and end up blaming themselves, finding a causal connection and a regret, e.g. If I hadn’t eaten chocolate, mum wouldn’t have gone. (Daisy probably blames herself for her own mother’s departure : her mother, we are told, loved this location, and we see a photo of her by a sundial, later seen atop a hill.)

Pure observational / empirical psychology. Later, Daisy talks about chocolate, too, saying what she thought she was doing by not eating it, but, much more than that, her depiction as a person with intrusive commands in her head, and who describes herself more than once as a curse, suggest that she may be meant to have (touches of) obsessive-compulsive disorder (better known as OCD). It is not merely that she is fastidious (calling the contents of the fridge ‘gross’, and claiming that cheese is ‘a lump of solidified cows’ mucus’), but that she believes that something dreadful will happen, if she does not do certain things, and we hear what is in her head, compelling her.

Certainly, Edmond (Eddie, played by George MacKay) knows that Daisy has an inner conflict, and seeks to encourage her that she does not have to do what she is telling herself, after he has toppled her, fully clothed, into the plashing current of the family watering-hole, and thereby makes a further connection with her**.

Shortly before, he has whispered the herd of cows away that puts Daisy off proceeding, and, when she clumsily climbs a gate with barbed wire on, heals her hand, magic elements no doubt from the novel, and which enliven a fairly inert story, which would otherwise be of type ‘upheaval plus making a dangerous journey to be with loved ones’***, e.g. The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003), etc.

Anyway, back at the OCD, we hear Daisy talking about the change in her way of thinking that she has found herself making during the course of the film, and we have long since seen her doing things that would have made the earlier Daisy squirm or scream. I doubt that this ‘progress’ is anything other than symbolic, although, with psychological treatment, people can learn to do things that would otherwise overwhelm them with disgust, but I do not know what it is meant to mean on a figurative level, as some may be confused by what she does and hears anyway

As, considered differently, a story about insurrection or war, there are brutal moments, such as the enforced ‘evacuation’ (though less harrowing, because of the sheer violence, than an equivalent scene in Sarah’s Key (2010), and later parts of the film leave one wondering, from the available evidence, what need there could have been for splitting up the family) and when Piper is under threat from two men, as well as sudden detonations and overflights of aircraft.

Such things apart, there is a fairly static presentation of military conflict by means of low-frequency notes in the score and shots of burnt-out cars or the debris of an airliner (although there is the failure to appreciate that a box of chocolates might not be so pristine that it even has a tag on it (a tag to play on Piper’s mind ?)). The strife, then, seems too staged, almost as if it might only be happening in Daisy’s mind…

That may be the answer to it. When we knew that Daisy was with the family for a summer, it all seemed a bit My Summer of Love (2004), and the representatives of (full) adulthood being largely absent in a rather Narnia way, until the trees shook (in Tarkovsky vein, or that of Looper (2012) maybe) and Something Happened (again, a bit Narnia). Fairport Convention performing Tam Lin, about a magical abduction, has already paved the way ?

If it is all symbolic, then the ending can be reinterpreted as seen from knowing the beginning, as the ending voice-over invites us to do. Probably a comparison with Beckettt’s novel Molloy is pretentious, but his fastidious character Moran makes a punishing journey (in more sense than one ?) and ends up transformed. Moran opened his part of the book with ‘It is midnight. It is raining’, and closes it with ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’. (Here, maybe that means that the end condition does not differ much from the starting condition, and maybe Eddie is no more than another aspect of Daisy's own personality, as there are certainly touches of A Beautiful Mind (2001), suggesting as much.)

With this film, it is all (for good reason) reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, too, with another dramatic transformation. That said, it is the words spoken over by Ronan that make one think that anything is significant, since the ‘journey home’ with Piper seems hare brained, succeeds against all the odds, and sees Daisy using excessive force and threats to protect her – unlike in Lore (2012), there is no great sense of something that needs to be done except in terms of telepathy and / or dream, or of Daisy being / becoming a different person because of what happens.

Coupled with the fact that the film, even at only 101 minutes, seems to drag, all of this makes me think that it will not do very well, as comments that I heard were that it was like Twilight, and at least they had had a free ticket…


End-notes

* Daisy is really Elizabeth, but has chosen this name for herself (although using both to introduce herself to her aunt) : not surprisingly, such renaming is not often unassociated with some turmoil about identity.

** Previously, she had declared, rather abruptly, that she did not fish, did not swim, but then decides to go along for the ride.

*** Of which, I take The Road to be another such.


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

Visions of the Baltic

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2 October

The more that I think about the first in the sequence of Estonian short films, Maggot Feeder (2012), the more that I believe that I have seen it before somewhere, somehow… (Probably on the screen in the bar at Festival Central, which had been showing a loop of clips.)

Not that it matters, because it said things to me with the stark beauty of its story-line, the Doctor-Who-like horribleness and ferocity of the maggots*, the faces of the man and the woman, motile behind the forms that contained them, and (again from science fiction) the stacked pairs of eyes of the spiders – inevitably, given the subject-matter, the frozen setting, I was reminded of the exquisite brutality of Far North (2007), but this film ended with blossoming, fecundity, to replace the sterility of the man’s reign (over the woman and the creatures whom he bloodily kills).

A perfect fable of stagnation, destruction and renewal, inventively brought about in animation and foley where every squelch of blood and slurp of lightly stewed flesh was telling. A good way into another transgressive world, that of My Condolences (2013) :


Without giving away the big twist, the delight of a crooked family, running a covert business, and how they respond to an outsider in their guilty midst. What better plan to hit on, worthy of Fawlty Towers in its bonkersness, than devoting a page in the illicit journal of their activity to the wording of a tribute to a fictionally deceased neighbour ?

The stranger joins in with their desire to express their regrets, and is asked to assume the position of scribe and author, resulting in excruciatingly amusing awkwardness, because the family members continue to fear detection…


Olga (2013) has already, vaguely, been accounted for, as well as the errantly provided Happy Birthday played with the conceit that Marilyn might sing to Mr Jesus on Christmas Eve, and that Mr Jesus is a robot with a rival : it did not have much to say, from what I saw of it.


In Triangle Affair (2012), cats, people with arms for heads (who, amongst other things, clean windows and cycle as a trio along high-wires), and trams converged spectacularly, overshadowed and overseen by chalk-wielding birds (crows ? Krähen in German / chalk, la craie in French ??), who are perhaps also the architects of this elaborate, futuristic city.

Maybe, though, they have bored of its having a function, and wish to subjugate that function to their desire to have fun (or to destroy) : crows and Kafka (which means ‘crow’ in Czech) and Prague…


Finally, Villa Antropoff (2013) uses animated full-frontal cleavage, sexual acts and drug use to parody the interests and attitudes of New Rich Russians, a freedom to be expressive since Estonia is no longer a satellite state, in the Baltic, of the Soviet regime.

Not unlike Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, one can prove to have outlived one’s popularity, if one’s actions are taken to excess, and it is then on to the next party ! (Oh, and a black man, whose home coast has nothing but debris on it, manages to crash the party, maybe in search of the same, but is not kindly received, but surely no denigrating stereotype here.)


End-notes

* Though, of course, maggots turn into flies, outside fairy-tales.


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I'm a self-destructive fool (Thanks, Kate and Anna !)

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1 October

* Contains spoilers *

During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :

He has the self-delusion that [...]


According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.

OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?

As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?

In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :

If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.


Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?

Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?

Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?

What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.

For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.


On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.

In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.

It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...


End-notes

* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?


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What did you do during the Festival, Father... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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1 October (updated 16 October)


Thursday 19 September
5.00 (1) My Beautiful Country (2012) (Eastern view) (A mini-review)
7.25 (2) Hawking (2013) (A mini-review)
10.15 (3) Blue Jasmine (2013) (A mini-review)
(NB This one is not quite a review, and contains spoilers)


Friday 20 September
6.30 (4) The Taste of Money (2012) (Top 5 Features)
9.00 (5) Unmade in China (2012) (Review by Rory Greener (plus Agent's comments), or there is the review-cum-interview (with director Gil Kofman) by Rosy Hunt, Editor-in-Chief of TAKE ONE)
11.00 (6) Exposed : Beyond Burlesque (2013) (33 1/3)


Saturday 21 September
3.30 (7) Google and The World Brain (2013)
5.30 (8) Pieces of Me (2012)
8.00 (9) The Redemption of the Fish (2013) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)


Sunday 22 September
2.00 (10) Marius (2013)
(11) Shown with Fanny (2013) (Top 5 Features)
6.00 (12) Blackbird (2013)
(Reviewed with Only the Young (2012))
8.30 (13) Only the Young (2012) (Young Americans)
(Reviewed with Blackbird (2013))


Monday 23 September
12.45 (14) The Taste of Money (2012) (Top 5 Features)
3.45 (15) Prince Avalanche (2013) (Young Americans)
6.15 (16) Dust on our Hearts (2012) (German)
8.30 (17) Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure : John Otway the Movie (2013) (33 1/3)
(Reviewed with Sing me the Songs that Say I Love You (2012) (33 1/3))


Tuesday 24 September
4.00 (17.5) Estonian short films (Eastern view)
5.30 (18.5) Just Before Losing Everything (2013)
6.30 (19.5) Sing me the Songs that Say I Love You (2012) (33 1/3)
(Reviewed with Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure : John Otway the Movie (2013)
(33 1/3))
9.00 (20) Deadlock (1970)


Wednesday 25 September
11.30 (21) Upstream Color (2013) (Young Americans) (Top 5 Features)
3.45 (21.5) Absolute Beginners (1986)
6.00 (22.5) White Star (1981 - 1983) (Roland Klick)
9.00 (23.5) Thomas Dolby : The Invisible Lighthouse (2013) (33 1/3)


Thursday 26 September
2.00 (24.5) German short films (German)
4.00 (25.5) Eyes on the Sky (2008) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)
8.30 (26.5) Paul Bowles : The Cage Door is Always Open (2012)


Friday 27 September
12.00 (27.5) Sieniawka (2013) (Eastern view)
3.45 (28) Black Africa, White Marble  (2011) (Too concentrated on the next film to watch more than 30 mins, but what was seen was very good : this won the audience award for documentaries)
6.45 (29) The Man whose Mind Exploded (2012) (Review by Hannah Clarkson, TAKE ONE*)
8.45 (29.5) My Sweet Pepper Land (2013)
11.00 (30.5) Tridentfest (2013) (Review by Mark Liversidge, TAKE ONE, plus Agent's comments, and the following Tweet)

Lovely review, by Ben Graham, of Toby Amies' film about Drako Zarrhazar, The Man Whose Mind Exploded (2013) : http://t.co/2iJ0YslIoc
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 5, 2013

Saturday 28 September
1.15 (31.5) Surprise Film 1 : Sunshine on Leith (2013)
4.00 (32.5) Cold (2013)
6.30 (33.5) Nosferatu (1922) (with Neil Brand)
9.00 (34.5) The Forest (2012) (Catalan)


Sunday 29 September
10.45 (35.5) The Redemption of the Fish (2013) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)
6.15 (36.5) The Orchard (2013)
9.00 (37) Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968) + Towers Open Fire (1963) + The Cut-Ups (1967)


End-notes

* There is nothing to add to Hannah's review, except that my interview with director Toby Amies will appear soon for TAKE ONE, and, for those who missed this single screening, there is a clip from The Man Whose Mind Exploded on the page for Hannah's review.


NB All links to reviews are now active, and titles with struck-through text were not watched in full (also indicated by adding a nominal 0.5 to the tally)...



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Giving the lie to Tebbit

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30 September

The poster for The Artist and the Model (2012) makes you hesitate - the shapely back cannot be that of Claudia Cardinale, unless it is a re-release...

The film is not, of course, about looking at Aida Folch's body (as Mercè), but about discovery, for, when we first see Marc Clos (Jean Rochefort), he is contemplating what looks like it could be a modernist maquette of a female form. He picks it up, looks at it, rejects it by throwing it down, and going on to look at a fish's head, a tree, all of which subliminally conveys the message that he will know a form when he sees it, and that it will arise organically.

Veteran actor Rochefort (The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)), at 83, has all the class to be Clos, to be believable as a man who poetically talking about creation, about woman, life, and whom we see working on sketches, painting, models with Folch as his muse - at a key moment, she is delighting in being seen, in being the spark of his energy, and cannot but smile. The film is essentially between Clos and untutored Mercè, and, in a preceding scene, he unfolds a Rembrandt sketch to her, and she begins to interpret what she first just calls 'joli[e]', and he says that she is not looking - he tells her how it was made, when, and what it means to him, and he awakens her.

Cardinale (Léa), though, discovers Mercè at the outset : having been his model, and still beautiful herself, she knows what feminine appearance in Mercè will provide Marc with good poses, and we see her learning how to adopt a pose for Marc, resume one, be a source not of sexual attraction, but of beauty.

With only hints of coloration when the film begins (and ends), it is otherwise in black and white, and this, along with a soundtrack of birdsong, the sounds of insects and leaves, heightens the attention on form, line, texture, and shape in Mercè's body. We utterly believe that Rochefort is an artist who is friends with Matisee, that he is sketching, applying clay, smoothing surfaces, as we watch, which is part of his own malleability as a cinematic artist.

Inevitably, one thinks of other films with a relation to art and to connections between the artist and others, such as Conversations with my Gardener (2007), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Scorsese's Life Lessons from New York Stories (1989), of which Nick Nolte is most compelling with the physicality of his large canvas, and Daniel Auteuil, with his gentle and humane observations and how he shares about life, love and art, whereas Derek Jakobi (as Bacon) shows us conflict between artist and model.

None of those quite compares to this portrait of Clos, although there are similarities to Auteuil as artist, and care has been taken (with Hockney as one of the advisers) to make everything as believable and realistic as possible in an immensely beautiful film.


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Surprise on Leith

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29 September

Yesterday's Surprise Film 1, which Tony Jones had said was a world premiere, turned out to be Sunshine on Leith (2013), the musical with songs of The Proclaimers.

No one expects great depth from musicals, I guess, but the way that the film started, with one voice in a personnel carrier, then a voice in harmony, from two young soldiers who proved to be friends and one of whom was the boyfriend of the other's sister, was evocative - understated, unexpected, it set the tone for the whole film. Many a musical weaves its course around the songs, as Ben Elton might agree, and it is not unusual that their lyrics drive the story, but these, taken from a stage version, seemed a good fit.

In Screen 2 at Festival Central, the quality of the sound was excellent, such that the clarity was there whether it was Jane Horrocks singing, or Peter Mullan, whose voice I quite liked. Mainly charting the ups and downs of the relationships between those two as a couple, and between the existing couple with their daughter, and between her friend and their son, as set up on a blind date. Strain causes travel for one couple when they split up, and the past catches up nastily until differences can be reconciled.

In a blaze of onlookers willing the remaining pair not to be stubborn and back into each other's arms, and then symbolically re-enacting the 500-miles song with a ranks of them moving in formation, the situations and the music that establishes them culminate, having built throughout the film, whether mocking up a proposal and marriage ceremony in the pub, or bemoaning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, as a type of female ambassador in one of Edinburgh's galleries.

I am no great fan of musicals, by and large, but this one did it for me : it felt right, it cheered without being sentimental, and it faced up to some of the things that come between those whom we love and us.


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It left me cold !

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29 September 2013

* Contains spoilers *

Definitely the word film that I have seen screened at this year's Festival was Cold, a film from Turkey that was, frankly, a turkey, and which, although it could have been filmed in the same snow-laden river-sited city as Kosmos*, one of my top three from the Festival in 2011, it in no way occupied the same space.

Oh dear, Cold (2013) at @camfilmfest - trying to bring Chekhov's sororial trio to Turkey, mixing in The Idiot, and larding with domestic v.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 28, 2013

So what am I getting at ? Well, the title-characters of Chekhov's Three Sisters - one of whom is the very striking Valeria Skorokhodova as Balabey's desire - have taken their parlous state to heart, and found that prostitution in Turkey may pay for their future.

Said Balabey is a person at whom the audience was early laughing, although the mention of taking his pills should have alerted them to the fact that he has not only either some sort of social phobia or related learning difficulty, but also a mental-health condition (we also know that he has been in hospital) - they were laughing at him outright, not partly with him, partly despite him, as in the film of Dostoyevksy's The Idiot at last year's Festival.

Balabey has much in common with (Prince) Mishkin, not least lack of self-awareness and self-confidence, and a huge streak of self-destructiveness. Thinking that a woman paid to sleep with him reciprocates his feelings for her is an insight that only we have, and it, just as woman, whether he actually does ever sleep with him (rather than talking about prayer, her beauty, and trying to slope off when she is in the shower), is only sure near the end. Even the man, referred to as some sort of chief, we arranges and pays for the first liaison is laughing at his expense.

It seems common knowledge that the place that we are shown, where patrons / diners take a table, and then one or more women are called, by name, to go to the number of that table, is merely a staging-post for the seedy hotel (wallpaper peeling off the wall, etc.), one of whose rooms we see - for some reason, Balabey and his chosen partner always end up in the same room, which I would believe was for symbolism of the room number (22 ?), except that it clearly simplified the shoot and gave a (bogus) sense of continuity of the encounters into the bargain. So far, so good with the tawdry aspects of Dostoyevsky, except that that novel actually has a sense of ambiguity about whether the Prince is risible, or a saint.

Point already made that women and sex with them are bought and sold, so hardly surprising when Balabey's sexually frustrated brother Enver both takes it out on his wife with his fists (although the erectile dysfunction appears to be his fault, not the wife's lack of flirting or sexual provocation), and has recourse to the same venue as his brother. Neat ending to Balabey's enduring attraction, such that he even dynamites a bridge** to prevent escape to Moscow via (a boyfriend in) Georgia, to have Enver and friends hire the sisters for a house-party in which another sexual failure leads to shooting into the air, demanding that the sisters have sex with each other, and one of them being brutally killed ?

As life is cheap, most of all female life, the two others are killed as witnesses, only leaving Balabey to find out and to strap Enver to the railway-line, camouflaged with snow, and for the express (has the bridge miraculously been repaired ?) to go through***. All sewn up, you could say - but only in the sense that Terry Gilliam's massive animation foot coming down and stamping on everything provides a resolution...



End-notes

* I have checked, and it was Kars again.

** As another viewer agreed, he has already said that he checks the railways-line, and that trains stop or proceed on his say-so, which means that destroying it was overkill.

*** My fellow viewer concurred that nothing tells us how this is possible, both as to getting Enver there from the side of the crude grave, and the operation of a railway service. He was still included to give the film 4 out of 5 for highlighting the domestic and other violence.


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A matter of Marseille

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

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26 September

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

Daniel Auteuil has a reason or two to love Pagnol – he was in films such as Manon des Sources from the mid-1980s, but he is also from that area, Provence.

The trilogy that he is making, of which Marius and Fanny screened last weekend and César is still in production, are less bucolic, being set in Marseilles (or, as in French, Marseille, without the ‘s’), and with a veritable maritime feel, almost a whiff (with Fanny’s seafood) of the ocean, which makes for a real freshness to both location and characters.

The story in these first two parts contrasts the fun-loving liberation of the jazz and cinema age with the Roman Catholic attitude to sex (and children as the evidence) before marriage, the desire for a partner and for children with a pull to explore the world. In all of this, Auteuil’s direction is deft, composing shots and a treatment of Pagnol’s writing that always draws the viewer in, and with a careful use of music.

Previously, he worked with Jean-Pierre Darroussin in Conversations with my Gardener (2007), and the other actor is here as a man, Panisse, who acts to save a situation when César (Auteuil) has insulted him by misinterpreting his motives, despite years of friendship going back to schooldays, and initially and violently seeks to oppose what is for the best. The quartet of major players is completed by Raphaël Personnaz and Victoire Bélézy as the other two title characters, and all are so strong, working with the grist of Pagnol’s original, that the result would be thoroughly engaging were they not supported by the likes of Marie-Anne Chazel, and by the old port and the ocean that it gives onto.

César, though, is not a violent man, though he does tend to tease people beyond their limits, and, after a grumpy start, he comes alive on screen when he shows Marius how to make an aperitif with four different ‘one-thirds’ in the same glass. When Marius disappears, as he all too frequently does, and abandons the business, his father just frets over him, addressing the absent Marius rhetorically as ‘mon petit’.

The first film, Marius, teeters around what he wants, and ends with a decision, whereas Fanny (and its title character) has to address what remains – at heart, both are driven by Marius not wanting what he has, and wanting what he cannot have, the latter in such a way that he becomes totally hateful, and is transformed. In all of this, César and Panisse show what grace and love they have, even for Marius and where his desires lead him.

All in all, a fine cast working in a lovely free manner together to create this drama, which so far has run to some 210 minutes, and whose conclusion is likely to be a tour de force.


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

Who says 'avant que' (except at 'A' level) ?

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25 September 2013

That is my only question about Avant que de Tout Perdre (2013), translated as Just Before Losing Everything : why the archaic construction, when, in the film, the closest that the French dialogue gets is the simple, everyday form ?

Otherwise, its length makes sense, as does how it unfolds, the palpable tension (the suspense left me needing a Scotch), the dynamics. It, and Léa Drucker as Miriam, are excellent. It speaks for itself - watch the film !


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If you’re naked already, what is exposure ?

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25 September

Some of the performers in Exposed : Beyond Burlesque (2013) really seemed like artists, rather than performers. My companion at the screening and I both valued Mat Fraser and his partner Julie Atlas Muz, and we were shown several excellent excerpts from when they gave their show in Amsterdam.

If there are such things as production values, they were high in the recording of Muz and Fraser’s work, rather than shot from beneath the stage, with sometimes wild foreshortenings and indifferent lighting. Even seeing these two under the sheets together or snuggled up on the sofa felt good – they were a couple who belonged, and they had things to say and do.

This is not to denigrate the other performers, but to say that the comedy, agility and inventiveness of Julie and Mat were simply of a different order, and that the compilation of them with eight or so others, who had unequal contributions to make both as to amount and standard, only demonstrated the variety of reasons for which people employ nudity on stage.

Perhaps it was also simply that, of all those who gave explanations of what draws them to appear on stage, these two were at home with who they were – it is not to say that they did not intend to challenge or even provoke, but, when the others did so or talked about how they felt about themselves, they seemed restless, in flux, even angry, almost as if working out their needs on their audiences.

I say ‘almost as if’, but never was the ‘I slayed them to-night’ thinking more evident than in the power, rather than vulnerability, that others described gaining from becoming naked before an audience, as, for example, when one act put a stage dagger into her vagina, and used black insulation tape to wrap herself up in a bondage net.

Obviously with any person’s stage-show, he or she will know what the onlookers do not about the course – or likely course – of what they will see, but when, in another case, a drag queen feigns to cut up a volunteer from the audience in a bath, and to attach her vagina to his crotch with a staple-gun (the most extreme thing shown), one wonders for whose benefit it is on the spectrum of performance.

The same performer, with the spirit of All About My Mother (1999), had breast implants during the course of the film, but otherwise remained male - he commented, as if what he had described having experienced already were not enough, that he would get more attention, abuse and violence (or the threat of it) on the street. Yes, of course he looks how he wants, but at the same time he know at what cost...


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Festival walk-outs

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25 September

Last night was a mistake - I had intended to see Leviathan (2012), and only realized, too late, that it was not a short prefacing it, but Roland Klick's Deadlock, which had few takers.

Not in itself indicative of anything, but it was not the film that I had wanted to watch, I didn't want to go into the other film after the beginning and catch up, and I was not engaging or in the mood to engage with a dubbed film.

This afternoon, the staginess of Absolute Beginners (1986) was the turn-off, a film that I had always thought would prove, as I had gathered, to have relatively little to say and say it with scant subtlety. The enforced cheeky jollity of a Soho on a stage-set did not chime with my mood, and Patsy Kensit dancing sexily did not persuade me that I wanted to see more of a film with an Alfie-type voiceover, but none of the charm, that I could see, of how Michael Caine plays it : compared with his world, this seemed naive when pretending to be knowing, so I walked at around 30 minutes.

And, yesterday again, the Estonian shorts - I had been compelled by Maggot Feeder (2012) and My Condolences (2013), but Olga, in her car-park, did not have that effect. Even though I knew that it was building slowly to something, coffee called, and, as I guessed, I was not back before the end. It meant that I missed the beginning of the next shown, which had in fact been intended to be The Birthday (2011), but what was shown (and this explained a lot) was Happy Birthday, an animated skits on Jesus and robots.

That's all so far...


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Drowning the piglets

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

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25 September

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

When, after the film, I encountered @mob61uk, I hesitated to elicit another one-word review - mine was, in its true sense, Awesome...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 25, 2013

We agreed that it was well made (as, at any rate, we did about The Taste of Money (2012)), and @mob61uk assented to my assertion that Amy Seimetz was excellent (as Kris).

I then propounded that, as many a film does, it treats of mental ill-health - here, the appearance that Kris had a breakdown and lost her job is belied by seeing how she had been deliberately infected, thereby rendered incapable of independent thought, and had been manipulated to cause her to obtain multiple amounts of credit, and use the equity in her home, on the pretext that she was finding the ransom for her kidnapped mother.

The financial excess, the wild behaviour, would easily have landed her with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and with the two chunky tubs of tablets that she puts on the table in front of Jeff when first they get to talk properly, saving them, as she puts it, 3 to 4 weeks. He does not quite understand what it might matter, what the implications might be, but does not seem put off.

One level on which the film works is a bit like that of Contagion (2011), of tracing the infection back to its root, and, thereby, of validating the experience of Kris (and others), even down to the pigs. Or The Matrix (1999) - when Neo is first captured by Agent Smith and, with the help of two other Agents, a literal, living bug is put into Neo's body, getting it out is as wrenchingly disgusting as when the deceiver makes Kris vomit. Not the only similarity, because there is feeling, when Jeff is directing Kris through the building at work to where the car is, of Cypher or others directing, say, Trinity to an exit, and of the same sense that the real feels unreal.

Back further, we have such touchstones of <i>Madness in Movies</i> as Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) being framed in <i>North by Northwest</i> (1959) (so everyone else seems mad, and he to them, for not believing him), likewise exploiting James Stewart's weakness as Scottie in <i>Vertigo</i> (1958), or, on the other hand, Stewart being credited by a psychiatric Ingrid Bergman in <i>Spellbound</i>, or Sean Connery (Mark Rutland) looking out the psychological basis of Marnie's (Tippi Hedren's) behaviour, because he loves and believes in her.

In Upstream Color (2013), Jeff is an Ingrid or Sean to Kris. They wear each other's identical ring, and there is more than a chemistry between them, because, through each other, they can trace the pig-farmer, and, just as he seems able to project himself into places and to observe people unseen, so Kris sees him, and looks right through him.

I think that this is really a tremendous piece of work by Shane Carruth of writing, directing, producing and starring in this provocative exploration of the nature of reality, and I can see myself hoping to watch it again very soon.


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Sunshine and tears

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24 September

Last night, seeing a film about John Otway, I laughed more than I have in a while. To-night, in a film about a concert in tribute to Kate McGarrigle and her life and work, the tears flowed.

Taking Otway first, Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie (2013) was a very fair title - a man of great energy and sometimes financially crippling enthusiasm, he showed how it was possible to book venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and The London Palladium and make the gigs work.

Never one not to doubt his own intuition, and to try to impress a girl, he persuaded the company that had just signed him as a rising punk star to release, as his next single, an instrumental version of a song of his, played by full orchestra. At another time, when a company was reluctant about a single, he dummied up copies as if on their label, got them to the media, and thereby shamed the company into agreeing to the release, because the single had been played as if it were one of theirs.

As I said to Otway in the bar afterwards, when I briefly spoke to him, he had outclassed Warhol and Marshall McLuhan - this was the man who, through early use of the Internet and e-mail and with a willing crew of fans, galvanized them into getting a single into the Top 10 (at number 9) for his fiftieth birthday, having left it to the fan-base, as scrutinized by The Electoral Reform Society, to vote for what they wanted the single to be.

Taking the knocking comments in good heart, and even making quite a few himself, Otway showed himself, both in the film and before and afterwards, to be thoroughly entertaining. We never quite heard how we afforded the £60,000 deposit that he lost on seeking to finance a world tour by chartered jet for his fans and him, and the price-tag of £3,000 per head if all subscribed to fill it was admitted to have priced too many out of the market for the subscriptions to be any better than half, but he did not seem bothered - any more than, when asked about the Bentley that - although not a driver - he had lashed out on with his first advance, he seemed troubled that he had soon been forced to sell it.

The film was a little rough around the edges, but, again, Otway had had the vision to get it made and have his fans fill the Odeon in Leicester Square, and that suited him well. As one who knew nothing about him, I was entertained and impressed.


With Kate McGarrigle, I had grown up listening to the self-titled album that her sister Anna and she made (and had even seen the sisters once when they played at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge), and needed no persuading of her credentials. What was patent here, in Sing Me The Songs that Say I live You : A Concert for Kate McGarrigle was the love of her children (by Loudon Wainwright III), Rufus and Martha Wainwright, both strong singers, of Anna and other members of the family, and those such as Teddy Thompson, Emmylou Harris and Norah Jones, who played in the filmed concert of Kate's music that formed the basis of this film (recorded at The Town Hall in New York).

Hearing how alike to her mother's voice Martha's now is, seeing the footage that the family had shared with the film-makers, the performance of several songs from that first album, and accounts of Kate in life and near to and at death (at the age of 63) - all made an immensely emotional experience, as it did for these members of the family and their friends, but who gave of their very best in Kate's memory.

Only, perhaps, one or two songs beyond what was bearable in length, this film really did allow one to cherish what had been good and true about the song-writing and performing of this fun-loving Canadian musician, and to feel that, although one was grieving for her, it was a powerful celebration of her music and person, carefully filmed, varied, and with gorgeous sound that was worthy of all who had contributed, which sounded just wonderful in Festival Central's Screen 3 !



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Fairytale Prince of the Forest

This is a Festival review of Prince Avalanche (2013)

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24 September

This is a Festival review of Prince Avalanche (2013)

I think that I have even seen this actor, Paul Rudd, play this type of character before, quite apart from knowing what some call a trope, I a formula, of a judgemental man who is so because he believes that he always does things properly, right, coupled with a foil who is seen as sloppy, ignorant (because, in Alvin’s repeated words, Lance does not know how to tie a knot, gut a fish).

That does not matter in itself, as, of course, there is nothing really new under the sun, but it does tend to give Prince Avalanche (2013) the feel not of a film, but of an extended edition of a t.v. comedy series, unlike, say, that classic The Odd Couple (1968) : it felt harder to stay with these two and feel for what happens, where and when they are, and believe that it was not a humorous set-up, where this team of two is forever painting lines on the road as the back-drop to this week’s wacky adventures.

Not really fair to make comparison with Lemmon and Matthau, but they are so good at making things seem cinematically true (as are Newman and Cruise), whereas the genuine chemistry between Emile Hirsch (as Lance) and Rudd reaches a plateau at a lower level, short of a feature where we can invest in them : when they go wild and booze, it is clear that their antics could be funny, although I was not in the mood for them, but one did not really feel that they had broken free – or through.

It is almost par for the course that there is a tinge of a mental-health issue – Alvin has to drop into the conversation that he has some prescription medications with him (as I guess, living in proximity, the inquisitive Lance would know anyway), but is managing to do without them – but nothing much is made of it. More is in Alvin’s character-type, than in any (psychiatric or) psychological origin, and that is maybe where everything seems forced, for Lance would have seen countless programmes there is a character with an up-tight superciliousness, so common is its portrayal :

It effectively knocks the stuffing out of any confrontation or threat between Lance and Alvin that one should feel that it is familiar from past viewing, just as it does that they settle their differences over drink and agree to party at the weekend. The quirky touches (the truck-driver, the woman looking through the burnt remains, the possibly other woman in the truck) do not, whatever else they do, add to creating a sense of being isolated in a place of prior devastation, and it does not help that one spot where the road furniture is being renewed appears to recur, as if different enough to pass off as new, rather than finding locations that were distinct.

It is good that we see Alvin solitarily do his thing for the first weekend (the film takes us from the preceding week to the eve of the second weekend), and that we only ever hear narrated (extracted by cross-examination ?) what Lance did in the town – in hindsight, it stresses to us that Alvin was really pleasing himself by doing this job, rather than sending money home, because, although it is unclear where ‘home’ exactly is, he could have gone into town with Lance (and, if necessary, on from there), not just sprawled extravagantly on his hammock and the like, as if convincing himself that he likes the outdoors so much.

This film could have, in more ways than one, explored territory, and one of the best shots is saved for last, after Lance and Alvin have driven off from their base and we see other signs of life than the truck-driver : some children playing on a little corner of land, and the vehicle going past, then coming back into shot behind it. Not enough to give a message, or to cement the unlikely feeling that the two men have found very much common ground.


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A love story ? Tough love !

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23 September

In the Q&A session after the screening of Staub auf unseren Herzen / Dust on our Hearts (2012), Stephanie Stremler (Kathi) described not only how Susanne Lothar (Chris) improvised with her and, when it came to the fight, only the cameraman was in the know, but also the film as a love story between Kathi and Chris, two women who had been left to bring up children on their own, but who had different ways about them.

I had postulated that Stremler, if one of her own parents were a therapist and tried to relate to her on the basis of being a patient, she would think it inappropriate, and asked whether she thought that Chris was trying to achieve that status all along – this is where she, although acknowledging that Chris is trying to gain control, talked of it as a love story.

If so, then a love affair that goes wrong, and seems likely, unlike what Fabian (Florian Loycke) says about his relationships, to result in severance. The flaw in it all is to believe that a mother such as this would only in the course of the short span that we see here come to impose her will on the welfare of her daughter’s child, let alone get her on the sharp side of her therapist’s desk.

Films sometimes do this – present us with a situation and / or a problem and invite us not to think whether it would have happened before, or rather pass over in silence the question of what the director and editor are choosing to show us is actually likely to be new. However, Midnight in Paris (2011), though, does not ask that of us, because it presents a totally new experience for Gil, whereas the allegedly naturalistic world of a film such as this seeks to achieve its impact by simply immersing us in interlocking lives.

Here, the impossibility of Chris as a mother cannot simply have emerged with a loud conversation on her mobile when he daughter is in the changing-room – she has always been like this, and all that is new is that her estranged partner has come back to Berlin from Cologne after many a year. He is clearly expected by Kathi, so is it really likely that the practicality of where, when he drives there (and he drives there with all of his life in the car), he will spend the night, or of telling or not telling Chris that he is back in Berlin, will have been overlooked until now ? And yet the film has Wolfgang have a meal with Kathi and Lenni with none of this resolved.

This is where a slice of life comes up against the exigency of a film, in 90 to 120 minutes (typically around the 90 mark this season), to show us an unfolding – if one had ever had a mother such as Chris, one would not simply be on an even keel of meeting / being in contact with her on a daily basis, and so the starting premise of the film is falsified. To get back to my question of Stremler – a therapist parent who tries to have a son or daughter as a client is straying so far from accepted norms as obviously to have a psychological disorder, and then we are in the realm of the paradigm ‘Shrinks are madder than those whom they purport to treat’.

I do not doubt for a minute that the film arose from the music-making and the real-life puppet theatre of Stremler and Loycke, and this level is the only one on which we can properly view the drama of this film, as of puppets in a life-or-death struggle such as in the synopsis of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka – if the characters are place-holders for emotions or emotional responses, then the piece can work, because we can acknowledge the artificiality of the theatre, of the depiction. We do not grieve for the policeman killed by Mr Punch because the interaction, the violence of the emotion, is stylized, divorced by being in the province of the booth.

In this film, where the origins lie, the only true human feeling is between Fabian and Kathi. Everything else is froth, and even the notion that Kathi is being moved out by him from the flat that her mother has purchased is belied by no notion that Kathi was ever living there (the last that we see of any joint endeavour to make it habitable is the painting scene), as we only ever see her in her old property, missing Lenni. Much is claimed, but only, in real terms, by insulting our intelligence.



Post-script
As I left Festival Central, I saw the film's poster again, mother and daughter as decorators so ungeschickt (if we believe that a woman who can buy a flat would not pay someone to see to the décor for her daughter) that both have a big daub of clown's red paint on their nose, and a long streak of white on the face of Chris accentuates that look.

In a way, this image both confirms and denies my thesis that the figures can only be seen tokenistically, as puppets, because it demonstrates an awareness that they have the potential just to be seen as archetypes, but nothing else suggests that we were ever asked to see their actions and natures from that viewpoint, and so maybe it does not go beyond thinking that it would make  good poster, easily forgotten.

Having written the review above, I am left feeling that I might be seen to have been too hard on the effort employed to make this film, because maybe it sins no more than many another, or because it was no great crime to have seemed to have promise. Except as to expression and choice of language, though, I do not feel that I need to offer excuses for a heartfelt opinion.


Post-post-script
Maybe we are meant to believe that it is the arrival of Wolfgang (Michael Kind), the father of Kathi, that precipitates everything : maybe Chris, despite signs to the contrary and when her hysteria that Wolfgang is around is based not on issues of domestic violence, but his having betrayed her with one of her friends, is supposed to be this way that we see with Kathi and Wolfgang purely on account of the trauma of his unexplained return from Cologne to Berlin...

I have already said why Wolfgang's arrival is problematic - unless we are meant to imagine that he loaded the car out of desperation and got out, not thinking of anywhere better to go than to his daughter. When he arrives, we have no idea who he is - an elder lover ? a friend ? - and there is nothing to suggest that him coming is anything other than expected, and that he has not been in regular contact with the person whom he is visiting (would Kathi really have concealed - been able to conceal - such contact from Chris ?).

No, I cannot think this through and make it work, which may be the flaw in improvising something that does not make sense beyond the boundaries of what is shown in screen.


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The Young Blackbird

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22 September

Two films shown to-night deserve treating together, although not quite in the same category : one was a feature film, Blackbird (2013), the other what was described to us (using another reviewer's words) as 'cinematic non-fiction', Only the Young (2012).

The latter made good what the former tried to do, because it had a grasp that was too insubstantial of what it was about, other than portraying a small West-Coast community (in Dumfries and Galloway, I am told) and the notion of trying to preserve what made it was both by capturing things before they fell prey to loss of memory or death, and not allowing it to be taken over by impulses that might change it for the worse. Anyone who knows and loves Scotland would have been in such places, would have recognized the people, and felt that emotional pull - anyone who does not might feel out on a limb to understand it or the social and cultural influences.

Already, then, a sort of preaching that might only work to the converted (but maybe not). In any case, we are invited to look, in part, at this place through the eyes of Ruadhan (pronounced 'Rowan'), played by Andrew Rothney, and his brother Callum.

This is where the brilliantly made Only the Young comes in : where the two friends live with whom we spend much of our time (Garrison and Kevin), there is an abandoned mini-golf course, where the restaurant served steak but which must have proved not to be the right attraction to be supported by that place, and pools and even a water-flume in a back garden that have also, if not outlived their usefulness, then not been kept up. Even at this level, the comparison is clear : Ruadhan decks out and lives in a beached vessel, whereas the boys and their friends have taken over an abandoned property as a base.

His motives are different, and his relations other, because (whether he is a relative or just an older person with songs to pass on) Alec sums up his screwed-up narcissism just right, and my experience in mental health would see him not as someone whose desire to collect oral traditions (there is nothing to suggest that he does anything with them) and make his own world is helpful even for him. Kevin, Garrison, Skye and Kristen maybe have a worldview from their Grace Baptist background to contend with (although they seemed accepting of the idea that the elders would influence their choice of loved ones, and so 'shepherd' their lives), but they are living, developing, dealing with life's problems.

Blackbird has only rather falsely, at the end, a notion of moving on, of dealing with life. I say 'falsely' for two reasons : one that I do not believe that Ruadhan can simply progress, and without intervention, in the way that we are invited to believe, when what I see suggests that what is actually going to hold him back is a not being able to let go (where Alec is spot on) that is a well-established psychological disorder, and second that, even if that were not so, the riskily transformative moment that his brother brings about is the film's emotional high point, and everything just drains away from it.

If Ruadhan were the sort to give of what is precious to him to cock a snook at the forces of change (for me, that does not quite ring true), it just becomes a barb to prick him, just as the wishes for a job when he cashes a giro on the heels of Alec's pension), when his insulting gesture is looked at as a possible bonus. With, back at the other film, Garrison and Co., we have no such sense of easy answers, and that the answer to one's head is to remove the brick wall that one is banging it against, or, rather, it from striking distance from the wall.

So, Blackbird seems to understand, and even to make accessible, someone with a very confused personality (principally via Amy as the love-interest), but then leads us on with the idea that it is purely situational. From that perspective, I wish that it had not even bothered to try to share notions of what such a person might be like, and have far more warmth for the achievements of Only the Young, not unlike those of Bombay Beach.


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