Building her up - for her*

This is a follow-up piece to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)

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19 September

This is a follow-up piece to this blog’s review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

* Contains spoilers – best read if you have watched the film *

To those who think that depression – unlike a broken leg – is invisible, just watch Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014) : the makers of this film have not just ‘observed’ depression well, they have understood it !

As the earlier review said, Sandra (or, as her boss Dumont invariably calls her, Mme Bya) shows low mood in her gait, posture, demeanour, expression. When we first see her, she has escaped into dreams, woken on the second attempt by her mobile, and throughout we see that tendency, characteristic of negative thinking, to retire out of it all to bed (or to sleep). When Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) arrives home, there is an uncertainty with which he calls out Sandra ? that hints that we have been here before**, not just that Juliette, Sandra’s colleague, has called him after speaking to Sandra (because she could not face meeting Dumont).

When Juliette and she do confront Dumont, Sandra experiences panic / a panic-attack, and the sort of freezing within that paralyses – to Juliette’s (Catherine Salée’s) concern, maybe because she does not know this in Sandra. After Sandra’s reluctance at home, the editing likewise surprises us by suddenly having us there, seeing Juliette’s car approach and pull into the car-park at Solwal (where they both work). Perhaps after that, and whilst most members of the family work on finding addresses for her other colleagues, we hear from her that she has declined an offer from Robert, her other supporter, to drive her around when Manu is at work (until noon on Saturday morning).

However, although Sandra clearly wanted to be alone to try to canvass her fellow employees, she is also obviously agoraphobic on the bus, and, as the day progresses (in no sort of descriptive order within the film) we see her confused, drying up / choking, using a stereotyped approach / rehearsed speech to broach the topic of the bonus and her being laid off, and maybe even mildly hyperventilating.

Have charities such as @MindCharity / @otrbristol / @CharitySANE taken note of Two Days, One Night (2014) for its understanding depression ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 18, 2014

Yet, for those who credit psychiatric diagnosis over ‘the social model’ of mental distress or formulation, what the film really, and subtly, shows is bullying in the workplace, pressures that have weighed on Sandra, who resists when (on the stairs) Manu is urging her not to retire to bed (and encouraging her to stand up for her job), and cites the tensions at work – she had expected to return there, but why, when she now has to face up to every single one of them if she is to overturn the vote of 14 for the bonus, 2 for her return to work, would she not be reminded of what was hard and painful ?

At the end of the film, we appreciate that it must be Dumont’s acquiescence in Jean-Marc’s divisive foremanship that has hurt her (this was felt very strongly on the second time of viewing). Dumont offers her the job back in September, when he will have not renewed the fixed-term contract of one of her colleagues (if he can be trusted that she will not just be laid off*** without any return to work), but, when she challenges him that he is ‘laying off’ others in her place, Dumont hides behind the legality that he would merely not be continuing their posts, which are specified to be time limited, rather than dismissing them (same difference ?).

The film is deliberately vague, but it appears that only on Friday (on the eve of Sandra being due to return to work – on Monday ?) has a vote has been taken (by a show of hands – and sprung on the workforce ?) that sets receiving the bonus against Sandra coming back. Cruel brinkmanship, almost calculated to make Sandra crumble at the fact that (frightened into it) almost everyone has chosen the former over her – which we can easily attribute to Jean-Marc’s chicanery (after all, if he stops her returning to work, he shows everyone his authority and power) and Dumont’s pliability…


In the closing shot, we see Sandra calling Manu and smile, having parted earlier from her former colleagues, cleared her locker and been promised a visit after work by Juliette, not just because (which she says that she will never forget) she has seen those eight people care for and vote for her (but eight still vote for the bonus), but also because she has been able to stand up to Jean-Marc, feeling presumably nothing to lose, and tell him that she knows how he has lied and cheated against her.

Julien :
May I speak to you frankly ? (Sandra agrees.) My wife and I were both [saying]. You can’t ask me.
[…]
Sandra (winding up the stressful conversation about the bonus) : We’ll see.


There have been other little hints (which come together well on a second viewing) during the previous part of the film :

* To Juliette, when Sandra and she have spoken to Dumont (but when – because she ‘froze inside’ (not her exact words) – she has failed to say what is on her heart, namely that she is well and able to come back to work), she says It’s the emotion of being back here and seeing Dumont

* Timur, on the edge of the football pitch (a rail significantly between them), reminds himself of Sandra’s kindness to him in taking the blame when he had broken some cells, and Jean-Marc had said that it had not been a very good example for Sandra to set to Timur (probably not believing it, and saving it up for retribution later ?) – Sandra’s smile, walking away, at having his support seems tinged (Timur says I’m really glad that you came), maybe with being reminded of a difficult time for both Timur and her

* To Anne, regarding Nadine, She could have told me herself, where, when earlier Nadine had pretended not to be in, but could be heard on the intercom, Sandra is hurt because of their apparent close relationship (and, by now, she has already heard a little of Jean-Marc’s intimidation of Nadine and the others from Juliette)

* To Manu, she exclaims It can’t start [up] again ! (referring to Jean-Marc’s tactics ?), and, as mentioned above, Sandra has reservations, when she thinks about a return like this, because of the tensions that already existed at work

* The fight that erupts where Yvon is knocked out is an indication of the tensions and pressures that people are under, quite apart from the abuse that Sandra is given (which erupts again on Monday morning)

* To Alphonse, in the launderette, You’re like me, you’re afraid of Jean-Marc

* All these phrases : You preferred to lay off Sandra / We can’t afford both [sc. bonus and keeping Sandra] (Jean-Marc ?) / Does he think it best I am fired ?


Some other little hints and references :

* The track that Manu turns off in the car, and first brings a smile from Sandra (when he puts it back on, and she then turns it right up) is La nuit n’en finit plus, with lyrics at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb-wQusuraY

* When Sandra is having ice-cream cornets with Manu, she says that she wishes she could be L’oiseau qui chante là – maybe Annie Lennox’s ‘Little Bird’ (from the album Diva (1992)) ?

* Two or three times, we hear the colourful, concise word chômage, so much more onomatopoeic than our ‘[on] the dole’… ?

* Sclessin (whose Rue Côte D’Or is mentioned as a colleague’s address) is a suburb of Liège (Belgium)

* The indications of need (the Eurozone / the recession) in those who are / seem to be ‘working on the black’ (travail sur le noir) :

Willy (met with his wife ) : Salvaging tiles in their back yard, and their daughter needs 500 per month (600 with room) – 1,000 both is and is not a large amount in relation to it ?

Of Juliette : Said that ‘her guy’ is doing up cars ‘on the black’ (which is also what Yvon is doing ?)

Hicham : Working in the shop sur le noir


End-notes

* Although Sandra doubts, at different times in the film, not that Manu pities her (he says that he does not as such), but whether he loves her, and whether they will stay together (saying that they have not slept together for four months and does that bother him), we see him giving her the encouragement that she needs to do what she does – she ends the film intending to look for another job, and early on had baulked at the task ahead, saying that they can go back into social housing.

Giving another perspective, asking why people have said what they did (i.e. what their motive is, e.g. to put her off so that they can keep their bonus), is a form of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for Sandra at this taxing time (because she wants to say As if I don’t exist, I’ll look like a beggar, and, after Anne’s husband has shouted at her (and using his words), that she does not want to piss anyone else off) :

Manu does, for Sandra, what the pressure causes her not to be able to do, not to think negatively, and we sense (and then see vividly, in the hospital) that he does love her, and that he is doing it for the good that it will be to her. No doubt she could now do with finding ‘a purpose in a project’, but this one is too personal for her to cope with, when she seems to be doing so well with her children and family.

** Maybe that disquiet is for reasons that connect with her later attempt at suicide… ? Manu tries to tell Sandra that the doctor told to stop taking Xanax, but she replies that she needs them.

*** Not an exact term, because the subtitles use it interchangeably to refer to dismissal, whereas (in England & Wales) a lay-off is temporarily requiring employees to cease work, but without dismissing them (e.g. in a downturn, say, yet in expectation of gaining new orders for products).


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

Strangers on a mountain

This is a Festival review of Fiction (Ficcío) (2006)

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18 September (expanded version to come)

This is a Festival review of Fiction (Ficcío) (2006)

This film by Catalan film director Cesc Gay, Fiction (Ficcío) (2006), screened (at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September) as part of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), curated by Ramon Lamarca (for the third year running)

When a collection of that urbane Argentinian writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (and pseudo-essays) was made under the title Ficciones*, that word, although so close to Fictions, had a significance that the English substitute lacks, but which is present in : fictive / fictitious / fictional .

As with Russell Hoban, Borges’ writing career seems to have circled around the nature of reality – what is subjective, what is objective – in miniatures such as ‘The Secret Miracle’ (‘El Milagro Secreto’, published by Sur in 1943) to ‘Borges and I’ (‘Borges y Yo’, first seen in the UK (?) when translated in the collection Dreamtigers, originally The Maker (El Hacedor), which was published in 1960. There are similar hints here that Fiction (Ficcío) (2006) is not quite what it seems:

Is, then, that sequence with the cabin a sly reference to the episode on Mt Olympus in John Fowles’ bestseller The Magus** (in its way, a masterclass in the novel as mirage and deception) ? And what does, amongst other things, the perspective of the video footage that we see several times at the start indicate about [the status of] what we are seeing (and yet, despite ourselves, get drawn into) ?

Do we, by our engagement, act out a fantasy of identification with what we know is fiction that is mimetic of the development what we come to see on the screen ? One has to ask, not just because of Gay’s later film V.O.S. (2009) (as screened at Cambridge Film Festival 2012), with its playful insistence not so much on blurring (as maybe here) as rather contraposing a film with its own making, but also simply because one does not draw attention to fictitiousness without a reason :

We have here both being fecund (here, as in the later film, there is a pregnancy shared by friends), making new relationships, and the creativity at the heart of being fictive (it is not for nothing that Àlex (Eduard Fernandez) makes films and has come to Santi’s house to try to work on a screenplay), yet, at the same time, mortality, getting lost (which, with Dante’s example***, bears more than one interpretation at once), and what Hoban (using a Spoonerism in his title for an essay (collected in The Moment under The Moment****) called Blighter’s Rock.

Words like bitter-sweet were coined for films such as this, where its script (co-written by Cesc Gay with Tomàs Aragay) additionally, calculatedly yet not unkindly, plays with our preconceptions (as Gay continues to do in V.O.S.***** (a video-clip can be seen here), such as where Àlex is when he arrives at Santi’s, and who Santi (Javier Cámara) and he are to each other, since they josh as if they are a gay couple – or who Judith (Carme Pla) is in relation to them both.

Earlier, we have seen Àlex arrive, we have seen a neighbouring property for sale and firewood being tipped off the back of a lorry at his direction, and we have (provisionally) tried to make sense of these elements, and of his reactions to the property and its contents (including Santi’s portrait on canvas (with cactii)).

Then, at first sight of Mònica (Montse Germàn), we – and Àlex – seem to say ho-hum at her being a violinist, a fellow creative, both because we are trying to get a toe-hold in this situation (where, all of them together over dinner, Santi feels able to make off-colour sexual remarks out of the blue) – and Àlex seems so wrapped up in his world, where he turns things down almost as a stock reaction (as protection for his time and work, which seem to be – and so he is unproductive ? – preoccupying his mind, as it does (though much more so, and naggingly) in Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987)).


Yet for all the knowingness (or because of it ? – after all, the film is Ficcío, which is a feminine Catalan noun, capable of meaning invention or fabrication), what unfolds seems on a plane akin to the fantastic in A Canterbury Tale (1944) or Roman Holiday (1953)…

Or it feels more like a David Lean for our times than a Vendredi soir (2002) (or a precursor to Midnight in Paris (2011)).

Were it not, though, for the very end of the film, whose unfolding, for its latency, is almost as much a miracle as that of [Nuovo] Cinema Paradiso (1988) : in the centre of the film, Judith and Santi seemed almost intent on leaving Àlex and Mònica behind (though we later learn that they have other reasons to have done so) – and with but the vaguest of instructions where to meet – and, as Santi (who has fallen asleep) has given access to his video-footage to Sílvia (Àgata Roca***), we wondered what images he may have caught.

Is this fabrication within the terms of the story itself, a product of time, place and behaviour, or is it simultaneously that the film itself, an invention just as much as the words and music of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds that we hear, effortlessly leaves us with the notion that we have maybe co-created the film with Gay, by our attention and participation ?


End-notes

* First published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1962. Then issued by Calder in its Jupiter series in 1965 (and later reprinted by Calder & Boyars).

The first part of Fictions is already a volume, under the title The Garden of Forking Paths; the second is headed ‘Artifices’, another resonant word.

** Resented because he did not think it the best of his work, but writers from Hoban (the success of whose Riddley Walker (from 1980) in no way seemed to promote the rest of his novels – not evenFremder (from 1996) ?) to A. A. Milne or Tove Jansson have found (or would have found) that what they thought best is not always what they are (or will be) known / remembered for…

*** Inferno, Canto I, lines 2 to 3 :
[M]i ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.


**** Jonathan Cape, London, 1992.

***** Where Àgata Roca, who appears later on, is part of the two interrelated couples, along with Vicenta Ndongo (who played Mar Vidal in Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013), also screened in this year’s Camera Catalonia strand).


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

Thomas with a twist – too much of a twist ?

This is a Festival review of Under Milk Wood (1971) plus director Q&A

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16 September

This is a Festival review of Under Milk Wood (1971) plus director Q&A

Under Milk Wood (1971*) twice screened as part of Cambridge Film Festival’s / #CamFF 2014’s Dylan Thomas 100 strand : this is an account of the screening in Screen 1 at 6.30 p.m. on Monday 1 September 2014, followed by a Q&A with its director and screenwriter, Andrew Sinclair

Wikipedia® reports that the famous Richard Burton radio production, broadcast on The Third Programme on the BBC on 25 January 1954, was incomplete, because ‘two sections’ (unspecified) had been omitted – Douglas Cleverdon, its producer, revisited the play in 1963, and it was broadcast in its entirety on 11 October.

Andrew Sinclair turns Under Milk Wood into a film, and we get (Drama on 3, Dylan Thomas: The Beach of Falesa) an unshotscreenplay on radio.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2014

Apparently, Andrew Sinclair’s film (his screenplay and direction) came nearly twenty years after both an incidentally recorded reading – the only one with Dylan Thomas (as First Voice (and Eli Jenkins)) – on 14 May 1953, and Thomas’ death (on 9 November 1953) :

At @camfilmfest, was Andrew Sinclair's film Under Milk Wood (1972) strange - but strange #NotInAGoodWay (and maybe better just as voices) ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 16, 2014

The strangeness is partly there from Richard Burton and Ryan Davies (as, respectively, First and Second Man), not least what they get up to in a shed that they go into : one does not doubt that Jack Toye (@jackabuss) is right that Thomas lost his virginity thus – but these are men not normally of an age to be having their first sexual experience ? (Unless, of course, we look beyond their age, and imagine their occasional high jinks to be re-living their youth ?)

In any case, even though it happened – with Thomas ‘sharing his partner’ (as one might have called it in the 1950s) with the other man – of what great relevance was this element of biography to the text of Under Milk Wood ? Except, of course, that Thomas gives us his fictional Llareggub awash with sex, sexual fantasy and desire (no doubt why there were two cuts in 1954 ?)…

Yet somehow, that seems an insufficient reason to introduce this particular ‘stage-business’ for First and Second Man (though, clearly, they have to be doing something**) – quite apart from what it suggests about whoever the woman is (not easily identifiable from IMDb’s cast-credits), and the role and self-determination of women, that Burton and Davies can just oblige her to divert her from her path, and down to the cliffs, in the first place. For there seems to be enough actual or latent passion as it is, without interpolating more, because, needless maybe to say, sometimes more is less.

Somehow, also, one is thrown back to infidelity and attraction in The Edge of Love (2008), which – whatever its merits or rootedness in fact – shows an ease of relations, and what, at worst, they can give rise to : jealousy, anger, and violence. Yet we also have what is in the centre here, that ‘ease’ repeatedly giving way to multiple relationships, whether the ‘marriage beyond death’ of Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard (Siân Phillips) or the various desires, lusts and even adultery of the others.

In Thomas’ text, we have the extremes of this film that featured him (please see above), with Vivien Merchant (Mrs Pugh) humiliating / emasculating her husband (Talfryn Thomas), but risking his revenge, and the disgust and disdain with and in which Polly Garter (Ann Beach) is held for her promiscuity (and, just as relevantly, her fecundity) : with Polly, one feels that Thomas’ heart lies, as it seems to do (in other ways and amongst others), and with the youthful attractiveness of Gossamer Beynon** (Angharad Rees) – see the comment on The Wicker Man (1973), below.

Likewise, the seemingly well-suited couple (amongst so many mismatches) of Cherry Owen (Glynn Edwards) and Mrs Cherry Owen (Bridget Turner), and even Captain Cat’s (Peter O’Toole’s) solitary, but content, world amongst the sounds from which he conjures up pictures of life – as Thomas, his creator, himself does, whether boomingly delivering ‘Fern Hill’, or here, in this play.


However, the question is – as famously with the play within Willy Russell’s original play of Educating Rita (1983) – simply put : Since this is a Play for Voices, why do we need what Sinclair has done with it, converting it into a film ? And, moreover, do we need him effectively undermining his own screening by being too candid about (not to list everything) :

* Telling us at which times of day – on account of sobriety – he could rely on Richard Burton to do various things on the shoot :

We also heard some of this from Roland Klick at the Festival in 2013, regarding Dennis Hopper, cocaine, and the making of White Star (1983), but Klick seemed to inform Hopper’s performance by what he told us, because how he told it was more germane…)

* Likewise with Elizabeth Taylor (and Sinclair’s having to have her as part – as it were – of the package, so letting her be as Rosie Probert), but bitching about her Cleopatra make-up, her behaviour on set, etc.

* Cast who came to Sinclair as part of the funding deal, when maybe it gives a better impression of artistic unity and purpose at least to be silent about such matters (unless asked), rather than glaringly seeking to be truthful that it had to be accepted, whatever the drawbacks

* Even, perhaps, drawing attention to the fact that Burton does not speak a word on screen (and it was recorded separately) – what maintains the magic of cinema better… ?


Yet, on some sort of fantasy level, Sinclair talks up Thomas’ work – which, as a champion of it when he was a fellow in Cambridge, he necessarily would – and also how easily the text (which has been analysed here by another) fitted with the talented actors (i.e. those who were not just, not in his words, ‘along for the ride’) : afterwards, Sinclair told The Agent (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) that the tempo to which, in the extended passages, the actors naturally inclined had never been at variance with his own vision for the delivery.

Maybe so, but we wonder how easily Sinclair persuaded women to wear costumes so diaphanous as to be transparent, or Rees to recede with a naked back – in a sequence that took us out of the already concentratedly odd (as if the Welshness that Thomas wants to share with the world is distilled eccentricity ?) into unreality : and maybe Sinclair’s film was influential on the significantly more interesting vision of Anthony Shaffer in his screenplay for The Wicker Man (1973), with Gossamer a precursor to the likes of Britt Ekland (as Willow) on a less furtive coastline ? Also a film where director Robert Hardy gives much more sense of being on a coast and of the sea (even if Under Milk Wood was filmed in and around Fishguard, Pembrokeshire) ?


Sinclair’s film starts and finishes with the sky at night-time, seen through branches as the camera moves onwards. Later, whether through the lack of budgetary or other resources, the night that Burton and Davies describe does not always resemble that pitch quality (again, Sinclair was not asked why it looks less like coal black than dawn – or brighter – before we even get to dawn).

Further on, it does not seem to be the real O’Toole looking out to the waves (if Captain Cat could see) from his vessel atop a building, but rather resembles a mannequin, and the film (even if it appears to match the length of the play) feels substantially over its length for its content – however much Sinclair has invented for his cast to do...


Which is maybe the problem, namely that this depiction is overly visual, often literal (despite the moments of unreality), an approach that draws attention to the fact that what one most wants to take from Under Milk Wood is Thomas’ words.

So what was the point of that Drama on 3 ? To get Dylan Thomas' screenplay made, @BBCRadio3blog - or to make it seem unnecessary ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2014

22:00 Drama on 3: Adaptation of an unfilmedscreenplay by Dylan Thomas set on a Pacific island. http://t.co/SBvm9OqZuq
— On BBC Radio 3 Now (@onradio3now) October 26, 2014

Yet it is, after all, quite nice to learn this (also from Wikipedia®) :

In December 2012 the director of the film, Andrew Sinclair, gave its rights to the people of Wales.

If so, maybe the nicest thought about the film was not mentioned in the Q&A…


End-notes

* Yet IMDb says 1972 (and, crucially, it says 87 mins, #CamFF 88 mins) – and never to be confused with Under Milk Wood (2014)…

** If, that is, they need to be embodied at all, and not just voiced over – a topic that did not appear to be canvassed in the initial part of the Q&A.


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

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part I : Q&A with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What's Best For Her (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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15 September

Summary account of a Q&A at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

As detail fades already, this is necessarily an impressionistic account of a Q&A that followed the second screening, at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013) with director and co-writer Mar Coll, and hosted by the curator of Camera Catalonia (for the third year running), Ramon Lamarca, at 1.00 p.m. on Friday 5 September

Next on the blog (the 1,000th posting), a write-up of Q&A2 from @camfilmfest with Mar Coll, director of We All Want What's Best For Her...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014

The first screening of We All Want What’s Best For Her at Cambridge Film Festival, at 6.15 p.m. on Thursday 4 September, had been a UK premiere and so was also followed by a Q&A*.

Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central - image courtesy of Tom Catchesides

To judge only by the end of that previous Q&A, this second one maybe gave a little too much weight to the question of Geni’s character (played beautifully by Nora Navas**) being a woman. That said, Ramon has since indicated that, because Birds Eye View is interested in and for exploring issues of gender and society (in relation to film-making), they had been very present in the discussion on Thursday evening – some might therefore be coincidentally interested in the following Tweet :

25 best films directed by women http://t.co/sHRuxtFxc7
— Raindance Film Fest (@Raindance) September 14, 2014

The reason for asking about Geni’s gender is that the main friend, on whom the film’s handling of the topic of recovery Mar Coll and her co-writer had based the premise, was a man called Eugènio (hence Eugènia, shortened to Geni) – maybe one of those slightly irritating facts that everyone wrongly thinks that they are alone in having heard and then so many people ask about it…

In fact, Mar did not think that it would have made much / any difference for Geni’s character to have stayed as a man (and, unfortunately, the reason that she gave for making the change has not registered mentally). [However, one is – only slightly – reminded of Cambridge Film Festival 2011, and confronting British actor and first-time director Paddy Considine with the possibility of such a reversal in his Tyrannosaur (2011), i.e. the idea of Peter Mullan’s character Joseph switching, say by becoming Josephine, with that of the now-everywhere Olivia Colman, so that we have a battered man (they exist), rather than a battered woman…]

For those who had seen Mar’s film before, this repeat screening was an opportunity to notice that, however ambiguously (and, of course, fully deliberately so) the question of paying the taxi-driver may have been left, we do not see Geni’s wedding ring after when she decided (after a hesitation) to leave it with him as a ransom,: the driver has been mean to her, and could she – on some level – have been acknowledging her husband Dani’s own meanness and have been making a symbolic sacrifice ? (For example, we soon see Dani (Pau Durà) criticizing Geni for stumbling in her speech, not talking in full sentences because she is upset, and how he patronizingly cajoles her, whilst all the time calling her ‘babe’.)

Mar acknowledged the possibility (which another audience member thought might even have been at the subconscious level of a Freudian slip) that parting with the ring is symbolic : as expected in the best of film-making, Mar wants the viewer to conclude what he or she thinks happened before / is happening on screen. (So when, after the Q&A, it was briefly mentioned that maybe Geni senses that Dani is attracted to Geni’s sister Raquel (Àgata Roca***), and perhaps has even been having an affair with her, Mar just agreed about the attraction, and left the rest as a possibility**** (although it is consistent with Dani’s lack of arousal when Geni, feeling close to him, tries to initiate sex on her return home, if he had been with Raquel earlier.))

Portrait of Mar Coll by, and image courtesy of, Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides)

As to future projects, Mar tempted us with mention of an exploration that she is doing with a group of film students, working on an adaptation of a Pinter play, and which your correspondent established to be Betrayal. When Mar asked, many of us knew the play, even the Jeremy Irons / Ben Kingsley / Patricia Hodge film (which Mar indicated that she was less keen on), so that sounds something to look forward to…


To come (when time / energies permit) : transcript / write-up of a interview that Mar Coll kindly gave about the film and its main character…

In the meantime, this is a link to a pre-Festival review (written with the kind assistance of Ramon, the producers of the film, and the Festival), which this account of the Q&A, and, in due course, the interview are intended to amplify (as the review had consciously been of a non-spoilery nature)


End-notes

* At which Tom Catchesides’ (@TomCatchesides’) striking double portrait of Mar and Ramon was taken, when Ramon interviewed Mar (together with Birds Eye View) :

** Whom we had seen before, in the Catalan strand at the Festival in 2012, as the mother in Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010).

*** Whom we also saw during the Catalan strand two years ago, in V.O.S. (2009), and also this year in Camera Catalonia, in the same director’s (Cesc Gay’s) earlier Fiction (Ficció) (2006), which screened at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September – review to come...

**** At Enric’s – Geni and Raquel’s father’s – lunch-table, we seem to gather that Dani and Raquel knew / shared with each other at university, which strengthens the parallel drawn in the review with that wonderful predecessor Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

Mar was pleased with that link, and also with having spotted the design influence of Allen’s earlier, neglected drama Interiors (1978) (for making which he had to endure such criticism, even abuse, because it was a drama, not comedy :

A style of film to which, after Match Point (2005) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (a review that, implausibly, has more than 10,000 page-views on the blog…), he has only fully returned to great acclaim, in Blue Jasmine (2013).)


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

The lady's not for turning ! or, Saying when you are wrong

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 September

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014), which was shown at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse) in Screen 1

at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September, and followed by a Q&A

Tony Benn, even when just fighting with the limitations of the law, and of parliamentary practice, to become the MP that he had been elected to be by the constituents of Bristol South East (a ward that later disappeared in Bristol South), has a fascinating story to tell, one which, in this respect, had been so often trivialized at the time as a rich boy believing that he could possibly speak for the ordinary people.

This film deliberately does not rely on other people to narrate Benn’s story, as some documentaries would (as if for taste of variety in the telling*), for, when someone is speaking about what happened, it is Benn himself. (Apparently, he had been wary of anything being shot that might be seen to be eliciting a reaction through sympathy, wanting to stand rather on his words and his record.)

Director ‘Skip Kite’*, answering a question from the auditorium, said that it had been his decision that it was best to hear just from Benn himself (and rhetorically asked why, when one could listen to Benn, one would want to have someone else talking about him) – just as had been getting Benn to read his choice, for Benn, from Auden and Shakespeare (Benn’s family had been surprised, because he was not a reader of poetry), filming him in Southwold (and other places where he had given public talks), and, most importantly, the staging of much of the filming :

When not filmed in his actual kitchen (we were informed in the Q&A that it had been the only part of that property then capable of being filmed in), Benn spoke in what was also confirmed to be a film set (at Ealing Studios), with enlarged front pages of newspapers on one side, hanging as if they were military colours. Though in fact – more often than not – they reminded us (as they gently changed around and became updated) of the scurrilous way in which he had been treated and represented in the British press.

No one watching Tony Benn : Will and Testament can doubt that he was prepared to stand up and be counted for what he believed. *Certainly, his life and work had been an encouragement to the creative team that was represented at Festival Central, who had united under its director’s assumed name of Skip Kite : they all said how much they had learnt from Benn and valued meeting him in making the film, but how every meeting unfailingly had to start with ‘a cuppa’ !

Without venom or great resentment, Benn told us how there had been times in his family life when the doorbell was rung at regular hours throughout the night, and his wife and children were followed in the hope that they might make a mistake or otherwise let something awkward slip. He well knew that, when he was dubbed in the press The most dangerous man in Britain, his principles would not be easily contended for, and, of course, he became a convenient target for people’s class and political animosity. Yet in later life, when we saw him after his record-breaking Commons career (back at Parliament, for a cuppa), he was almost rueful about being viewed as a kind, grandfatherly figure… but still believing himself to be ‘dangerous’.

It also shows that, whatever one thinks of what Benn said or represented, one can – as much of the publicity for the film suggested, e.g. on the film-poster – consider his integrity apart from his politics and policies. Talking factually about how he had asked what a mark was on the pavement, when being shown around Nagasaki and having been directed to it, he said that he had been told that a child had been sitting there and been vaporized by the A-bomb : he had clearly been moved by this experience, and it lay at the root of his conviction of the evil of nuclear weapons.


Tony Benn : Will and Testament does show his remarkable will, that of paying the cost of contesting what he thought morally wrong – for example, whatever one’s beliefs about the rights and wrongs of The Miners’ Strike might be (in 1984 to 1985, and a theme of several Festival films this year), one can scarcely doubt that he meant it when he said how proud he was to appear at the annual gala at Durham Cathedral or pictured on a miners’ banner (and alongside heroes such as Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan).

Wanted to make it to @EnemyWithin1984 at @camfilmfest, but - as ever - so much choice, bi-location not perfected, yet saw @TonyBennFilm...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014

Likewise, when Benn says that he came to realize that he had been wrong in government to work on setting up nuclear-powered power-stations in the UK, because he had failed to appreciate that plutonium, the principal by-product of uranium fission, would be used to make warheads for more nuclear weapons. Several times in the film, he says that he had had to admit that he had been wrong, and that he thought it only right to do so.

That said, a comment on Michael Foot’s leadership and how the dimension of his CND stance at the 1983 election** helped (along with the jingoism of the recapture of The Falkland Islands from Argentina under Margaret Thatcher) lead to another term of Thatcher government could have been elicited, but appeared passed over.

And, surprisingly, one Festival regular said that he would not attend the screening because of its subject, and one guesses that it must likewise have attracted, or kept away, those with leanings to the left or, respectively, lacking them, thereby giving rise to an audience that was generally interested in Benn and how he was to be portrayed :

Was, I think, appropriately dressed for Tony Benn: Will and Testament. Encouraged. #CamFF pic.twitter.com/JPMtWG4mMz
— Lilith Cooper (@Coops_LJ) September 6, 2014

To those not interested, whether because not holding left-wing views or not wanting to follow their history through a major figure, one has to suggest that they are mistaken in not watching this film. It has much to say about humanity and what makes life worthwhile, whether Benn’s shock at the death of his brother Michael in the Second World War, and his love for, and loss of, his wife, Caroline Middleton DeCamp (to whom he proposed within ten days, because she was otherwise returning to the States) – or his saying that what mattered to him most about Concorde, when he was Minister of Technology, was the people who built it.

@THEAGENTAPSLEY Thanks! appreciate the review! best Tishand the Film team :-)
— Tony Benn Film (@TonyBennFilm) September 15, 2014

End-notes

* Let alone on t.v., where people pretend to remember what their first thoughts were about x (where x could be anything from children’s programmes to a giant of British comedy), when one guesses that they have seen it since, and that they have been ‘guided’ as to what their recollected response was, typically We had never heard anything like it….

** According to Wikipedia®, the party had the lowest share of the vote since 1918 (though some appear to blame the SDP for splitting the vote and letting the Tories in).


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

A less-than-divine comedy ?

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 September

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014), which had its UK premiere at

Cambridge Film Festival

According to one who also struggled with Amour Fou (2014), but not in Screen 1 at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse), but at Cannes, the film had been billed as a comedy.

Admittedly, a few people did laugh occasionally, but laughing at the manners of the early nineteenth century from the perspective of two hundred years later, and (not necessarily the same thing) seeing the film not as in earnest, but as pastiche, was clearly – if it was one – a conceit that seemed to have been largely lost on the Festival audience (this was the first Festival screening, the UK premiere) :

Yet watch this film as if it were a serious portrayal of the times and miens of the age, and it is literally tedious, i.e. one could not wait for its long-winded vacuum to be refreshed by the buzz and tang of reality in the Picturehouse bar, or on St Andrew’s Street – anywhere, really, but the world of director Jessica Hausner.

-> Under the Skin (2013), for example, one might not enjoy, but think good, @TakeOneCFF - neither was Amour Fou found good, nor enjoyed.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 10, 2014

From this perspective, it is a lifeless piece about love and death – which soon leaves one craving the relative complexity, affectionate Russian (versus German) lampoonery, and tears of joy of Woody Allen’s own Love and Death (1975). Maybe that was the springboard for this pale story, about a man (Heinrich), who is to and fro between two women with his indecent proposal and a ludicrous – even if period – hat.

Except that the word ‘ludicrous’ connotes laughter, not cringing at the notion that such a whining bore, let alone a poet of talent, should be entertained by any except the most pretentious family : melancholy may still have been the fashion (despite a good work-out in places such as England from the mid-sixteenth to early-seventeenth centuries, with Richard Burton even publishing his guide-book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621), but this Heinrich seems to be almost feigning it as a bargaining tool for what seems, through notoriety, to be a way – if an extreme one – to gain attention for his works.

God forbid, but maybe we were meant to relish Friedrich and Henriette’s implausible patronage, even if, because clearly strained financially, they are lesser nobility / land-owners. Not that one has gone to research the social interaction, the salon life, of Germany in this age (when, in England, Austen would have been preparing Pride and Prejudice for the press), but it seems scarcely likely that any but a Goethe (active at this time) or a Schiller (who died in 1805) might be revered as a person, not just for his or her works, and treated as an equal.

For patronage has ever been an uneasy relationship, but the derogatory opinion of scribbling, and the desire to prove that Shakespeare’s poetry and plays are enobled by really having been produced by such a one as the Earl of Oxford (as beyond the ken of a grammar-school boy from Stratford-on-Avon), have been ever with us, and they linger. Exceptions may lie in real aristocratic patronage, such as what – for him – appear to have been the taxing times for René Descartes (and other scholars and thinkers), at the beck and call of Christina, Queen of Sweden (as Beckettt alludes to in his early prize-winning poem ‘Whoroscope’).

Or, in tribute to the great director, his account of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 – 1798) in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) through the medium of Donald Sutherland – let alone Josef Haydn, languishing first at Schloß Esterházy, then at Esterháza (broadly 1761 to 1790), Johann Sebastian Bach, restricted at the court of Cöthen (1717 to 1723), or Wolfgang Amadeus, running away from service to the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg (1773 to 1777) to Vienna.

In film terms, at any rate, we have another Sleeping Beauty (2011), which defies us to stay awake, and taunts us if we do so and hate it : there, as a student waitressing to pay her way through some course (as part of which she is required to study games theory), Lucy / Melissa (Emily Browning) is short of money. Yet that film is not one about how she is trapped into a form of (or what is little better than) prostitution.

At best, it is her acknowledging to herself what she must have known all along (there have been clues enough) : she is not special, nor is she, though, a Sonmi-451 (in Doona Bae), coming to consciousness (in the visualization of Cloud Atlas (2012)) and stirring up a movement with consequences, any more than Heinrich has an original bone in his body, with his longing for one woman (or the other – it does not matter much to him) to accompany him in his quest for immortality.

In relation to this film, we have scant notion of what Heinrich’s writing might be like – unless the text of the two songs to which we are ‘treated’ (fortepiano and voice, twice each) might be inferred to be his (see below). And many a celebrated Lied has started as an unremarkable poem, from which a musical talent has crafted a finer creation (although also ones by Goethe (Heidenröslein*) or Heine (the settings in Schwanengesang, D. 957) have also been not unequal to being set well).

Those who are acquainted with the plot of Die Marquise von O. (The Marquise of O), but forget that its author was Heinrich von Kleist (to whom our Heinrich does turn out to bear a striking resemblance, physically at least), may be surprised to find Heinrich appearing to pass it off as his own… But would it, any more than if we had been confronted with, say, William in Love, add anything that a version of the real story of Kleist is being told here in semi-disguise (although aspects of Kleist’s life and work have appeared in at least a dozen other films) ?

Well, try comparing this with Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut’s film based on a novel, with a woman in between the two title-characters, and there is no knowingness, no depth, in Heinrich’s wheedling**. Even on the best interpretation of Amour Fou, namely that it wishes to depict for our amusement the foibles of the bourgeois classes and their dangerous flirt with the arts, it has nothing much to say, least of all with its – apparently hypothetical – suggestion about the facts at the end (which, given the preceding confusion and implausible sudden certainty, does not actually surprise, because one had surmised the position to be quite arbitrary).

And one doubts that, ready to laugh, the clumsy consummation of something that was meant to be beautiful (and to transcend the misery of life) either has one laugh – or, if what is felt seems an inappropriate reaction, choke it back.


End-notes

* To which Das Veilchen, a setting of which (twice) we hear, is Goethe’s companion piece : to judge from Wikipedia®, it appears that Mozart's is the most celebrated setting...

** The film is set, if only in static words, in the era of post-Revolutionary France, and amongst the chatter of those who stand to lose concerning the changes to make taxation general, but even that background feels unimportant, if the film wanted to say something to us about our own times. Nothing, in any terms, seems to amplify (by taking us beyond it, in a running-time of what felt much longer than the advertised 96 minutes) the general description given in the Festival’s printed programme…


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In this cold, it’s paradise*

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 September

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

As a rarity, Iranian (2014) was interesting, a film dangerous to its maker Mehran Tamadon to have filmed – but could it, for all that, have been better, maybe much better ?

As narrator (over scenes inside a mosque, or of religious veneration on the street), he tells us that he has tried for three years to obtain the agreement of Iranian clerics to spend time in a house together with him, an atheist, so that they can talk about what it is to share a space (the house, which here is his mother’s house, outside Teheran) and what that might be like in The Islamic Republic of Iran – making house rules for the use of the shared parts of the house, which may or may not translate into what should be permissible for people to do generally in that country.

So when four (understandably but regrettably ?) unidentified clerics, two of whom seem more senior to the others (and is referred to as Haji Ali), accept his invitation (and, during the course of settling in, then bring along their families), do we imagine that he would want to be prepared to counter, for example, facile arguments or debating techniques (not least when one of the other men, slighting him comically on camera, asks how he ever read philosophy (when he cannot follow the instructions for ritually washing himself))…?

(Having tried the ritual, he is asked if he felt Incredible joy : twice he took it back to the refreshment of the water (rather than any spiritual quality), and, when he resisted probing as to whether the ritual in itself had been beneficial, he was told Maybe you need to be more attentive, as if the ritual were inherently beneficial and purifying, if he would just notice. Rather pompously and insultingly, around this point, Tamadon is also told (by the cleric on the right (Tamadon is on the left), who is the main interlocutor) You lack knowledge.)

Possibly, grateful that the men are there at all, he falls into the trap of being too nice to them**, and then this felt like a bit of a wasted opportunity, for, although at the level of intelligent undergraduate debate, it was good enough, there are things that anyone should be wise to :

* Not allowing the other participants to define the position that one is defending (or attacking from)

* Not allowing extreme examples or cases to be used, or false dichotomies (as if the choice is only between A and B, and there is no C, etc.)


In this film, Tamadon only weakly defends the assertion that his argument is for ‘secularism’ – the others say the word a few times, and, by attrition, he accepts it, and then ends up with a false label to what he is seeking. This label is then, necessarily, used against him.

For he also allows his guests to refer to the case of naked protesters in Holland (although, to be honest, Das englische Garten in München is where people are allowed to be freely naked outdoors and in public) and then to brand him with dictatorship, under the guise of having made a claim for secularism, because he says that he had not been proposing for nudity to be allowed – this line of argument had, after all, started with the requirement in Iran (whether or not part of Islamic law as such, or of the law of an Islamic Republic – this dis disputed between him and then, and not resolved) of women being veiled.

There was much good humour, not least when, on arrival (and later) the idea of avoiding religious taxes is invoked in relation to Tamadon’s mother’s largely unused property (since his sister and he both live abroad). But too much of the humour is allowed to be at Tamadon’s expense, and the theatricality of one cleric, in getting him to answer a broad Yes or No question, and his then falling into some trap based on the bogus notion of an excluded middle, and even calling him ‘cunning’ more than once.

For, no, if he were even a good debater, let alone a cunning one, Tamadon would say So what if 98% of those who voted 34 years ago voted for The Islamic Republic – two generations have been born since, and how many people who voted then are now alive ? Instead, he weakly says that his parents voted for it, but they did not know what it was going to be (and any such appeal to the individual case, Tamadon’s or anything that was not a generality, was just jumped on).

Against which, science and scientifically established fact kept being invoked – a woman singing (only allowed if a woman sings to an audience only of women) is said to evoke lust in men, and that men are more inspired to lust by, say, seeing a woman’s bare head. Tamadon’s arguments for self-control then sounded regressive, because the high ground had been taken by asserting a scientific basis for the claims, not least when the argument is that it is necessary men’s inclinations must be shielded by women not singing or being unveiled :

We were really in the puerile territory of judges who say that women had it coming with rape or sexual assault because of how they dressed, as if The Accused (1988) had never existed. These debaters are arguing that when a man is attracted to a woman it almost automatically and unavoidably ends in adultery, and this in a society without the loosening effect of (too much) alcohol, and whatever the film may have meant as its message is lost on such thinking.

This film is maybe not the only opportunity that there will be to argue the issues properly, and, when it came to what music could be played in the living-room, with the agreement of the five men, it was interesting that there was not a uniformity of view amongst the other four, and a willingness to allow in that special situation what could not and would not be sanctioned in society as a whole : an indication that, doctrinally, there was more room for movement, with one cleric who stated the official line, and yet what he could personally permit / accept there.

There was a good feel generally to seeing the shared life for these few days, and the prints on canvas, of the men’s libraries, that were used to decorate the walls gave a sense of their influences and viewpoints. However, all of these things were too little to outweigh the substantial poverty of good argument.


End-notes

* Of the fire in the garden, whose flames had been likened just before to those of hell.

** There are, after all, liberties that guests sometimes have, but hosts do not, and vice versa.


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