By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (4)

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8 November

Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...

Finally, (althought he didn't appear to put his name to it) Tim Robey at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8682252/Sarahs-Key-review.html


To which the retort, on 20 August, was:

Sadly, this review is not to be trusted, and I would, also sadly, doubt that there is only one such review a summer.

(Is there even such a word as 'dismayingly'? Is the use of the word 'tenterhooks' meant to be echoed by the use of 'dramatic hook' later in the sentence? How can filmmaking embody 'tongue-tied worthiness' (and what is it anyway)? Where, when and with how much thought was this assemblage of paragraphs dictated?)

'The role of Julia Jarmond, an American reporter in Paris, is dismayingly routine, for all the empathy and conviction she manages to summon.' Should this be interpreted as:

She plays the role of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, but, despite the empathy and conviction that she manages to summon to it, her character's situation dismays by being so routine.

(Obviously the crafted comment of someone who knows when 'wincingly wooden English-language exchanges' (of which there are very few in the film) are shown on screen, and could do much better!)

So what is routine about finding out what Julia does about the place where her husband's family used to live and taking off in search of some answers, and without explaining to anyone what she is doing?

Oh, I forgot that's to be dismissed by writing that 'the trail of flashbacks and letters and far-flung familial ties stretches far across the horizon of head-slapping cliché'.

Funny that no one was doing this head-slapping on either occasion when I saw the film, because people seemed engaged, and even - which is very rare - waited for the credits to finish.

Perhaps this reviewer, who thinks that the Jews were just, albeit devastatingly, 'arrested' (which is what they hoped, of course), was actually confused, as Philip French was, by following the trail, although, in fact, there's very little far-flung about the connections, which, in geographical terms, are France (where we start), the States, and Italy.

And there was nothing (to consider 'far-flung' as meaning 'improbable') unrealistic about the motives that would cause someone to go to the States, and someone else to make a home in Italy.

It is likely to mean improbability, because the dialogue in English 'turn[ed] all plausibility to mincemeat'. However, whether or not anyone speaking that phrase would have turned it to better effect, it is unclear whether this criticism is intended just for the meetings between the staff of the magazine for which Julia works, or also for the ones in the States and later, where she is talking to people unknown to her (some of whom may be more used to talking Italian, as she may be to speaking in French).

Maybe, though, a back-handed way of approving the French dialogue ... whereas the general approach of such phrases as 'a grimly tasteless suspense device' (on my reading of it, taken from the novel) is to try to slap the film about the head.

Oh, but not with anything like a cliché: with coinages that ring as little true as a wet fish wielded (in Python) on a quayside by a military John Cleese.


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By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (3)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 November

Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...


OK! Then Nicholas Barber at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/sarahs-key-111-mins-12a-2333119.html#disqus_thread

Who, just for the moment, seems to have disappeared my comment...*

And I can't find it on Rotten Tomatoes as a review...



End-notes

* Not even there in a saved copy of the web-page (as checked, including its source, on 18 March 2012).

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By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)

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7 November

Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...


Right! Next came Philip French at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/07/sarahs-key-scott-thomas-review

My comment (on 10 August):

These very short Guardian reviews, this one running to just 169 words, are inadequate in their very nature.

One might be forgiven, just from the humour - or at the attempt at it - in the opening sentence to think that Mr French has 'lost it', as has been suggested. Certainly, the quip wasted around one-sixth of the total length, and gives us little credit for knowing how things work, if we are supposed to believe that he was really so misinformed.

Or is it, for him, just like a conveyor-belt, with a voice announcing what comes next and which he mishears to make some sort of joke, sadly misjudged when, as he admits, the reality is inhuman treatment and genocide?

As for much of the meat of the review, I can live with it, probably, though it is inexplicable why Julia's (Kristin Scott Thomas') husband is deemed 'dodgy' - he may be uncaring about her real needs, and superficially appearing to take account of them, whereas he is really looking to his career. If so, then these mini-reviews don't have the time to say what they mean, and are a shorthand that is not even clear to someone who has already seen the film.

I have seen the film, and I will see it again - I did so with I've Loved You So Long, and it 'worked' just as well as it did the first time, even though I knew where it was going. I full believe that Sarah's Key will too, and, if someone who is used to film found this confusing, then what hope for watching, say, Chinatown?

It's just that certain films require rather more work from the viewer than others, and it really was not difficult to keep up with Julia's quest (for that is what it is, or becomes) at all - I have no idea how the unfolding of what she finds out, and what happens in consequence, relates to the novel, but I shall find out.

In the meantime, I will be finding more in the complexity that this reviewer took for something else: the complexity is not in the plot, it is in the emotional response, all excellently acted, of at least five characters (Julia, her husband (dodgy or not), his father (her father-in-law), and in Sarah's adoptive parents (particularly her father) and her son), and little of it overplayed or drawn out by the score.

But, finally, what about 'Thomas is good as always' - is this a text-message that just happens to be related to a rating of four stars, or is it foolish to be asking why the reviewer is (a) assuming that we know how good she is, and (b) not bothering to tell us more than she has done her job as she should? Five casual words, when thirty-seven were wasted on the opening sentence!


QED


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By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (1)

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7 November

Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...


Ah, yes! Peter Bradshaw, where it all began, at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/04/sarahs-key-review


Seemingly, on 8 August, I replied:

When I read this review, which headlines as one of Sarah's Key, I found myself straightaway reading about another film, which, the more that I think about it, seems to be its real subject-matter.

I was initially unclear whether this was a review in two parts (or, even, the film that I have just seen, Sarah's Key, was being referred to under another title), but it is actually the vehicle of comparison to criticize, with faint praise, the new release for not being 'a decent attempt' at dramatizing those events that The Roundup and it have in common. For, otherwise, it is difficult to make sense of the following two sentences as anything other than implying that, in some way, the screenplay and director of Sarah's Key have spiced things up:

The depiction of the dehumanised conditions in the velodrome is appreciably tougher here than in The Roundup. This movie shows a desperate suicide and also what happens when thousands of people are confined for days in a sports arena with no lavatory facilities.


I simply cannot tell whether this is intended to be (which, for me, it fails as) a mere statement of fact, but I find myself forced back on these words 'deceent attempt', and, perhaps, the implication that the attempt in Sarah's Key fails by going too far in showing these things.


Again, this is meant to be a review, but I am given no real clues as to the meaning behind the comparison, except in:

It took what might be called a top-down view of this event: narrating the story and showing the political machinations of high-ranking French and German officials who had decided on this horrendous action.


By implication, since one has to tease out what the reviewer, presumably, means in telling us his summary of how The Roundup works in what is meant to be addressing the merits (or otherwise) of Sarah's Key. Otherwise, it is a mere juxtaposition, not a review.

However, at this point, all that I can see is that the headlined film only gets three stars, and it is unclear whether there is again implied criticism of it, by making the comparson, for not dealing with the same story. (I also have no idea how the film of comparison is rated at all,)

Yet it is clear enough that this story starts with Sarah (she is in the opening shot) and that the events that the films both depict are, it seems, their only (and factual) point of contact - the film is not about why what happened took place.

Yes, it is a given (with challenges to our complacency that we would not have been complicit, both in the exchange between neighbours looking out of windows in the same building at the Jews below them, and when Julia (Scott Thomas) challenges her female colleague), but only what needs to be told for the much wider story, which appeared to have lost the reviewer's sympathies or patience (but was the powerful, emotional heart of the fil for me), is shown.

My feeling is that the existing title of another film Secrets and Lies, comes close to saying what this film's message is, and it does not seem fair to it to suggest that there is just one past, and then the present, as there is an unfolding of past events, as Julia follows her trail (and why she does it, when her daughter and then husband ask, leaves her struggling to explain at first) if people finding out who they are, what matters to them (e.g. keeping a baby), and achieving peace and reconciliation is simply 'a bit TV movie-ish', then so be it, yet, to bear any relation to the novel, putting it on the screen is more or less bound to have the broad outlines of its trajectory, and one might just as well dismiss the novel, too, for telling that story.

I saw several strong performances from male actors (for example, from Julia's father-in-law, her husband, and the man who cannot, at first, believe what he is told about his mother), which all admirably showed the feelings that emerged from being confronted with a past, but no one at all is given any credit for them in this review.

Oh, actually 'Kristin Scott Thomas gives it [the TV movie-ish film] weight', which I should like to believe is an appreciation of what I thought was a very strong piece of work. but it could just as well be telling me that she, just by adding her name to it, puffs up something otherwise less worthy (and makes it a three-star release).

I am sorry to be critical, Mr Bradshaw, but I cannot see that this review does what it is supposed to do, i.e. give some proper basis on which to understand the star-rating, and, more importantly, actually talk about the acting at some point.


QED


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'I got plastered last night'

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6 November

I didn't, but we know what it means:

Why does it mean that?

* Rhyming slang ('plastered wall'?)?

* Corruption of another word (mastered?)?

* Cultural reference (e.g. a film in which getting covered in plaster, as Laurel and Hardy do all the time, has something to do with booze)?


Answers on a comment or, if you prefer, a tweet

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‘Inspiration’ over a pint

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6 November

Passing the bar, I chimed in when I heard talk of someone wanting an iPad (a son of the speaker’s family, I think):

Never mind eye-pads, knee-pads are better – and cheaper!

A little consternation, but I persisted, pointing to the lower half of the body, and repeating the claim of superiority for pads for the knees.

Duly enough, others who had half-heard also checked their hearing, before taking it up, and it was then the Admiral Lord Nelson impersonations, etc.


Sheer inspiration! Or was it only ‘inspiration’ as opposed to ‘expiration’, breathing in fumes from the nearby log-fire leading to confused thinking…?

In any event, England Expects England’s Glory – match that!


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Notes on a performance: Grief, 'a new play by mike leigh'

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5 November

Mike Leigh explicitly works on plays and films by freely involving the cast in improvisation, role-play, etc. – does this make for a less tenable notion of a play being 'by him' than with a film? (The short answer: probably not, but it feels as though it should, feels as though someone who sat in on a development session and contributed a line 23 minutes in, when everyone was stuck, might have something to say…)

Although the script of a play may, after experimentation, become fixed (as I understand Leigh’s does), with a film there is a set of performances whose nuances are captured (i.e. more than one take might be made, and then there would be a choice, but the choice, once made, would be in the cut).

With plays in general, how the words are delivered, or the stage-directions observed, can vary immensely from one show to the next, let alone one theatre – or one production - to the next. Admittedly, less likely to be so, if the actors are good ones, and the writer/director keeps an eye on things.

If the film credit says 'BUBBLEPOP - A Mike Leigh film', we know that, in studio speak, that may mean more than 'Presented by Dead Parrots Pty' or 'A Clint Eastwood production', but, perhaps crucially, who claims ownership or authorship of the script in the credits? The massed dancing bands of the city of Brno?

At any rate, the programme tells me - in a note on Leigh by Michael Coveney - that the gesture used to be 'devised and directed by', and maybe I'm happier with that.



Anyway, as to Grief, it needs to be judged whether it really works, but it is not, I believe, a great piece of theatre.

It all happens on one set, changing only as to time of day, which is shown largely through the large bay-window, stage right (but also through the light entering into the hallway, which is also stage right, through the room’s entrance in the long downstage flat). Light within the room, when it needs to be turned on during a scene, is always done by Dorothy (Lesley Manville), otherwise by the stage crew between scenes.

That said, there are various curiosities of this household, as we see it move from late 1957 into mid-1958, and which crucially relate to the staging (and what is staged):

* The only bell that we hear is the doorbell - the telephone (if there is one) never rings, is never referred to (or used), and visitors just turn up unannounced, starting with Edwin’s GP friend, Hugh (David Horovitch).

Yet this is not the provinces, but suburbia: which means not only that people may have come from a distance to happen by, but also that, though it is still early days for television, it is not for a telephone. As we know how the play has developed, this approach to people calling will be a given, but how true is it to its period?


* For the simple reason that, if visitors did turn up unexpectedly, there would be somewhere to receive them, houses of the time had two reception rooms: what we are shown here would have been the front room, almost exclusively used to keep neat and show guests into (whereas another might have doubled up as a dining-room, which Dorothy’s household has).

Guests simply would not have seen the living room in the way that is shown here, and those social niceties were alive well into the 60s and 70s (and beyond). We are, unrealistically (because anachronistically), presented with one room with the shared function of those in the household coming together and of receiving guests, i.e. what is now a lounge.


* Dorothy would have been viewed very strangely by her other well-heeled ex-telephonist friends from wartime, let alone the cleaner, if she had really had a home on the principles shown§. As to the telephone, I do not know, but it seems surprising, as does the absence of radio.

For radio would have been a large part of people’s lives at the time, but there is no evidence of one, or of anyone listening - only a reference by Gertrude (Marion Bailey) to a song that she asks Victoria (Ruby Bentall – more of an exciting name than her stage character’s) whether she has heard. (She has, much to the glee of 'Garrulous Gertie', who herself wants to seem young.)


Fine, with the second point, a number of those in the audience would have known that there was a conflation of function being shown, but younger viewers would not, and then one asks how much, if it is meant to be one, this is 'a slice of life'. It is a compromise, and one that, I imagine, one would not make in a version of the script for film - but I may imagine wrongly...

Of course, it is done just because it is a convenient way of having one large area on the stage, not the separate rooms often depicted in a set in a search for naturalism, but does that fatally flaw the integrity of trying to show a household in Britain where there is so much emphasis on a war that is not much more than a decade over, and of trying to (regain or) maintain reality? (Victoria is even told by her mother how good she was during the war.)

However, on another level, the five songs (including 'Goodnight, sweetheart' and 'Night and Day') that are burst into would not have had such a place with the presence of radio, the central one being Gertrude, Muriel and Dorothy singing 'Black Bottom' together. Otherwise, the songs are started in equal measure by Edwin or Dorothy, with the other joining in, complete with harmony at the end of some of them.

Edwin abruptly breaks off 'Night and Day', seemingly either through his own, or his sister's imagined, awkwardness: perhaps at the sentiments, although they do not differ vastly from other songs, perhaps from some connection to his bachelorhood. I was reminded not so much, as some might have been, of Dennis Potter, as of Pinter’s play Old Times, which Leigh surely knows, with its snatches of song shared in the same way.

Poor Edwin, unlike the eccentric - and, the more that we hear of him, rather irritating* – Dr Hugh, is doomed to exist more in his memories: both Dorothy and he are, and they take comfort in a familiar pattern of songs when holding their sherry, finishing with the usual ‘chin chin’, led by Edwin.

Before the final scene, with retired Edwin at home from May onwards, Dorothy and he seem like Winnie and Willie from Beckettt's Happy Days, presumably a deliberate reference by Leigh: Edwin calling out snippets from the newspaper, which make less sense to the person who cannot see it, whilst Dorothy tries to make conversation with him, but he is then immersed in this, or whatever else, he is reading. He has been warned about just slowing down rather pointedly by Dr Hugh, and the play is called Grief.

All of the cast were excellent, so I do not see the need to single any one out for praise, although, since they were necessarily on the stage for much of the two hours' duration, one's admiration for the leading players is greater.


As, though, to whether what they performed really amounted to much:

1. Grief had an end that always seemed likely (though it was unclear what we were to infer had happened to Edwin - a stroke?). Was the pain in his knee an aneurysm?

2. For the reasons stated, it was not true to its time (there were also momentary snatches of dialogue that seemed too modern for their time, e.g. Victoria saying ‘I hate you!’ to Dorothy, and largely getting away with it); and

3. Both in the 'steals' from other playwights, and the kind of life, rather empty except for remembering other times, and talk (or cross-talk) listened to by other characters with a sense of frustrated toleration, it lacked originality. Not that everything has to be new, and there were some amusing moments, but so what?

Unless it was deliberately anachronistic, and was trying to show us, by mixing times, that the 60s and 70s, and their attitudes, had their roots in the behaviour of the post-war period, which would, with war-time, have been all that Victoria knew.


* ’All's well that ends’ was fun as a quip the first time, but not by the second repetition: David Horovitch appeared in the Shakespeare, and he may have brought it to the party as a cast-joke. He seemed like a witty doctor, in a Chekhovian British vein, with his ‘Where there's death, there's hope’.


§ Not that the modern style of living with which we are all too familiar, with the emergence of the lounge-diner (or even the studio flat), had not begun in the 50s, but the window in the set showed that the house of which we saw part was not a new build of that type at all - if it had been, all well and good, and people getting used to others living that way would have been got out of the way well before the scenes that we witness, but what we were clearly shown was from an earlier property, not this.


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Awaiting a report from - or about - Wallingford...

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5 November

Although I already had a ticket, my friend Chris couldn't join me on his way (sort of) from Grantham home to Bicester for a screening of Dimensions at the Festival, as it had already sold out.

However, he had a chance to catch up with it last night at the showing at the Corn Exchange in Wallingford. He was going to resist reading the review that I put on IMDb till afterwards, and I didn't hear from him after the screening, so I wonder where that has placed him.

Still, with ratings of 8.1 on IMDb, it has a good body of support behind it, and I've just found these goodies to look at, too:

Links to BBC Look East Behind-the-Scenes of Dimensions


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5 November

Back at the blog with no name, I looked at what was happening, to find that, one second earlier, Luke McMullan had posted:

At the last analysis, the provisional will come to mean only itself.


This called out for a riposte, but, possibly for that very reason, none was possible there, so:

What we call the last of anything is only when we can't imagine a sequel


Or:

Our best analysis is itself only provisional - until something betters it


Or, as John Pilling seems to have written about Beckettt in Beckettt before Godot*:

To discover the 'provisional' was Beckettt's ambition, because it could give his scepticism a limitless domain in which to operate


* Even Google, once more reliable, did what I wanted with the search-string '"Molloy"+"provisional"+"Beckett"', though I was really after Molloy's own words...


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Funny Games v. Melancholia

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5 November

Isn't Lars von Trier's Melancholia, perhaps, like Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997)?

In an interview with Haneke about the original film in German (but it may be applicable to the US remake, bizarrely also made by this director, ten years later)*, and elsewhere (there appears to be, if I could find it**, an essay of his called 'Violence + Media'), he said that it was a healthy response to have had enough and (in the cinema) walk out or (otherwise) eject the DVD before the end. (Indeed, on the cover of one DVD release, on Tartan Video, one is asked 'How far is too far?')


Or, maybe, Moira Buffini's play Dinner**?

It's supposedly witty, etc., and opens the wittiness with the guests for the title's meal being served with lobster. Only the lobster under the cover is alive!

Hungry people (does no one eat something before a meal out, just in case?) faced with needing to kill / cook - for some reason, in whatever class they (are supposed to) hail from, they have not done this before.

If, however, as it is not really a culinary (but a cultural) rarity, one of them had, then no premise for all the distress, as he or she would simply have cooked for all - unless that was against the rules: I forget.

Those who found Dinner simply provocative (i.e. provocative for no very good reason, and, in that sense, like the torture and violence of Funny Games, for no reason other than 'Because I can') might not have stayed.

It was in the first half of the 2010s, but I'm fairly sure that even one of the guests does just that - or maybe that's not allowed within the rules of the evening: I forget.

Either there was a hint to take, and I took it when I could (always easier with an aisle-seat), or I vacated my seat for a longer interval than others may have enjoyed.


With Melancholia, when I came to leave its realm / influence / phantasy, was not pushing the same buttons of 'I do this, and I defy you to continue watching', but almost - far less overtly, but still something there to challenge one's continued attention.

Not entirely seriously, I wonder whether the screenings of the film were a nationwide psychoanalytic study:

By and large, because some people go to films socially (rather than alone, just because they want - or think that they want - to see the film), and one may have chosen this one without, in some cases, the other(s) even considering it, there will have been some basis on which the audience has selected itself.

If it is a screening in a multiple sense, what does it say about the people who 'stick the course', as it were, rather than giving up on it as one might Funny Games or Dinner by walking out?

I think, if I am right, rather more than about those who leave - those who don't get secretly tagged, and followed until a convenient point to invent a spurious medical appointment at which a more durable microtransmitter (plus, depending on your fantasy, microchip, transponder, etc.) can be inserted. (Or is that, given where we started, the scenario of one of Haneke's other films?)


End-notes

* Strangely, the two young men who - principally, but not exclusively - play the games are described on the IMDb web-site as 'psychotic' when writing up the original (in US English, if arguably not in British English, that word is a synonym for 'psychopathic') and 'psychopathic' for the English-language follow-up (and so not using the word 'psychotic', although it seems more current in the States).

** Incidentally, when a search-engine not only wants to default to what it thinks that the appropriate search-string should be (as an afterthought, offering up one's choice as an option, and only, and after protest, letting the string in the search-box be edited), but will not find a play from one's recollection of author and title, it's time to say 'Goodbye, Google - hello, Amazon!'. (As things stand, the software on the latter's web-site allowed me to find the play, despite the misremembered name.) With the Haneke essay, having the title did not even help!


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I'm so indecisive - or am I?

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5 November

When I'm teetering on the fulcrum of That / No that (or even the pinnacle of That, No that, No that!), waveringly motionless, near-balanced forces both physically and mentally in opposition (one because of the other because of the one, ad nauseam, is that an approach / an approximation to the more enduring state or moment (does it just seem like one long, agonizing moment) of catatonia?

I'm not sure (pun intended!), but maybe I'll research what the experts say - no, screw them, what the people who have experienced it report!

Then, perhaps, the title for another feature for von Trier - he could make a Dyspepsia trilogy*, maybe...


* Actually, I've got another idea about that one - if you like, see the next posting...


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Signs and Symbols

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4 November

This one is a classic, snapped on a recent visit to London, and full of its own obscurity, intensified by the fact that such pronouncements are usually uttered, a few words at a time, by being on a pillar or flange behind where the driver sits:

Please do not speak to or obscure the driver's vision while the bus is moving


The ill-judged consequence of aiming at brevity is one thing, but a finer is:

Am I, then, free to apply a bandage to the driver that partly occludes one eye when the bus has arrived at a stop - or even to blindfold him or her, prior to carrying out mysterious initiation rites on the lower deck?

Yet nothing quite beats the message on the airport tannoy, effectively telling us, with a circularity of redundancy (or a redundancy of circularity), that smoking is not permitted except where it is permitted...


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4 November

Enough of moderation - time for excess! Fasching, Liberty Hall, Princes of Misrule!

At http://pdpdpdpdpd.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/report-from-the-page/#comment-2:

In the wide canon of writing, a report may be a retort, a shot.

Or an account, perhaps from the battle-scene. (The First Folio gives the good offices of 'a bleeding Captaine', neglecting his wounds. (As Macbeth, wedded to slaughter, his.))

Ariel is the best sort of page, ranging the island in a trice. Or Puck, so fast, so mischievous, reporting his misprision.

Mistress Page, duped by and duping the 'roasted Manningtree ox'. Ditto Mistress Ford. Ditto Mistress Quickly?

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Nicola Malet at The Tavern Gallery (Meldreth)

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4 November

I was very glad to be able to make it to-night to the private view of the new show at my friend David's gallery, the work of textile artist Nicola Malet. (On the invitation, David calls it multi-media textiles, which also seems OK as a description.)



One of Nicola's points of departure for creating this very varied display of her work - there is a long wall of the gallery where almost every piece is different in feel (not sure if one was invited to touch, so I didn't, but these works have a tactile as well as visual quality) and compositional make-up - is a tour that she made of South East Asia, and the interest that it gave her in the plants (leaves and flowers) that she had seen.

Another (because Nicola has gained a degree in this sort of art) was the colour and characteristics of all the fabric that she saw, presumably both on sale and in clothing being worn. When I asked her what her guiding light was in juxtaposing fabrics, as, for example, she has done in a long vertical canvas, she told me that it was a visual sense of what goes with what. (I say 'canvas', not because it is painted, but because, as artists like her do, there is a strong sense of a coherent unity that is much more than the sum of the individual elements.)



As I hope that I have already indicated, there is a wealth of techniques employed from subtle gold shadings that bring out the texture to a filigree-like overlay using machine embroidery that gives a multi-dimensional sense of depth and complexity. I could say more, but this needs to be looked at, not described!

What can be described, though, is Nicola's thoughtful inventiveness and belief in her own work when talking to her, which is there to see at The Tavern Gallery, Station Road, Meldreth, till, I believe, 18 November - if a visit is possible at the weekend, there is a good chance of talking to Nicola about her exhibition, too...
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Let's be rude about Hugh Grant!

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2 November 2011

Not about the quality of his acting, which, of course, speaks for itself (he's not known as Huge Rant for nothing!), but about his recently announced, if delayed, proof of virility:

A story about a 'fleeting affair', which I did not quite understand from the snippet that AOL threw up at me on its sign-on page, has been headlined, for the last day or two, something like 'Hugh Grant becomes a dad at last'.


Well, incomprehensible folly as it seemed (other than as - pun intended! - an ill-conceived publicity stunt), his late-night encounter on, as I remember, Sunset Strip with Divine Brown (brilliant name, I always thought, even if it might have been penned by Max Clifford) struck me as the most interesting part of his career, before or since 1995.

The angle was that he was - or was supposed to be (in that Hollywood studio sort of way) - involved pretty nebulously (i.e. where, with stars in the firmament, we are told what someone wants us to hear) with Hurley Burley at the time of his 'indiscretion'.

But how much of an actress was Liz (in any way that one chooses to understand the question), what did she do for Hugh's popularity ratings, and what charms - physical or otherwise - did she really have, except those that a post-punk use of big safety-pins compelled us to think of, and of her, in a certain way?

Were we supposed to think that Divine's form of relief was what Hugh found lacking? Or did he genuinely - no Big Machine talking - seek it out on a whim? Unlike government secrets (and whether George Michael's 'outing' was a similar police-fuelled mistake discovered), there is, alas, no thirty-year rule that will give us the answers, if we just waited!

So all that we can do is wonder whether there is any connection with the time taken for Hugh to achieve this status 'parenthood' (unless, of course, there might be a suite of other children, sequestered from the world, whom he has secretly fathered), when no issue (pun intended!) has come (pun intended!) of his sex-life until now...


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When worlds collide...

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1 November 2011

For all that I know, Melancholia is symbolic, a battle of wills between sisters in the heavens that results in one vanquishing the other...

In Tirza, which some might guess that I favour more, Jörgen comments on how he was told that his daughter's battle with the effects of an eating disorder is a typical condition of the white, western world: dramatizing his guilt at having made Tirza that way by his parenting (which cultures, one wonders, need a word for such a thing?), he accuses himself ragingly as being, himself, the eating disorder.


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Quiz night in Bermondsey

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31 October

For some obscure reason, I had known of this part of London for years, but I really did not know where it was.

I was quite surprised that it turned out to be near Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, and that incomplete pointy building, highly visible from Tate Modern. (I think, perhaps, I had been confusing Bermondsey with Bethnal Green in some corner of my mind, although, rationally, I knew that that was Bethnal Green (and, therefore, not Bermondsey), and so placing it north of central London.)

Near the hospital, and on the way from the Tate to the venue of New Empress Magazine’s first quiz night at – and in association with – Shortwave Cinema, I turned out to pass the pointy building (I wonder if there is there some connection other than its proximity). The hoarding told me that it’s properly called London Bridge Quarter, but what I now know to be The Shard of Glass still looked no nearer completion: maybe the money’s run out, or ‘quarter’ (or 'shard': shards are like that, unlike shreds!) relates to the unfinished pinnacle…

What beckoned all the while was a film quiz, courtesy of Helen Cox, editor in chief of NEM (which I now know to be named after a cinema in Nottingham, which closed in 1927), and compered by comedian (and film buff) Adrian Mackinder (it may not be spelt quite that way...), with the general assistance of film-maker Phil Bowman (sure a Sagittarius, and a devotee of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher). (In one round, various combinations of the three valiantly acted out dialogue from various films for us to identify, if we'd ever seen them.)

On getting there, it was straightaway apparent from the question papers (why are they often called that when they are answer-sheets?), since I know no film with a shark in it (except perhaps a cartoon like Marine Boy, who was always terribly, maybe – except for the title – unnecessarily aquatic in his tastes), that the picture round wasn’t going to be where (if at all) I could shine.

Which was a shame, because, as a free radical, I had accosted and oxidized the team of Betty, Ulli and Stephanie (I never did - try to - discover any connection between them, and maybe they just met when they all got off at the nearby bus-stop), just at that vulnerable moment when they had brought chairs in from outside and hadn’t yet ordered drinks, and Betty had stipulated that I could join them, provided that I was a film geek. (OK, I lied…)

They had agreed to take me in as an orphan, and I accordingly owed them my share of points in the final score (if that’s not soccer, rather than quiz nights). However, little did any of us probably realize that an early inspiration regarding that page of shark-laden images was our best chance of winning anything…

All in all, what I guessed at, rather than knew, was that the film that had been banned and is being remade is Straw Dogs; that the MGM lion had had five incarnations; and that Douglas Fairbanks was one of the four founders of United Artists; but, I think nothing else, and none of these (except that the Dustin Hoffman film had been banned) was any more than luck.

(Oh, and I ought to have said that, in the round with clips from music that had run over unnamed films’ closing credits, I thought that one was from The Matrix, but, as is the way with a quiz, another team member had another answer, and I felt meek. I also recognized the vocalist in the next clip as Freddie Mercury, and, I suppose, although that did not help me to the name of the film, I could have shared that with the team.)

All in all, my participation led to a gain for the Sleeping Beauties (Stephanie had preferred that name to my impulsive first suggestion of The Geeks, and it was adopted by default) of two-and-a-half points, as one of us also named Charlie Chaplin as a UA founder, and so we got credit for two out of four. (No one had seen the film from which I derived the name, but someone had spotted the poster: unfairly, I suggested that, in my opinion, this was the best thing about the film.) Those points – no pun intended – actually counted, as we would otherwise not have been nudged ahead as fifth overall.

During the time allowed for finishing off our second-half answers, no one objected to me doodling, by filling in the blanks of the picture round with unrelated titles such as Citizen Kane, Hannah and Her Sisters, and even, nautically enough, 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea (although I probably wrote 1,000).

Admittedly, I was taking what I had been taught to extremes, but I knew not to leave a blank where a well-educated guess (Hannah and Her Sisters? the scene where Michael Caine first makes a move on his sister-in-law?) might give a chance of a point: of course, this became the norm with the advent of examination papers with multiple-choice answers – why is it even called multiple choice, when you can usually choose only one answer, and, with ordinary questions, there is a infinite choice?

Apart from these meaningless answers, my first reaction to seeing the depiction of a large tooth-filled mouth lunging at a bridge had been to say Sophie’s Choice, so I stuck with that answer, as I still liked it (despite telling poor Stephanie, who did not seem to connect with it). I think that the premise must have been that the water level had risen, amongst other devastating effects, and thus that the bridge – or those on it – were within striking distance…

When I helped with marking tests at GCSE (more multiple choice, but thankfully long ago!), I just memorized the string of intended responses, and did not really register the content of incorrect ones. Fortunately, Helen had not only clearly read the answers minutely, but found the intended humour in my choice for that image, because that was the basis on which we won a prize, a copy of the – now rare – first issue of New Empress Magazine.

So, as my team members ceded it to me, double the reading of NEM for me (I had bought the latest issue on the night), and very good and varied it is, too!

Oh, and a further prize was talking to Rob, who owns Shortwave, and the jewel of seeing the auditorium - as I told him, I was reminded of The Electric Picture Palace in my beloved Southwold.

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Melancholia: Gravity, levity, or some more middling place? (2)

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31 October

Perhaps a good night on which to write a follow-up, after, at last, I had a chance to hear from Amy what she thought:

* She doesn't generally see films with special effects, so did not have my expectations / criticisms;

* She was fine with how Wagner had been used, particularly later, as Melancholia gets closer, and thought that it worked well;

* She liked the visual imagery, and thought it unusual;

* I learnt that the world of the mansion and its golf-course is our ambit (which did not seem unlikely);

* It appeared from what she said about the sisters that they were archetypal, and she agreed with that.

Nothing in any of this made me regret having used the ejector-seat, and I had no desire to have seen, in what was missed, Justine bathing naked in the light of the planet.


Chris, to whom I had outlined my critique of the quality of the effects and the depiction of a seemingly gaseous planet just absorbing another solid one (and it is, apparently, meant to be Earth), did not think that the latter was good science, even if the gases of the planet were uniformly mixed.


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A. E. Housman and God

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29 October 2011

The so-called 'scholar-poet', probably best known for A Shropshire Lad*, is said to have opined:


A malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man


Even so, one wonders which dram he had to hand - or, else, in mind - when he wrote (assuming that this was not a Johnsonian quip, noted by another)...


End-notes

* Somewhat tempting, in the reverse tendency to the title of The Winter's Tale, to type The Shropshire Lad - probably because, in the words 'a' and 'the', it is the same dull, unstressed vowel-sound, which peppers English speech (or, at any rate, British English), and so the variant title sounds very similar in my head.


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Dimensions - another screening (in Cambridge) (2)

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20 October

As to Wallingford, I quote directly from http://dimensionsthemovie.com/:

Next chance to see the film is at a preview screening at the Wallingford Corn Exchange in Oxfordshire on Nov 4th. If you know anyone in the area, please tell them! http://www.cornexchange.org.uk/

The Cambridge event is, indeed, on Tuesday 22 November from 10.00 to 1.00 (a morning event, not a late-nighter, this time). The current Arts Picturehouse booklet (p. 22) lists it as a 'Contemporary British film industry event: producers and audiences', with the further subtitle 'Funding and producing an independent British film:

Sloane U'Ren (Art / Set Director on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Being John Malkovich and Ant Neeley [sic], composer of Six Feet Under, will discuss their current production Dimensions, a period sci-fi drama shot on location in Cambridgeshire.

NB However, given that this listing is on a spread headed 'Cambridgeshire Film Consortium Education Events' (there are details of the consortium in a column on the same page as quoted from above), and that it is under a banner reading 'Education events for schools and colleges' plus 'Suitable for a/as/undergraduate film/Media Studies / Cost £3.50 accompanying teachers free', it may be that others are not encouraged to attend...

Maybe I shall enquire?


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What's in a mind?

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20 October

News, if it were really something that has just been proposed (rather than known about weeks ago), of another cut in mental-health services in Cambridgeshire prompted this thought (for want of a better word):

Is mental ill-health really a disease of the brain,
Or is the brain just a disease of the rest of the body?


Please interpret that 'thought' how you see fit...


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Dimensions - another screening (in Cambridge) (1)

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20 October

Some will know that, on 4 November, Dimensions hits (hit?!) Wallingford, in Oxfordshire, which I believe that I read about on the film's web-site...

But, and I really should check the date, on 22 November the film (through the Arts Picturehouse, or at least the mention is in its latest booklet of what's on) is being screened for the fourth time in Cambridge, its home city, and I shall provide details here, just as soon as I can (possibly or otherwise - six impossible things before breakfast, etc.)!

As I recall, Sloane and Ant will also be talking about how to make such a film (or any full-length film) without (the usual) funding - if their names are not already familiar to you, then you have been caught napping on the job of jeeping (?) abreast of this blog, and need to remedy that omission, whilst you can, by reading some earlier postings (if you can find them amongst the plethora of dross).


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Making law and criminal evidence

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19 October

A year or more ago, Professor Michael Zander gave a talk on the subject of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (affectionately known as PACE).

The title was PACE: Past, Present, and Future: Professor Zander's thrust was more on how PACE (and its various subordinate Codes) had come to be revised, than on the need for and initial implementation of the legislation, or any requirements to do so in the future.

In the session afterwards, I asked him this question:

In the light of the various apparently wry observations in your most informative talk, and of your status as an author on parliamentary procedure, what confidence do you think that we can - or should - have in the processes of legislation's being made, reviewed or amended?

What indeed?!


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Melancholia: Gravity, levity, or some more middling place? (1)

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18 October

One almost inevitably knows, at some point, how long a film lasts (especially if planning eleven consecutive days’ viewing at a film festival), even if that is information that has been forgotten at the time that the feature begins.

In this case, buying a ticket on the evening and (in case things got tight beforehand - with having some proper food, for a change) asking how many minutes’ worth of trailers there were, I also got told roughly when the film would come out. (I already knew that it ran to around 2 hours 15, and what I learnt confirmed that it would not be over till past 11.00.)

In the event, after accounting for the reasons behind my early emergence to an usher whom I know, I was back in the bar by 9.45, feeling that a cup of tea and catching up on some writing were avenues that I had done well to open up to myself. So what had Melancholia done for me that was different from that pastime?

Well, it had not taken me somewhere else, and the write-up, which I had read around the end of August, had already revealed a lot about where it would go. (I have just reminded myself of what it said, and the opening sequence of the film itself placed the still from the poster in context (it had also appeared on the cover of the cinema booklet)). My reasons for not wanting to go, which I formulated when waiting for a good moment to leave, were numerous, diverse, and compelling.

Without being a fan of Wagner or his music, I know that the latter has some power, which can be appropriated, and has been many times*. Here, it seemed a lot more as if it were misappropriation, and when it started, and I registered the music’s period and what it was, I recalled that I had read a comment about the use of Wagner – pun intended, I was attuned to what I was listening to, and it gave me a disjunction (intentional, for all that I know) between the aimed-at dreaminess or other-worldliness, which, to me, Roy Andersson has achieved much more effortlessly.

Which takes me on to special effects. Fine, an Earth that does not resemble the views from space with which we are all familiar, because there is no way of knowing when what unfolds is happening, and continental drift does, after all, continue**. Not so good when one heavenly body, in close shot (with another in the background partly occluded), resembles nothing so much as a painted polystyrene sphere (I was once given one by someone studying degree-level chemistry, and sprayed it gold as the finishing-touch to a prop crown).

As to the collision between – these or other – spheres, where one (as I likened it to the usher in describing my experience) simply absorbed the other as a blancmange would a grape, I do not for certain know who, if anyone, was imagining these scenes, but it did not bode well for her (?), the film’s credibility, or my desire to see much more.

Still, one didn’t wish to be hasty, so, the suite of moving scenes being finished (including Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (or The Return of the Hunters) being given a treatment reminiscent of Gilliam in the early Python shows), the announcement of whose film it is, and of the first section being ‘Justine’.

Clearly, a wedding – at some stage, though one knows that bride and groom are not conventionally in the bridal car till after the ceremony. Perhaps it is meant to be a farcical scene, but, even at this stage, the script, the delivery, Justine apologizing to Michael (rather the timid driver whose cars the pair of them have ineptly contrived to drive into a boundary stone), none of it worked. Not setting up, for me, an expectation that the subsequent frames are going to redeem what has been faulty in the preceding ones.

The script / scenario goes on, the accents that sometimes sound US, sometimes British English within the same performance are introduced (including John Hurt, as the bride’s father), and we have the wedding breakfast that no one wants: the bride’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) ably and suitably embarrassingly saying what a waste of time marriage is (except that no one seemed that awkward about witnessing it – heard it all before?); the groom not twigging beforehand that now is the first time that he is expected to make a speech (and bizarrely giving Ms Rampling another opportunity to heckle); and the bride, probably miffed that no one else seemed interested in what she has spotted in the heavens, absents herself, as and when she sees fit, with liquid-related activity such as having a bath or finding a new take on watering the fairway.

And so, unpromisingly to my mind, it went on, with Ms Rampling’s bags being dumped outside the host brother-in-law’s front doors (since she is another inappropriate and antisocial bather), only to be brought in again, and the brother-in-law agreeing that he usually makes this gesture: acknowledging it in a tone and manner perhaps directed as deliberately intermediate between farce and something more serious.

When he confronts the bride (she had already promised his wife, her sister, not to cause a scene, and then absented herself at key moments of wedding ritual) with how much the reception has cost him (though, apparently, he is immensely rich), she not only (maybe implausibly) does not know, but he (certainly implausibly) says that it will be worth it, if she agrees to be happy (which, of course, she does).

On what planet (pun intended) does anyone make any sort of pact where her side of the bargain is to be happy? Would that I had the power to choose! Yet, except, perhaps, on some higher plane relating to the influence of the planets in their orbits (or, even, from somewhere else), how was I to engage with what was being presented (and, if so, as a metaphor for what?)?

If, as the write-up suggests, the real message was that life is too short, then mine was being curtailed as I watched - and the deliberately shaky camera-work in the function room, which was just making me feel dizzy (rather than, maybe, causing a sensation of anxiety that could have been created in a less crude way), meant my well-being was being sacrificed at the same time.


* At least it wasn't Strauss and Also Sprach Zarathustra!

** Of course, it could be that it was not intended to be Earth at all, but otherwise to be some other so similiar planet that one might be forgiven for thinking that it were...


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Preparatory to a review of Melancholia

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18 October

One must get one's priorities right, and not get side-tracked by visiting the feedback web-site of Pizza Express - unless, of course, the visit there before the film was the best part of the evening...

So it was that I end up suggesting (as my one thing that I would change) the retirement of garlic dough balls, and replacing them with a lightly fried combination of fresh garlic, porcini mushrooms and bacon, with the option of a freshly grated Italian cheese (not sure which) sprinkled over the dish to melt when it is fresh from the pan.

And I'm sure that I didn't steal that from the feature either!


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Matt Damon has post addressed to my house

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15 October

Well, occasionally – when he has nothing better to do than order items on the Internet!

For he, like the rest of us, is wary of having his identity stolen, so, a little like the self-styled Lord Voldemort (whose real name is, it has to be said, just pathetic), he has split it into several pieces: if a piece gets fraudulently taken, he still has the other pieces – that sort of thing.

And each piece has a different name, Ant Dammot, Toad M. Mant, Damon Matt, Tam Modant, that sort of thing – so don’t buy insurance from anyone with such a name, or you’ll be horrified to find out who the underwriters are!

Why he doesn’t anagrammatize his real name (as, at least, Tom Riddell had the decency to do) remains a mystery, because, for example, the one immortalized as Homer’s Arctic Lay gave rise to such wonders as Trashy McAlister, and Matt Damon (the name) does not. Probably a matter best taken up with his agent, as Matt is too concerned with dodging international terrorist plots, and the possibility of threats on the life of his pet cobra, to be much occupied with these daily foibles of the anagram community...


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The Hunter, one year on

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14 October

I have been reminded of a film from last year's Festival, The Hunter (2010), whose main character, Ali Alavi, is played by its director, Rafi Pitts. At the time (a bit like Kosmos at this year's Festival), it seemed likely to be too subtle to be readily understood (though not quite as the film's official wording would suggest):

In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive (edited for punctuation).

On the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (www.rottentomatoes.com), Jason Wood (in Little White Lies) is quoted as saying 'Seemingly destined to go largely under-appreciated, this is a work of precision and complexity'. (Given that someone - presumably by mistake - has posted a review of the film from 2011 of the same name on IMDb's web-page for this film (www.imdb.com/title/tt1190072), there is evidence of under-appreciation that it even exists as a separate entity!)

Looking at what both who Wood is (or appears to be?) in relation to the film's distribution and what has written (www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/the-hunter-12001), he is clearly not going to give away exactly what happens or, more importantly, the rationale behind it. But there are two short sections (amongst others) that I think most worth quoting, the first for where the film is, the second for where it may have come from:

[...] And yet the film also feels incredibly universal. In its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places, it perhaps has more in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.

[...] Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident, intelligent and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver (edited for punctuation).


At the screening, I definitely felt as Wood does in the first quotation - it was a very intelligent take on those earlier films, with a good dose of redneck lawlessness thrown in for good measure.

As for the specific echoes that he identifies, I will need to consider them, and also to look at obtaining my own copy of The Hunter. What I will say is this, by way of indicating my own thinking about the film: what is it that we are told about how Ali's wife comes to be killed?


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Kennedy on the campaign trail

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14 October

Not just because the documentary was covered in an edition of the Festival booklet TAKE ONE, I have relatively little to say about The Camera That Changed the World. The side of it that looked at the development of handheld cameras at around the same time in the States and in France, rather than the applications to which they were then put, was certainly made much more entertaining and less dry by the appearance of the delightfully eccentric Jean-Pierre Beauviala, who also spoke far more to the point than some of the others.

As to why a camera cut down from a model intended to be used on a tripod and which still weighed 30lb (the Auricon in the States) should ever have been a competitor for the ultralight Éclair, which was, I understand, engineered from scratch to be so, I could not figure. (Weight was not the only difference, as the Auricon had to be directed from the shoulder, and blind, at the intended subject, whereas I believe that the Éclair had an eyepiece.) And the wording of the title almost leads you to believe that there was one camera, not two...

However, although the preference for cinematographers to use one over the other was certainly touched upon, it was not in a very obvious or, to my mind, convincing way: that said, it did not seem to be a matter of mere patriotism, but to have some basis in experience of using the equipment, which, I do not think, was sufficiently explored (or capable of being) in the 62 minutes given to the topic.

Since the ambitions of the film were also to do justice to accounting for the first documentary uses to which the pioneers put their new machines, this was quite a tall order. Here, also, the commentary became unnecessarily emphatic (by way of repetition) in stating that, because the new cameras were light enough to carry, they could 'go with the action' and follow it into places that were inaccesible to the static models: if we had not grasped that this was the purpose of developing them, we would surely have been napping!

However, showing footage from the film Primary, which John F. Kennedy allowed Robert Drew's team in the States to make on the campaign trail (and, in a rather enigmatic formula, that he would not contact Drew, unless his answer to the filming were 'no') demonstrated this point admirably: in addition to what else we saw, the well-known long take, following Kennedy through a large group in a convention hall (full of people, all of whom wanted to shake his hand), was chief amongst the evidence.

As someone else had commented before I saw the film (possibly the Festival's own David Perilli, although I only recall speaking to him about the film afterwards), the French developers / film-makers were not given equal billing: we always heard about Drew and what he wanted to achieve first, and, in telling us about the filming of the first project (certainly not in terms of showing us what was shot, although various people involved in the project were shown interviewed), the film-makers in France got the raw deal.

All this apart, the film paired well with Pennebaker's film Dont [sic] Look Back about Dylan's UK tour in 1965, filmed by Pennebaker himself and others (using the Auricon), with which it was screened. (It could almost have been made too thin in places to allow the pairing not to be too long...)


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Lack of Drive ?

This is a review of Drive (2011)

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14 October

This is a review of Drive (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

It took me a long time to seek to work this one out:

The lack of impetus for a review that I have experienced comes from no lasting impression of Drive (2011), in terms of thoughts that arise from it. It's not that one cannot choose to think about it, because I can, say, summon Carey Mulligan's face and demeanour (as Irene) to mind quite easily, but there is nothing in superficially recalling the fact that I have seen this film that makes me want to.

As with seeking to review Drive, it's not exactly that I have to force myself to revisit it, but that the film just doesn't seek me out unbidden and remind me of it (unlike, dare I say it, Tirza? - or Dimensions?).

Not that I think that anything is necessarily wrong, or, indeed that this isn't a good film (or that I wouldn't watch it again), because, unless there is a long list to be critical about, I would not find it natural to write as much about most documentaries than about most feature films - but without implying any superiority of one type over the other. Not having anything to say does not mean much, as the film may be eloquent enough on its own account (as is Charlotte Rampling in The Look, for example).

What I will say is this: Dirty Harry; restraint erupting into violence; Clint Eastwood. Those are all things that echo, not so much through Ryan Gosling's performance as Driver, as the character himself. A review in the Festival booklet TAKE ONE, of which I was a little and (I hope) no more than gently mocking, drew attention to the fact that, although we (I?) could swear that we hear him called something, we do not: Ryan Gosling is credited simply as Driver. (By contrast, in 1971, Eastwood was the Harry of the film's title.)

Does the lack of a name say more than Driver's prepared speech? Definitely, the speech is where I came in with thinking of Harry Callahan and his famous 'Do I feel lucky?' spiel.(Moreover, Harry is relatively nearby in San Francisco, where he is seeking a gunman calling himself Scorpio: and what is the emblem on Driver's light-coloured jacket?) For anyone who knows Harry, I cannot believe his formulation would not have been a touchstone for Driver's own, either because, as with Travis Bickle, Driver has modelled a persona, or (or as well) because the film is nodding to that sort of territory:

We first hear the set speech (as a recalled voiceover) where Driver is very much in control, dictating the terms; when we hear it again, he is trying to pretend (to himself, as much as anyone?) not only that he is still in control, but also that he knows what he has let himself in for - which he (clearly) does not. (Though there has been a foreshadowing of the violence in the scene where he is accosted, when drinking in a bar, by someone who recognizes him as having driven for him: it had not gone well for that man's accomplice and him, but he is told quite clearly where to get off when he makes a proposition to Driver.)

But is the attempt to be in control linked to, and just an aspect (albeit a central one) of, the namelessness? I think that it may be (don't worry, this isn't a review of the Eastwood film - trust me!): Harry asserts himself, asserts the role of chance, in confronting another man with a weapon that may (or may not) be out of ammunition, but does so through a set pattern of words - a mantra, a prayer, it doesn't matter what it is, it works for him, and that is what it is intended to do. After Driver's second utterance of his speech, he is more and more on his own in making choices, planning, seeking to regain control, to protect and survive.

Whatever his life exactly has been before, he has survived with work in the garage and, relatedly, driving. Yes, he does different sorts of driving (and there is a neat misdirection with the scene where he is about to do a stunt, and is dressed in LAPD uniform), but there is no detail, no feeling of a life led other than by a cipher.

When Irene asks him, he says that he has recently moved to the - unfurnished, unpersonalized? - apartment around the corner from her, but, after a hesitation, he continues that he is not new to Los Angeles (as becomes evident - from where he works, and from how he knows where he is going when he drives). (Yet, with the stunning night views of the city, I almost feel that we know LA better than we do Driver.)

So is what the film wants to say that meeting Irene and her son Benicio changes his life? - and, not necessarily for the better, vice versa? He wants to help and protect her - but in his chosen way, which involves exposing her to an epsiode in the lift that will surely gain a life of its own. However, as things happen (not entirely outside his own making - a self-destructive streak, consistent with the nature of the night driving that he does?), he cannot be with her, cannot do any more than further conceal his identity and who he is.

Maybe, if anywhere, that's where there is scope to wonder: what does he really see in Irene, and what is his vantage-point? Yes, she seeks his company (and, in doing so, is not being strictly honest about what her intentions are and what is possible), and she would - might? - not have sought it, if she had known the truth about him. He does more than go along, clearly enjoying spending some time (the film is vague as to how much or for how long) with Benicio and her, and becoming aware that they may be exposed to risk.

Regarding the timing of the second time that we hear Driver's speech, and where everything really starts to change, he tells Irene that he had offered to help Standard, her husband. That may or may not be true, as Standard is shown playing a line in innuendo and low-level menace that suggests that he thought ill of Driver's recent attentions to his wife and son, and that appearance seems more consistent with his having 'suggested' that Driver should help Standard with his problems.

In any event, whether he is free or not to do what he does, he assuredly does it for Irene and for Benicio, not for Standard. Maybe it seems likely that he would, maybe it doesn't, but he does, and that is just another part of his unknowability: the tender (but quiet) times in Irene's company, contrasted with the explosions of violence. Maybe more of Travis, along with Harry, after all...?


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New allegations: Matt Damon opens my post

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 October

Not that I have, knowingly, seen him sitting down doing so with my paper-knife, but you can never be too sure, after Dylan Thomas besmirched the name of postal workers in that play for voices of his (and provoked a three-week stoppage in Swansea, some say)!

I probably wouldn't recognize him anyway, since his appearance in Festival Surprise Film Contagion on 25 September (which became Surprise Film (1), and its companion SF (2) thereby took away any audience for the Closing Film) as the slightly bovine focus for our concerns (obliged, as we are, by what peers out at us from the lens of the camera) did not make me cry out (to myself - in a hushed auditorium, after all) 'Ah, m'ol' mate and mucker Matt!'.

Still, sooner that than be spotted straightaway as Jude Law, but with the puzzlement of what on earth that non-Kiwi accent was supposed to be! It sounded as though it wanted to be from that part of the world, and maybe, like a virus, it had mutated by merging with the local one (I think that he was supposed to be in San Francisco)...

However, the internal evidence, i.e. of being called Alan Krumwiede, hints more at Afrikaans, of happy, youthful times spent in what - depending on his supposed age - might have been the white privilege of Rhodesia, if Law hadn't sounded much more like a Cockney than anything. (And yet not even that interpretation would have been convincing...)


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