Tuesday 13 May 2014

Remembering Rita - with a Postlude

This is a review of Locke (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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13 May (Postlude added on 14 May, Tweet on 11 June)

This is a review of Locke (2014)

In Educating Rita (1983), Rita (Julie Walters) writes an incredibly short essay for her Open University tutor about staging Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. She says that Ibsen did not envisage it on stage, but to be sounds, and that, to accord with his stated wishes, it should be a radio play.



(Willy Russell’s original play itself was just a double-hander between Frank (Michael Caine) and Rita, but his own screenplay inevitably widened the portrayal out to involve other characters.) This film’s strength is also its weakness, in that it only shows us Ivan Locke, although he is surrounded by voices, real and imagined.)

One tends to feel the same about Locke (2014) as maybe Ibsen / Rita did about Peer, i.e. that its relatively minimal visual quality (not least if one has the same evening watched the stunningly alive colours of Advanced Style (2013)) made it less of a film than an audio-file with images – although some of the (largely fleeting) tension might have been lost in a play for radio, one imagines that there could have been compensating adjustments made elsewhere in text, music and sound-effects.

So it is that cars that come right up behind Locke (Tom Hardy) on the M6* seem to remind him of his father, to whom (whether or not he is alive) he seems intent to prove himself different, e.g. that he gets things done**, and that, although he is tempted to shirk what he feels that he should do and, as he puts it, carry on around the M25 to Dover (?)), he will not do so. As to the rest, apart from the amber lighting that is there so that we can see his face, and the illumination that his gaze sheds onto the back of the car (in the direction of his father), the rest is pairs, Morse codings, egg-shaped blurs of lights from other cars and from the buildings that edge the motorway :

All very arty as an embellishment to what would otherwise be Locke, in his car, sometimes doing 80 (although he says that there is a speed-limit), and doing very little when not snuffling, addressing his father and very occasionally being quiet except talking to the same rough half-a-dozen people, plus a few others. Except that the M1, which he gets onto from the M6 (though with not much evidence of that very distinctive junction), certainly does not have incessant illumination on either side of the carriageway, and we seem to see the same red elevated awning of a petrol-station at least twice more, and the credits tell us that the filming on location was in London :

Which means that the distorted lights that vary the darkness are as fully added in as the stunning shots of Earth that enliven watching Sandra Bullock clumsily floating around in Gravity (2013). They are so obviously there (and they are occasionally quite dramatic), that they are integral to the work that we see. Are we meant to accord the effect the benefit of taking it at face value, or see it as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, to distance us from Locke himself ? Are we to credit that he fancies to himself that what he is about is a mercy dash, and so he has a thick jumper on, but the sleeves shoved up, because there is no time to stop ?

Something is up. Yet it is up in the way that film too frequently asks us to believe, where something is meant to be happening that has never happened before, and the film then comprises watching it unfold (maybe with the assistance of flashbacks, or other disjunctions in time and / or space)… As with Gravity, we might invest what we see with some significance, because it is new.

If, though, we do not, whether or not we mentally strip away the added visual elements, do we have a film even as striking as Enter the Void (2009), whose relative virtue is that it does not pretend that it is a slice of life that is unadulterated by music and by visual effects and a constructed sound-world ? Or does it, in this regard, resemble the unseen pair of characters Mitch and Murray in Glengarry Glen Ross*** (1993) (based on David Mamet’s play) in that, whether or not we know it, we suspect that we will no more see Bethan or what happens to Locke than we will them ?

Locke, however, delights in anonymity and keeping us uninformed. The ‘Home’ number on Locke’s hands-free device begins 01632, which the film is not alone in using for fictional purposes, for it is a UK area code [...] not in use and […] set aside for providing non-working, dummy phone numbers for drama, fiction and testing purposes. Yet the film studiously avoids other information :

* Locke mentions Croydon (or Crawley ?) to Katrina (Ruth Wilson), but he could never be heading there in the time that he estimates

* His son, stereotypically drawn back to the football match as if it is the new awkward topic to replace the weather, avoids mentioning another team / his own team

* Locke seems to say Argyll at one point, but he cannot have set out from somewhere near there (and the name of the place where the concrete is to be delivered seems fluidly indistinct**** ?)

* He has his boss Gareth’s number stored under Bastard (which is fair enough), but, apart from a rant at Locke, Gareth (Ben Daniels) seems powerless to do anything other than call Mitchell Dean[e] in Chicago and later report what he has been told to do : not much of a bastard, and the man whom they call ‘Chicago’ has a name that evokes Taunton Deane service-station on the M5 + Mitcheldean (in Gloucestershire)


Tom Hardy is not Welsh, and he does not at every moment sound Welsh (even to someone who shares his English background), although it can be disguised to some extent in the un-English stress-patterns that he is adopting. Then we have Gareth and Bethan as names of people who sound nothing but English, but is it another attempt to mislead ? In any event, Hardy is good, but Olivia Colman, as Bethan, has more to offer: she is somehow less hysterical than Katrina – but, then, she does appear to go to the theatre and read Beckettt.

Whereas Locke is just wrapped up in numbers, facts and codes, such as whether, in context, he has nine or ten years’ service, and it is only when he lashes out at his absent father (who, the film has us credit, is almost there at one point) that he feels any more than frustration that ‘my building’ might go wrong (shades of Ibsen again, in The Master Builder, with which there are a few parallels ?). He seems to care more about the concrete, as if it is a living thing, than much else.




Which is where the nub of the film lies, or it proves not to have much of one. Unlike the transcendental nature of Enter The Void, Locke feels banal, inconsequential – in Glengarry, so much more seems to be riding on what happens, yet here we have no notion that people will not be in a different mental mode overnight. And, for all the unwonted incaution of what Locke is about, it never rings true as any sort of clear breakdown (whatever, of course, a breakdown is) :

He may be depressed, but, if so the catalyst is unlikely to be the action that we see, but to inaction and self-recrimination along the lines of comparison with his father. It may be the early stages of a manic episode, and somehow everyone – Locke most of all – has overlooked that his seeming solidity lacks the infrastructure that he ironically busies himself providing in his work. Even if that is the intention, what this film encompasses is so slight, and the evidence of irrevocable damage to relationships (outside work) so uncertain, that it is in danger of popularizing impressions that may mislead.

The assertion also that there is a world of difference, for example, between ‘never’ and ‘once’ seems posture, convenient to bring in a binary, 0 or 1, dimension to life to match those coloured eggs that wink in the unreal darkness of night.



Postlude

One point of comparison has already been given in Gravity, but that is a film, frankly, that one has to agree ‘has the plot of a B-movie’, so what do we find if we turn our attention to All is Lost (2013) ? It has almost no speech, whereas Locke is really nothing but, yet points of connection are :

* The concentration on one seen character

* What Our Man (Robert Redford) faces is partly of his making by seemingly choosing to be where he is, though not for getting snagged and pierced by an abandoned container

* The need to travel on, whether to safety or what could be a new beginning

* Unfolding events that change the course or status of what has gone before


Any other links would probably be tenuous, but which is the stronger performance / script ? On both counts, it has to be Redford’s film, because the best engagement with Our Man is inferential, on the level of working out why he is doing what we see, since, of course he has no need to explain it to anyone (and a voice-over of him talking to himself would be dire).

If anything, Locke over-explains, and repeats itself : the son will always awkwardly divert to the game, the ‘pour’ will never be straightforward and risk ruin, and the reminders that Locke is on the road, and not heading home to sausages and beer (and his wife in the club shirt), will be hammered home. On this level and bringing in the near-solo Gravity again, Locke is a most unsubtle film, and Hardy is an onscreen equivalent of Clooney to Donal’s (Andrew Scott’s) offscreen Bullock (Donal panicks just as much as she does).

Special pleading for Gravity wants to say that Bullock’s Ryan Stone is a universal symbol for humanity and that it has a spiritual dimension, but what about here ? Film Eye’s complimentary programme tries to suggest, having quoted The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney about the look of the film, that :

The stream of car and road lights is mesmerising and seems to reflect Locke’s contemplation of his life and his predicament


Whatever Locke may have done before, he is now acting (or believing that he is acting) on principle to lay to rest the paternal spectre (and, as a curt mantra, he keeps saying to others – as if it exculpates him from responsibility – words to the effect I have no choice, whereas precisely the opposite is true, and it is only in the car on his own that his motivation, of proving himself to his father (and so proving the father wrong), is laid bare). We still have to ask the related question about this ‘predicament’, whether or not it is of his own making :

What effect does it have on us that some of these ‘car and road lights’ are added in, laid over what we see, which would otherwise actually just be a bloke in a car, making quite frequent phone-calls ? If we do not realize, then it is just a nice light-show, whose beauty and brilliance we will like, but come to take for granted as naturalism (although it is artifice). If, though, we have inferred what has been done, it is still not, as with Gravity, that we can necessarily see what is real / what fake, but the lights are then present to us with the knowledge that the basic image has been processed to have them there most of the time, and that it is more like some form of enhancement, of an allusion to hyper-realism. (But hyper-realism that is at its strongest when it is actually hiding behind semi-barked, serious utterances in a Welsh accent ? (Is the real notion of a joke something known to Locke, we might end up wondering…))

Thus, we come back to Enter the Void, and we come back to John Locke (1632–1704) – and this facetious Tweet :


— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

For Void’s hyper-reality is palpably artificial and never pretends to be otherwise, but it asserts that what we see is inhabiting other dimensions, which are apparent on drugs and in death (the old doors of perception theme, taken from Blake by Huxley, and from him by The Doors). Such a transcendent aspiration is given to Locke, but it is despite what he does and says, and, for example, it begs our indulgence that he has been with his wife Katrina long enough to have two teenage sons and yet does not have the remotest idea how to start to break something to her.

Instead (and attribute it to his being in shock, if you like), he twice prefaces how he has formulated what he wants to say with the very platitude that she latches onto, though both times she listens to him say it in silence. Clearly, something different is afoot this night, but is this naturalism, or is it symbolic – symbolic, say, in the way that the story is behind Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, with its roots in Richard Dehmel’s poem of that name (the news broken there is different, but of a similar kind) ?


— BFI Player (@BFIPlayer) April 26, 2014

Could the vehicle in which Locke is travelling, under the influence of engaging with the philosophy of the other Locke and his arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that there are no innate ideas, be a sort of second womb where he, through his eyes and ears, becomes open afresh to sensory information ? We watch him turn these sense data into material on which to reflect in his journey and approach them from first principles…

Can Locke, as with Void, really be setting out general principles about life in the guise or medium of a film ? On one basis, it leaves uncertain the outcome of what we see befall Locke (though we did not know him before, for that matter), on another it has taken the simple footage of an apparent North to South journey and, by processing it, created colours and lights outside of reality, and maybe done so to impart truths on a symbolic level.

Somehow, it is hard to conceive that this is so (any more that it has the claims that Film Eye suggests to resemble Under Milk Wood) rather than it was just to make Locke look more interesting, but maybe it has been worth considering nonetheless...

Yet Film Divider's interview with Steven Knight, the film's director, certainly shows that the other Locke was part of his thinking :

He’s Lockean, as in the philosopher John Locke, he’s a rationalist and he tries to apply the theories of Locke, which would apply on a construction site, to the problems he’s now facing in life.



End-notes

* Locke appears to be one of these drivers who is wedded to the middle lane, so this will happen from those who do not think that he should be there.

** That remains to be proved, whether what he has managed to achieve at the wheel will come off flawlessly.

*** Or the two in Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter ?

**** Can it possibly be close to Home, so that Locke could then have left in the middle of the night to be there well ahead for the crucial time of 5.25 a.m. ? If so, how should it all have worked out, and, say, what reason did a file have to come to be in the car, rather than in the site office ?

There must be a site office (where Donal is being directed what to do), and Locke seems to had the relative luxury of its not being at a distance is the fact that it is relatively local what matters to him about it ? In any case, the holding company for the film is, appropriately, Concrete Pictures Ltd !




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

From the archive : Much-delayed review of Max Barton’s No Magic – performance 6 March 2010 !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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12 May

As one who came to Cambridge’s ADC Theatre (Amateur Dramatic Club (@adctheatre)) that night clutching book 6 of Harry Potter (HP and the Half-Blood Prince), it was a distinct surprise – not to say ‘spooky’ – to find that the performance opened with Potter, and, within moments, Max Barton, as his own Harry, crying out Expelliarmus !.

In the flyer’s write-up, the play’s origins in Barton’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde are made explicit. However, for anyone with a background in the world of mental-health, they make one wonder whether, in his premise for the work, he has mistaken the symptomatology of multiple personality disorder (as it tends to be called, rather than split personality) for that of paranoid schizophrenia*.

In fact, the suspicion turned out to be justified, because, although it was suggested that Harry might have been hearing voices (as those with the diagnosis of schizophrenia commonly, but not invariably do (auditory hallucination)), there was great weight placed on the notion that he was acting under the name of Edward Catcher (we do not learn Harry’s surname) as a distinct personality, who has distinctly violent, even murderous, inclinations. [Touches of Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), not to mention Powell’s Peeping Tom from the same year ?]

As the drama unfolded, any belief dissipated (although it did occasionally revive) that Barton might have seen a more subtle parallel between Hyde and the apparent subject of his own work : it had been initally fostered by the fact that the programme notes, despite the flyer’s suggestion, did not mention Stevenson after all). There was also an increasing feeling that the seeming similarities with Sebastian Faulks’ novel Engleby**, itself clearly set in Cambridge, might be more than coincidental, and that maybe, when it came to the involvement of a lawyer in Harry’s unfolding case, implausibly so. Yet, Faulks’ novel, too, appears to have, as its proper subject personality disorder, its possible origins, and its public understanding.

Interestingly, in the scenes with the lawyer, and in Harry’s prior experiences at some unnamed Cambridge college, there was an allusion to the finding attested by an apparent body of research – the link, because skunk is a highly concentrated form of hash (specially cultivated for being stronger than the ‘traditional’ forms of hash), between its use and the onset of schizophrenia. Or, perhaps more properly, the sorts of psychotic experiences to which this label is frequently applied. What made this allusion relevant was the way in which Barton’s text appeared to suggest is that there might be a cynical manipulation of such research findings, by the legal profession, to exculpate the guilty from full responsibility for their crimes – a topic more fully and knowingly dealt with by Faulks’ eponymous Corpus graduate (Harry does not get to graduate).

The way in which No Magic and Engleby both fight shy of specificity are also, one can only believe, more than chance: Faulks renames a well-known pub in Bene’t Street, but, at the same time, makes it so clear, from the choice of alternative name, which one he is referring to, as one of Engleby’s largely solitary drinking haunts, that one wonders why he has bothered. Likewise, although Barton himself is at Cambridge, we are only told in a wry way that Harry is there, in a running joke, carried off to great effect by the cast. There is, though, no way of knowing at which college the 'real' Edward Catcher was an undergraduate (although, for no good reason, one suspects Fitzwilliam).



Postscript

If completed, this review would have dealt with the subjects whose headings follow, but the fact that it did not is why it is incomplete… [However, recollected comments, in square brackets such as these, have been added - there was some contemporaneous correspondence with Barton, which, when located, may provide more detail / confirmation] :


1. Blocking / staging
[The most vivid moment was one that reminded of the infernal scenes in What Dreams May Come (1998) (not to say Doré's illustrations of Dante), and the terror of Event Horizon (1997), in an effective combination of latex and lighting***]


2. Acting
[The principals were probably fine, with Barton as Harry****]


3. Ensemble
[Almost certainly generally tight enough, even if some scenes could have been dwelt on less in the playing]


4. Text
[As mentioned, there was a certain teasing coyness about where this place (Cambridge) might be, which suited the likely audience congratulating itself that it was 'in the know' - hard to remember now whether Barton's evocation succeeded, probably in the midst of in-jokes, in portraying a more recognizable Cambridge than Larkin did Oxford in his undergraduate novel Jill]


5. Further comments about pathology
[Only that the attempt to cover similar ground to Faulks also gave rise to somewhat cynical attempt to take down the whole justice system by association - a matter much in people's minds with Yewtree just now]



End-notes

* A useful confirmation can be found in the published diary of Phoebe Pluckrose-Oliver, who was the show's producer :

Last night I was up until 1am in the Homerton auditorium making 3.5m by 2m frames out of Lycra and scaffolding for the set we’ve devised for the play. [...]

The frames are an important part of the set for the play, which is called ‘No Magic’. Written by a second year student on my course, Max Barton, it’s about an undergraduate who develops paranoid schizophrenia.


** Hutchinson, London, 2007.

*** This aspect seemed to have attracted favourable comment from Nathan Brooker, the (more-timely) reviewer for Varsity (though issue 731 seemed to be having a dig and /or private joke with the last of its (festive) Predictions : Max Barton will resurrect his verse-comedy No Magic).

**** The resource of camdram.net is interesting...



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 10 May 2014

From the archive : The Language of Insults

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11 May

The Language of Insults


Let’s abuse each other !

Waiting for Godot, Act I


If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem, again, to be polysyllabic.)

OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because, they say, they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a ‘fucking psycho’, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (For we use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting, or of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if beautified, goes along the lines We don’t like you – or want you around – because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here, where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust .
Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic

At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I suggest :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make...


End-notes

* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').

** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

*** Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :
man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .

**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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From the #UCFF archive : The Lottery Ticket (submitted to @BBCRadio3 as a competition entry)

The Lottery Ticket :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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11 May

The Lottery Ticket :
Six Numbers


[In homage to Stravinky’s Jeu de Cartes
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)]

To Svetlana



Alex frowned.

He had become captivated (again) by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and now he just didn’t know how to go on… In particular, he found the story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ perplexing, and his equilibrium upset. (This was, of course, before technology would render his musings virtually redundant, but at the impossibly high cost of re-creating another Borgesian fantasy, that of a library without end or catalogue, or even meaning.)

Despite the clear reference to another of this century’s great writers in the name of ‘the sacred latrine’, which – maybe? – threatened to undermine the whole edifice as artifice, was there ironic plausibility in the claim that ‘A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out’? After all, hadn’t he heard that the same writer, in his A Universal History of Infamy, had plundered – or rather dismembered – the Encyclopaedia Britannica in search of tales of ‘Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’ and of ‘The Tichborne Claimant’?

That being so, why shouldn’t there be a grain of truth in a lottery in an ancient land decreeing ‘that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates’, or giving rise to a world where it could be said that ‘Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave’?

He cursed Borges under his breath at the notion that, in the simple frustration that he just couldn’t know the answer, there lay the beauty of the text, and, in search of sleep, turned over once more.
13

* * * * *


Christy woke him – too early! – the following morning, with a shake. ‘Wassamatter?’, he raged incoherently. ‘Your mother is here’, came the stark answer that brought him unerringly into the wakefulness that he sought to avoid. Christy had a knack for doing that, and for being to hand as the (logically necessary) messenger-boy in the first place.

Alex threw on some clothes, and descended into the farmhouse kitchen. There, indeed, she was, brandishing a pale pink oblong of paper. ‘Now I’ll be rid of the lot of you!’, she shrieked; ‘And you all told me, over and over till I nearly was, that I was out of my mind!’. He had no idea what she was talking about, but there was no chance to find out, because she had metamorphosed into Science Officer Spock, complete with tricorder, blue top, and those ever so slightly kinky boots, and started flying around the room.

He jerked himself awake, regretting that the act of emergence meant that, the revels being, though thankfully, ended, he would have to face the day.

And who the hell was Christy?, he railed to himself. (Or was that, as he surmised as soon as he’d said it, an unbidden consequence of listening to Beckettt’s All That Fall…?)
8

* * * * *


Across the heath, he spotted a shape on the horizon. Not having the patience for it to materialize in a long shot, like Peter O’Toole on horseback, he busied himself with some papers: if, whether or not bearing scythe, it was for him, it would be there soon enough. But where were his notes from the other evening?!

When the knock came at the door, he descended. He half-expected Maria Andreevna – although she was no horsewoman – and accordingly started puzzling at why that term conjured up a satyr-type hybrid for him, whereas the word ‘horseman’ didn’t.

In fact, it was Dr Wassimiter, ever darkly cloaked against the wind. As usual, in the six or more hours that he was with Alex, he drank tea, kvaas and vodka to excess, and consumed copious pickled beetroot and herring, but, most importantly, he had brought the love-note that was so long awaited.

Alex waved him on his way, and fell to opening it.
19

* * * * *


Her carriage came crisply for him at ten, glistening with frost. At first, he was disappointed at the thought that it had been sent to him empty after all, but the pallor of her unveiled face gave her away, when she tried to sneak a further look.

Ably helped, amidst a cloud of powder, he climbed the steps that the footmen let down for him, but, losing his balance at the summit, almost fell into the furs on top of her! Scarcely a fit way to greet your queen when she condescends to call you to have your future read – a horoscope likely cast whilst the Englishman improvised a fantasia or two, and that other saucy fellow embellished further the record of his sexual conquests!
7

* * * * *


All at once, she was Leni to his Josef K., betraying the advocate with her passion, toppling and crushing the piles of paperwork over and over under her willing back.

Or Frieda, bringing the odour of the slops and swill into Klamm’s private rooms at the Herrenhof, into which K. and she had penetrated to avoid the tiresome attention of the assistants – and now found themselves alone, as never before since his arrival in the village, with the luxury to enjoy (rather than snatch at) sex.

He came close behind her, nuzzling the side of her neck and covering it with kisses, as he crossed his hands under and embraced her breasts.

Yes, to-night was the night!
29


* * * * *


As he drove her home the next morning, she caught him unawares, just after he had taken the gentle S-bend by the church.

‘What are you looking like that for, like you’ve won the lottery?’, she said, slyly.

46


31 January

Copyright ® Belston Night Works 2010




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 9 May 2014

From 11F2 to you : But the delivery service never makes a mistake

This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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8 May

This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)

A beautiful film about the things that we say, and transport of all kinds (e.g. by train, emotionally, and to convey), The Lunchbox > (Dabba) (2013) is prudently packed with metaphors, none of which are leant on, but which give great richness.

It is rightly said that Irrfan Khan (Saajan Fernandes) excels in this film, which he does by pacing, by small facial gestures, and by his sheer humanity, but so does Nimrat Kaur as Ila, with the central group of characters completed by Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Shaikh) and Yashvi Puneet Nagar (Yashvi). Other characters, we either never see (Auntie, played by Bharati Achrekar), or might as well not have (Nakul Vaid’s Rajeev) : Auntie, though invisible, proves more kindred than some.



The film, set in Mumbai, revolves around trains, but without ever being about them, except as passing social commentary on the Westernizing influence of, amongst various matters, commuting. It starts and ends with a train, pleasantly leaving us in the dark, right in the beginning, as to what we see, but later letting us sometimes be one step ahead of the game. The central medium of the lunchbox, carried far and wide, bears many an import : as blind Cupid, the happenstance that other modern styles of media (such as Twitter®) can give rise to*, as a barometer of the feelings and of interest and appreciation (Twitter® again, with fire-fights, or e-mail (also mentioned, but unseen)), and of what sharing is, whether of food with another (we see some highly contrasting contrasting meals) or via the delivery service.

Sending something of oneself to another place, and what life is and concerns itself best with, these are the matters that The Lunchbox devotes itself to**. Unafraid to look matters such as stagnation, ageing, death, suicide and the content of a lifespan in the face, the film sets them in relief against the revolutionizing potential for good in (being open to) change. Hopes and fears, encouraged or allayed by Auntie at first, transmute into the aspiration for a place elsewhere, which could be Bhutan, which is not shown (but maybe familiar from Michael Palin’s excellent series Himalaya).

En route, the façades that, if we are honest with ourselves, we all should know that we put up of withdrawing into our nutshell and becoming ‘the king of infinite space’ (Hamlet), or, equally, of embracing some new way without heed to its impact on ourselves and / or on others – taking a lover, ‘exploiting’ an opportunity, closing our heart. Clinging on to what we find that we have really been resenting or needlessly protecting is exemplified by the realization made by Ila’s mother, or by the little girl who shuts Fernandes out from what he can see (symbolically, too), whereas his sense of something good, right and different is palpable when we see him open the lunchbox, almost as if the aroma came to us alongside how fine the food looks.

Yes, it is partly what some like to call magical realism, with the delivery system that has been endorsed by Harvard Business School as the engine for change with a life of its own (despite the customer-service response from the local representative’s denials), but this is not the hackneyed topos of the mystique and draw of India that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) depicts.

Instead, writer / director Ritesh Batra has fully absorbed the examples given by works such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and there is a seamless integration of medium and polymath message. Neither a rough ride, nor striving just to feel good, this film even gives us little flavours of themes such as those of The Double (2013) (in the government offices, devoid of technology, and of people seeking to get / hang on), and maybe even The Matrix (1999), in looking beyond the life that we take for life…

With camera-angles to wallow in and a controlled use of light, not to mention an insightful triptych mirror-scene, the film is as wonderfully put together as it is acted. Max Richter, in at the start with his score, is on very good form, and the result of this endeavour is a film that is moving and intelligent : it does not just entertain, but with the pretence of a big message of Small is beautiful (You’ve Got Mail (1998)), or needlessly and provocatively revel in the epistolary power to corrupt (in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation for Dangerous Liaisons (1988)), but engages with the questions that we may avoid even acknowledging as twentieth-century citizens.


End-notes

* Though the Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet, more than 400 years ago and to name but two, both manage very well in rely on the potential for, respectively, fortuitous and calamitous (mis)communication…

** And it may not just be coincidence, for what it is worth, that Khan is part of Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

*** Almost racist in its suggestion of the primitivism of different ways, just as the very flawed Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) feels to be in its transplanted setting of the Catalonian capital for the original one of Los Angeles.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 8 May 2014

Stranded (Excuse the pun) ?

This is a review of The Sea (2013)

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

8 May

This is a review of The Sea (2013)


With no knowledge of the prize-winning novel from which John Banville is credited with adapting the screenplay, one can only comment on other literary features that are apparent, the whiff of L. P. Hartley’s child- and class-centred novel The Go-Between* (also the film of that name from 1970), the feel of Harold Pinter’s troubling Old Times, and of Cocteau’s also troubling text Les Enfants Terribles (and his influence on Jean-Pierre Melville's directorship of Cocteau's screen adaptation). (Not to mention the ring and aura of many Irish actors who have played in Beckettt’s work, or read it aloud.)

The Pinter has a direct link here, for Rufus Sewell, this film’s register-twisting adult male (Carlo Grace), played opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams as Deeley when they magnificently alternated the roles of his wife Kate (reviewed here when KST played her) and Kate’s friend Anna (likewise reviewed – and that on the last night of the run at The Harold Pinter Theatre**).



Sewell brings to the part the mix of lightness and indefinable menace that he found in Deeley, and serves perfectly for Connie Grace’s (Natascha McElhone’s) mate, she seeming to be carefree – and open to misinterpretation (not only tones of Hartley, but also of the mystery of childhood for Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (from 2002), who is similarly drawn back to his past). Connie, more welcoming than Carlo gustily feigns to be, does not reckon with the backlash from Carlo’s and her playful high spirits, in invasive yet immersive scenes that we cannot, deep down, utterly credit being remembered aright (any more than the Pinter trio’s competitive claims for their time in London), because (through colour-balancing in shooting or post production) they are tinged with colour, golden light – as if of a Golden Age.

The mixture of fascinated flirting, stark inadequacy / naivety, and simply being in love with this unworldly family of Graces that Matthew Dillon brings to the role of Max Morden has us hooked into what he feels and then tries to think through – without that immediate involvement with his world, his viewpoint, nothing that Ciarán Hinds brings to his stark, rather gruff universe, whose colour (in a Night and Day contrast, especially at the key moment in the drama) seems to have been sucked from it, would move and affect us.

If we are tempted to think that it is a mystery falsely postponed that Hinds’ character keeps from Charlotte Rampling’s, and hers from him, that each knows who the other is, then it is best thought of as an unfolding : as in Old Times, the power is not in knowing (or guessing) the story, but, as always with Pinter (or in mature Beckettt), in the telling itself, the words, actions, nuances.

As also with Pinter, the resolution – if there is one – is on the level of some sort of acceptance. Max Morden (Hinds), suspicious of whether fellow guest Karl Johnson (Blunden) has a real or invented military past, suspicious and frightened, in fact, of so much, and feeling such pain, hurt and guilt, senses that he has misjudged this man. Perhaps, in his heart, he senses that, even if the forces background is a convenient fabrication, then not only have been his own references to ‘my parole officer’ (or maybe needing to write about Pierre Bonnard), but also the stories and confusions with which he has dogged himself / allowed himself to be dogged by through some misplaced respect, reverence even…

The Sea impresses strongly with how it has been shot and put together, no least as a worthy companion for the stunning Calvary (2014) and its own Irish grounding. Not, in that trite way, that the location is another character – just to the extent that Morden, shunning the present, seeks to inhabit this place in County Wexford, and finds that he has the weight of its cruel reminders to bear, borne in Hinds’ terrified expression of being in thrall.

In its way, more alarming for Morden than the demons of Event Horizon (1997), though not, for us, with its lingering mood (or that of Under the Skin (2013)), but rather with a final promise of peace, which could be as redemptive as that of Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013).


End-notes

* For no very good reason, a dear friend thinks of it as The Gobi Twin (though a title of some resonance after all).

** That review has, at the time of writing, a staggering 1,302 page-views on the blog, the other just 88… !






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 7 May 2014

Stockholm’s under-belly of punk

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)

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

7 May

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)


Maybe skip this section if you are less interested in punk attitude, more just in the film…

Perhaps Swedish punk, rather than imports from the States and the UK, were factually what a thirteen-year-old girl, whose elder brother had been into punk, would be listening to in 1982*. However, in the light of visiting three of the four Scandinavian countries (Finland excepted) around this time, it does seem unlikely – and knowing what, for example, German and Norwegian speakers have said about songs in their language not working, and so singers / listeners choosing English for their lyrics, more so.

Language and lyrics are a part of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013), so it is a shame that the sub-titles do not always seem plausible – is the heckling, in Swedish, really as frank and harsh as the words Communist cunts render it ? (Likewise, unless there were a family tradition of the usage, would a girl her age saying ‘Screw dessert !’ to her mother, in a tussle over going out, seem unnoticed ? (Instead, the mother just replies to the effect that the estranged father, the girl and she will not ‘screw dessert’, but the girl will help her make it, and it will be nice.))

Maybe upping the stakes in translation was intended to make the teenagers’ rebellious nature seem stronger (since they are punks), but the apparent mismatch with context and with people’s reactions seems to suggest that it was an ill-judged strategy. The mother laying down the law, for example, takes no visible offence at the word ‘screw’, when she surely would, since she is dictating what her daughter will do, if it is inappropriate : one is left wishing that one knew in what register the exchange really took place, rather than in the version overlaid by ‘the translation’.


Do join here, if you skipped the section above

All this is by the by[e] for some, but the Swedishness of everything makes it impossible to tell how much, if anything, of the punk scene is real, rather than invented – a matter of intrigue to some**, but one which may not bother others at all… (Though, when a group of girls try to do a stage routine, in the school concert, to Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, we are spot on in time for 1982.)

We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013) reminds a little of another recent film, The Rocket (2013), but also – inevitably – of The Commitments (1991) (let alone, in its wake, The Sapphires (2012))***. Yet, as commented, it distinguishes itself from these others by having a different heart, a different pull, from that, say, of Sitthiphon Disamoe in The Rocket, as Ahlo, a ‘fixer’ – although the overwhelming feeling is likewise that of people being brought together (where this film ends****).

The school concert, mentioned in passing above, is where Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) realize that they have overlooked, and underestimated, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) – we have already seen the pair (under the catty pressure from fellow students at the lunch table to conform and look like them) refuse to normalize. At this stage, we may not realize that Bobo is female (jazzer Bobo Stenson is definitely a man), because the other two appear to be addressing Klara and Bobo as if one of them is male*****.

In a beautifully casual way, they have formed a band – essentially Let’s play, because this band [Iron Fist : possibly a reference to Sweden’s Soviet past ?] is crap, which is a fairly earthy punk attitude, if ever there were one… Hedvig, initially, fits in because maybe, Klara and Bobo conclude, they could use her – not knowing, as we do not, where her engagement will take them. That emergence of Hedvig, responding to them as they respond to her, and with God thrown in for good measure, is the joy of the film.

As to the dynamic, with Bobo sometimes more serious than her often frivolous mother’s friends (happily playing Spin the Bottle at a party), she can sound quite alarmingly sage when she makes a reasoned assertion. Yet one can easily believe that this tempering of and firing off each other is why Klara and she have been friends for so long, as complementing each other, rather than as opposites. (It is not for nothing that a larger girl is not unusual in being a companion to a slender one.)

Having said this, although the film is a good and thoughtful one, it does take a while to bed down, just at the time when one wants to start feeling part of it and perhaps has started to despair of being able to do so. Call that a tease, if you like, but it cannot be the full intention, since the film relies not on alienating us, but on engendering an interest in and affection for the efforts that Klara, Bobo and Hedvig are making.

So an audience needs to be patient with the film, allow it the odd uneven moment (even when it has established itself), and be taken along by Klara’s energy as a driving force for much of what happens, but also Hedvig’s quiet rebelliousness mixed with good sense, and Bobo’s envious uncertainty.


End-notes

* Maybe, though, with the Swedo-centric nature of the featured music, we have a reflection of cultural bias in Sweden to the home grown (one that certainly helped Fredrik Gertten with legal obstacles to releasing Bananas !*, whose story is told effectively in Big Boys Gone Bananas !* (2011)).

At any rate, the libertarian picture painted in this film, mainly of Stockholm, but also of outlying areas (with a debate about whether one is a mere suburb or a city, and whether the inhabitants of another are (sic) ‘retards’), extends to adult sexual promiscuity and drug usage, but firmly not to minors consuming alcohol – and, contrary to the translation’s hutzpah, the three girls do not seem brazenly defiant to their parent(s).

** Not least viewers of films such as those of Shaun Jefford and Don Letts – respectively, Beijing Punk (2010), and Punk : Attitude (2005).

*** However, it is only really the sense of striving that feels similar in the former, and the latter, strong though the music is, lacked any cohesion beyond the loose notion that the group of performers should (be encouraged to) play soul because they were ‘black’ – there is precious little, beside (and between) the set-pieces, to constitute a story, just a few links.

**** That said, the credits are artfully integrated into the closing moment, and you will not want / be able to miss them…

***** Yes, those subtitles (again) seem to interpose a little difficulty, because the person responsible for bringing them to the screen has not only paired them, but brought them up contrary to our expectations, so that they make us confuse who said what to whom…






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

Charity begins - in Ireland ?

This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight* (Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)

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

6 May

This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight*(Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


A division was called on the motion 'This Film is Not a Good Film'


Nos

* Lovely shots of the beach in Ireland

* Arty tricks with light at the beginning (which remind of K-PAX (2001)'s tag-line beam of light)

* The whole mystery of the opening scene, with the near-masonic pre-burial - though a mystery sought for in vain elsewhere...

* The girls are convincing sisters

* A cute kitten (a device as favoured by The Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist))

* Some of the photos from the Kabul trip

* A role for Maria Doyle Kennedy (one of the people who rescued The Commitments (1991)), but blink and you miss it - sure some scenes cut there along the way !



Ayes

* Too many lights crystallized as out-of-focus dots

* Much wooden dialogue / delivery

* Flagging up that it is Afghanistan by the descending words on a building KABUL BUSINESS CENTRE (or some such)

* Accents from Binoche and Coster-Waldau that nearly wander as much as her character travels the globe

* Editing that cuts off several scenes rather abruptly, and not as if to move 'the action' along with a pace

* The closing resemblance to Jennifer Saunders, let alone the wild, bearded stereotype of marine biology

* She is patently not taking photographs with those Canon EOS 5Ds - at best, she shows how to snap a lens onto a body

* As if she would (but she is thoughtless...) only realize on the plane that her daughter might want to photograph Kenya whilst there, not giving her the chance to try out the camera

* As plausible as The Bride's rising from a coma (in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)) that she should recover both so quickly and with so little damage from that blast

* How a family could possibly have survived in tatters this long, given how old the daughters are 

* The clunky Skype-type scenes with Jessica (whoever Jessica really is)

* We also need to believe that Jessica just commissions photographs of someone about to become a suicide-bomber, no questions asked - let alone the ridiculous belief that it matters very much that those particular people were killed or maimed, whatever the real target was

* That the said 5D and its lens are so robust that photographs can be taken after the blast - even more robust than Binoche, really

* Any notion that the camp in Kenya, declared safe, was going to be safe

* That the hut used as a shelter really afforded the photo-opportunities whose results we see

* The clear similarity to te main theme of In a Better World (Hævnen) (2010), which may not have the billing, but... could be a better film


QED The Ayes have it !



End-notes

* What Romeo and Juliet has to do with it is anyone's guess - director / co-writer Erik Poppe likes the sound of the words ?






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