I lost track, somewhere – what was real, what was performance

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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22 February

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film

Right from the start of the film, Natalie Portman’s detail-rooted response, as Jackie Kennedy, to the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – to losing him, and to what his assassination means, because he was also the 35th President of the United States of America – is prefigured and then accentuated by ‘a dying fall’ in Mica Levi’s score¹.

As we proceed with the elements of Levi’s sound-world and with Jackie (2016), they are multi-layered, with, for example, a cello-part that alludes to when Pablo Casals performed at The White House (as depicted), and, with some material, Levi sometimes seems to be subtly evoking the stateliness of many tributes in music to JFK² (if not the twelve-tone Elegy for J.F.K. (1964) that Stravinsky composed [Cathy Berberian, and three clarinet soloists from the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Pierre Boulez, via YouTube] ?).

Expectations of Grace of Monaco (2014) put right by @everyfilmneil's encouraging review, this was screen-filling intensity and immersion.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 22, 2017

As mentioned, Neil White’s (@everyfilmneil’s) long-running cinema-blog [everyfilm.co.uk], where he sets himself the challenge every year of watching every film that has any release in the UK [starting from 1 January, Neil’s reviews number 87 at the time of writing], had very usefully set out what this film is, and so caused it to be listed to be watched :

Portman captures Jackie's essence in a film which is quite different to any which will be released this year. […]

It ought to be made clear that this is not a biopic of Jackie's life with JFK nor does it explore her further life and marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

Instead, it concentrates on the immediate aftermath of the assassination with occasional flashbacks to the shooting and a live TV programme in 1961 in which she revealed changes she had made to the White House.

Greta Gerwig (as Nancy Tuckerman)

Although Jackie is seen through the relative calm of being framed by a fictionalized newspaper interview³ (one of several ‘frames’ within the film, another of which also involves a significant conversation³), the scenes within its chosen strands speak of Jackie’s deep anxiety at the death of her husband, and at The White House, following her life with him there. As alluded to by Neil White, these are lives effectively lived out on t.v. : when Jackie Kennedy gives a tour of what Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig) suggests she call ‘the people’s house’, it is largely on her own, because it has been thought best for her husband only to join her at the end, and we see all the apparatus of the static and wheeled cameras that make this welcome possible, and, behind the illusion, Nancy mouthing reminders and encouragements to smile…

Director Pablo Larraín and director of photography Stéphane Fontaine have given the meeting with the journalist a very different ambience (with its peaceful location on the edge of water, at a named property in Massachusetts), so the times when we are with them cause other parts of the film – whose shooting-style and camera-movement make them feel highly tense and claustrophobic – more manageable⁴. For us, as much as for Jackie Kennedy : nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the motifs of Mica Levi’s music – and finally seeing the horror, near the end of the film, of being at John Kennedy’s side during the shooting – leave us unsettled.

The grief, the guilt and the anger at God, which we hear her ruminate and rage on in the moments with The Priest⁴ (John Hurt), are very much her own (could she have shielded her husband, and where was God in it all ?), and we have a very definite sense of place. Yet, in both of these ‘frames’, time seems deliberately elongated and a little unreal, and, when we end up at night-fall, it seems even more unworldly…

Jackie Kennedy with The Priest (John Hurt)

Maybe the anxiety, which in Jackie Kennedy has her mind concentrate on all that is specific (as a way of trying to cope with the reality of what has happened), is not being portrayed because she is different, or set apart from, our experience. The particularities of her hurt and pain apart, can we identify with moments as nonsensical as someone insisting that an autopsy has to take place, because it is ‘required by law’, but not being able – or not being willing – to say what an autopsy entails ?

Is anything familiar to us in that nightmarish moment of her rushing to the doors behind which the autopsy is taking place, only to be caught and turned back by Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) ?

End-notes :

¹ That straine agen, it had a dying fall.

Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene 1) [text from the First Folio]

² Though, necessarily, avoiding the obvious sound of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings [Leonard Bernstein conducts The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, via YouTube], which was broadcast over the television at the announcement of Kennedy’s death. (It was an arrangement that Barber had made, in the same year as his String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936), of its slow movement, and which had been heard when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death was announced, and on many public occasions since.)

We read in Wikipedia® :The Adagio for Strings was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite pieces of music. Jackie Kennedy arranged a concert the Monday after his death with the National Symphony Orchestra and they played to an empty hall.


³ Neil White comments on this point in his review (please see main text, above), 'Director Pablo Larrain based the movie around an interview which Mrs Kennedy conducted with Life Magazine's Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who is played by Billy Crudup but not named.' On the film's web-page on IMDb (@IMDb), Billy Crudup is generically credited as ‘The Journalist’, John Hurt as ‘The Priest’.

Jackie Kennedy with The Journalist (Billy Crudup)

⁴ Not the least of the ambiguity, with The Journalist (and The Priest ?), is what, of what we see Jackie Kennedy speak, she is actually saying to him, and what saying, but forbidding him to report (since she had said, at the outset, that she would be editing as they go) – but also the uncertainties between them all along, such as when she asks whether he is giving her career advice, or suggesting that she should hold a party at the house - or when she matter-of-factly tells him, I don’t smoke, so directly denying what we see her do.


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

An Education revisited - or Why did they include that on the DVD ?

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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2 November (updated 4 November)

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

* Contains spoilers *

The advice is always to hand in your working, as well as your answers, at the end of Maths exams* (probably applicable to those in Physics, too).

We get to see the film-makers’ working (having been shown it by distributor E1 Entertainment) on the DVD of An Education (2009), which was, as it were, ‘educational’ – but only in how not to tell a story (or how to undermine the story that you have just had the likes of Mulligan, Molina and Pike tell on the disc).

In this case, it is less that one bothered to film these false steps (i.e. the deleted scenes) in this BBC Films’ production, or even scripted them in the first place : for one should be in little doubt that, when Sam Mendes says (on Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3blog’s) Night Waves (now re-labelled as Free Thinking – @BBCFreeThinking)) that another ending for American Beauty (1999) tempted him, there probably was one.

Yet, even if it was not, at the time of the original VHS release, generally the fashion to put ‘Bonus Features’ or ‘Extras’ at the end of the video-tape, one may wager that Mendes would not have allowed that other ending (if it had survived) anywhere near the DVD re-release (in July 2006) – quite sufficient that he should mention it on air some six years later…

More than any of this, it was just the misjudgement embodied in including this material as a ‘Bonus Feature’, as if it ‘might interest’ the viewer who had just watched An Education – although, almost necessarily, this critique is from the viewpoint of having seen the film as released, and treating that assemblage of scenes as having ascendancy over those that were wholly rejected (or which here appear in a different, usually longer, form).

That said, maybe one can already program modern DVD-players to add in or cut out scenes, so that one has (and can store the settings for) the viewer’s cut at will, an idea with which – in connection with an unfinished version of this posting – Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) was horrified quite a few months back at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (when he brought A History of Children and Film (2013)) !

Even so, there is barely anything here that one would have wanted to keep, albeit some are decisions that would easily not get made until editing – too much time with the school-friends has been wisely relegated, because Jenny’s (Carey Mulligan’s) interaction with them there either adds nothing to the whole, or overstates what we already know / infer : when they are in the window of the café, one asks ‘What do you do all day, Lady Muck ?’, to which one of the answers is ‘Helping to look at some flats’. Or when the three meet for a post-mortem on Jenny’s romance, and, again, we learn what was better not mentioned, but passed over - or guessed at.


Yet the possibility that we probably least want to see filmed is that of David being ahead of Jenny at the end of the street in Oxford as she cycles with a male friend** – and, when she has asked the friend to wait and approaches David on foot (please see transcript, below), his seeking to make her accept his apology / explanation, and inviting her to resume a relationship with him (as if she is likely to agree, even in principle) :

On one level, the scene wants at once both to impart the fact that David has been in prison (You probably know I’ve been away), and to suggest that it is realistic that he would already be at liberty during Jenny’s time at university : Jenny tells him that she knows, because of a piece in the local paper that her mother sent to her, that he asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration : One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

To be able to credit this scene, we would have to believe – as, for good reason, Jenny no longer does, having met David’s shocked wife Sarah (played by Sally Hawkins in a quick scene*, who was shocked at Jenny’s age) – that she, out of the others (of whom Sarah makes Jenny and us aware), has been special to David (Peter Sarsgaard).

Which is what the film has us believe only so far, then chips away at it, first with his convenient lying (about visiting C. S. Lewis), and his morals in ‘liberating’ an old map, and managing to justify himself to Jenny afterwards in terms of mere pragmatism (that he cannot buy her drinks, etc., otherwise).

As a closing moment, this request (whose refusal the deleted scene shows him simply accepting) asks too much of us, i.e. that David should really have cared about Jenny, for him to be making this approach, this speech – although it is consistent with what he says to Danny (Dominic Cooper) at Walthamstow, when he has been challenged about his intentions : to look at Jenny, and see that she is different.


Even if it happened in Lynn Barber’s memoir, on which Nick Hornby based the screenplay (and which might now be worth checking…), we are better off not having David appear in Oxford, or our hearing what happened to him. Not to make a better ending, but because it seems consistent with the scene with David’s wife Sarah Goldman, which, in the film is shorter (and without a child in a pram, or Jenny listening to everything that Sarah has to say), but carries the same meaning :

David’s involvement with other women (at least one of whom, even in the included version of the scene, he has made pregnant : You’re not in the family way ? – that’s happened before) has clearly enough been a repeating pattern of offering himself as available, when he is not, but not (as Sarah views it, again in that longer scene) being able to go through with it, because he loves his children**. (As Sarah says, answering her own question about whether Jenny knew about the house, child and her, They never do.)

For the film as made, with Jenny’s voiceover about getting to Oxford (and having had to make out to a boy who wanted to take her to Paris that she had not been), physically - though not necessarily emotionally - distances us from what she has gone through : even the closing shot does not retain the splendour or triumph implicit in a crane-shot, and then drawing out, but just slowly backs up to a wide shot and a blackout (as against a slow fade, after a significantly long hold).


The original memoir would, one imagines, have been in the first person. However, in the film, Jenny has not been at much distance from her own story before, or outside it, and has only been seen telling it to others in the fairly immediate moment – or, indeed, trying to avoid doing so, after finding the letters in the glove compartment***, and having required David to take her parents and her straight back home :

At this point, and despite being unfairly urged Don't be like this (which echoes his words Please don't be unkind in the deleted closing scene - please see below), she had put him on the spot with When were you going to tell me ?, and seems to take at face value when he replies Soon… it just never seemed like the right time. He tries to divert onto the good times, to justify asserting I can get a divorce – everything will turn out for the best. The truth, though, is that he drives off, when she requires him to speak to her parents and his wife.

The effect of giving Jenny a voiceover implies exactly the opposite of having her meet David, an accommodation with a past about which she feels very differently from when he tried to manipulate her with it there : Which, in this alternative world that we are shown, she has to express to David, who conveniently obliges by turning tail, and she goes back to her life in Oxford.

For this version to be on the DVD, David’s approach to Jenny has to be plausible and worth showing, neither of which it is, when he seems to invest no real energy in convincing a woman who now can have no reason to listen to him, let alone believe him – and David has always been seen to talk around the people whom he knew that he could persuade, because he knew how, not that he thought his powers to be unfailing.


Characterization of the first twelve deleted scenes

1. After Mulligan has whispered to Sarsgaard ‘That was scandalous’, regarding his manipulation of Molina’s mood and morality (approval that suggests a greater level of complicity / endorsement), closing business with his putting his hat over her eyes.

2. Pike and Mulligan, clearly having swapped hats, and the former initially lying on the bonnet of the car, and casually (as her character is) being quite candid about how little there is to do in the places where Sarsgaard and Cooper (Danny) stop.

3. A kiss in what initially looks like a railway compartment, but, as we draw back, is a private booth (where one can hear the 45 of one’s choice).

4, 5. Mulligan and her school chums caught smoking (when they thought themselves out of view around a corner), and then brought before Thompson – ‘Not surprised to see you’ (to Mulligan).

6. Curling around the café, in a pan, to the picture-window where Mulligan and co. are sitting. After she has put one of them right that the literature question that she is looking at asks for two examples (and the light quip from one friend that the other is excused, for being ‘rubbish at maths’), they turn to asking her about her (post-school) life : ‘What do you do all day anyway, Lady Muck ?’, to which Mulligan answers (not altogether convincingly) : Um (Pause.) I’ve been… trying on dresses, helping to look at some flats – I’ve been reading a lot, too.

7. In through the door of the kitchen, where Mulligan is being tutored, by Colman (her mother) in how to make afternoon tea, and we realize that Sarsgaard is there : he is asked, again, where the flat is, and eventually answers Down near Russell Square – two minutes’ walk from the Underground.

After Mulligan jokes about putting the tea-cosy on her head, Colman leaves. When questioned about where he is living now, Sarsgaard, after saying that he has only stayed there a couple of nights, states – when pressed – that Mulligan must think him very odd (You do seem to float around…), but I live at home […] – just [with] my mother, my father’s dead […].

8, 9. Inconsequential scenes, with Colman at the foot of the stairs (That’s what David sees, lots of nice places / You won’t be bored, you know – he’s not boring.), and outside the house, Sarsgaard kissing Mulligan, and sweeping her off her feet.

10. Extended scene with Hawkins (after No, don’t tell me… Good God, you’re a child !, and just before the moment when Mulligan walks away), where a longer speech from Hawkins catches her :

You didn’t know about any of this, presumably – no, they never do. Did he ask you to marry him ? Yes, of course he did. You’re not ‘in the family way’, are you, because that’s happened before ? […] (Brings out pram.) […] That’s why he never goes through with anything – he does love them. […] He’s four months old […] Perhaps you can remember a night, four months ago, when my husband seemed… a little distracted. […]

11. By the river / weir, distractedly smoking, then throwing the cigarette-packet away into the water.

12. Mulligan with her friends, around a table at the back of the café (where she had been waiting for them) – I’m sure my uncle knows someone who could kill him, if that would help – There was lots I didn’t tell you, plus a moment of attempted profundity : That’s the thing about our lives, isn’t it – it’s so easy to fall asleep, when there’s nothing to keep you awake….


(Transcript of the last deleted scene


13. Mulligan cycling, Sarsgaard in distance, and, as is revealed in a wide, tracking-shot, the Bridge of Sighs in the near background. Concentrating, though, on the dialogue (rather than the shots) – and what a quantity of dialogue for a scene that was not used (the whole sequence is 3 minutes 25 seconds) !

Mulligan : Good God !

Sarsgaard : Hello, Jenny.

Mulligan : What are you doing here ?

Sarsgaard : Uh (Pause.) I came to see you.

Mulligan : I think, in this case, ‘Better never, than late’.

Sarsgaard : Please don’t be unkind. (Pause.) You probably know (Pause.) Um… I’ve been away. (Pause, nodding.) So, I couldn’t come before—

Mulligan : Yes, my mother sent me a piece from the local paper. You asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration. One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

Sarsgaard : I wanted to make a clean start, for a new beginning – (Slight pause.) together. (Pause.) I came to tell you… I’m going to speak to my wife about a divorce.

Mulligan : Don’t you understand what you did ?

Sarsgaard : Jenny, I do, I really do, and I know that… my behaviour… must’ve… been – confusing. (Pause.) Um. (Pause.) We never sat down and had a chat about it all, the ‘why’s and the ‘wherefore’s – that can wait. (Slight pause.) The important thing (Pause.) is – (Pause.) you’re still my Minnie Mouse (Pause.) – and… (Pause.) I love you. (Long Pause. She looks across at her friend, waiting.) And we had fun, you know you had fun.

Mulligan : (Long pause.) Yes, I had fun. (Long pause.) But I had fun with the wrong person. (Pause.) And at all the wrong times, and I can’t ever get those times back. (Pause.) But I’ve got my own life back now. (Pause.) Look, David – I’m at (With a boast.) Oxford.

Sarsgaard : (Snorts.)


End-notes

* Not surprisingly, in reviewing How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths), Mark Liversidge (@MoveEvangelist) remarks as much.

** Admittedly, this argument conveniently uses the content of one deleted scene to prove that another deleted scene has no merit, but the upset to Jenny in finding out that David is married is, in its own terms, so great that, having gone further and met his wife, she is likely to believe that he has taken her for a ride.

*** In truth, there is no clear reason why she looks in there or now, and not only now, but not before.


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

That was big of you - oh no, it was bigamy !

This is a review of An Education (2009) (seen on DVD)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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27 March

This is a review of An Education (2009) (seen on DVD)

* Contains spoilers *

Nice enough to see Carey Mulligan and RosamundPike, but An Education (2009) says nothing about vanity that Frisch didn't with Biedermann...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 27, 2014

Biedermann und die Brandstifter, not least through its Epilogue, implies that what we have seen is a slice from a cyclical pattern. In the scene with Sally Hawkins, we learn that Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is just the last in a line, yet what makes no sense is why (a) the former tolerates this behaviour, (b) Danny (Dominic Cooper) seems to react in private to David (Peter Sarsgaard) as if this is the first time that this has happened, and (c) why the letters that Jenny finds would be in the glove compartment (unless - although such a notion does not accord with what we see - she is meant to find them).

Maybe all that is in Lynn Barber's 'memoir' (and adopted by Nick Hornby in writing the screenplay), but it does not make for credibility that Jenny is (excuse the rhyme !) one of many, and so of less importance (to David), and more of a victim. (Where the resonance with the Epilogue of the Frisch is strongest is when parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and daughter blame each other, as responsible for what happened.)

An Education (2009) : Some nice shots, now and again (not too many to frighten the horses), a relishing of awkwardness, and bits of Paris...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 27, 2014

As for the two or three longish scenes with Emma Thompson as the head, whether, in 1961, even an intelligent pupil such as Jenny would realistically have been permitted (by such head) to speak to her as Jenny does seems doubtful - Jenny may be spirited, spurred by David's attentions, but figures in authority have never taken to those whom they are dressing down or warning 'talking back', whereas this one seems to take it on the chin (if reserving only the power to reject when ignored).

Otherwise, it is a nice enough tale of duplicity and hopes only postponed, not dashed*, and it does not hang around, at 96 minutes, in the way that a more recent would-be morality story does. However, it tries to end with the rather trite message of I was wiser for what happened as if it is some profundity, not a cliché : by contrast, Frisch's play is Ein Lehrstück ohne Lehre, which is broadly a lesson without teaching, and, in common with Haneke's films, one is not directed what to think about, or how to interpret, what one sees and hears.

Equally, @H_onfilm, An Education (2009), watched to-night, is a white, bourgeois dream of betterment again - no easy getting away from it ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 27, 2014

Fair enough to nominate Mulligan for an Academy Award for best actress, but best film or best adapted screenplay ??

There is now a follow-up piece about what favours the so-called 'Bonus Features' on the DVD did the film...


Or this review, from Time Out's Dave Calhoun, makes for interesting reading...


End-notes

* Maybe it feels a little like My Week with Marilyn (2011) - important to the young person at the time, but one gets over it ? (Each film has a (different) Williams, too...)


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