It's a jolly holiday with Disney

This is a review of Mary Poppins (1964)

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14 December

This is a review of Mary Poppins (1964)

When a company celebrates an anniversary, you can be almost certain that it does so to sell you something – in extreme cases, the complete works of J. S. Bach on CD (151 CDs, to be precise, which, if truthful to yourself, you know that you will never all play, even just once).

In this case, it is two cinema-tickets for everyone in your family, not only to Mary Poppins (1964) (as restored), but to the making-of film, Saving Mr. Banks (2013) - even if it does sound rather like that Spielberg one.

If anyone can be as brisk and British as Julie Andrews, surely Emma Thompson can, even if the plot has – as it is said to have – a licence to make Tom Hanks, as Uncle Walt, more cuddly than he really was (and what, one wonders, did Miss Andrews know of the tussles about authorship and artistic integrity).

So far so good, apart from the question whether a spoonful of sugar (or some larger confection) is going to be necessary to make the [Disney] medicine go down…


Now continued as a review

83 = S : 13 / A : 16 / C : 11 / M : 14 / P : 15 / F : 14

A rating and review of Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



This is a film that, for many reasons, should not succeed in being touching – and one cannot quite untease whether what is touching is that it is showing (a version of) the cinematic genesis of a loved childhood film, i.e. working off one’s emotional attachment to the film within the film onto the latter.

Initially, the soundtrack is just too obvious and overpowering, reaching a low with a jazz version of Heigh-ho on Travers’ arrival at Disney HQ (which, according to the loud assertion of a fellow audience member, had been Dave Brubeck’s). Maybe one became accustomed to it, maybe it became more subtle, but it did not work against drawing out emotion from scenes in the way that it had before. (It did not really help that the disturbing, percussive bass notes of the trailer for All is Lost (2013) had created pounding in the heart.)

P. L. Travers, seemingly portrayed effortlessly by Emma Thompson, just cannot, we know continue as she first presents herself, fussing, dismissing, disapproving. (Thompson is perfect for the part, as is Hanks for Disney – he seems to have had his eyes modified to heighten the resemblance, unless he just always looks that way.) And can Disney really do everything nicely to get her to sign her rights to him (which, on her agent’s advice, she has not done) and let him make the film ?

In between, something happens, whereas it could have more closely resembled the confrontation in, say, Frost / Nixon (2008), onto which, at some level, it may be seen to map : what will the breakthrough be that changes the dynamic of declining to sign ? (In fact, the film is a better contender for that category, for, on the face of it, Frost does nothing whatever to elicit an apology from Nixon, just lets him bluster time and time over.)

In this film, a natural star is Annie Rose Buckley, as Ginty, the young Travers, who exudes faith and trust (not least hugged to his arms on horseback) very naturally as well as looking very pretty. Colin Farrell, in the role of her father, seems initially to have been allowed a longer leash, but he is not playing against type, and it does not take us long to be shown that he is as tortured, in his way, as Ray in In Bruges (2008), save that this is a PG, not an 18.

One sees his wife Margaret (suitably quietly played by Ruth Wilson) struggling to relate to his way of loving his daughter, so different from how she is, for they are really quite a way apart, which both pains and paralyses her. One beautiful use of cinematography takes us above a maze of sheets on the line, children, chickens, and parents, momentarily symbolic of how tortuous the relations have become. And then there is Thompson as a grown-up, with an army of pill-boxes at her deployment.

That shot alone tells us that things are not, in conventional terms, going to be simple. It is indicative maybe just of hypochondria, although (seeing Travers) that seems unlikely, and here we come to the nub of the film : why Mary Poppins means something to her to such an extent that she will not bear her character just being called Mary.

She will not have herself called anything other than Mrs Travers (which her driver, played with real humour and humanity by Paul Giamatti*, as a sort of look-alike cross between Bilko and Eric Morecambe, confuses, and keeps calling her just Missus). She just insists on certain things, being or not being, as if just for the sake of it. And this is where my regret lies, that we are in a type of Marnie (1964), but with no Connery to her Hedren to help her open up her mind to psychodynamic change (and explain why she chucks pears into a swimming-pool).

It is just that we have come a little beyond the way in which the earlier decades** showed these matters, and this seems some sort of implausible spontaneous process (though it may have been what happened, or how it was interpreted at the time) that someone should go into what, in effect, is a disasssociative state at the impulse of working on a piece of writing with close, personal meaning.

For me, Disney talking about his childhood and how he relates to it seems a little more likely to have conveyed a message. And, for me, I cannot separate from this film what Andrews and Mary Poppins (1964) meant to my childhood, so it was especially nice both to see contemporaneous stills of Disney, Travers, Andrews and of the storyboards, as well as hear a little of these tapes that Travers insisted being made.


By the way, one goof :

Anyone used to weather-vanes will know that they point in the direction from which the wind is coming, the reason being that the latter part of what rotates resists the wind, and so gets pushed until there is no longer any resistance, when the front, needle part points into the wind (also offering least resistance) and, if the markings around the edge are correctly oriented, at the letter 'E', if the wind is from the east.

This is how the admiral's weather-vane works in Mary Poppins (1964), turning to point to W when the wind has changed and is no longer from the east. This was lost on someone, for, when Ginty is being told that the wind has changed and is coming from the east, W is being pointed at.



End-notes

* Excellent in Sideways (2004) and The Last Station (2009).

** There are some anachronisms : in the 1960s, it was de rigueur for saucer to stay with cup, there were no chains to keep trace of glasses, and no British person was casually diagnosing ADHD (least of all in an adult). (And the rendering of the steam train's progress against the landscape did not quite work.)


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One heckuva film !

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13 December

* Contains spoilers *

Gone with the Wind (1939), seen on Monday night, has been digitally restored, but still runs to 233 minutes...

One thing that one has to get over is its great nostalgia for The South as it was before the Civil War, because that meant slavery, however nice the O'Hara family was to its slaves. Another is that The United States were still segregated at the time of the film's making, as films like Michael Roemer's Nothing But a Man (1964) make clear.

Kitty Scarlett O'Hara, Gerald O'Hara's (Thomas Mitchell's) most winning daughter, is of course played by Vivien Leigh, who would have been around 25 at the time (and only lived until 53) - naturally, an accomplished piece of acting, however old she was supposed to be at the opening of the film, though, much as we might admire O'Hara, we can rarely like her. Leslie Howard, as Ashley Wilkes and about whom she was besotted, was (because of the war) to live to a similar age to Leigh, but was much Leigh's senior at around 45 at the time of filming.

(Such things would commonly matter much more now, as if these were times of greater verisimilitude... A long-shot of Tara, with the building so obviously painted in, or a red sky, supposed to be Atlanta burning, but clearly just a back-drop, is not, though, our modern expectation.)

One of the most striking things about the film, other than O'Hara's steadfast regard for Wilkes, is Max Steiner's music, which underpins so much of the action in a non-distracting way, but, when it wants to bring back the big themes of The South or of the family homestead Tara, does so unmistakably, and weaves in tunes such as Dixie.

Olivia de Havilland was wonderful in the digital restoration of Gone with the Wind (1939) at @CamPicturehouse - complete with intermission.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 9, 2013

Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) is one of the treasures of the film (38 at the time of filming), and with whom there necessarily is such chemistry with Leigh, believing that she might love him when he knows that (through having overheard, right at the beginning) all that is on her mind is Wilkes, and her carelessly losing two husbands before marrying Butler. The other is Olivia de Havilland's non-judgemental performance as Ashley Wilkes' cousin and wife Melanie, loving Butler and O'Hara much more than they can ever love her.

Rather meanly, O'Hara characterizes Butler, after seeing him for the first time at the ball at Seven Oaks, as 'able to see through my shimmy [sc. chemise] as if I weren't wearing it', which raises the issue of his licentiousness from the start - as if, in her own way, O'Hara were any less licentious, as time progresses, willingly dancing with Butler, although in mourning, at the fund-raising ball in Atlanta for The Confederate Southern Army shortly afterwards, where she has chosen to be because Wilkes will return there on leave.

With Melanie's death, apart from the disconcerting, famous lines, the film is but at an end, except for whether Scarlett will descend into her father's condition, or rise up to win back Rhett by going back to Tara (which she fought for, and then forgot about).


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It's a matter of conscience

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9 December (completed 13 December)

* Full of spoilers - only read if you know the film *

Marius (2013) is a superbly compiled piece of cinema, and, from a second viewing, well worthy (with Fanny (2013)) to be in the top five of selections from Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (@camfilmfest).

The first thing that we see from Marius' point of view is out to sea from the harbour bar, which he helps - when he does not just disappear* - his father César run. Then, when we see him, he looks as though he is in prison (which, metaphorically, he is), because the window is barred. He tries to make Fanny believe, when she appears, that he was looking at her, and there the dichotomy is stated in one.

In his beautiful score, Alexandre Desplat has a muted trumpet theme, which is full of longing, and could be longing for a woman or - as it turns out to be - for the sea. A little later, he has a second main theme that is full of piping, and which comes into its own at the end.

Marius likes to believe that he has rationalized his feelings, telling both César and Fanny that he 'cannot marry', and representing to the former (who believes that it is on account of a mistress) that she - really, the sea - might kill herself, if he ended it. As in so many places in this film, the scene gains its strength, because of dramatic irony, in that we know what is really on Marius' mind. How Marius behaves towards Panisse, when Fanny and he are trying to have a quiet drink in the corner of the bar, shows that he has not rationalized things - even though, at the dance at Cascade, Fanny had tried to tell Marius that she is thinking of accepting Panisse's proposal.


When Fanny takes Marius' advice literally, he tries to back out of it, and then ends up revealing to her the draw of the sea, which - if a rap at the door had had a different message - could have taken him away at a moment's notice. In telling her what he had learnt from the crew of the vessel that came from The Leeward Islands, we hear (in Desplat's music that there is) real poetry, intoxication, love... However, Fanny - characterizing it later as an irrational fascination for the land of the green monkeys - must have misconceived, by believing that his love for her would be stronger and overcome.

Having, feeling as he did, hitherto behaved properly towards Fanny, he allows himself to kiss her and presumably also to believe that he can overcome his inclinations, although he had been on the verge of joining a crew, if he had been needed, that very night.

Weeks later, thinking that he has been deceiving his father (whereas César has told his card-laying friends that he knows his ploy of climbing back inside and locking his door from the inside), he slips out to meet Fanny, and, when she overhears her relationship described as 'a matter of conscience' to the captain who wants Marius to serve, she takes the chance to assure the captain that he will go, because she knows that Marius does not love her, and she cannot bear to hear that he will cry himself to sleep, if he does not go (she believes what is said, for the simple reason that the captain must have known others who had been drawn to the sea, but did not go, and has no expectation that she will persuade Marius to go, as she claims).

When Fanny realizes, from what she has heard Marius say, that he is not in love with her, she has as much reason to want him to go to sea (so that she can 'cover her shame' and marry Panisse), but she probably cannot contrive that her mother Honorine (played impassionedly by Marie-Anne Chazel) gets a lift back from her sister's with M. Amourdedieu** so that the lovers are discovered, and Honorine puts pressure on César, who puts it on Marius.

All of these factors come into play when Fanny urges Marius to go to sea : as she is saying that she will look to his matter of conscience, he will not be forced into marriage, if he goes, and he does want to go. She also wants him to go, because she is ashamed of being deceived by him until she hears him speak to the captain. Here, the actual piping, which had been in Desplat's score, evokes the latter by association, with all its resonance. So Fanny covers for him, occupying César, whilst the ship gets ready for sea, and sails.

Panisse, who could have had a message from Marius for his father, instead just has incoherence after Marius has clumsily knocked some crates over, but still goes to try to alert his former schoolmate César to what is happening at the dock - only he is too busy with Fanny's deception, intended to let Marius go. Whatever Pagnol's screen adaptation of his own stage trilogy might have been, it is scarcely possible to conceive Auteuil's version being any less crisp, with scene seamlessly following scene in just 93 minutes.


End-notes

* He tries to leave Fanny in charge when he runs off for a meeting with the captain at the brothel, and she, presumably not knowing why he has gone there (when she follows), ends up crying on her bed.

** Pagnol keeps the names of his trio of linked characters simple (and also that of Panisse), whereas César's circle of friends have some outlandish ones, such as Escartefigue and Frisepoulet (unless that is Auteuil's deviltry !).


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

Really shot in Wyoming !

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7 December

89 = S : 14 / A : 15 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 13 / F : 15

A rating and review of Nebraska (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

It may not only be true of lesser films (well, not true of The Third Man (1949)), but Bel Ami (2012) fails at attempting to pass off London as Paris, and On the Road (2012) is a film that, as this one does, features landscape - just nowhere near, reading the credits, where the various journeys were supposed to be happening.

It is an interesting choice to present this film in black and white, because it really adds almost nothing to what we see except the views of the scenery, which are faultless. With Frances Ha (2013), it worked, it did enhance the film's cinematic qualities, but here - apart from the obvious suggestion that much of life in states such as Montana and Nebraska is being presented as lacking a dimension - it was only the fleeting longer shots in transit that benefited, but, then, so much that I would not have had the film any other way.

And this is a film that says something about acceptance, though that does not mean that I have to accept this highly inaccurate account of it from IMDb :

An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize


I see no evidence that David Grant (also unwillingly known as Davie / Davey, and played by Will Forte) is estranged from his father Woody (short for Woodrow, and acted by Bruce Dern), and it is he, rather than his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who comes for him when he has been picked up by the police at the start. The other descriptions beg the question : what life has Woody led that he is as he is, and can his wife Kate (June Squibb) exculpate herself ?

The course of the film takes us to Hawthorne, where Woody grew up, and where there were at least two women in his life. One, sympathetically and with great naturalness brought off by Angela McEwan, is Peg, whose humanity is evident, and says that Woody knew that she 'would not let him touch all the bases' - by implication, the highly judgemental Kate, his wife (Squibb with great ease makes us dislike her), would. (There is a grim scene in the Lutheran graveyard (Kate is nominally a Catholic), where she calls a dead member of Woody's family a whore for having had sex from the age of fifteen.)

It is here that, bit by bit, we can piece together the influences that have worked on Woody, such as the death of a brother with whom he shared a room, being shot down in Korea when being transferred, and the age at which he and two other men from the town were sent to war, and how he returned from it. The laughter at Woody's expense seemed to have died down by this stage (and, in this respect, the film has the pattern of Philomena (2013)), but where it laid things on a little too thickly was with the vacant relatives, who, for example, are querying the journey-time from Billings, Montana, and even infect David with it, who asks Ross how he travelled over.

At Mount Rushmore (another place that Woody did not wish to see), in what he has to say about the monument not looking finished (which. with his critique, it did not), we are given the insight that how he relates to the world does not mean that he is ignorant and foolish, and, in his way, he just as much speaks the truth as he sees it as Kate does. (Indeed, we hear him dub other drivers idiots, and tell a mechanic that he is using the wrong wrench.)

I think that the script suitably covers objections to some of the things that happen for the purposes of the plot and which get us on the road, and that it works well enough as an exploration of the goals that we set, or expectations that we all have, without needing Woody's background and circumstances - the things that we think that we must have, when really something else (or lesser) might do.

In emotional terms, rather than those symbolic of setting out on a quest (and feeling that compulsion), the film resolves itself - and rights some wrongs - right at the end (even if we do not quite know how it can be done, and maybe it is a bit too pat). What is clear is that David has also been in need of healing from the childhood that he had where he is likened to a girl or a prince, and called beautiful - to assert himself, not least as he does, albeit with a fist, with Woody's former business partner Ed Pegram, and to believe in his worth.

The quest itself turned out to have to be completed, even if it was just to be told that it had not garnered anything except an ironic cap, but probably for other reasons by then. As for having to live with the disparaging Kate, nothing had changed that, and her threats of putting Woody in a home, and she had only defended him out of self-interest, both not to have relatives clamour for money, and to have him as her own victim - except that David certainly has more respect for his father, and in that there is hope...


As for the review on IMDb (by Steven Leibson) that calls this a hilarious comedy, well...

However, I quite liked Mark Kermode's review in The Guardian, so here it is (or gu.com/p/3yvcg/tf, if you wish to share).


There is now a little follow-up piece here...


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More Haneke than Buñuel ?

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5 December

Jeune et Jolie (2013) was screened at The Little Theatre as part of Bath Film Festival 2013


How many reviews of Jeune et Jolie (2013) am I going to have to read where its uninspired writer references the completely irrelevant Belle de Jour (1967), just because - whatever the fit - it is the only film that, in each case, he or she can think of where a woman works as a prostitute ?

* Tim Robey* in The Telegraph

* Ian Freer in Empire

* James Mottram in Total Film

* Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times

* Andrew Nickolds at TAKE ONE

And so on...


Have they never seen Natalie (2003) or even Sleeping Beauty (2011), which have far more in common for how the topos is treated ? What, in fact, does a married woman with sadomasochistic fantasies have to do with a seventeen-year-old, who has just uncomfortably lost her virginity ?

Sooner that, though, than being smugly dismissive (Mark Kermode in The Observer) or claiming that Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) is indisputably better (Brian Viner, Mail Online : Viner says that Jeune et Jolie 'is in no way a match for' the other film, but they are very different films, no more capable of being compared than Superman and Bambi just because both (of J&J and Blue) feature sex.


Reviewers tediously also want a motivation for what Isabelle does. As i** carps :

Ozon's motives in making this film are as inscrutable as those of his teenage heroine Isabelle (Marine Vacth) [...] who, for reasons Ozon doesn't even begin to make clear, decided to embark on a part-time career as a teenage prostitute

They see (as the quotation shows) the fact that no motivation is stated is a flaw, which it might be in a world of perfect rationality, but that is not our world. So, Nigel Floyd (for Film4) reports :

“I didn't really try and understand psychologically who [Isabelle] was," Vacth has said. "I wasn't interested in knowing exactly. And anyway I couldn't, because François didn't tell me anything about her psychology.” The second half of this statement is more revealing than the first. Given that their creative collaboration was so one-sided, it's not surprising that the film suffers from an atmosphere of uncontrolled, unrevealing salaciousness.


Has Floyd even seen the film, if he thinks it salacious, one might wonder.

All this business about motivation is ultimately a dead end, a red herring, and would have one interrogate Amour (2012), when Michael Haneke is on record here, and in relation to other films, that it is up to us how we view them, and there is no one way.

What more do we want, and why, than what the films tells us : that Isabelle's friend Claire and she were approached in the street (Claire previously alludes to this encounter in talking to Isabelle), and the man said his number. Do we need spelt out what impulse led Isabelle to follow up a man interested in her ? Obviously, most girls of her age would do nothing with it, but why should she not register the number and act on it ?


In fact, an answer to why she did is utterly boring, when the fact is that she did, and we see her approaching room 6598 where not her first client awaits her, but Georges, with nothing of what preceded. There is something seriously wrong with the idea of cinema-going if that does not suffice, and critics are unhappy not to be told more.


End-notes

* At least Robey goes on to make this (necessary) observation : 'The film makes more sense if you see it as a companion piece to Ozon’s last one, In the House, which had a 16-year-old male schemer insinuating himself into a series of power plays'.

** In the edition on 29 November 2013.


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The great hip hop film

This is a Festival review of The Great Hip-Hop Hoax (2013)

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3 December

This is a Festival review of The Great Hip-Hop Hoax (2013)

It is my approach, with films, to know as little as possible about them as is consistent with being able to make a choice whether to see them.

This one sounded as though it might share common ground with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) - to which one member of the audience indirectly alluded in the Q&A with director Jeanie Finlay, by asking whether Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain are actually any good at hip hop - but it is far more interesting : in anything that has someone pretending to be something so long that it becomes questionable whether there is a way back, and, when there is a slide into the sort of existence that kept John Cooper Clarke out of circulation and composition so long, one is facing greater concerns than what The Pistols were in it for.

Mocked by A&R people when they travel down for 13 hours on the bus from Arbroath to London, because they are Scottish, but trying to get recognized for their skills in hip hop*, Boyd and Bain are only spurred on to make themselves be what is necessary to be taken seriously, and immerse themselves in sounding, in words and accent, as if they are from San Jacinto, California (under the name Silibil N' Brains). An initial gig gets them spotted by Chris Rock, who wishes to sign them and, as they need a manager first, sends them to Jonathan Shalit - who gets them a deal with Sony instead. Not, though, the end of their problems but, just before that deal, where they all begin...

Bringing the expectant original journey and disappointed return to life, where at least one of the young men is so hurt that he says that he did not speak all the way, Finlay uses shots of passing scenery to amplify the sense of what they had invested and how cheated and abused they felt. In between, waiting for and before the panel, we have the first use of John Burgerman's colourful and quirky animation, again with Boyd and Bain's comments in voiceover, and its character fits well the tone of the film. A third strand of material, other than recent interviews with Bain and Boyd, and withtheir friends, family and colleagues, is what was recorded on home video made at the time, along with gig and MTV footage and stills, all put together creatively and with flair.

As hinted already, the real focus of the film turns out to be what becomes of the relationship between the two men (although it is now seemingly healed, after they separately contributed to the film, on its being shown on the festival circuit) - it turns out delaying giving the go-ahead for the release of their first single, because Bain is not happy with it and wants to re-record it, means that, because Sony then enters a merger, it never happens, and Boyd essentially tires of waiting around, rather than getting on with life with the woman whom he had recently married.


It is clear from what Finlay says that, with the men giving or publishing accounts of what happened that differ from each other (or from verifiable fact, such as, as Finlay reported, contrary to one's claims to have crashed the BRIT awards and drunk with the stars), she had a difficult time trying to piece together a version of events for the film. She has a telling quotation from Boyd :

Lying is like a drug. Eventually you get carried away, and that’s where you’re out of control. Telling the first lie’s a bit like smoking weed, but after a while you need a stronger hit.


I also confess to having had trouble, which may be personal to me**, remembering which of Boyd and Bain I was seeing in the later interview footage, and in consistently relating that identification to the animation / period material - although, when they made it their business to behave madcap and provocatively to avoid serious questioning, they could act interchangeably (but, though no one realized why, even included the names of fellow hoaxsters Milli Vanilli in a lyric). For real deliberate grossness, for example, we see one openly urinating in public, whilst the other receives the urine on his palms and wipes it on his face ! At such times, it seemed to matter little which of them was playing which part.

This is a thoughtful and interesting piece of film-making, because, behind the antics, the two were so set on staying in character that they even kept in it with the sister of one of them, with whom they stayed when first in London, and also freaked out Boyd's bride not a little. The pressures that they put themselves under by living a lie may not be those weighing on a Raskolnikov, but, past the first steps, they had much to lose, if found out. Remarkably, Rock and Shalit are in the film, but, Finlay told me, the latter only agreed to be interviewed after three years, and she said that Sony had completely distanced themselves.

In the Q&A, someone tenaciously questioned why what he thought the standard of a t.v. documentary (indeed, the film commissioned by the BBC's Storyville series) was being called 'a film'.

Strangest question tonight - "you keep referring to your film as a "film", is that how you see it?" Me: "errrr, yes, it's a film!"
— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) December 3, 2013

I asked about Shalit's response to learning of the deception, describing it as 'philosophical, even amused', and wondering why he had not been more bitter - not appreciating that, as we were told, he was booed in the screening at Edinburgh Film Festival for denigrating Boyd and Bain's background as 'nothing'. It seems that Finlay believes that what Shalit chooses to express as what he thinks of it all now may be a convenient representation of his position...

Having seen Nick Fraser in interview at Aldeburgh Documentary Festival, I asked Finlay whether, as editor, he persuaded her to do or not do anything (having seen something of him in action). She said that he is a formidable figure, and explained that he had commissioned the film, but she had been working with others on the staff.

That said, he had had her pitch the project to him in the BBC canteen, with all sorts of famous faces around, and had banged the table, saying, for example, Make it better ! However, as the film and Finlay testify, he was duly satisfied that it would make a good documentary, which it does.


End-notes

* Apparently, the phrase rapping Proclaimers was derisively used.

** Since it is in the nature of a documentary only to give you the name in a caption on the first occasion (whereas a feature film will typically drop the name in where you cannot miss it and fail to make the association), and here we had two names for Bain.


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Turkish delight II

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3 December (completed 7 December)

This is the second part of a review of Box of Delights, a collection of short animated films, as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival


The first part of this review is here (the first five films out of nine)



Inukshuk (2008)

It should not be imagined that curating a programme such as this is any more straightforward than deciding which poems should go in a collection, and in which order, or programming a concert, but I suspect that this film was not best placed here, after the vibrancy of Nicolas et Guillemette (the last film reviewed here). Kimberley Ballard's account of it makes it sound as though it should, nevertheless, have made an impact, but the impact on an adult watching Box of Delights is almost bound to be different from that of a youngster :

On an enchanted block of ice in the Polar region, an Inuk man and a naughty polar bear watch their world transform as they peer into the dark sea. One of the greatest shorts of recent years, Camille-Elvis Thery conjures his landscape in frost-tinged black and white, and blankets the sublime tale in a string of dreamlike images.


Reading this again afterwards, and at a distance, I have the feeling that I should have been amazed by Inukshuk - one can ponder, with Wikipedia's help, on the meaning of the title (maybe the polar bear, or the whale, was the Inukshuk ?) - but I know that I was not, partly because it did not bear comparison with the world created by the previous film. Partly, though, because of the sketchy nature of the animation, where the sun is just a big circle with lines around the edge, and the bear laughing at the man's stupidity just felt like Entre Deux Miettes. Even the surprise at the end of the true nature of the surface on which they were felt like too little, too late, though for some it might have been transformational.


Rabbit Rabbit (2006)

This is a short (two-minute), quick film of moving images following each other in a mirror, punctuated by three duels (the last with unexpected results, which made me think of bullet-time and The Matrix (1999)) - it is Rabbit Rabbit, because the starting-point for a series of replications and reflections is a stylized rabbit and its mirror-image, which, at times (and probably not just incidentally), resemble a Rorschach test.

Kimberley Ballard is spot on to say that 'its kaleidoscopic cast of rabbits will leave you reeling', which is because it is not just a matter of multiplication, but deft movement, too. A film that works on many layers, suggesting the human population explosion (somehow, rabbits are known for their fecundity), opposing forces, and a world beyond the superficial. Nearly halfway through, the polarity changes, and all is made new again in this charming work with its slurping soundtrack, a little like someone in slippers dragging his or her heels...


Lifeline (2009)

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.


These words by William Blake, which were only published posthumously, do not sum up this film of morphing shapes and creatures, but they are the sort of inspiration for the daughter whom we are shown to try to share a perspective with her father : the title is clearly not meant to be overlooked, with its implication that this is not a casual slideshow of the natural world, but a crucial attempt.

The father does not look as though he can take in beauty, and he appears deeply depressed (or at least to have cares, burdens and woes). In Samuel Beckettt's play Endgame, there is a mention of someone who can only see ashes, and these lines*, too, could have been written for the grey man whom we see. The lively, flowing worlds of  cosmic colours that she brings before him seem like encapsulations of creation in all its dimensions, resembling icons, mandalas and illuminated manuscripts all at once. Somehow, we feel that the father cannot fail to respond**.


Flatworld (1997)

One cannot help being reminded a little of Pratchett's Discworld by the title, though Flatland is a hundred years its senior, but none of this helps as an approach to this piece.

In a film of 28 minutes' duration, Daniel Greaves (who directed Rabbit Rabbit - please see above) has produced something as long as the first five in Box of Delights put together, so it necessarily has a different dynamic and build from the other items screened. It allows us not to understand everything all at once, such as what is being done to the road to repair it, and Greaves wisely does not stick so rigidly to things being two-dimensional that everything is flat.

What he does neatly predict, though, is the flat-screen t.v., which I was getting confused with the fish-tank (because both are hanging on the wall). Just when I was getting excited about the idea that a fish-tank could double as a t.v., that is what Greaves gives me, in a world where a remote-control can change reality :

In the same year as this film, director Michael Haneke talks about the moment at Cannes when the audience applauded when one of the two youthful torturers had been killed - until the other picks up such a device and rewinds what seemed to be normal, live action to remedy the mistake that led to the death of his accomplice. Maybe just coincidence ?

In any case, when the man, his cat and his fish can all enter a colourful world in three dimensions***, courtesy of the t.v. channels, suddenly their world is thrown into relief, the real adventure (rather than the rivalry between the pets) in under way, begins, and the energy is infectious. The other work had drive, and it informs this one, with clever twists and turns, as the man battles to clear his name when mistaken for a burglar, with more than the bag of money at stake. Very entertaining and imaginative !


End-notes

* 'I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look ! There ! All that rising corn ! And there ! Look ! The sails of the herring fleet ! All that loveliness ! (Pause.) He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause.) He alone had been spared.'

** Unless this should be an elaborate metaphor for the supposed wonders of ECT.

*** The less literal suggestion may be that the two-dimensional world imprisons life in a somewhat uninspiring way, because there is not the will and desire to break out of it into one of possibility, potential and freedom. Hints of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) ?


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

Life after war : Sixteen (2013) at Bath Film Festival

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 December

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) [and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival]

95 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 15

A rating and review of Sixteen (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Wrongly, Sixteen (2013)* felt like it might be just too many things jostling for screen-time, which usefully put one edge – as to whether the enterprise would succeed – in the way that Jumah (Roger Nsengiyumva) must feel, and which John Bowen’s effective score accentuates (more on that later), for we have :

* A love story

* A child soldier from Congo (who, as with many who have been in conflicts, probably has something like post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD))

* The love between a mother and her adoptive son

* Petty crime that has got out of hand

* Reaching a time (the sixteen of the title) when the future has to be considered

* Fighting one’s own battles


I swear that these do all fit together, and the unifying force is that soundtrack, which – as I put it in the Q&A – moves from disturbingly menacing to uncertain to sensual, when Jumah is asked to give his girlfriend Chloe (Rosie Day) a haircut, and back again, and which has an otherworldly quality to it : writer / director Rob Brown, who has worked with Bowen before, said that what he was after with scoring the edit was understood by Bowen, but that a sound such as that of Brian Eno and others had been mentioned. (I also heard Peter Gabriel's sort of open chords.)

In my opinion, the score tautened one’s awareness of the past that Jumah brings with him, and fed a sense of how he must be feeling into what we saw – someone being attacked might have one resonance (in, say, a film like Witness (1985)), but here we were aware (from sources such as War Witch (2012)) of the brutalizing world in which he had been forced to live. Except with very low-frequency growling, it did not mask its presence, and it partly distanced us from the early shock of some events, just as Jumah might have been in situation but not wholly present in them.

This sort of character was what Brown said that he had been aiming at, and which had drawn him in other film projects, effectively someone who had certain experiences and for whom living is difficult. As a foil to him, Day’s portrayal of Chloe was perfect – one sensed that, beneath her confidence, she did, as she told Jumah, want to be helped to feel positive about herself, and that she, if she can be helped in return, has resources of trust and validation that can help him heal.

Above these two, Rachael Stirling, as Jumah’s mum Laura, acted exceptionally well how she sought to bear with him, from the moment when she comes into his bedroom and Chloe and he are resting in each other’s arms to wanting to hold him back, and not knowing what he might do : that moment when he decides who he is and what he wants feels so unstable, and we cut away to her with no certainty what might happen.

The atmosphere of the film, with this excellent score, is electric, and one even feels that, as with War Witch’s title-character Komona, there may be some sixth sense in play for Jumah to be in the right place several times. This is not an easy ride much of the time, but that tactile quality of the hair, and all the feeling that comes from the other great film with that theme, Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990), plus the tenderness between Chloe and Jumah, soften it sufficiently.


End-notes

* There are two films this year with that title, so IMDb designates this Sixteen (I) (2013).


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

Turkish delight I

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 December

This is the first part of a review of Box of Delights, a collection of short animated films, as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival


Box of Delights (programme 2), though it takes its title from him, really has nothing to do with John Masefield, and the festival’s film note says :

Although chosen for children, these films appeal to all ages as they summon an assortment of charming characters whilst exploring themes of identity, culture and friendship*.


It is well known from as far back as Greek tragedy, and the ways in which use of the chorus can be dramatic irony, through Chaucer’s ambiguous pilgrims and the punning of Shakespeare that things can operate on more than one level, and the best of these short films (though the longest, at 28 minutes, is much longer than the shortest, which is 2 minutes) do that.


Office Noise (2009)

For younger members of the audience, this film may just have operated (superficially) on the level of a clumsily large animal (elephant), where, as with Tom and Jerry, the hurts are momentary and creatures passing through walls make a hole their shape : in fact, we have a fall, and some bandages, but very little notion of severe or lasting damage. (I have never been in a huge open-plan office with free-standing padded dividers, but we all think that we have from such sources as The Matrix (1999), or even After Hours (1985) – conveniently, here, the place is deserted.)

The dynamic of the film, though, is a little tenuous, with irritating colleague (with an ingressive trunk) becoming regret at irritating colleague being injured, but coming back just as irritating – a lot of effort not to say very much, except as (somewhat dark) entertainment. (Somewhat oddly, an 'Acting Consultant' is credited at the end.)


Between Two Crumbs (2005)

This English title may not be a brilliantly idiomatic translation of Entre Deux Miettes. In any case, Sylvain Ollier, in the entry on Vimeo, says ‘This is my student animated short film, made in 2005 at the Emile Cohl School (France)’.

As Kimberley Ballard’s write-up says, the film ‘seamlessly mixes live action with animation’ in this five-minute short. As to what comfort adults with an experience of bullying can take from it, except that there is always a nemesis in someone bigger than the bully, I do not know, but the embodiment of the minute creatures at its heart is rather wonderful.


What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks (2009)

The quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet may be lost on some of the audience, although famous, but the film puns on the idea of light breaking into pieces, no doubt partly influenced by the wave / particle duality by means of which science seeks to explain its properties.

Sarah Wickens, on the page for the film at Laughing Squid, is said to have ‘created the beautiful stop-motion short film titled What Light (Through Yonder Window Breaks) [Note the added parenthesis] for her 2009 Masters in Animation graduation project at the Royal College of Art in London.

It is a complete break (no pun intended !) with what went before, because the credits simply acknowledge the starring (no pun intended !) role played by The Sun. What that means is amplified by this quotation on the web-site :

I like to experiment with combining techniques and finding new ways to make animation; in my graduation film I use windows and stencils to create animation from sunlight as it travels around my bedroom.


The film speaks for itself (available via the link above), but just the row of five photographs with the sea in black and white and a jetty centrally reaching out into it show an artistic mind occupies this space. What is created may very well fit in with Mercutio’s equally famous (interrupted) speech in the play about Queen Mab, for example :

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep


Akbar’s Cheetah (1999)

This film, according to Kimberley Ballard’s description, is one that comes from an ecopolitical agenda, and I wonder whether, in consequence, its story-line about the Emperor Akbar (1542 – 1605) verges on a racist account. For the emperor’s Wikipedia entry suggests that he understood cheetahs rather better, if he was, indeed, an animal trainer and hunted with and even trained cheetahs, whereas the animation has him acceding to be a prisoner in his (modest) palace to let such creatures rule the roost.

Apart from suggestions of breasts and genitals early on, the film is quite a stylized and relaxed one for this audience, even if the figures, particularly the baby, have a lardy quality. However, it drifted through its course relatively predictably, and just gave the impression that Akbar was rather naive and out of touch, whereas British history of around this era (maybe before – probably the reign of one of the Henrys) shows that control and importation of animals even at this stage was so advanced that the Tower of London’s White Tower was a royal zoo, which is not really consistent with this painted fable.


Nicolas and Guillemette (2008)

Just as What Light, not least as the work of an artist, seemed poles apart from the first two shorts, so this animation is engaging, and charmingly inventive, built, as it seemed to me***, around or even because of the lovely berceuse that we first hear via the musical-box (actually, quite a sophisticated one, with a tape of hinged, punched cards, such as a pianola uses).

The music, composed by Mami Chan and Norman Bambi, is utterly of a piece with the visuals, and they are credited, along with director Virginie Taravel, with the singing voices that we hear. As with Wickens’ film, no description can really do justice to this piece, although Kimberley Ballard rightly talks of ‘childlike glee’, and ‘a whirl of vibrant colours’, and the closing apotheosis is a very pleasant surprise, and, by transcending circumstance, a fitting close.



Continued here (with the remaining four films)


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

Young and attractive*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 December

This is a review of Jeune et Jolie (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 17

A rating and review of Jeune et Jolie (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

Jeune et Jolie (2013) soon reviewed on the blog - a delight seeing Charlotte Rampling, and strong work from Marine Vacth / Géraldine Pailhas
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2013

After the location of the opening section, François Ozon’s film is set in Paris, but more by implication than by depiction (except for showing a fascinating bridge where it seems to be the fashion to leave a padlock on the side mesh) in a film that haunts interiors. For a film that seems to centre on the sexual act, it is impressively unsexy, unlike its distinctively arousing contemporary from Abdellatif Keciche, Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), and it really hinges on the seasons, starting with the summer, when Isabelle (Marine Vacth) turns 17.

In her head at least (though this is true of the pupils in both Keciche’s film and – another vehicle for Adèle Exarchopoulos – Pieces of Me (2012)), this is high time to lose one’s virginity, which is shown typical gritting-one’s-teeth style as if it is just something that has to be done**. Impossibly, since her German lover (no virgin) is with her and escorts her home, she looks at where it happened as if outside herself, so we know from this, and her lack of desire to see him, that the act has significance beyond our measure.

Keen though she is not to announce what she has done to her friend Claire, she does capitalize on it, and the attention that men give her. Comparisons have been made with classic Buñuel in Belle de Jour (1967), but Isabelle’s motivations – to the extent that we ever understand them – are nothing to do with sadomasochistic fantasy, nor (as in the rather dire Sleeping Beauty (2011), and despite what Isabelle pretends) with lack of funds as a student. If one is reminded of any recent film parallel, not least by how J&J ends, it is the excellent Natalie (2003), for doing something just because one can…

The film neatly sets up expectations that Isabelle’s brother Victor, who spies on her going topless on the beach and with whom she makes – and breaks – an agreement to tell him all about her lovers’ tryst, is going to remain important : what is, though, important is what her first sexual experience with another meant, for that moment of standing outside herself was almost reminiscent of the coping strategy of Samira as a victim of gang-rape in As if I am not There (2010).

This, I believe, rightly remains unclear. It has some bearing on what Isabelle did, but we are too little privy to her therapy sessions to know whether the psychological truth behind it all becomes clear to her. As a pithy description on IMDb says, this is a film in four seasons and four songs, the first of which we hear when she is reflecting on what happened on the beach. As befits songs (and it remains to be established whose words are set), they can exist outside the realm of the person with whom they are visually associated, just as a singer can tell a tale of jealousy without being a jealous person :

Without a teacher’s voice intervening, what is effective is a moment when different members of the class, Isabelle included, recite parts of a poem by Rimbaud, and then are shown, in their seats, interpreting it. Not only is one reminded of the school setting, and relatively impenetrable protagonist, of the previous film (In the House (2012)), but also of the provisionality of what we see and hear, whether in poetry, or in film.

The taboos that are broken share ground (though not content) with films of Haneke’s such as Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997) or The White Ribbon (2009), with both writer / directors showing that they have insights into the world of adolescence and the excessive liberties that it can lead to. The alliance between brother and sister to keep secrets, and that uneasy interest in each other’s sexuality, is the germ of what happens, the sort of rebellion that Haneke keeps coming back to.

The seasons denote attempts to come to terms with sex and relationships from the first sexual act to thinking oneself invited to perform lesbian acts, and, in between, a searching for identity, warmth, a place to be oneself that ranges from flirting with one’s stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot***) to trying to love a peer. In all of this, the threatened connection between mother and daughter holds firm, but there is the unsettling feeling that what one did / who one is perceived to be will break through.

Ozon’s film is seamlessly constructed, thoughtful, intense, and the performances that he has from Vacth and from Géraldine Pailhas as her mother Sylvie are highly impressive, with solid support from Pierrot, a little more able sometimes as Patrick, even if his way of expressing himself is pounced on to his ill by Sylvie, to see the wood for the trees. Ultimately, Ozon leaves us to ponder, whether or not as parents, what he has brought to us here.


Though there is also a follow-up piece here







End-notes

* The film gives as its English title Young and Beautiful, but any student of French will tell you that jolie does not mean 'beautiful' (which is belle). One of the posters for the rising star Peppy in The Artist (2011) is Young and Pretty, but Peppy does not suit a leading lady, and would fit the dog better.

** Rather implausibly, given what twentieth-century girls lives are like (plus she is described as a tomboy later on), she bleeds, as if her hymen had been intact.

*** A prolific film actor, best known to me from being a foil to KST in Sarah's Key (2010) - a film unfairly slighted by UK critics - and, in a different capacity, in I've Love You So Long (2008).


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