I’m not a trained poodle !

This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

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16 February

This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

It seemed inevitable that Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) would bear resemblances to Woody Allen’s 1997 film Deconstructing Harry, if not in terms of the nature of the soundtrack (the film’s title was also asked to serve as the name of the character’s debut solo album, or vice versa¹) : however, unlike Harry Block (writer’s block ?), Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) seems to come to a rather slight realization of his nature, and the film prefers to take comfort in the ploy of using one version of the film’s ending to open it, and then lead us back unawares (on which, more below), as if it is the greatest of ploys.

Either that or it is a Sisyphean world-view, which endorses both Beckettt’s choice of Giambattista Vico as a precursor of James Joyce and his then ‘Work in Progress’ (which became Finnegans Wake) and Stephen’s assertion, in Dimensions (2011):

Now, I believe that every single possible combination of events has happened already, is happening right now, and will happen again in the future

An unexpected attack (which we are made to wait to learn is for insulting someone’s wife) takes us right back to George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), sounding off down the phone to his daughter’s teacher, and then getting a sock in the jaw from her husband in Martini’s Bar, and there are instances where, as Bailey’s do, Davis’ meanderings go from bad to worse – just when it could not be conceived that they can : perhaps this is where the Joycean notion fits in, with Davis having his own (extended) Bloomsday (both are Jewish ?), since this film’s principal cat is called Ulysses ?

Likewise, the upsets that befall Allen’s Block (also Jewish) on his journey, and which – to a very appropriate track – even have him being led down into Hell. Of course, there will almost always be parallels, since no work, even if it aims at originality, exists in a cultural vacuum and can easily claim uniqueness. Whereas, to provide a background to the cat’s reappearance (and, perhaps, to dispel the whiff of the end of the same year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)), The Coen Brothers seem unable to resist invoking The Incredible Journey (1963) with its Disney animals travelling 200 miles across Canada, even if blows the idea that we are really in 1961…

In Inside, though, the cat (the wrong cat) has no choice about travelling, and we are also in the territory of On The Road (2012), its particular company of grotesques as travelling companions being a driver grunting monosyllables or John Goodman’s forthright, stick-wielding jazzer. The contrast with Davis is unmistakeable – Roland Turner is an established artist, and, as so many of the great jazzers were, can afford to be a monster, unimpressed by Davis’ three-chord tunes, and probably, for Davis, sufficient reason to strand him in the car when the driver gets pulled in².

The nomadic life of Davis even reminds of that of Frances Ha (2012), down to the fact that his Chicago is her Paris, his Mike her Sophie (she goes to Tokyo, rather than dying). As with Frances vaguely hoping to meet a friend in Paris (to substitute for Sophie ?), it simply does not bear thinking about why Davis does not post his LP to Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), in case it went astray : for, when he has got himself there with Grossman in Chicago, other than a foolish crack about ‘That’ll be five dollars’ when he hands over the record, Davis seems to have nothing prepared.

As Davis is ‘in the business’, one might think that he would not just have no notion that Grossman is likely to want to hear something or what that ought to be, rather than expecting him to be impressed by being handed yet another record (this is where we learn its title). This half-hearted Davis is the same person makes bold claims to his sister about understanding the music industry when she shows him some embarrassing early recording that he wants to disown.

One might as well turn up for an audition or screen-test without having thought through some of the things that one might be asked to do (as in the embarrassing audition scene in Staub auf unseren Herzen (2012)) – Davis sings well enough³, but he has chosen something that comes from (or sounds as though it does) the older tradition of folk song. Given that he did even know what he was going to perform until he started, he has scarcely calculated his opening gambit, by knowing his audience, in trying to get coverage or representation from Grossman.

In these respects, the meeting, though the song is pleasant enough, mirrors the trouble that Neo, in The Matrix (1999), has to go to reach The Architect, only to find that doing so was only an intermediate goal, and to be told that, after all, he is not The One : yet Davis seems to ingest fully what he is told, and it is only one of his own booby-traps that prevents him going back to sea. As a slice of life, do we believe that he then had a good gig and, despite being beaten up, things are on the up ? Maybe, maybe not, but do we care any more ?

For we have seen the rumpus that he caused at The Gorfeins’⁴ when, perhaps through grief at being reminded of his partner Mike Timlin’s death or perhaps at recalling his loss of a meal-ticket (since Grossman declares him not a frontman), he violently challenges Lillian Gorfein harmonizing ‘Fare Thee Well’ and petulantly objects to the idea of having been asked to give a song at all – not as if he had not (thought they do not know it) lost their cat, and, as it turns out, brought them someone else’s.

In the scene immediately after her screaming ‘Where’s its scrotum ?’, he is seen, as if he does not have wits to do anything else with it, getting into the car bound for Chicago with it – when he first lost Ulysses, he did not have any notion of what to do (with the problem that he had created, allegedly humorously) other than take it across town to Jim and Jean’s⁵. Definitely plot driving character, for, however much fun it is to see him with the cat and people’s responses to that situation, he did not seek far for solutions, let alone where the time goes (unless he rose very late) between leaving The Gorfeins’, leaving the cat at Jim and Jean’s (as if he can, just because he has the need), seeing his agent Mel, and arriving to be confronted with Jean’s hostility.

Reading between the lines of her anger, and her affront at his saying that ‘It takes two to tango’, Davis seems to have forced himself upon her (maybe worse), which later, when she (Carey Mulligan) is on stage with Jim (Justin Timberlake) at The Gaslight Café, he brags about : no other explanation seems likely to explain what she says about Davis.

In Frances Ha, she smacks of something like borderline personality disorder (which therapy can help, and so make the ending less implausible), whereas, with Davis, it could be something in the nature of narcissistic personality disorder, which may be less amenable to change.

At any rate, Davis is not very likeable, he seems to have the same vividly dark beard without ever needing to groom it, and expects the world to revolve around him (he has paid his back dues, but seems to think that, having settled the debt, he can just ask for it back), to the extent that he is always after favours, and blames his sister for his lack of thought when she throws out his box of things when he tells her to.

There are nice touches with him thinking that he has found the cat again, with learning later why Jean is angry with him, and with Pappi claiming that Jean slept with him to get Davis a slot, but they are not enough to support the piece, or its structure. And does even this have significance ? : as against at the beginning (where it finishes with 'Hang me, oh hang me' (Trad., arr. Isaac & Burnett), at the end of the film, Davis concludes his set with a further song, ‘Fare Thee Well’ (Trad., arr. Mumford, Isaac & Burnett), the song that he recorded with his former musical partner Timlin. Also, unlike the opening version of the attack, which ends with him on the floor, he is shown staggering to the top of the alleyway after he has been attacked, and seeing the man get into a cab. He mutters to himself – is it in some recognition that, at some level, he deserved what happened for his coarse heckling of the man’s wife ?

On balance, for depth, balance and musicality, another film about a musician who has a lack of empathy and warmth is far more compelling than this one, Daniel Auteuil in Un Cœur en Hiver (1992), and without the gimmicks or the feeling of being derivative.


Post-script

An interestingly negative review, somehow classified by www.rottentomatoes.com as 'fresh' when it is 'rotten' to the core (not that tomatoes have cores), is by Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman. Mark Kermode's review, in The Observer, also has criticisms to level, but maybe giving 3* counts as being positive...


End-notes

¹ Calling a film Inside Llewyn Davis offers the obvious prospect of getting under the skin of a man with a made-up Christian name (as far as one can tell), but, when one realizes that it is the exercise in PR that is an album-title, maybe one lets go a little of such expectations…

² As if he would be, without resolving the problem that had led to his arrest of the vehicle being inappropriately stopped…
³ Unlike some of the other numbers, where the disjunction between the full-stereo studio sound and the visible acoustic makes one aware of the artificiality, this sounded to be miked / recorded fairly naturally. That said, the songs are, apart from providing the background to the realized image from the poster of a guy loping around with a cat, really the best thing about the film.

⁴ Who seem enlightened in their willingness to entertain not only contact with him a matter of days later – but they are supposed to be intellectuals, who do not bear grudges – but also to put him up again.

Then again, at The Gaslight, Pappi is not an intellectual, but allows back as a performer a man whom he had thrown out the night before.
⁵ He keeps trotting out, as if this both explains and excuses his behaviour, that it is not his cat, it is The Gorfeins' cat.


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Britten Sinfonia Voices : life, song and wine

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14 February

A concert given by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 11 February


This concert comprised three compositions by baritone Roderick Williams (two of which had received their World premiere at the Sinfonia’s concert in Norwich the previous week), four-part songs by Schubert and Schumann, and a Lied by the latter.

It started with Williams’ Red Herring Blues for clarinet and piano (from 1994), which opened with a jaunty solo from the former, played by Joy Farrall. Tom Poster then joined in, but with similar material that yet sounded different on a different instrument. As it developed, there were some violent gestures from the piano, reminiscent of moments in Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus when some powerful chords are struck, and even of that composer’s birdsong. A short, meditative piece, it ended with what seemed like a quotation from the first bars of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Next, the four members of Britten Sinfonia Voices (Susan Gilmour Bailey, Alexandra Gibson, Nicholas Mulroy, and Eamonn Dougan) gave two multipart Lieder of Schubert, Der Tanz (D. 826) from 1825, and then the earlier (1816) An die Sonne (D. 439), the second much longer than the first, which gave a taste of the operatic quality of these voices, which happily reached right to the back of the auditorium, and with very clear German diction. An die Sonne allowed us to hear what good voices they are individually, before blending them again so well.

Whereas the other Lied contrasted the despondency and infirmity of age with the energy and dancing of youth, this writer, Johann Peter, turns to weightier things : the poet’s persona enjoying creation in the immediate moment, even praising it, but suddenly realizes the truth of his mortality along with it. The line-ending of the final stanza, Staub (dust, in the phrase ‘Return to dust !’) is followed by a somewhat creepy tone from Mulroy’s tenor, but, as the stanza is reprised, resolving into a happier conception (via the word Laub, meaning ‘foliage’).

The first of Williams’ two commissions by the Sinfonia and Wigmore Hall was The last house on the river, for all forces, and had an eerie quality to its opening, and hints of Boulez’ writing for piano, before we heard from the clarinet in its chalumeau register. The work went round in cycles of Williams responded to by the singers in close-harmony style, and with regular instrumental intermissons.

Karen Hayes’ highly poetic text (she is the librettist for both works) is deftly set by Williams, and the very English sound of the group of four anchored this very specific evocation of time and place, with the intensity of the what is perceived picked out by the almost improvisatory feel of the clarinet writing. An enthusiastic round of applause met this new work, and the sensation in West Road Concert Hall was that there was appreciation for a well-conceived and performed programme of music by and sung by Williams and his colleagues.

A solo Schumann Lied followed, Auf einer Burg (from Liederkreis, Op. 39, setting Joseph von Eichendorff), where Williams’ mastery of his vocal resources, and of telling a story with his intonation and phrasing, were to the fore. As with the earlier Lieder, where there was a movement from a joyous state to – or to contemplating – a state of decline, this Lied leads us up, through all the surrounding circumstance, to a wedding, but the final image is that the beautiful bride (die schöne Braut) is crying.

Staying with Schumann, Britten Sinfonia Voices brought us Mondnacht, from 1840, which had a feeling of floating, of calm, with a change of mood as it ended just with piano. Then Schubert again, Schicksalsenker (D. 763) from eighteen years earlier, which began with tenor voice, and gave the feeling of being taken back in time, partly in the restraint with which the quartet sang, and partly in the repetition of the word from the title (Fate’s Anchor). The link is that there is a feeling of transcendence, of the soul stretching wide its wings (Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus), and of a world where every pain has escaped far away (Fern entfoh’n ist jeder Schmerz).

The feeling of Gemütlichkeit in the Trinklied (D. 183) from 1815 set the mood for this final group of works, with even a table and drinks of some sort as the Stammtisch of the Voices, as they gave us this drinking song, praising friendship and wine, and with variants of the sentiment of Ohne Freunde, ohne Wein, / ich nicht im Leben sein (‘Without friends, without wine, I should not like to be alive’) as the closing couplet to each verse.

Next, the second Williams’ commission In His Cups (again setting Karen Hayes), so one could see why it was keeping company with this Schubert genre. For this piece, Joy Farrall played off stage in a piece that evoked a Britten-like sort of Englishness, of a village pub, and of secular and church life in small communities in an earlier decade, and with outbursts from the piano. The diction and syntax of Hayes’ poetry takes one beyond John Clare and ‘The Deserted Village’ even to Shakespeare : But in his cups he’d thought her beautiful could evoke the topers in Twelfth Night, and Williams had carefully matched his setting to a pastoral of yesteryear, such as might parallel an inland Peter Grimes.

The final two short songs, both by Schubert (Lebenslust(D. 609) from 1818, and another Trinklied (D. 75) from 1813), ended the recital, and both stir up the notions of friendship. In the first, we have allein sein ist öde, wer kann sich da freu’n (‘To be alone is bleak, who could enjoy being there ?’), and the delivery was both crisp and emotional. The second had a clarinet line added to the scoring for tenor, chorus and piano, so it was a rousing close to the proceedings, with even a Schiller-like invocation of the spirit of brotherhood in Laßt uns all Brüder sein ! (‘Let us all be brothers !’) – perhaps the correct context of the ‘Ode to Joy’ is the pub ?!

A recital that delivered many flavours and juxtapositions, all of which seemed to enrich each other.


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

Ain't misbehavin'

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

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12 February

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

Just hearing the dialogue of the trailer, it had been clear that this film was a mess, and not a very appealing one. Still, though one chose not to face it in the case of Polanski’s Carnage (2011), some tasks cannot be ducked.

Quite apart from the fact that this film is not very cinematic in nature, sometimes it is just inadequately or even poorly shot – opening shots of landscape to set the scene do not, of course, have to be vibrantly beautiful, but these were mediocre, whereas a different unit, later in the film, produced some very nice work in and around the lake, and another ambiently showed when Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch) is met by from the coach by his father, Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper).

Inside the house, another sequence of Barbara (Julia Roberts) lying, rising, going out through the screen-door, and birds flying was all nicely filmed. Compare that with the distracting variable focus around the infamous lunch table, and no doubt some of the time the back of the chair was sharp so that Violet (Meryl Streep) was in soft focus, but other times her wrinkles were crisp, and there seemed no rhyme or reason as to what the camera was most on from one shot to the next. In this respect, this must take some beating as an entirely arbitrary approach that acts against concentrating on the swordplay.

It may not be from a very pretty play, but, although it does not need to please the eye, why does August : Osage County offend it so much ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2014

Some of the lighting and composition of shots was not much better. No, not every shot need be composed so that it gives one an aesthetic thrill, but the sequence after the three sisters come out of the conservatory, and Violet tells her tale about the boots, is clunkiness itself, worse than many a holiday snap – if you have a visual medium, you cannot just offend the eye to feed the ear with dialogue and a faltering speech, as you might on the stage.

Tracy Letts is credited with the screenplay from her own stage-work, but, in the translation, she has in no way freed it just because there are cars (overtaking cars, even), a gathering at the Baptist church, and a few other moments outdoors. Some might say that the paucity of life outside the restless confines of the house throws one back on its claustrophobic quality and intensifies it, but, equally, it could have the effect of stressing the stage-bound nature of the writing, conception and direction.

Streep and Roberts are both nominated for awards, which seems to send the message that people who shout, say ‘fuck’ a lot, and declare that they are in charge are the best at acting. As to whether the repetitive lines given to Roberts, urging Streep ‘to eat the fish, bitch’, represent the heights of dramatic inspiration or its nadir may divide opinion, but it all seems to be about to set off the fuse off another lunch scene when, starting with Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), three plates of fish are dashed to the ground :

Which is the essential message, If you smash your food on the floor, I’m damned if I’m not going to do the same, more loudly and messily, if possible. Against all this rebellion, the best speech from Aiken was when he tells his wife, Violet’s sister, that they will not make it to their thirty-ninth anniversary unless she changes. Which begs, of course, the question how he ever made it to the thirty-eighth, and Violet’s husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) survived as long, because, at the rate at which emotional and relational ammunition is being fired off in the compass of the film, even the grass that is supposed to get Aiken through would have worn thin.

The plot tries to be like an Ibsen play, with secrets from the distant past back to haunt, let alone like Chekhov (Violet being in the position of Firs in The Cherry Orchard ?), and all this ‘truth-telling’ that Violet indulges in makes the stressful wedding reception in Melancholia (2011) seem like a walk in the park, except that one ultimately does not much care, because the film frankly does not, whether she is like it because of abusing psychiatric medication, because of any actual psychiatric condition and / or whether the abuse has made it worse, and / or because it is just in her nature.

Yet what all that says is that it has all happened in the past, because we are told both that Beverly has disappeared before and Violet has been in rehabilitation, so nothing is different now, but we are expected to believe that severe home-truths, which could not be unsaid, are being told for the first time. Apart from a fleeting suggestion that Violet might be a Lear-like figure to Barbara’s suddenly tyrannical Regan / Goneril, which might have been interesting, some more actually powerful moments than the fireworks around the table are :

* When Ivy tells Barbara and Karen (Juliette Lewis) that they have both left her to it, but she is going to New York (Three Sisters meets Uncle Vanya ?)

* Earlier, Karen’s monologue, overpowering Barbara in the car, and into the house

* Charlie meeting Little Charlie (as mentioned above)

* Ivy joining Little Charlie to watch t.v.


In this world, Lewis for turning herself into Karen, and Nicholson for a very nuanced performance, go unnoticed in the shade of the nominations, but not on this blog…


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The way you play cards !

This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)

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11 February

This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)

* Contains spoilers * : Best seen cold – you might even avoid the poster, which seems to suggest that it is about a car auction – so quit reading now

A harsh generalization, but a film that needs you to know what it is about beforehand is a failure – this one starts off where it ends, but rodeo is not what it is about, but a man who keeps losing consciousness and ends up in hospital with news that he is quick to reject as a mistake. He is quick to reject it, but not slow to find out all about it – we had taken him for some sort of a hick, with his trailer, so it is a surprise to find him, when his eyes will co-operate, deep in research down at the library.

Ron Woodroff may not have been quite like this, but Matthew McConaughey creates a compelling figure (and, as a fleeting headline suggests, he may have had access to Woodroff’s diary), even to the extent of being stick-insect thin at the start of the film. Yes, he is HIV+, and he is even told that he has full-blown AIDS and just thirty days to live, but that is where Woodroff’s considerable will to win, which had him excitedly take bets and then scarper when he lost the bet, begins to kick in.

Dallas Buyers Club : A definite and strong whole, but with elements reminiscent of Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Philadelphia, Lorenzo's Oil...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 10, 2014

The hospital will be one of our ports of call, and the four most important people are there together right at the start : Woodroff, Dr Sevard (Denis O’Hare), his junior doctor Eve (Jennifer Garner – IMDb can be a bit short on recording names, which one has heard in films, but does not recall), and Rayon (Jared Leto)*. (Everyone else, relatively speaking, is on the periphery of the narration, including Dr Vass, Richard Barkley, and Woodroff’s mate on the police force (ditto IMDb).)

The question that the film poses is this one : does one see more of Woodroff’s character, and beyond the man who calls Rayon (and others) a faggot when trying to be friendly at the hospital, because we spend more time with him, or because he is fighting the rules and the warped system to save his own life (and that of anyone else who can afford to pay to keep him afloat), and that brings out the best in him ?

When we first see him, he is using the charged and close atmosphere of a pen at the rodeo to have sex with two girls, which – as we are judging creatures – gives a negative indication of his attitudes, not least when he runs off with the stake-money (in a very quick-thinking way). And then he keeps collapsing, ends up in Dallas Mercy (ironic, as it turns out), and is confronted with the level of his T-cells and other test-results.

The incidental meeting - because of being in neighbouring beds - with drag-queen Rayon (for which Leto deserves an Academy Award for best supporting actor), whom he does not understand or want to be touched by, but plays cards with (pitiably badly, according to Rayon), is his prompt to realize that they have common needs, and to learn about the trials of the drug AZT. The dynamic of the film is not so much to make us approve of Woodroff in himself, but as battling the unfair and self-interested regulation of the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) on behalf the members of the buyers club that Rayon and he set up :

We admire him because he takes the risk of seeking to do all that he can for them, because it also helps save his life, but it is individually how he softens towards Rayon, and how Eve finds herself more and more out of step with her superior (and valuing what Woodroff is doing), that the film has its emotional core. Seeing him, with much neck and no small amount of humour, pretending to Barkley to be a priest, and spinning a yarn about how much medication he needs to take, is priceless, and the film is unobtrusively laced through with all sorts of comic touches.

A very different film, although it has the same transformational account of Joe Miller coming to change his view of Andrew Beckett, is Philadelphia (1993), because of how the film ‘feels’. Despite having HIV and AIDS in common, the parallel feels even less close than with Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), based on Manuel Puig’s novel, because, as already suggested, Leto’s portrayal gives a potentially weighed-down film the right amount of buoyancy. Yet in no flimsy or tokenistic way, and with the crushing poignancy of the scene when he goes to see his father at the bank and moves him to pity, not least by how he refers to Woodroff, an origin that he casually passes off, in handing over cash to Woodroff, as having cashed in a policy.

A really affecting moment in Dallas Buyers Club when Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) and Rayon (Jared Leto) shake hands, then embrace.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 9, 2014

Where, despite opportunistic Woodroff showing that he will happily have sex with one of the members of the club because he knows that he cannot infect her, we might feel that we are heading for an anodyne romance is with Dr Eve, but the film seems aware of that being too pat, and the closest that we really get to corny smooth-talking is when he buys her dinner - and that is fun, since it is so knowing. Medically, she sees that what he is doing is better than the AZT regime, and is won over by it, even if the FDA, changing the rules, stymie things. The politics of that, if not the subject of a film or two already, soon will be…

This is not a feel-good film, although accepting Rayon and obliging a former drinking buddy to shakes his hand is one of those moments where one embraces the feeling behind what Woodroff has done, and cringes at the means - just as much as his stealing Dr Eve’s pad of prescriptions, and how he responds on being challenged by Barkley that the names on the prescriptions are all members of the Dallas Cowboys. Yet, far more profoundly than a film like Gravity (2013)**, it is about adversity, the human spirit, and the capacity to reach out to others.


End-notes

* Plus it was really interesting to spot the name Griffin Dunne (as Dr Vass) in the credits…

** #GravityIsGravy on Twitter (the film lacks ‘it’).


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

Delivered of a burden

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012) (seen at Saffron Screen)

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10 February

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012)

Viewed at Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen), in Saffron Walden (and on a recommendation from @amandarandall5)


Am I so much as... being seen ?

Play, Samuel Beckettt

The Patience Stone (2012) is a film that could be set anywhere, in any time, in case one wants to read in condemnations of where it appears to be set and its rules and religion, but the simple fact is that it acts as an inverted One Thousand and One Nights, where the nameless man and we are both an audience to his nameless wife’s confessions : only the film has to interest just us, to stop us cutting off its head by walking out, although we suspect that the husband, willy-nilly, can hear every word…

With all the adeptness and beauty that Zrinka Cvitesic brought in the role of Danica in My Beautiful Country (2012) to a bedbound Ramiz (Misel Maticevic), a film released in the same year, Golshifteh Farahani tends to her husband, who appears to be in a coma : at the start of the film, she is doubting what she has been told, because the mullah said that her husband would be well in two weeks, and it is the sixteenth day, with him not better, and her running out of money for serum.

It was a beautiful (not just literal) play of light and dark, @Saffronscreen @amandarandall5 - review under way in The King's Arms, SW...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 10, 2014

Birds*  that emerge from darkness on the curtains to a point of maximum light and then back toward shade open the film : they tell us at all sorts of levels that there will, although this is essentially a chamber work (set primarily in the woman’s house and grounds, but also her aunt’s former and present flat, and the street), be a journey, and the film will waver between light and dark.

(Sadly, there are two places where the quality of digital image-capture, as against so beautifully done on film in Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013), lets the aesthetics of the film down, and it verges on pixellation - briefly, both times, in the scene in the basement, and when Farahani is first lit by the light of the hurricane-lamp. That said, the criticism draws attention to how very good the image was the rest of the time that these stood out as momentary exceptions.)

Necessarily, with a man in a coma and despite conflict going on, one is tied, but the inventiveness of blocking the scenes in the principal room is anything but limited, and makes not just for variety, but also for some very striking and even beautiful angles. The man (Hamid Djavadan) and Farahani are in this with such conviction, that, apart from visits from the mullah and a soldier, and time with her children, and her aunt and her family, we barely realize that we are thrown back on their resources.

As a sort of Scheherezade, the woman has a voice, but not for telling stories, such as one that might narrate what happened to the stone of the title that her aunt is reminded of : the account of how she became pregnant might even be from the Nights, with its questionable, but inventive, solution to a practical problem.

It is the final part of what she has been telling her husband throughout the film, and not without reason – so much that she has already related, both of the present and of her past, sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes as if to him within her head, has built up to this revelation. Spurred on by what her aunt has said about the stone, she has continued her confession, even down to having let a visiting cat eat one of her father’s fighting quails and getting a scar by her right eye about which her husband, who maybe has never properly seen her, has never asked.

The very shocking end of the film is ambiguous, and could represent two or three possibilities, on different literal or figurative levels. Twice, once when we think that she might really go away for good because of the impossible conditions in which she is having to leave (and for which she blames her husband), she tells him to ‘Go to hell’, and there is much frank language about sex, including the insult that got her husband into the fight with which he lies wounded. She has had, often enough with her aunt’s advice, had to make her way in this difficult culture, and the film celebrates female ingenuity in getting around male oppression whilst still pretending to be subservient.

The film is thoughtful, throwing one back on one’s preconceptions, and (not knowing much of the woman’s reliance on her aunt) we do not understand at the time why she tells the captain ‘I sell my body’, because his reaction is the last thing that we imagine she wanted : it goes back to the woman’s place, as the aunt expounds the male psychology.

All that the woman has been bottling up, keeping inside – that is why Beckettt is quoted at the head of this review, because, not least in the trilogy of plays* that The Royal Court (@royalcourt) is reviving, he writes (Not I) a part for Mouth, who cannot seem to stop talking, but who is, as the characters in Play are (a man, his wife, and his lover), looking for a response to this flood of words. Hence the quotation, where the Man momentarily interjects the possibility that there is not even an observer to what he is going through by telling his story : as with our lead, he has no name.

Here, that confession is to a man who may not have the conscious faculty to hear it, but for whom the truth is being laid out with candour (as that trilogy of novels taught Beckettt to do). It may not sound much of a basis for a film, but with excellent realizations of Max Richter’s music (which was such a strength of the rather disregarded Sarah’s Key (2010)), carefully wrought cinematography from Thierry Arbogast, and, as well as from those mentioned, lovely performances from Massi Mrowat (the soldier) and Hassina Burgan (the aunt), it is electric.


End-notes

* A twitcher would know what they are, but maybe ducks – thoughts were of M. C. Escher’s panoramic mirror-image.

** Though not written as a trilogy, unlike Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and maybe not even for performance together.


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My 200-word story

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9 February


My 200-word story

For Mark Brown


I needed to tell a story in exactly 200 words.

I looked in my wallet and my purse, but I only had 63. I rang up my brother – probably it was too early, as he gave me just 2 words, and I knew that my girlfriend would be the same.

I sat down by the cat, who trilled to see me, so I lay down next to her and stroked her as she walked all around me. That was another dozen, but 133 to go…

Outside, I saw one of my neighbours go past, so I dashed out and talked to him about the weather until I was up to 98 – halfwayish.

Meanwhile, the free paper had arrived, and, as I picked it up, a word fell out. I shook it thoroughly, and was then short by 45 – careless, these journalists !

I called my girlfriend after all, and, although she sometimes doesn’t have a good word for me, I was left 16 short.

Checking pockets and drawers took the total to one hundred and eighty-nine, requiring 11…

Sad at being so close, I went to the park. Wait, though - all those numbered yellow football shirts had words…


Done it !



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Scorsese’s hesitation about Kazantzakis

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8 February


This posting relates to a special screening at Wells Cathedral on 25 January


The last temptation is for Christ to get down off the cross and live the rest of His life as a normal human being

(Scorsese on Scorsese*, p. 124)

In his chapter in about The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) in this book, Scorsese talks about his collaboration with Paul Schrader, and how the latter produced a ninety-page script in four months (p. 117). Having been introduced to the original novel by Kazantzakis by Barbara Hershey and David Carradine in 1972 (p. 116), Scorsese says that this is what interested him about making a film of it :

I found the representation of Christ, stressing the human side of His nature without denying that He is God, the most accessible to me. His divine side doesn’t fully comprehend what the human side has to do; how He has to transform Himself and eventually become the sacrifice on the cross – Christ the man only learns about this a little at a time. In the whole first section of the book, He is acting purely on human emotions and human psychology, so He becomes confused and troubled. […]

(p. 116)

Talking about his own belief in relation to portraying Jesus in the film, Scorsese writes :

I believe that Jesus is fully divine, but the teaching at Catholic schools [Scorsese says that he has drifted away from the Church over the years, and is no longer a practising Catholic] placed such an emphasis on the divine side that if Jesus walked into a room, you’d know he was God because He glowed in the dark, instead of just being another person. But if He was like that, we always thought, then when the temptations came to Him, surely it was easy to resist them because He was God. He could reject the temptation of power in the desert; He could reject especially the temptation of sex; and He could undergo the suffering on the cross, because He knew what was going to happen, what death is all about.

(p. 124)

About involving Schrader by asking him to write a script, he comments :

Knowing that Paul Schrader and I have close affinities, I thought it would be interesting to see what a Calvinist approach to the book would be. It’s a very long book and I wanted a normal-length film, not a six-hour mini-series, so I thought Paul would be able to strip away all the unnecessary elements. The whole relationship between Mary Magdalene and the Apostles and how they were fighting with each other, all that was fascinating, but couldn’t be put in the film. […]

(p. 117)

Schrader and he discussed the treatment of the miracles (and the importance of the supernatural existing alongside the natural), and depicting Jesus terrified by them, not smiling (p. 118), as he gradually realizes that they lead to the cross (p. 120). For Scorsese, the key scene, when Jesus knows that He is God, is the raising of Lazarus, where Jesus is momentarily pulled into the tomb (the symbolism is clear), before leading Lazarus out (p. 143).

Scorsese acknowledges that some people have said that the book is more Kazantzakis than Jesus (p. 143), but he did go to the trouble of meeting the writer’s widow, and of exploring his life from staying in a monastery on Mount Athos to the books that he wrote in the last ten years of his life (p. 145).

Those who want to say that the film is blasphemous (see below), because it shows Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene, seem not to bear in mind that neither Kazantzakis, nor Scorsese, is subscribing to the theory that Jesus actually did have a family with her – this is the content of the temptation, the ‘last’ of the title, that both book and film are about, but it is not saying that it happened, but what if Jesus were tempted on the cross to believe that he did not have to die there to fulfil his purpose ?

These are very different ascriptions to Kazantzakis and Scorsese, but those levelling the criticism seem slow to understand the difference. Regarding the relationship that the book puts at the centre of that last temptation, Scorsese has written :

One problem I have with the book is the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If there had to be sexual temptation, it could be another woman; for it to be Mary seemed kind of obvious. And the fact that she became a whore specifically because he rejected her is almost as bad as the Hitchcock movie I Confess, where Montgomery Clift becomes a priest basically because he was jilted by Anne Baxter. As the young priest whom I adored when I was young said, that doesn’t happen, because you have to have a vocation otherwise you’d only last a week in the seminary ! I Confess is an interesting movie nevertheless, but I found a similar difficulty with Kazantzakis.

(p. 143)

Yet Scorsese seems not to have been put off, and writes about what he hoped for from the film :

[...] I found this an interesting idea, that the human nature of Jesus was fighting Him being God. I thought this would be great drama and force people to take Jesus seriously – at least to re-evaluate His teachings. […] So through the Kazantzakis novel I wanted to make the life of Jesus immediate and accessible to people who haven’t really thought about God in a long time. I certainly didn’t think the film would destroy the faith of those who believe strongly [Editor’s emphasis].

(p. 124)

The cynical may doubt Scorsese’s sincerity in the passages quoted above : of course, his motives and beliefs may be questioned, if one thinks that making the film is itself blasphemy. Here are two letter-writers points of comparson (they are said to have appeared in the Wells Journal on 23 January 2013 [sic]) :

One does not have to consider a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine as worthy of contemplation, despite any dubious claims to artistic merit either.

Paul Arblaster

The film’s photography and musical score are of good quality. The 1936 Olympic games stadium in Berlin was of good quality too. This is hardly the point.

Fr Ewan, Po Wo and Donna-Marie MacPherson

So Nazis, and a deliberate act of provocation, are the chosen points of reference ?


End-notes

* Faber & Faber, London, 1996, p. 124.


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Lit by Saul Leiter

This report is from a special preview screening of The Invisible Woman (2013)

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6 February

* Contains spoilers *

This report is from a special preview screening of The Invisible Woman (2013) at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) on 1 February, followed by a Q&A with director and lead actor, Ralph Fiennes

At @CamPicturehouse, both the lovely visuals and acting of The Invisible Woman (2013), and @jackabuss hosted a fine Q&A with Ralph Fiennes !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 2, 2014

The time of the film is clearly the nineteenth century, but labels are largely given to places, not to dates. Charles Dickens died in June 1870, and an important scene has him showing Nelly (Felicity Jones) the galley-proofs of what would have been chapter 59 of Great Expectations, which was being published in instalments between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861.

The title-character really has to be Nelly, but, when Catherine Dickens (Joanna Scanlan) visits her with a gift that the jeweller wrongly had delivered to Catherine, she says what the following question, asked of Fiennes (during the Q&A in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse), summarizes :

Mrs Dickens, probably out of envy, warns that her husband is drawn to his audience as well as to her. Is the challenge that Nelly faces to know Dickens not as a writer, but as a man*?

Catherine does not appear to have wanted herself the acclaim that Charles receives, from other things, at public readings, so she presumably allowed herself to be relatively in his shadow : after such a reading, Nelly’s mother, Frances Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas), expresses regret that Catherine could not have been there (and Charles gives some reason why she is not there), which means that she is unlike a royal consort, and is free not to do what he chooses to do.

(If she is envious (see more here), maybe it is of Nelly that she can see Charles as a writer, for a comment early in the film (when The Ternans, mother and daughters, have travelled to Manchester to the production of Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep (published in 1856), which Dickens is mounting with Collins) suggests that she does not personally view the novels as more than entertainment (‘Tis a fiction, designed to entertain), at which Nelly, expressing her surprise, says what she sees in them. So, in Manchester, Catherine was with Wilkie and Charles, but she later appears to withdraw from that role.)

In Collins, we have the example of a man co-habiting since 1858 (with Caroline Graves (Michelle Fairley) and her daughter Harriet (known as ‘The Butler’)), but perhaps at the expense of the greater reception of his writing** ? If so, he compromised greater success and not living with Graves (they were only apart for two years, when she married another man), and with spending part of his time with her and with Martha Rudd, a woman whom he met as a nineteen-year-old when researching Armadale. The family arrangements that we know so well from The Pre-Raphaelite Brethren (founded in 1848, and initially secretively operating under the initials PRB) and from Dickens in this film (based on Claire Tomalin’s book of the same name) were actually closer with those of Collins than we might have imagined.

The journey of a biography to film - interesting piece by Claire Tomalin on The Invisible Woman http://t.co/lbibG5znV7
— Isobel Dixon (@isobeldixon) February 1, 2014

It is for those such as Tomalin to explain and speculate why Dickens felt himself different from his friend Collins, in not being able to copy an arrangement that was less complicated than his own would have been. It was not until a century later that our present divorce laws were enacted, but it appears that an informal separation, such as Dickens is quoted as announcing to his family in The Times, might have been an acceptable position, whereas an affair with Nelly being known of during it clearly would not. Only such reading can shed light on this question…

Back at reviewing the film, Abi Morgan had written a script that sounded as though it might have been spoken 150 years ago, but without drawing attention to its age :

Despite UK / US differences, Abi Morgan's dialogue - The Invisible Woman - sounds like speech, John Ridley's - 12 Years A Slave - does not.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2014

The emphasis is on the spoken words resembling speech. Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) reports that the dialogue in Slave sounds as it does, because it is taken directly from Solomon Northup’s book, which can easily be believed : it satisfies her that it should be, but, to some, that might seem a cop-out… (After all, Northup wrote his memoir, with the help of a writer, during the course of three months, and he is in, in this way, writing dialogue that could have occurred ten years earlier, so it can scarcely be verbatim.)

This is not one of Andrew Davies’ celebrated adaptations of Dickens or of other classic novelists, but giving a plausible voice to Dickens the man. It is a voice that is strengthened by the judicious use of very effective music by Ilan Eshkeri (who scored Fiennes debut as director, Coriolanus (2011)) – more detail will have to wait until another time, when (furniture-shifting for) the Q&A (and the consequent lack of detail about musicians on IMDb) does not obtrude reading the credits…

None of that would be worth a candle without Fiennes, who brought to the figure, familiar through Simon Callow (and even Doctor Who), a conviction and a humanity – it was not for nothing that Dickens was amongst those who campaigned for sanitary conditions for all, and we see him here at a benefit for The Hospital for Sick Children, and also hear him privately speak poignantly of his father’s and his family’s plight in poverty***.

A character very different either from Fiennes’ last Dickensian film role, as Magwitch, or his self-directed part as Caius Martius Coriolanus (let alone in Potter), and there we find his compelling versatility. To Dickens, a man shown to be not without tetchiness or anger, Fiennes seemed to bring some of the qualities that his character Stephen Tulloch had in his sister Martha Fiennes’ writer / director feature Chromophobia (2005) : despite that film’s fate in history, nothing is wasted.

Yes, stand-out performances, Felicity Jones luminous + Fiennes a fine Dickens - & director. @THEAGENTAPSLEY @TheVelvetNap #theinvisiblewoman
— Isobel Dixon (@isobeldixon) February 3, 2014

Opening with a gorgeous expanse of the coast at what we are told is Margate, and, with Nelly’s introduction, anxious, quick cutting, and one wants to know what drives her there, what her anguish is. We know of a connection with Dickens, but has she just come from him**** ? Nelly is a true Wilkie-Collins-type heroine, in her black against the washed-out sand (in more senses than one), and this could be The Shifting Sands, and some source of mystery.

Both within the dynamic of a scene, and from one to the next, the film is paced beautifully : once we have seen a later Felicity Jones in a Dickens-laden situation where she is unable to say what she knows, it unfolds with her in an almost Becketttean way, seeming to revolve it all, and without a friend to turn to*****. Nelly has been out too long, yet she knows what she must do, and straightaway does it, throwing herself into the rehearsal of Collins and Dickens’ No Thoroughfare.

Perhaps they are her memories, or maybe it is purely by the medium of cinema, but the play connects with the event of arriving in Manchester on a foul day, and first meeting our two writers in another collaboration. Nothing is over-explained, with ambiguity to keep us involved (Is the young man called Charley with the umbrella somehow the young Dickens … ?).

It is a fairly dark rehearsal space, and the polarity between so many interiors to come and the luminescence of views such as that beach at Margate is one of the themes of the film : the interiors are shot, by Rob Hardy, in a way that Fiennes told us came out of finding that Hardy and he had a common interest in the photography of Saul Leiter, and with Hardy’s eye for composition, but using Leiter’s effects and aesthetic. The effect, and the result of shooting on film, is gorgeous and inviting.

We guess at what has happened between Nelly and Charles, but it is only when Wilkie and he take her to the former’s home that it becomes clear that the state of affairs is more fragile, this coming hard on the heels of Catherine’s visit that day. In fact, it is apparent that Charles does not seem to know what he seeks, although he enjoys Nelly’s company, his writing, and appearing in public, but that more has been claimed in the press.

In all of this, Kristin Scott Thomas, as Nelly’s mother Frances, has been more apt than any to see what is happening early on, and to raise her concerns about Nelly with Charles – hers is a modest part, but, along with that of Wilkie (Tom Hollander), central to what unfolds, and both convincingly portray a circle of those close to Nelly, which later she seems to lack. A reflective and poignant film, which will repay watching again.


End-notes

* Fiennes, although questioning Catherine's envy, did indicate that Jones had followed such a path in preparing her role with him. The way in which what Catherine says to Nelly about Charles' public is structured does, however, suggest not only that she is sharing her experience of Charles to benefit Nelly, but also that she may hope to put her off by it.

** Having said that, Collins wrote four novels in ten years, which allowed him to give others financial support : The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone.

*** Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dogson (1832 – 1898), i.e. Lewis Carroll courted social danger in this same century not only by going to the theatre, whether to see, say, the celebrated Ellen Terry perform, or his child-actor friends, but also by his association with Terry, such as seeing her backstage, or keeping up a correspondence. (In Carroll’s case, that might partly have been because the theatre was not thought a fit place at which a member of the clergy should be seen.)

As the opening scene of the film wisely avoids making clear (because having due regard to class and social distinctions would have complicated the story : Rev. Benham’s (John Kavanagh’s) admiration for Dickens’ works and seeming interest in theatrical matters), the theatre was frowned upon often enough, and there would have been an attitude towards Mrs Ternan and her daughters for the way that they supported themselves, and the film does not disguise their lack of means at home, and so why they act.

**** We are told that it is 1883, but the year might not register (not least because of the stunning view of the shore), unless one knows Dickens’ era well.

***** We do not know what has befallen her mother and sisters, but she is the youngest.


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I like beating people !

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

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1 February

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

One cannot help wondering whether writs (US) or claim forms (England & Wales)* will be flying over Alex Gibney’s film The Armstrong Lie (2013) (which takes its title from the headline of an article in L’Equipe [in English, The Team], ‘Le Mensonge Armstrong’).

The reason is given both by Armstrong’s litigious history, and the fact that, for example, accusations are made (even if made elsewhere before) about the connivance of the governing body’s officials with Armstrong about test-results that should have concerned them (more), the suggestion being that they gave those such as Armstrong a generous chance to come up with an explanation for positive findings : the film not only shows Armstrong presenting the cover-story that he had been prescribed a cream for saddle-sores whose use had caused him to register for steroids, but also how it is claimed, by those working with him, that, after hearing of the problem, they had trawled for a plausible excuse and found one in the cream (after which, presumably, a prescription being made out, as if on the relevant date, was the least of anyone’s worries).

Is though, in fact, the title The Armstrong Lie a partial misnomer, for, at least in part, the film revolves around (but never, maybe, centres on ?) all Armstrong’s denial that he doped, and on how he presented matters in a way favourable to him, as well maintaining the status quo, by such means as suing into submission those who spoke out ? Maybe reprehensible for a sportsman, who seems to have sacrificed friends Frankie and Betsy Andreu to defending his position, but all perfectly normal PR work of seeking to limit damage, one might cynically say, even if it does concern the emotive world of sport and the legendary feat of endurance that is Le Tour.

In fact, one could wager that the handling of what we might cause ‘the issue’ of illegal performance-enhancing drugs and even mid-race blood transfusions is probably textbook for the world of PR, and to place all the blame / responsibility on Armstrong, when, clearly, he had legal and medical advisers and so was not going to be short of the means and nous to employ advisers who could manipulate the media – the truth even – is short sighted. (In fact, as advisers, they would probably have urged on him such likely consequences, if he did not (and did not pay them for helping), as bans and litigation to recover payments that had been made, which the close of the film neutrally uses words on the screen (not, say, Gibney’s voice) to convey to us.

Imagine that this film were on an adjoining screen (as it probably was) to that showing the morally somewhat ambiguous portrayal of the world of the real Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (or, for that matter, the fraudulent activity of American Hustle (2013), another film recently in this very Screen 3, and which more definitely makes entertainment out of a true story). About Wolf, a presumably responsible critic of the calibre of Peter Bradshaw (writing in The Guardian) wants to say :

The Wolf of Wall Street does not quite have the subtlety and richness of Scorsese's very best work, but what an incredibly exhilarating film: a deafening and sustained howl of depravity.


What is the moral relativism operative here ? The narrative of the exploits of a man (Belfort) who happily sold people with nothing to speak of (other than their savings – and some greed) stock of whose worth he had no concerns to claw his way back after the 1987 crash is being lauded for depravity**. Whereas Armstrong is castigated for what seems like having gone in too deep and with no way back (except that no one seems to have made him go in for the Tour de France again in 2009, when Gibney was making a film about him, a film that, despite / because of Armstrong’s coming third (and what then unfolded), had to be put on hold for four years).

Of course, Lance Armstrong is no Macbeth, but the words of Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play have a certain resonance [Macbeth has just had his friend Banquo killed by men to whom he lied about who had kept them in lowly positions (he claims that it had been Banquo) – what about Armstrong, as we were told, only agreeing to interviews with Frankie Andreu, of all people (see below, following the quoted Tweet), during the 2009 Tour and then making him wait every time as another chilling way of abusing a (former) friendship and rubbing it in Andreu’s face ?) :

[…] I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

In The Armstrong Lie (2013), Alex Gibney himself doesn't know what kind of film he is making, so what chance do we have ? Confusing / long.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2014

Never mind Andreu, though. Gibney makes it quite clear in his commentary that he was personally affronted at how he felt treated that Armstrong denied doping to him – as if Armstrong were honestly going to do anything else, when he had weathered such storms as The Andreus’ depositions (in front of whom they said that he told the truth about his treatments to the doctor with care of him), and then employed people who did not care what means they used to destroy their credibility (they did not know whether the doctor in the room at the time was male or female, what the room was like, etc.).

On the view that Armstrong was in so deep that he felt / was told that he had to continue denial, damaging testimony is heard in court, and a legal mind for hire will be used to defeat it, so Gibney was not going to be let into the truth. Equally clearly, from what he said, he felt that he should have known, so out of what motive has he made his film ?

As to the quality of the film itself, the best documentaries do not tell a story for effect in a distorted way, even if one acknowledges that they typically have scores of hours of footage to distil into 90 to 120 minutes – ‘a good bit’ simply has to be left out if it does not tell the story, not inserted with a shoe-horn, and it does not help to have too many strands to it. Here, Gibney seems to have been desperate not to lose too many of ‘the good bits’ from what he shot in 2009, before the film was interrupted, and so he has combined them with what came from 2013, but not necessarily to good effect.

Not necessarily, because one often enough cannot tell whether it is from the earlier or the later period that he is showing footage. When it comes to narrating / telling the route to the come-back Tour of 2009, it seems clear enough that Armstrong has had cancer at some point between 2005 (around the time of his seventh win) and the decision to race again. (This seemed to have been the testicular cancer that Armstrong describes ?) But Gibney does not trouble himself, in the structure and content of his film, to distinguish this period of having cancer from an earlier one, which, when one learns of it, makes one doubt whether one might have misunderstood why Armstrong had been out of competition from 2005 to 2009. Wrong-footing the viewer in that way achieves little.

A simple telling of the key facts and dates in Armstrong’s life would certainly have helped. Perhaps not everyone knew very much about Armstrong, so it might have included where and when he was born, because we only went to the footage of Armstrong as a sixteen-year-old in Texas quite a bit later on (when, in the words that head this review, he boasted his competitive and athletic nature)…

Of course, no film need be linear, but there is not a lot of point, for example, in editing one’s film in such a way that the concept of ‘the yellow jersey’ (le maillot jaune) is explained when it has already been introduced once or twice (and, at the time, with the seeming assumption that viewers knew what it meant) : as with editing text, defining something when it is first mentioned is the rule of thumb (unless, of course, one wishes to keep one’s audience waiting for a purpose). As to the substance EPO, perhaps we did not need a structure diagram on the screen or to have spelt out what it stands for (which Michele Ferrari could surely have done), but it was as nebulous as the jersey : eventually, the film told us that Armstrong and others, under Ferrari’s direction, were having injections, but Gibney was not that careful, again, to tell us enough about it before he came to the involvement of Ferrari, when it may have been too late.

How feature films are put together will be quite different, but there will be the same journey, in editing, of finding that a scene ‘does not work’ or has to be put later / earlier than envisaged, and, unless someone is to remain ambiguous as to identity, introduced in such a way that the viewer will remember who he or she is / what his or her name is. Makers of documentaries tend to imagine that, despite what else is going on in the soundtrack or on the screen, it suffices to say in a caption who someone is the first time that we see him or her. However, if I do not know that Bicycling is a magazine, defining the person on the screen in relation to it by its title does not tell me that he or she is a journalist in the field of cycling.

Along with the fact that the caption will only, at most, be visible for the length of the clip, this may not be enough for the audience not to be in doubt that they have seen this person before, but not to recall his or her significance in the story. The point is of general application to documentaries, but also relevant here : a happy medium between giving the person a caption every time (which is overkill), and also bearing in mind how and how frequently voice-over is to be used.

At root, one wonders a little why Gibney came back to this project. Even saying that, three hours after Armstrong’s appearance in interview with Oprah Winfrey, he was in front of Gibney’s equipment (according to a caption). Did he expect something from Gibney, and what did Gibney hope for ? As one could only tell from whether the content had to be pre- or post-Oprah, it was hard to place when Gibney had filmed him, and this constituted another part of the cloudiness of the story-telling – nothing against a story that throws out clues that cohere to explain something at 40 minutes in that was unclear after only 10, but this did not have the air of being that sort of film-making : it just was unclear what Armstrong said to Gibney, or did not say, three hours after appearing on t.v.

The film did have (thanks to Ben Bloodwell’s work) astonishingly beautiful ways of photographing cycling, whether a group of riders, at a distance, ascending an incline before a wondrous ridge, or some really inventive shots from closer to the action, and, for those not familiar with the madcap world of Le Tour and its carnival, it had these people unbelievably posting themselves in the cyclists’ way to get a picture (and no one stopping them doing it) ! What it did not have, despite these strong points, was an idea of where it was going and how the viewer would be taken along :

The film does not know whether it is a film about a man who doped, a man and his colleagues who decided to dope when everyone else was doping, a man who let a film-maker down, a man who betrayed friends and kept up his denial as long as possible, or even about cycling. If Gibney ever asked Armstrong why he risked exploding everything by going back in 2009, he shows no answer in the film, but (even in hindsight) it seems the key question to have put forward.

The only explanation that we have why, in the face of the allegations of the kind made L’Equipe (which even seemed to have changed its tune about Armstrong come 2009) and The Andreus, no one told the truth for so long is in simple, mantra-like repetition of the word omertà, which is not properly translated or put in context by Gibney’s film. On a literal understanding of that word of defiance, federal agents or police officers should not have broken ‘the code of silence’, whereas, in this film, of course they trumped it.

In conclusion, perhaps there, too, Gibney took for granted that his film and what he showed in it made sense and fitted together as a whole. It does not, and, along with the desire of the score to extract anxiety from moments too often and for too long, misjudges its effect just as directly as when a writer tries to proof his own work and is too easily satisfied that what he or she intended to write is what is actually being read, overlooking the typos, the missing or repeated words, or an edit of a sentence that leaves it incoherent.


End-notes

* The writ (or its County Court equivalent, the summons) has not existed for two decades, although the media still like to use the word : they misguidedly think that it sounds more stylish to say Z has issued a writ against B.

** Surely, part of the effect that Scorsese was seeking – after all, there was no way that, although he also makes documentaries, he was going to throw away the doubtful / would-be glamour and glitz that only treatment in a feature could give to the story.


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

How lost is this Academy-Award-winning film ?

This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

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

27 January (watched on DVD)

This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

Probably, more of us will be familiar with the humane portrait of drinking, gluttonous and bawdy Sir John Falstaff than with the soberly (pun intended) unremitting world of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945). Yet it won Academy Awards for Ray Milland (as Birnam, who is almost never off the screen), Wilder as director and co-writer (with Charles Brackett), and as best picture (as well as nominations for Miklós Rózsa's towering score (Rózsa only lost the award because of winning it himself for that of Spellbound (1945)), and for editing and cinematography).

To-night, the dark experience of Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) - Miklós Rózsa's score with saw-like theremin, and Ray Milland drunk
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 26, 2014

The theremin cut through like a saw in Miklós Rózsa's wonderful soundtrack to The Lost Weekend (1945) - deserving of its own Academy Award.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 26, 2014

Sir John is a comic character (although Orson Welles introduces or emphasizes light and shade in his Chimes at Midnight (1965)), Birnam is more complex, and we see his complexity in detail first when the duet with chorus Libiamo ne' lieti calici in a performance of La Traviata starts to get to him, but he is driven to the humorous situation of having to wait for the owner of a leopard-skin coat (Jane Wyman as Helen St. James), because their cloakroom tickets have become confused. As Sir John might, to get some sack from Mistress Quickly, he knows how to turn on the charm, having gracelessly thrown her umbrella at her feet when asked for it, but is torn between the bottle of rye whiskey in his pocket and her kind invitation to a cocktail party, until the former gets smashed (and it remains unclear whether she buys his alibi of having wanted to take it to a sick friend).

Helen's faith in Don, and why it lasts as long as it does (as does that of his curiously named brother Wick), almost certainly has to be a given, for it is not fleshed out, nor is some of the recent past. For some, there may be clues as to whether the New York setting is contemporary, but, if it is, one wonders how Wick and Don avoided the draft. In all honesty, though, Wick's job, how he manages to support Don and him, and where they are supposed to be headed for a long weekend are peripheral (as long as one realizes that 'the cider' talked of there is just apple juice, because US usage calls our cider 'hard cider'). The title, too, can remain ambiguous, whether meaning the weekend that Don does not participate in, his being lost, or how he 'loses' it - perhaps, even, that it is lost as seen from the future that the ending promises.

Don has tried to outsmart Wick at the outset, and, at the end, he tries to conceal his intentions from Helen, but both times his desire is thwarted by chance, that of, respectively, where Wick's tossed cigarette ends up, and the view afforded Helen in the mirror. In the middle part of the film (when he is on his own, with only Nat's professional company (brought to us by Howard Da Silva) to serve him), a reciprocal arrangement between pawnbrokers to close for Yom Kippur has him walking exhaustedly for blocks, checked off by the lamp-post road-markers, before finding out that there is a pattern.

In a way, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is a mini re-run of the sort of degradation, despair and delinquency that Don is led into at the bottom until he meets a man calling himself Bim (Frank Faylen), and hears a few truths that, whatever has happened to Don before, he has been hiding from himself : Bim has seen it all before, is matter of fact, and dismisses Don's future, and that strikes home as clearly as if he had suddenly pictured himself in the downward path of Hogarth's 'Gin Lane'.

According to Wikipedia, Wilder had worked with Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944), which had sent Chandler back to drink, and Wilder had chosen to make the film to hold the mirror up to Chandler. In the film, at any rate, Bim holds a mirror up to Don, a message that eventually leads him to the film's two possible endings.

Wilder and Milland pull no punches in showing a man who will beg, demand and even steal for drink, with only the touches of charm to lighten him that seem to have kept his brother and girlfriend loyal to him. But the magic that they work, ably assisted by Rózsa's soundtrack, is to keep us loyal to him, because we have heard about how early success with writing, then over-confidence, then setbacks and the lure of a drink to steady the nerves have reeled him in : he knows all this, because he tells it to Nat as a story in the bar, but that does not help him know it in a way that offers a way out of it.

Then, and since, countless experts and other writers have given accounts of how to beat an addiction such as to alcohol (or gambling or smoking), and maybe they would have different views about what would work for Don to do it, but there is no denying that the image that we have of a man in thrall to whiskey is compelling, frightening and vividly alive, and the film merits its place in the US National Film Registry as an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism, and to be described by The Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Shortly after, and in the film adaptation with Albert Finney in 1984, we have Malcolm Lowry's uncompromising story of a man with a deeper debt to alcohol than Don, but, for this film, it ends as it does, with a share of ambivalence (seemingly more evident in Charles R. Jackson's original novel), and much relief. It must be open to put other meanings on the cravings that drive Don, and where they have come from, but one can also just take the film as it comes.


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