Courtship dance of the thumbs

This is a review of Visitors (2013)

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7 April

This is a review of Visitors (2013)

Some people might define this as a non-narrative film. However, there is a narrative – only some of it is of one’s own making.

Other documentaries such as Leviathan (2012) attract praise or hatred for the same (or greater) apparent lack of narrative (one just needs to look at the reviews at IMDb to see that there is little middle ground), but they may not have had the enlivening musical style of Philip Glass behind the soundtrack* : one engages with something written by Glass largely knowing that it is by him, and, of course, director Godfrey Reggio and he have, to say the least, quite a history.

That said, this film, presented by Steven Soderbergh (who made a small appearance in the preceding film, Naqoyqatsi (2002)), names ‘dramaturgical associates’** in the closing credits, and, with a film that features both a gorilla (Triska, a female from Bronx Zoo), and, towards the end, that view of Earth as seen from The Moon, one is immediately directed to thinking of that Kubrick film – with all that the reference may, if not entail, then at least imply…

As to the title, whether we relate to The Dalai Lama, or to The Bible (Exodus 2 : 22), or just to a Green agenda, we cannot escape the impression that the images are presented in a didactic, but benign, way. (Put another way, we are being directed as to how to view the pieces of footage in relation to each other – but that still leads to a discussion-thread for Naqoyqatsi on IMDb’s page for it that is entitled Ok so how does this movie make any sense?.)

For the title Visitors cannot be said to have come from seeing the word, as shown in around the fourth shot, carved into two stones laid next to each other, with the inscription split after the third letter (VIS / ITORS) – that belief would require us to imagine that the former was inspired by seeing the latter, rather than some existing notion of temporality (or stewardship) in seeking to make the film.

However, the fact that the word does physically feature, in a work of artisanship, focuses our attention on it, and we quickly sense the knowingness behind what is presented in this film, by way of commentary on what the notion of visiting suggests : a sense of not belonging, impermanence, and maybe a consequent lack of care and commitment (versus good stewardship ?).

Compared with Samsara (2011) (which one can barely do, since it – unlike the near-contemplative Visitors – is full of motion, although at varying tempi), this film feels more like a meditation, but that directive quality leaves one less free, and there were at least two moments that induced a cringe at the apparent banality : one was a scene with a statue with a crumbling nose (the setting veered the image towards bathos, rather than pathos), the other when we are led towards light that is penetrating into a deserted factory (or warehouse).

Momentarily, the scene evoked Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup) (2003), but, as we headed towards the door (the word ‘EXIT’, as of a fire-door, above it), we were clearly going into a white-out, and there was the fear that this might rather literally have been chosen as the closing moment. (In the event, the closing moment – though trickery – was better, but still felt a little too limiting for what the film could have been and / or done with its material.)


It is very good at many things :

* Being in monochrome (or near monochrome) almost throughout

* Making a large object seem small, and also having the view invert on us, as in an optical illusion, as we move through the shot

* Seemingly by over-exposure (though it may be partly post-production effects) to darken the sky, and lighten the subject, such as the foliage and fronds of the scenes shot in Louisiana

* Allowing changes to register in their own time, be they the shift in gaze of a person as we look at his or her face, or a shadow creeping around the three faces of a building, casting the left-hand one into shadow as the right-hand one is gradually illuminated

* Combining composition and exposure in external shots so that, without the nature of what is shown necessarily being relevant to it, one was struck by the grace and beauty of the image

* Choosing faces (or groups of faces) to show, and editing them in with other footage in a way that was not predictable

* Filming things in such a way that one wondered at how it had been achieved


Not wishing to give too much else away (although it is not the sort of film where a description can elicit an impression of the visuals), there were times – when one did not know that the human subjects had been cast (though they still may not have been professionals) – when one’s musing on what was being shown led to whether it was ethical, such as the three faces in a row that looked like masks. Beautifully lit and photographed, but were we being steered to think something about these people at their (or our) expense ?

Visitors was a good watch, especially with the luxury of Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), but one doubts that it would translate very well either to equipment at home, not least unless one had a very good sound system : without the impact of a large image, and hearing Glass’ score so clearly, it might as easily get lost in the noise of a house as the signal that it seeks to transmit about transition and transitoriness…



End-notes

* Instead, in Leviathan, one hears sounds that make one more and more aware that they are generated, not the recorded sound of what the footage presents, and the credits talk of sound composition, as well as of sound mixing and editing.)

** This definition is taken from Wikipedia® : If we imagine ourselves as directors observing what goes on in the theatre of everyday life, we are doing what Goffman called dramaturgical analysis, the study of social interaction in terms of theatrical performance.


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

I always wished I was an orphan [Suzy] ~ I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about [Sam]

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

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5 April

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) - sweet, but not saccharine

* Contains small spoilers *

It is not until the very end of the film – and then it is not really an explanation – that its title makes an appearance, as a description of a place where things seemed to be very sweet. (Moonrise Kingdom (2012) has a suitably quirky web-site, which may say more.) Except that life was going to catch up with the idea that it conjures up, that of getting away from it. For, as twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) confidently says to Suzy (Kara Hayward) (and, by now, we know that he paints) :

That sounds like poetry. Poems don't always have to rhyme, you know. They're just supposed to be creative.

Bob Balaban (familiar from a recent repeat viewing of Deconstructing Harry (1997), where he plays Richard) is credited as The Narrator. Garishly, even gnomishly dressed, he is perkily moved, by magic as a static figure, from scene to scene to paint the backdrop to what we will see in the course of the following three days : from his measurements (for his narration is an omniscient one, and – without the grandiosity, but with assurance – reminds of Hamm telling his story in Beckettt’s play Endgame), he makes us aware of what is to come. Nonetheless, it is a sort of surprise.

With Suzy and Sam, their secret correspondence and their desire to get away together illicitly, we may feel that the film is operating on one level : there are gentle ways in which they seem to be more adult than the adults (say, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as the Bishops, Suzy’s parents), so Sam has a pipe and that Heath Robinsonesque flair for designing mechanisms that we see featured in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Suzy is dressing to impress*, and hurt by the booklet that she has discovered her parents have, called ‘Coping With the Very Troubled Child’.

Yet the climax takes us beyond all these small things to the big question of what life is all about. Mr and Mrs Bishop, for example, think that it is a matter of asking how the other’s litigation went, but their formal manner shows that it is a duty to remember the detail and ask, by contrast with the commitment that Suzy and Sam have to each other. Their letters to each other may have been oddly matter of fact and have made us laugh or smile, but this belies the connection that they have made.

When we first saw where The Bishops lived, it was in elevation, but one that proved to be a decoration for one of the walls of their precise abode, a bit like a castle, as Wes Anderson has us scan it up and down and through, seeing, say, Mr Bishop both upstairs relaxing and downstairs about something less passive – however, it has an unreality to it, as fully as if it were Wemmick’s Castle in Great Expectations, or Kafka’s The Castle, a quality that it shares with The Grand Budapest.

Engaging both with Benjamin Britten’s music in a very impressive way, and also having the film scored by collaborator on Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Alexandre Desplat**, Anderson creates a scope for this film, building on the story and imagery of Noye’s Fludde (Britten’s Op. 59), that transcends its particulars. It feels, early on, a bit like a fable, and looks less like a cartoon than Budapest, but it has the impact of a Biblical account like that of The Flood :

The Khaki Scouts flee to St Jack’s Church, because it is high ground (smacks of Father Ted, as a feature that Anderson has given to New Penzance Island ?), which aptly seems to be where Sam first saw Suzy and talked to her – in the organ loft, two figures amongst those with masks are momentarily there, then gone. What unfolds is a stand-off, which provokes an offer from Captain Sharp (of the police, played by Bruce Willis in a fairly unaccustomed subdued style of role (Looper (2012) ?) that pacifies the embodiment of Social Services in Tilda Swinton***, complete with a stamp to certify that she has done her duty.

Setting the film in late September 1965 allows Anderson to take a sideswipe, from the seeming perspective of history, at the forces that would normalize (or, conversely, pathologize****) everyone and, if deemed necessary, do so with uncaring foster homes, and highly invasive treatment for those who do not fit in, and focus our attention on the couple.

Suzy, in Noye’s Fludde, is a raven, the first creature let out of the ark (Genesis 8 : 6–7), and probably usually forgotten because of the dove with that olive token. Suzy says of herself to Sam I like stories with magic powers in them. Either in kingdoms on Earth or on foreign planets. Usually I prefer a girl hero, but not always. Though the books that we see are fictitious (artists are credited with the cover images), and within a fictitious story in a fictitious place, Sam and she still have a lot to share with us in a film well worth watching more than once.


End-notes

* One is put in mind a little of the appearance and delivery of Emma Watson (as Nicki) in The Bling Ring (2013) (or one of the more feminine girls in Foxfire (2012).

** Who has scored some significant films, from Budapest to Philomena (2013), Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013) to Argo (2012).

*** It seems a little hard to credit that IMDb is right that Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons were considered first for the role (and offered the part)…

**** At the same time, the rise in diagnosis of – and shockingly adult treatments for – ADHD (see, for example, Benny in Bombay Beach (2011)), and the sizeable recent controversy in the UK about the classifications in DSM-V, the latest (fifth) edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual suggests Plus ça change…


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

Going for the double

This is a review of The Double (2013)

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5 April

This is a review of The Double (2013)

Anyone who is familiar with the trailer for The Double (2013) (though we should know that trailers are not made by the film-makers) is not going to expect Dostoyevsky’s novella to be any more than a jumping-off point for the film (as Thurber’s story is for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)), but what the trailer does do is to suggest misleadingly* that the latter is also a benign, and less dark, study in the nature of inadequacy.

Particularly at the start (before we meet Simon James’ double), it feels as though co-writers Richard Ayoade (who also directs) and Avi Korine (from that family whose members brought you, amongst other things, Spring Breakers (2012)) have ‘mashed up’ sources such as those that follow (although that feeling of making reference, or borrowing, does dissipate somewhat over time, as the propulsive nature of the telling takes over (please see below)) :

* Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (some see Dostoyevsky’s work, four years later, as a rebuttal of Gogol’s works)

* Yury Tynyanov’s Lieutenant Kijé (as popularized in Western Europe by Prokofiev’s Suite, Op. 60, distilled from his film-music)

* Brazil (1985)

* Rear Window (1954)

* Elements of Lynch (not least the feel, look, and sound of the world of Eraserhead (1977))

* Even The Apartment (1960)


Without saying more, one will see – unless one guesses – what aspects of the film correspond with the earlier material to make this disturbing whole, driven along by the Glass-like rapid string arpeggios of Andrew Hewitt’s score, or the low-frequency rumbling that makes the corridors seem so unnerving …


And that apart from other disturbances in James’ life of the kind given by Sally Hawkins in a nice authoritarian cameo, let alone the increasingly hostile security guard (IMDb puzzlingly says that it is ‘rumored’ that this was Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s role), or the grumpy service in James’ local café (asked why he comes back here, he says that he is ‘loyal’ – and one cannot conceive of James doing anything very domestic in his flat, with utensils that look to be of grandmaternal origin).

In an early scene, in an underground train equally devoid of comfort (or a sense of the common good), we imagine that it must be a nightmare of the type in 8½ (1963), or a parody of one – James is, in what is established here, seen to be so labile that we have to hope hard that he can show himself as in the Mitty film, and maybe wonder whether he is more in the vein of Ronnie Corbett’s Timothy Lumsden in Sorry !.

In this film, partly because we are influenced to identify with Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), partly because we look for an emergence into real life of The Replicator** (in the form of Paddy Considine), which James says is his favourite t.v. programme, we invest a hope in what might happen. We believe that Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) might respond to James (whose interest in her is reminiscent of that of Josef K. in Fraülein Bürstner in Kafka's The Trial ?), if he knew the right thing to do, and we believe in the notion from Roxanne (1987) (and its more illustrious antecedents) that he might he helped to, and for, his own good.

It might have been fun if Wasikwoska had doubled the part of Melanie, played by Yasmin Paige, to mimic Eisenberg’s duality : as it is, we are offered an insight into her character’s fragility, which has been exploited by a knowledge of that of James, and we see her torn, although not in a way that is not unusual in cinema (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) ?), between what attracts everyone else and the likelihood (which, with Marilyn’s Lorelei, fatally attracts, or at least fails to repel) of getting hurt.

Of course, the theme of betrayal by a seeming friend is an age-old one, pre-dating Judas, and which has resonated ever since, in, for example, the tables being turned on K. in Kafka’s The Castle by his assistants (themselves a form of substitute). Here, far more was possible with the topic of identity theft than the film encompasses, and it prefers to stay within the general bounds of what is a person and what about a person is perceived to make him or her worthwhile.

In the end, subverting the messages of James’ powerlessness (as we provisionally thought that it had to), it offers the sort of Pyrrhic victory*** that we know, for Ray, from In Bruges (2008). It is not unlike many other endings (e.g. from episodes of Star Trek (original series only, please) or Dr Who, amongst others), and so concludes the piece, nowhere near Dostoyevsky (unless we make some massive inferences), because there had to be some ultimate resolution.

That said, principals Wasikowska and Eisenberg are both excellent, and the film is not without an effect from how it contrasts the homeliness and colour of her flat with that of his, as well as from Hewitt’s score, and the levels of tension that it gives to this cheerless universe.



End-notes

* NB Contains a spoiler As does IMDb : A comedy centered on a man who is driven insane by the appearance of his doppleganger (sic).


** Shades of The Reprisalizer from Matthew Holness’ A Gun for George (2011) ?

Here, the t.v. series is a sort of Orwellian distraction from the predominant greyness of life in this place and time, though it is less clear that it is a degraded world of the kind that Gilliam’s referenced film gives us, or a reimagined instance of the early computer age a parallel for the world of the pre-Soviet government department.

The real Replicator in the film is Hannah (probably in more senses than one), because she is a junior member of the copying department, operating what some might describe as a steam-punk take-off of the large and clunky Xerox® machines from the late 1970s : James and she are amongst the few of an age in this organization. Her boss tells James that any sensible person would want two copies (which proves to be astute, although James does not want another he), not just the one that, as a pretext for being there, he keeps coming up and asking for.


*** You could even posit a reference to the scene with the Patronus across the lake in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)…


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

A richly immersive short opera – in a Cambridge college

This is a review of Kate Waring's one-act opera* Are Women People ?

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3 April

This is a review of the matinee performance on Sunday 23 March (at Hughes Hall, Cambridge) of Are Women People ?, a one-act opera* by Kate Waring, which had been given its world premiere during the preceding evening

In her composer’s note, Kate Waring tells us that this work was inspired by, and uses material by, American writer and satirist Alice Duer Miller (1874–1942). Waring says that she wished to compose a comic opera last summer, and that it was devised by using poems by Miller ‘in which she reacted to quotations and news items of her day’ : the poems had been collected under the title given to this opera (the text is available here), a suitable volume that Waring had discovered, but had first appeared in a column in the New York Tribune (from February 1914 onwards).

That said, Miller’s words appear to have been transported, for Waring’s purposes, to a setting in England, sometimes with variable results, because a poem such as ‘The Revolt of Mother’ (see also below) contains the words in legislative hall, which sadly does not necessarily mean much in the UK. Likewise, the opera gives the impression, in setting ‘O, that ‘twere possible’, that Miller meant the British newspaper The Times, whereas the explanatory text in the book makes clear that the poem referred to the New York Times :

Oh, that 'twere possible
After those words inane
For me to read The Times
Ever again !

[At this point, Mr Webb was trying to chase his daughter, who was hiding from him, and the outcome was a facsimile broadsheet being torn into shreds]

After an overture (for select forces of clarinet, cello, and piano, our band for the piece), there was so much going on that this review is perforce of a highly selective nature : in addition to keeping an eye on the instrumentalists and quite a lively staging with three singers, there was also an ever-changing projection on a screen placed between the two trios (sometimes lyrics, sometimes cartoons, sometimes images) - and having chosen to be in the front row proved not to make managing it all any easier…

The piano (played by Alex Reid) began the opera quietly, but it did not take long to adopt an insistent fortissimo, although this subsided into softer Satie-like motifs in repeated semi-quavers. Attention then passed to the clarinet (Sarah Bowden), with some very pleasant harmonies from the cello (Jon Fistein), before the latter took a rich solo and then played pizzicato as the clarinet resumed. And so we came to the trying on of hats, as Amanda (Hazel Neighbour : soprano) entered down the aisle with her parents, but wearing a German spiked helmet.

The scene had been set with a hat-stand upstage, rich with all sorts of hats and scarves, and which clearly indicated that there were to be some changes of role (another feature of which to try to keep track). Mr Webb (Simon Wilson : baritone) and his wife (Jessica Lawrence-Hares : mezzosoprano) straightaway busied themselves with what there was to wear. By contrast, Amanda’s non-comformity was already patent, and it was matched by the quality of the writing for her, which, compared with that for Mrs Webb, had its own spikiness : most often, Mrs Webb’s part sounded like Michael Nyman’s most lyrical writing for voice.

A veneer of uniformity, as of a family resemblance, was given by all three singers having a whited oval on their faces, complete with red cheek circles, and so, when they later arranged themselves for a family portrait (please see below), they felt like puppets, Pinocchio, or (Waring’s reference) characters from the commedia dell’arte.

Closer inspection, though, revealed that Amanda had spider-like eye-lashes (a reference, perhaps, to eye make-up from The Hunger Games films ?), which made her seem more exciting than Mr and Mrs Webb**, less conventional : for, amongst other movements campaigning for change, one such as female suffrage inevitably faces the resistance of seeking to depart from the status quo. Amanda (it was not clear why) is much seen looking at a book called Keeping Pet Chickens (maybe an ironic comment on what women’s lives can be, i.e. they are as much ‘kept’ as chickens ?), and Waring yokes with this family a satire about someone called Willie turning 21 (who figures in the preceding poem to that addressed to Mr Webb) to give Amanda an unseen brother.

The approach to the libretto, not unusually, has been to fit the chosen texts to a scenario (so Willie’s absence is seemingly explained by being away on military service) : here, doing so gives us a new context to a poem that again satirizes a quotation from an anti-suffrage speech (it is possible that Miller’s quotation from it was read out). The dangers of war are then juxtaposed (in apostrophizing Amanda’s brother) with the alleged ones of voting (which include moral dangers, such as becoming coarsened or degraded) :

You must not go to the polls, Willie,
Never go to the polls,
They're dark and dreadful places
Where many lose their souls


Since war breaks out during the piece*** (i.e. The Great or First World War, which began on 28 July 1914 (whereas the States did not declare war on Germany until April 1917)), it may be that references to the unseen William, away at war, are to conflict elsewhere (for, to name but two troubled places, the territories of South Africa soon became involved [starting with The Maritz Rebellion] when the World War began, and in the preceding years there had been two Balkan Wars). Yet this instance is where one is less than clear what Waring intended, on account of how she marshalled her literary material (please see below).

Moving on through the piece, there was ample scope for Neighbour to hit high notes – which she did extremely nicely – in settings such as the one that ends with the couplet But in the midst of such enjoyments, smother / The impulse to extol your ‘sainted mother’ (‘Lines to Mr. Bowdle of Ohio’); to add telling gestures to an aria based on a skit called ‘The Maiden’s Vow’ (responding to the assertion that ‘Many girls […] had lost their souls through this study [sc. of algebra]’); and to hold a shiny tea-tray behind her father’s head, as if it were a halo, and then pretend that she did not (in ‘The Revolt of Mother’****).

This apart from bundling Mr Webb around, as if he were a rag-doll, and miming stoking him from behind, like a boiler (in ‘The Gallant Sex’), which Miller wrote because a woman engineer had been dismissed, and a new rule made that women shall not attend high pressure boilers. One gathers that Waring had graphically envisaged the stage-business, and that there was much to occupy one’s attention besides the music, and Miller’s witty, but purposeful, words.

In another number (apparently an adaptation of W. S. Gilbert, called ‘The Woman of Charm’), which started as a duet and ended as a trio, Miller rhymed ‘take off the scum’ with ‘residuum’, in ridiculing the notion that one could heat up the best bits of women such as the Sphinx, Cordelia and Cleopatra in a crucible (as conspicuous ladies of history) to obtain the desired sort of woman, who is ‘a mystery’.

On the screen we also had a full measure of wit, and so a photograph had been doctored with the heads of Obama and Thatcher to confront the equal absurdity, as of women getting the vote, of a black man as President of the States or a woman PM, and we were presented with a cartoon to depict ‘hugging a delusion’, with a figure clutching an object that bore the words ‘The Ballot’.

The cover image of the programme (and used in the publicity ?) was recreated when a smiling Amanda stood behind her less-than-cheery parents. A snapshot from a time of change, and it was coupled with the lyric ‘What Every Woman Must Not Say’, where, having listened to Mr Webb pontificate about women and their nature and concluding with asserting that they have no self-control, Mrs Webb bites back :

‘No, I don't admit they haven't,’ said the patient lady then,
‘Or they could not sit and listen to the nonsense talked by men.’


We see, again, a microcosm of change in Mrs Webb, coming closer to her daughter’s position, and Miller also gives us (in ‘Evolution’) the shifts in position of a Mr Jones, using quotations (whether or not fictitious), and matched by circling movements on stage. Mention on the screen of munitions and ‘every girl pulling for victory’ signalled that mobilization was in the air.

Stronger than mere intellectual arguments for and against changing women’s roles, the cast foreshadowed the changes that would unavoidably come with war by donning military helmets (which we may already have noticed the in the corner (where Amanda deposited hers at the start)). Thus – in a number where Miller reworked Kipling against him (‘Women’) – the patriotic angels are allowed work outside the home, although they had been told before that the home was their place, and Waring gave it a rhythmically precise setting.

In setting ‘Advice to Heroines’, she wrote a sharply chromatic line for Amanda, which Neighbour delivered with ease, and in which Miller re-used the metaphor from the title ‘Sometimes We’re Ivy, and Sometimes We’re Oak’, denoting a woman clinging to a man, or, in contrast, standing strong in her own right when bright-faced dangers shine when the hero is absent. (Yet, whatever women may do when the call comes, Miller wisely observes that it is only until men want their jobs back.) All too soon, on the screen, we had the fact displayed 5 August 1914 : Britain at war, which was reflected in Mrs Webb’s tonally uncertain aria, because William is at war.

As has been alluded to, a certain incisive angularity characterized settings for Amanda, whereas, for Lawrence-Hares, that of ‘A Suggested Campaign song’, for example, was rooted in a ground bass, and, suiting the secretive nature of the lyric, was of a more restrained nature : Miller had ironically written it – as if for the ‘anti’s – in response to another speech against suffrage : No one knows what we oppose and we hope they never will.

Waring gave us the poignancy of ‘Playthings’ (and with Reid beating a drum), as toy soldiers, guns and other weapons of war are not crowding the shops, which is not only as they’re made in Germany, but also because :

Perhaps another season
We shall not give our boys
Such very warlike playthings
Such military toys


However, she chose not to end the opera on that note, but with the spirit of further absurdity and contradiction, in a skit called ‘A Masque of Teachers’. This extended item took, as its basis, a bye-law of the New York Board of Education, in which each of Mr and Mrs Webb and Amanda took it in turns to be a would-be woman teacher : we hear that women who want to teach have to advance a dire circumstance concerning their husband, such as his wits are all astray – irrespective of what other reason the women have, and despite what they can otherwise offer, that factor alone qualifies them to teach.

Upon the husband’s circumstance being named, Miller has the members of the Board inappropriately rejoice Her husband’s doomed ! Hurray ! hurray ! about the position of ‘The Ideal Candidates’, thereby invoking the topsy-turvy logic, used to oppose women, that had been heard throughout the piece :

No teacher need apply to us
Whose married life’s harmonious


The performance closed with banners brought onto the stage, by Waring herself amongst others, which reminded us of this distance between 100 years ago and now (or lack of distance ?), including this one from Phyllis Diller (born in 1917) :

Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance ?


Although Miller’s other poetry appears to better remembered, perhaps it seems a little tame compared with the sparky wit that, in common with Diller, she brought to this writing. The notion that the best work comes out of some sort of suffering, as a pearl from an oyster, may just be a conceit, but it does appear that, when she responded to contemporary issues, and then coined titles such as ‘Why We Oppose Votes for Men’ (from ‘Campaign Material’ For Both Sides)), she was creatively ‘fired up’.

The reservations expressed earlier in this review apart, Waring has therefore aptly found material in Miller’s Are Women People ? for her chosen purpose, and, with her two skilled trios of singers and instrumentalists (along with all those others involved), realised with flair her notion to compose a comedy – even if one did feel that the writing for the role of Mr Webb, compared with that for Amanda, gave Wilson relatively few chances to show his talents…



End-notes


* Its title is, in a way, more polemical than ironic, taken from a retort to a father from a son in an imaginary dialogue that introduces a collection of pieces first published in the New York Tribune, and dedicated to that newspaper (please see below).


** The family whom we see is called Webb, because a poem called ‘Our Idea of Nothing at All’ is addressed to a Mr Webb of South Carolina (it is responding to a quotation from a speech that he made against suffrage for women).


*** Although, equally, the opera does not appear to be absolutely chronological as to every detail (we are given notice of the outbreak of war on the screen), but does seem to follow the order in which Miller’s poems have been collected in the book.


**** Which ends with this stanza :

I am old-fashioned, and I am content
When he explains the world of art and science
And government—to him divinely sent—
I drink it in with ladylike compliance.
But cannot listen—no, I'm only human—
While he instructs me how to be a woman.


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

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

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

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27 March

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

* Contains spoilers *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


End-notes

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


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

Via Tasso : No torture for you, just execution…

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

This is a review of Roma, città aperta (Rome, open city) (1945)

This film has several things in common with both The Third Man (1949) and A Canterbury Tale (1944), in being in black and white, made shortly after (even during, in the case of Powell and Pressburger’s feature) the Second World War, and making a feature of the bombed city, as well as the fact that two cities are spiritual homes of Christian leaders. This observation is made not to confine the film to its epoch*, but to recognize that VE Day and The Allied liberation naturally led film-makers to dwell on the preceding five years, what had been lost, and at what cost regained, and to respond in ways that have gained credit for all three productions.

Yes, Roberto Rossellini's Roma, cittàaperta(Rome, open city) (1945) is a form of propaganda, but it's gloriously executed, compelling !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 11, 2014

At the start, the title Roma città aperta is rendered in black capitals for ‘Roma’, on which the other two words are overlaid in white lower case, with a panorama behind : quite striking, in the ways that this film – not just visually – is throughout. Compare this with August : Osage County, where the focus on faces seems to be all over the place, and here the effects are subtle, gently putting Francini (Marcello Pagliero) into softer focus as if to give him a mystique, even sanctitude, as a member of the resistance : one almost feels that director of photography Ubaldo Urata would be taking Adriano Goldman, that of Streep’s film, aside, and telling him a few things, explaining how a film should look.

That aside, no wonder that Martin Scorsese recently listed Roma, città aperta as one of his 85 top films, for it is crisp, clear, and certain as to what it achieves, even if, as an audience, we have to work quite hard, at times, to keep up. In honesty, though the restoration looks grand, the lack, particularly towards the beginning, of subtitles for the German speech makes for difficulty.

(For, although one can infer, for example, from the direction in which the SS goons are sent what their orders have been when they are sent to search a building, the information in the other dialogue at that time is only available to those with a grasp of and ear for the language, which does not help. On another level, for anyone with any Italian, the general lack of synchronization between lips and speech is tiresome, because the film looks as if it has been dubbed, and one also does not have the immediate cue of a mouth moving to be sure who is speaking when it could be one of three men in a dark scene.)

#posteroftheweek⁰ An illustrated Anna Magnanigraces this vintage poster for Rome, Open City pic.twitter.com/8fI8InjXyC
— BFI (@BFI) March 10, 2014

We see the occupying German forces determining to divide Rome up into sectors for the purposes of carrying out searches more efficiently, we hear them grandly declare their ‘rights’ as occupiers, and we see them home in on Manfredi. Is this the meaning of città aperta (‘open city’), rather than some positive meaning (although, of course, we hear mention of Cassino, and we know the course of history) ?

Or does the significance lie in the sacrifices that we see made, by those captured, not to betray their comrades in the resistance to the arch Nazi, Major Bergmann (Harry Feist), who seems rabidly adherent to the idea of a master race**, and thereby to fight for the freedom of the city ? For we see a convoy, which is transporting prisoners, attacked and they are freed, and the film places at its centre the values of trust and protecting others, when, doubtless unfairly, Italian combatants have been given a reputation for cowardice, and the resistance in other countries has been given a much higher profile.

Aldo Fabrizi, as Don Pietro, is unassumingly at the centre of the film, but we have no appreciation of his eventual role when Pina (short for Giuseppina, played by Anna Magnani) sends her son Piccolo Marcello (Vito Annichiarico) to fetch him early on. As the Germans were not the ultimate victors in Europe, the film can, of course, make the locals knowing and skilled in their subversion of the activities of the occupiers. It appears (from what
Wikipedia says) that the reason for the film was, in part, that a wealthy, elderly lady initially wanted to finance documentaries, first about Fabrizi’s character, and then about Roman children who had engaged in combat against the Germans : Rossellini had already wanted Fabrizi to be the priest, and Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei suggested a feature film to cover the two subjects.

That
Wikipedia item, however, goes on to quote Rossellini as saying that it is A film about fear, the fear felt by all of us but by me in particular. I too had to go into hiding. I too was on the run. I had friends who were captured and killed. As portrayed, though the struggle is of a deadly nature and we see death, the zeal of Major Bergmann is amusingly undermined by one of his junior officers, Captain Hartmann (Joop von Hulzen), who is (by his own admission) the worse for drink, and who reports experiences with patriots in France that cast doubt on Bergmann’s faith in his powers of extracting information by interrogation and torture.

A sybaritic and, despite her apparent sympathy, even more ruthless figure is that of Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), who would not be out of place as a Bond henchman (or even villain), in whom and whose environs Amidei (with the collaboration of Rossellini and Fellini) evokes the feeling of The Weimar Republic that we get from Christopher Isherwood via Cabaret (1972). Against such as Bermann and she, Pina and Don Pietro shine, which, despite our knowing that it is an artificial distinction, does not lessen the power of the story.

With a vibrant score by Renzo Rossellini, and its evocative camerawork, the tension that there is in this film is palpable. With the moral argument that the invaders invoke being against history, the resultant way in which courage and resignation can be shown on the part of those fighting back is the stronger : for some reason, between 1951 and 1960, the film was banned in the former West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland).


End-notes

* Another example is La Bataille du Rail (1946).

** Some critics, though, seem not to have been kind on Feist’s performance, and set it aside from that of the others.


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

Let’s make an agreement… ~ Francis

This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

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This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Thanks to @CamPicturehouse's Wes Anderson series, @THEAGENTAPSLEY reports on the wonder of The Darjeeling Limited : http://t.co/E2kNoFdK2k
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 24, 2014

Francis’ (Owen Wilson’s) brothers Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) may have some notion as to why they are in India with him, but we just suddenly start the film by seeing Peter run and make a train that businessman Bill Murray misses*, joining Jack and Francis on the gaily painted several carriages that constitute The Darjeeling Limited. One frankly does not care whether up-market independent train operators such as the Bengal Lancer and this one are a reality in India – one buys into it, because of the sheer persuasiveness of Wes Anderson’s directorial / writing vision :

Just as with the poignantly elaborate set of luggage, Anderson is packaging a concept just for the film, and we do not so much as hesitate to legitimize it with our attention and belief. (Likewise, The Grand Budapest and its mountain perch patently do not exist, but that is the whole point : in that film, the wholly deliberate irony is that the Author who, when younger, met an older Zero, who told of Gustave H. and their earlier adventures and fate, is investing with meaning a story about a non-existent place, and we laugh and cry about it even so.)

The feature, however, is – as stipulated – preceded by a short called Hotel Chevalier (2007), which involves Jack, the room in the hotel in which he has ensconced himself for quite a while (elaborately customizing it), an item of that monogrammed luggage, and a call from and the arrival of Natalie Portman as the woman who has hurt him in some way. The encounter is loaded with suppressed energy, yet at the same time seems low key, with questions and quick-fire, almost knee-jerk, answers, as if this is the endgame to a hard-fought game of chess, reduced to its essentials : she says that she will feel bad in the morning, if they have intercourse, and he responds with ‘That’s OK with me !’.

Such feelings, under the surface but maybe not (fully) acknowledged by either party, prepare us for what is to follow. For the trip on which Peter joins Jack and Francis is on the latter’s obsessive terms (who, we later see, gets it all from their mother Patricia (Anjelica Huston)) – assisted by the enigmatic Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky), who has been engaged to devise, print and even laminate the itinerary as a convenient card, the trip progresses, trying to get spirituality from scheduled stops at this or that holy place.

One is reminded a little, by the trio’s shakes of the head at nothing happening when they have completed some ritual, of the moment, in Beckettt’s Endgame**, when Hamm, Clov and Nagg (three other males), on Hamm's injunction Let us pray to God, adopt 'Attitudes of prayer' : when, afterwards, all three say that nothing took place, Hamm concludes The bastard ! He doesn’t exist***. This ‘reporting back’ is one of the film’s routines, and there is a comic inevitability that this or that procedure hasn’t worked because Peter and / or Jack did not ‘do it properly’.

Through these stipulated activities from Francis, through Jack’s lust, and through Peter embracing danger – as well as from their casual abuse of pain-killers (coincidentally, they also feature throughout Endgame), and even cough liquid (reminiscent of Beijing Punk’s Madame Pearl’s syrup ) – we come to know them all, their inability to keep secrets, their failure to abide by the agreements that Francis procures, and the rebellion that covers mourning, a sense of irredeemable loss.

What does work for them is an event that is entirely off programme, and which sees the trio, going native in Darjeeling Limited pyjamas, where they had not expected to be, but where they are graciously included in what happens. We see them enter into it in slow motion, just as Peter caught the train at the beginning, but this seems fitting, no affectation. The pyjamas are what they offer as the best that they have to fit in, and that is how they come to relate to where they are, rather than continuing to expect the spiritual to come to order.

If you glance quickly at the publicity cut-out for The Darjeeling Limited (2007), it looks like it could patronize India - how untrue !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 20, 2014

Anderson has achieved a rare and lovely thing with this film : not the over-reverential approach of the British in A Passage to India (1984), where India seems so ‘other’ that it is always going to remain at a distance, and not the mixture of the worst of what is almost frivolity and of predictability in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) (such as a hotel not as expected****, run by the stereotypical entrepreneurial dreamer without substance, and where racism can be charmed away by generosity and hospitality).

To which @CamPicturehouse's publicity for the Wes Anderson retrospective draws attention, a friend spotted Grand Budapest's animated look...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 23, 2014

Instead, Darjeeling gives us an immaculately structured work (including the unusual frisson of an apparently separate prelude to the main act), which has been put together and filmed so carefully, with Anderson’s heightened sense of a unity of composition, that it seems to be in the same relation to India, but no less true than, Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (from 1910) to the jungle : our appreciation is heightened by our awareness of the technique behind the art. Plus, of course, the three strong central performances (all of them are Anderson regulars), in which Brody probably has the edge for presence, but Wilson has done some of his best work, and (with Roman Coppola) Schwartzman also co-wrote the script.

20 ways to turn your life into a wesandersonmovie http://t.co/Taz9cGFM95 via @iD_magazine
— Bath Film Festival (@BathFilm) March 13, 2014

End-notes

* A paradigm for life ? How often do we say I missed the boat on that one ?

** Faber & Faber, London, 1964, pp. 37–38.

*** An utterance censored by order of The Lord Chamberlain (when there was such an office), and required to be something more tame.

**** According to IMDb, the British visitors are ‘retirees’, which logically implies that another person (‘the retiror / retirer’) has retired them, not that they retired.


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

I am a big pile of lies ~ Kingo

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23 March

This is a review of Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono) (2013)

It is doubtful that one needs to know the Clint Eastwood original of Unforgiven (from 1992) to appreciate Sang-il Lee’s 2013 tribute version, set on the Japanese island of Hokkaido : one can easily translate a brothel in Wahiro to one in the States, and a ruthless Chief to a sheriff.

What is more likely to attract attention than such comparisons is the sheer beauty of the film, although, because of the samurai component, one is also making mental references to others, such as Kill Bill Volumes 1 (2003) and 2 (2004) and Only God Forgives (2013), neither of which comes off well, especially the latter. The reason being that Tarrantino, as often enough, is so knowing that the result resembles pastiche, rather than homage, and that Winding Refn (as observed) does not even do that skilled work of assimilating his influences.

What an unexpected delight to-night, Sang-il Lee's Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono) (2013) ! Immaculately shot and framed throughout.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 19, 2014

Ken Watanabe (as Jubei) leads a very strong cast, and makes thoroughly credible the struggle that he has with staying true to what his deceased wife taught him – essentially, he is in a double bind, because he either ignores the sacrifice that his friend Kingo (Akira Emoto) made, or he honours him and goes against his new way of life. This, of course, will be what Eastwood faced in some form, but Watanabe is wonderfully open to the contradictions that are in Jubei, back to whether to leave his home and accompany Kingo in the first place.

Directorially (Lee also co-wrote the script), the use of flashbacks, following the historical setting of the scene, to illuminate where Jubei’s character has come from is highly effective : we look at the scenes as if he is reliving them, and, because they are in the snow, they have a strong emotional resonance, because we appreciate that the events that we see are in an environment where food, energy and one’s life’s blood are at a premium.

Koichi Sato, as the Chief Ichizo Oishi, is a force of vengeance and retribution with some resemblances to Only God’s Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), but many times better drawn, for all the presence that Chang has. For, just as that film has its genesis in violence towards a prostitute, we see Oishi mete out what seems to be arbitrary justice, only exacting what amounts to a fine, payable to the owner of the brothel, yet beating up those who are seeking a bounty (which, when it is Jubei, reminds of Julian (Ryan Gosling) taking on Chang).

With Chang, there seems, at times, to be little rhyme or reason in his actions (and we doubt that he is truly human), whereas Oishi is demonstrating that he does not value anything other than what threatens the rule of law (as he interprets and enforces it) : if that requires a humiliating and sustained act of brutality to send a message, that is enough justification for him (as, to an extent, it is for Chang, but then everyone would already have heard of him). And, as viewers, we are torn between the disrespected and disfigured prostitute and her comrades in not having justice (because seen as chattels), and between despising how Oishi abuses his power, even if killing people for reward is clearly a form of lawlessness.

No doubt those pulls in different directions are in the original. Here (although the lack of detail in the IMDb entry does not allow credit to be reliably assigned), the performances from those mentioned, all of the bounty hunters, and the injured prostitute and her champion are all very strong, the music is highly effective, and the sense of place and presence is intense. So far, the film has eight nominations, including one for Watanabe, and two for Norimichi Kasamatsu’s cinematography, and they are well deserved for this strong and beautiful feature.


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Echoes of the future in Beethoven's Septet in E Flat Major, Op. 20 ?

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18 March

A concert given by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), Cambridge, on Tuesday 18 March

This lunch-time’s concert saw a pairing of Versa est in luctum, a new commission by William Cole for the same forces as and with Beethoven’s Septet in E Flat Major from 1800 (Op. 20), a string trio plus double bass, bassoon, clarinet, and horn – the Sinfonia and the Wigmore Hall asked Cole to write the piece after he won the Cambridge University Composers’ Workshop in 2013.

Cole’s piece preceded its illustrious forebear (as Jo Kirkbride’s informative programme note bears testament – in fact, too illustrious for Beethoven’s liking, as he came to rue it as a cultural straitjacket by means of which others sought to confine his artistic development), and ran to around one-quarter of its length, in one movement.

It opened with what seemed to be a canon*, Clare Finnimore (viola) following Marianne Thorsen on violin, which, as it recurred, had increasing levels of interjections from the other instruments. Not necessarily being anthropomorphic about the composition, but the original theme then started becoming fragmentary (and maybe with hints of an inversion ?) before an extrapolation that reduced any resemblance further.


By now, the sound had become an exciting hubbub, but this appearance subsided, leaving the violin over a repeated interval, and with a beat being kept by the bass (Stephen Williams). When this, too, had become intense, there was a long pause, as if the piece might be at an end, but a short pizzicato moment gave way to a section for clarinet (Joy Farrall), cello (Caroline Dearnley) and bassoon (Sarah Burnett). What then sounded like open notes from the horn (Susan Dent) led to a sonority with the reed players, before the work closed with a gesture from bass and cello.

As an experience, Versa est in luctum did not seem as though it were just ten minutes long, as there seemed to be worlds within it : fitting, indeed, as the text comes from the central chapter of what is known as Job’s closing monologue, and, given all that has happened to him over time, is of a reflective nature. It received its World Premiere on Friday in Norwich, and, of course, played with conviction and verve by members of the Sinfonia, was well met in Cambridge.


As to the Beethoven, its six-movement structure began with two marked Adagio, although the first turned to an Allegro con brio. Words that do not always fit in one’s mouth at the same time as thinking about Beethoven, from the opening unison chord it exuded charm and grace in the Sinfonia’s hands. After some writing that felt its way around the dynamics, and a theme that sounded as though it had a statement and a response built into it, the material proper began with a melody that the composer might have been disgruntled to have described as Mozartian, with that sort of ambience for clarinet that he so liked. The succeeding interplay of voices led us back to the beginning, ending soon after with a feeling of suspension.

The cantabile movement that came next gave the melody to the clarinet, with strings underneath, and then passed it to the violin, before a prominent passage for bassoon. An air of expectancy had been built, into which a series of horn notes fed, the strings then providing support as it went on, but leaving still a sense of restraint until the violin emerged and gave the movement its main expressive force. A short piece in Tempo di menuetto followed, with, as in the opening movement, a theme, of an accented nature, and a paired theme, the whole impression being somewhat grand, perhaps military.

A mildly staccato statement of the theme, as used earlier in the work, in the Tema con variazioni : Andante led to a set of six variations, a form that Beethoven was to turn to throughout his career and where his own voice became more apparent. The first variation began with violin and viola, and then introduced the cello, whereas the second had the other players responding to the violin giving the theme, with the cello in its upper register. Next, clarinet and bassoon with the strings beneath them, and then, in a variation reminiscent of a movement twenty-four years later in the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, horn and violin together (then playing quickly underneath, with a pizzicato from cello and bass.

In another variation that evoked later writing, the fifth had some of the character of Beethoven’s masterly writing for string quartet, before the brass and reed players joined in, and with a real quality of sweetness of playing from Thorsen, as the theme passed back and forth. Finally, the bass and the cello in its lower voice were to the fore, and brought the set to a close. In the Scherzo : Allegro molto e vivace, a movement of equivalent length to that of the Minuet, the ‘parped’ horn theme reminded of somewhere in the first two symphonies (No. 1 being the next Opus number, and, as Jo Kirbride usefully tells us, performed at the same concert where this work was premiered). The cello then advanced, supported by the bassoon, with a softer version, and the movement proceeded in sonata form, ending quite quickly, but not before a short ‘pa pa’ from the horn to recall the opening.

Again, as Beethoven was to go on to do (and Mozart (and Haydn) had done before), the Andante con moto alla Marcia; Presto began in a funereal vein, before the full-blown finale broke through, with a great feeling of lightness. Nevertheless, he gave an insistence to the theme, and there were glimmerings of his writing to come in the Symphony No. 7 in A Major, just over a decade later, and wrote captivatingly, which Thorsen brought out, for her instrument. When the theme returned, the balance of the ensemble, as had been apparent all along, was just right, and, after a momentary suggestion that we were veering into the minor, this accurate and emotionally careful drew to a close.

There was immense appreciation for the quality and deftness of the musicianship that we had heard, and the concert will be a treat for Radio 3 listeners in the summer, not least for those who find similar evidence in this work of what was to come. At the same time, one can well understand, as he expressed himself to pupil Carl Czerny, Beethoven’s not wanting to be tied to this piece, and to look forward, not to be asked for something in the more agreeable style of the Septet ! How many times are we grateful to true artists for being true to what they felt that they should compose, or paint, or write…


End-notes

* Which Cole tells us, in his note, is from a fifteenth-century motet by Alonso Lobo, setting a verse featuring instruments from the Book of Job (Job 30 : 31).



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Dreams - and impossible journeys

This is a review of The Rocket (2013)

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19 March

This is a review of The Rocket (2013)

A world of tradition, of reverence, of suspicion and ritual, confronted with a force of nature, the one represented by grandmother Taitok (Bunsri Yindi), the other within Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) : if it had not been for Ahlo’s mother Mali (Alice Keohavong), as a twin* he would not have survived, but he continues to be weighed in the balance as to whether he is a blessing or a curse, one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, in which, despite himself, he places increasing belief. With reason, given what happens in a Fitzcarraldo (1982) sort of episode, when his village’s inhabitants have been required to evacuate.

The representatives of the village have been sold a lie to get them to leave, and even Taitok, despite swearing that she will not leave, does not stay. Dressed and behaving / believing as she does, she seems a constant reminder of what has been left behind, for she is as trapped in her ways as Ahlo seems doomed to be, but we see her make adjustments.

The family leaving their home allows them to become subject to the dynamic of two other people who do not fit in, the young Kia (Loungnam Kaosainam) and her uncle (Suthep Po-ngam), whose real name we once see, but whom Ahlo calls Uncle Purple. It is a surprise in store why that is, but he is as tremendous as the young actors, and an inspiration to Ahlo : once such inspiration means that it is best for the group of adults and children to move covertly on together, as if there appears to be anywhere to go.

Set in Laos, where the States had got involved with the Laotian Civil War in connection with the communist allegiances of nearby North Vietnam and, from 11 December 1965, ran large numbers of sorties with B-52 heavy bombers, parts of the world that we see are littered with unexploded bombs (Sleeping Tigers, as Uncle Purple calls them) and intact bomblets that had been dropped in cluster bombs, and the bombers from 50 years ago are still in the language.

Where the travellers end up, and the ever rebelliously adventurous Ahlo seeks to make his family’s and his footing secure, there is a mixture of the old and the new, of monks embracing the profane, and of beliefs in forces that can make or withhold much-needed rain. Against this backdrop, we see a struggle between mother and son with Taitok and Toma (Sumrit Warin), with mixed messages of encouragement and discouragement and a portion of blame on the side, we find Kia a complementary force to Ahlo (epitomized by the beautiful blooms, dropped on his head, with which she introduces herself), and the functionally ineffectual attempts to rein in Ahlo’s exuberance.

At the end, everyone reaches the improbable prize at the end of the rainbow, and, finally, with recognition for Toma as well as for Ahlo, the former having had to play the underdog and suffer indignation, which was a role of great inner strength for Warin under the spotlight of the more obvious potency of Yindi as Taitok. The exultation not only at the achievement, but what it means for their future, is tinged only by a momentary minor note as Uncle Purple bows out.

Maybe he has sensed that his time has come and that he has fulfilled his purpose by now in Ahlo, maybe it is just his ghost that we see, but it does not stop the film ending on a very high note, with real pleasure at the outcome.

From Red Lamp Films, The Rocket (2013) as reviewed by @THEAGENTAPSLEY - the victory of possibility over probability : http://t.co/UIQT0tTgSR
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 20, 2014


End-notes

* Think of twins, and, once one has swerved around Twins (1988), one inevitably cleanses the palate with the duos from The Shining (1980) or The Matrix Reloaded (2003), where nothing suggests that there is really anything to choose between the siblings.

One might even head out of film altogether and in the direction of The Comedy of Errors, where two pairs of twins wreak havoc (Ahlo ?). In that late sixteenth-century environment, there is nothing to suggest that any moral judgement attaches to one member of a twin over the other, and Viola and her brother Sebastian, in Twelfth Night, are not alone in Shakespeare’s world in being twins blamelessly at the centre of the action : for Anne Hathaway and he even produced twins, Hamnet and Judith.

On the other hand, although what we call the parable of The Prodigal Son is not said to concern twin brothers (as it is really about being in a relationship with a father, but also the envy of not feeling appreciated because another is welcomed home – Abel looked at awry by Cain ?), the sons are quite different from each other in their actions and attitudes, if not at opposite poles as Robert Mitchum’s knuckles are in The Night of the Hunter (1955)…


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