A Night in Tunisia ?*

This is a review of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013)

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11 April (updated 30 April)

This is a review of a special preview screening of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), based upon the novel of that name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and screened at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, on 8 March, followed by a Q&A with screenwriter / director Biyi Bandele

Q&Awith Director of Half of a Yellow Sun @biyibandele yesterday at the @CamPicturehouse @HOAYSMovie pic.twitter.com/v4sxBgVU4P
— Mane Sanchez (@msanchezblesa) March 10, 2014

When one has heard Biyi Bandele talk about discussing making a film with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of her novel, and even had him acceptingly answer one’s question about whether we had been right to feel uneasy sometimes that we were laughing (he wanted to see tragedy in comedy, and vice versa, and referred to ‘gallows’ humour’), there is the danger of losing objectivity, and of failing to say what one heard, saw and felt, because one does not wish to offend. However, the film is the thing being reviewed, and the worst that can happen to it – obviously not as a result of this review – is to be re-edited, censored, or even banned.

There are two neat shots in this film, first where, early on, we move downwards, through the floor / ceiling, and see Olanna (Thandie Newton) at the table, who had just been preening herself upstairs. The other is a similar magic-trick in a way, which is when Odenigbo’s mother is to Olanna’s right (we are facing her), then we move across to look just at her, and, when we move back, Olanna is now sitting next to Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), having another – but related – conversation.

These shots seem quite out of place in the rest of the film, where the next nearest thing is a busy tracking-shot, back and forth outside the home that is being evacuated (though they all act as if they are going on holiday, not least with what they think it necessary to take with them, rather than fleeing) – rather than intensifying a moment that is already tense (please excuse the wordplay !), the tracking is just somewhat irritating.

The aesthetic that gives rise to these devices, which seem out of character with the rest of the film, can therefore scarcely be intended to provide some sort of alienating perspective, since they act in isolation. (However, with the one last mentioned, one could probably seek to justify it, after the fact, by maintaining that it heightens our appreciation of how their bourgeois values have not yet been ground down to face the reality of conflict as against, say, preserving candlesticks.)

Likewise, Olanna and her supposed twin sister Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) really just present as spoilt bitches, not out of place on the set of late-1970s t.v. series Dallas. Though they are certainly not virgins, of course no one watching wants them [to have] to sleep with the minister who has come to dinner to win their father the lucrative contract that [Kainene and ?**] he wants, but that does not make their general attitude and behaviour endearing, any more than it does in the story of Cinderella***.

To some extent, though, that trans-generational revolt provides a sort of alienation – except that the film will also have us believe that they will discover what it is to be a mensch through the horrors and deprivations of the war in Biafra (1967–1970). (It has to be said that, in that, it appears little different from the novel****. It is also little different, say, from The Book Thief (2013), where we see similar kindnesses in the time of war, probably more so, but neither film approaches anywhere near the atmospheric and dramatic status of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).)

According to what it seems Toby Miller (@tobytram) [of Cambridge 105’s ‘Bums on Seats’ radio-show] established in his interview with Biyi Bandele after the screening, the film is actually intended to show a melodrama, whereas, as intimated in the question to Bandele, it appeared that it was perhaps striving to be something else. In any case, if one compares Sun, say, with a dynastic film such as Buddenbrooks (2008) – though any difference is, obviously, largely rooted in the different nature of the original text – the only parent who has any real part is Odenigbo’s Mama (Onyeka Onwenu), and we have a chance to get to know and value her.

Therefore (although this may be a matter of digesting the elements of a novel and making a screenplay from it), we have no further sight of Kainene and Olanna’s father (there is telephone contact*****), and we are never again in Lagos. Tellingly, Bandele had told us that his view is that slavishly trying to capture every strand of story of a novel is best fitted to a t.v. series, not to a film, and that the latter medium best makes a screenplay based on a short story.

Yet what Bandele has nonetheless chosen to make into a film is, of course, a novel, and where he stated that he had had ‘to tone down’ Ejiofor’s character (known between the sisters as ‘The Revolutionary’, seemingly privately) so that he was not overlarge for the screen. When asked if he had relied on his own memories of the civil conflict, Bandele had to point out that he was only aged three when it ended (and, indeed, we can see that the novel’s author Adichie was not born until a decade after him), and we hear that what happened is not talked about now in Nigeria.

Clearly, there are good reasons why we should learn that ‘Biafra’ is more than a name from the 1960s, where it was, why, and why it no longer exists. Thus, in addition to Anika Noni Rose, and Thandie Newton (whom Bandele says he has known since the age of nineteen), let alone the now-celebrated Ejiofor, he also has Joseph Mawle (as Richard) in his cast, plus cinematographer John De Borman, to whom he referred for his work on The Full Monty (1977) (though arguably better known for Made in Dagenham (2010) or An Education (2009) – or even Quartet (2012). However, one cannot help feeling sorry for Ugwu (John Boyega), turned into (compared, one gathers, with the book) someone who is ordered around for much of the time, and only much valued when traumatized.

Sadly, that is too much a paradigm for how the film operates / fails to operate as a whole. It was a valiant effort for Newton, amongst others, to work on through typhoid to complete filming, and for Bandele to wrap with just enough time to let Ejiofor get to the States and straightaway start filming Slave. However, does the film do justice not so much to the novel, but to the history of Biafra and of the Biafran War, in giving proper insights into what was happening then, rather than relying on newsreel (even if that need not have been ineffective - the first clip set the scene wonderfully well) ?


Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) writes more here about the adaptation...


End-notes

* At the party to which (or the one that we see) Kanine and Olanna escape from their father’s house, we hear the distinctive strains of Dizzy Gillespie’s composition A Night in Tunisia – it is a shame that it has not been contrived that we are unaware that they are miming (to a credited version of the tune).

** Kainene is going, as she says that she will be, to Port Harcourt to head her father’s business operation, not continuing her extensive education (unlike Olanna in her academic post). Maybe their father would not listen to Olanna and her about sexual favours for the minister, but the impression is that it had been assumed, never discussed, and that these women suddenly assert their own rights…

*** A certain literalism seems to go with Bandele's approach to film-making, such that we have an unnecessary caption to tell us that where we see Kainene at one point is the airport (it plainly is), and her entry to get married is cued by, of all things, 'The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' (from Handel's oratorio Solomon).

**** * Contains spoilers * The film would have you believe that you have watched a true story, by putting up captions afterwards such as ‘Kainene is still missing’ – given that it is 2014, and that part of the film is set in 1970, this seems a strange assertion, because few people probably consider someone ‘missing’ who has not been seen for more than forty years.

***** Despite an apparent desire to attend to period accuracy for props (e.g. chunky handsets for telephones, with those shell-like cupped mouthpieces), when Olanna uses wine as the means (or catalyst ?) of seduction (the film – maybe, also, the book – plays with drunkenness as a licence for illicit sex (reminiscent of Lot’s daughters ?)), the type of corkscrew that she uses did not exist (according to Wikipedia, it was not invented for another twenty-five years - so certainly not the modern method that she employs, piercing the capsule and pulling the cork through it…).


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

Sir, what are you doing in my house ?*

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

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10 April (updated 13 April)

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

If Xavier Dolan had put all the care and effort of his directing, adapting and acting in Tom at the Farm (2013) into selecting a text...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 10, 2014

If Xavier Dolan had done so, then his work might not have been in vain (unless he had taken another stage-work, August : Osage County** (2013), as a starting-point – though, by contrast, Dolan fully succeeds in not making Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) feel like a play***)…

For, whatever the play by (Michel Marc Bouchard) may have been, Dolan tries to make Tom a sub-Lynchian piece with a horrific undertow, with a vibration set off with Gabriel Yared’s high-frequency string-writing (and the start of a composed soundtrack that seems intrusive to the point of perversity), piccolo even, when nothing is on the screen that gives rise to spookiness, as Tom, arriving at the farm, explores it on his own – cows in a stall, barns and machinery do not resonate with fear, unless, perhaps, they are frightening in their otherness****. However, if one looks at the synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, it claims that Tom is in the grip of grief and depression.

Maybe… Yet, contrary to many people’s belief that it is invisible (Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !), it can be traced in look, posture, demeanour (as was just being written about yesterday in reviewing the superb film The Past (Le passé) (2013)), and Dolan shows no signs, except smiling inappropriately, and a certain clumsiness in conversational pleasantries – which comes across just as a somewhat implausible gaucheness, given that he says that he has a significant role in advertising (of course, that may be a lie).

Not unreasonable for him to be feeling as IMDb describes, but a film should stand for itself, and not rely on any external data to the viewer, and the only fitting account for how Tom appears is that it could be a form of psychotic depression. Clues abound that there is more to what we see than is evident, from a car on a poster with Real Deal as the caption, to the name of the bar (sadly not caught in French (which is in the plural), but something of the kind The Real Thing, to Tom’s hosts disappearing (as if they had never been there), with no sign that they had ever been there.


Suffice to say that, if the whole film is to be interpreted as delusion, induced by a massive natural high, then we are nowhere near the journey from and back to the office in After Hours (1985) (with its inspired dazzling ending, though not the first thoughts for it). We do not even have the resonance of Julianne Nicholson (Ivy), departing from the farm. No, it is then as with The Truman Show (1998) – a paranoid idea about the world blown up into a screenplay, whereas Tom has pretensions of being another Sunset Boulevard [or, originally, Blvd.] (1950) (although actually, if not in its exact scenario, it smacks of Pinter's The Homecoming, with its brooding awkwardness).

One skips to the end, because, with Tom in Tom, one really only cares about – and then relatively little, in fact – what happens to him, which brings us inevitably to the status of what we have seen happening. Is it the psychiatric equivalent of a very bad trip – a Funny Games (1997) without the consequences or implications – and then do we have any reason to be interested… ?


To come, when time and strength permit, a spoilery posting that deals with the rest of the plot, failing which...

'Xavier Dolan's best film', Tom at the Farm (2013) ? Sadly, @indiewire, that just doesn't say very much about the others...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014

End-notes

* A touch of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ – not really built upon in any obvious or coherent way, although Tom has such golden hair…

** Also set in a remote location in North America, and with some challenging family interactions, if of a different kind.

*** Spoiler alert Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily, agrees about the music, but comments instead about the adaptation :

Based on a stage play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who co-wrote the script with Dolan, Tom At The Farm betrays its origins in some overly pretty dialogue and a few scenes (like a tango dance in a barn) where you can practically read the stage directions.


**** Town Mouse and Country Mouse, maybe – given the contrasting setting at the end (apparently an amalgam) ?


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Secrets and lies – behind glass

This is a review of The Past (2013)

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9 April

This is a review of The Past (2013)

The beautifully crafted script of The Past (Le passé) (2013), from its director Asghar Farhadi, reminds of so many strands of literature of the best kind, and all in a very good way (which is because the themes have rung down the ages on account of the issues that our lives together throw up).

Amongst them are : Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (and probably Ghosts), Chekhov in Uncle Vanya (or aspects of The Cherry Orchard, Death and the Maiden (1994) (adapted from Ariel Dorfman’s play), much of Michael Haneke’s cinematic work (not least Hidden (Caché) (2005), or Amour (2012)), to name some principal ones. (And it is only in the title that it bears any relation to Miranda July’s The Future (2011) (even if that film tried something of this kind*) !)

Casting, delivery, posture, gesture, editing – there is nothing to fault here, and the latter, with the other ingredients, means that there is never a moment slack at the wrong time, but, equally, we will be lingeringly with two men who have nothing to say to each other, and keenly, if awkwardly, wonder which will break by uttering something first, or abandoning the stage.

Marie-Anne (or Marie) is a far worthier role for Bérénice Bejo than that of Peppy Miller in The Artist (2011), and one where she can play a part that does not seem a caricature of itself. The Past also has Ali Mosaffa (Ahmad) and Tahar Rahim (Samir) along the other two sides of what is its often triangular heart, which is true all the time, because the centre of what we see is a form whose shape and structure change with time.

The presentation may be linear, but only in the way that, say, one of those Ibsen plays is. Thus, from the first moment when Marie spots Ahmad the other side of a glass partition that separates Arrivals from Baggage Reclamation and tries to attach his attention (before tellingly speaking to him through the transparent obstacle), we find that the past is an all-too-visible barrier in the reactions that are evoked.

In reacting to those three in this film who are sixteen or younger, it could be that acceptable discipline is viewed differently in France, but the way in which Marie and (to a lesser extent) Samir behave towards them in some scenes will shock. When, straight afterwards, Samir takes the time to listen to his son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) and hear what he says, he comes to a better understanding in a very moving moment together, and Fouad and he have then dynamically changed their positions in relation to each other (and, therefore, regarding the others).

Léa (Jeanne Jestin), who seems younger, has less of a role, but, when she challenges Fouad about the account of things that he gave to Marie earlier, the truth of their positions resonates. Likewise, Marie’s fury towards Lucie (Pauline Burlet, whose plausibility as Marie’s elder (16-year-old) daughter is undoubted) abates, as Ahmad knew that it would, but, as in a game of chess – where a player moving a piece can ‘reveal’ an attacking capability of another piece on his or her side, one answered question leads to another – much as steps in a dance (though, in literal terms, this is a piece of cinema that is refreshingly sparing in its score).

In The Past, there are references to depression, but they are no mere tokenistic ones, showing another experience in life that can drastically separate those having it from the world and from loved ones – which is not helped if family, friends, employers, and so on do not understand its capacity for suppression of feeling, even to the extent that nothing reaches through it or at all matters. For Farhadi’s dialogue shows that he knows what he is talking about, and includes scenes both when Marie reminds Ahmad of how it had been for him, and then when he, having remembered that time, talks to Lucie about what depression is like.

Depression is in this screenplay as an integral reflection of our lives, and so Ahmad’s restaurateur friend Shahryar (Babak Karimi), recognizing the pressures on Ahmad, points out to him that he does not belong in this place (he flew in from Tehran days before), here where the other barriers that, in a complex way, the film revolves are doubt, delusion and dilemmas.

Very subtly, without overplaying differences between West and East, Farhadi has Ahmad show that he can come alongside the others, relate to them, and help them to articulate and approach the fears that torment and threaten to overwhelm them. They kick and scream, and he may not always be right (mainly when talking about himself), but there is an empowering that they receive without necessarily appreciating that it came from outside them. However, as the ironic face of one of the impulses that can bring on (or heighten) depression, he is the sort of help to them that one senses that he could never be to himself when still in France.

Here, when Marie and he got soaked walking to the car, he does the right thing and offers to dry the hair at the back for her. However, he is distracted, and maybe he only offered because he thought that he should, and so ends up holding the drier in one place and burns her head – throughout, there are instances of people doing or saying something on the basis that it is expected (with Fouad a largely welcome change). Farhadi permits, amidst a narrative that takes us by surprise, these gentle moments of dramatic irony, when we momentarily see the course of things and smile, or snort with amusement.

This is a stunningly strong film and, agonize as one might that, under it all, it would fall apart and betray its promise, it disappoints in no respect. In short :

The Past is brilliant ! By which @THEAGENTAPSLEY means not yesteryear, but a masterpiece film just seen (once so far) at @CamPicturehouse !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 9, 2014

End-notes

* Another film that tried and, in other ways, spectacularly misjudged was the histrionic Dust on our Hearts (Staub auf unseren Herzen) (2012), complete with its own scene with paint...

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We’re all different on the inside

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

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8 April (updated 9 April)

This is a review of Starred Up (2013)

It was a very good thing not to have seen the poster for Starred Up (2013) before the screening, which is where the tag-line for this posting comes from – accepted that posters (and trailers) are to convey messages that their makers think will ‘sell’ the film, and those interests may be divergent from those who made the film, but still… Whatever intention there was to allude to psychological truth, the clanging impression was of a gaudy headline from The Sun !

There have been powerful films concerning prison in recent years : Cell 211 (Celda 211) (2009) has a relentless, driving energy (not unlike that of Drive (2011)) – even if it does not manage to disguise a fatal flaw at the centre of its plot ; Hunger (2008) has a very different raw strength, and a far greater one than that of 12 Years A Slave (2013) ; even Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein in I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime) (2008) evoke an experience of a prison that is never seen.


However, despite Starred trying to get us to believe that it is powerful by the incessant spitting out of words such as ‘cunt’ and its accompanying violence / brutality of a physical kind, it is not. As that tag-line suggests, it feels as though it has more in common not with, say, Steve McQueen’s vision in Hunger, but with t.v.’s long-running series Porridge (and that a comedy !).

Saying this goes against the trend of appreciation for this film (and / or its lead) (as it did with Slave), but one has to say what one saw, heard, felt, believed – just as much as with a concert in, say, not joining in those giving Sir John Eliot Gardiner an ovation for the Monteverdi Vespers (1610).

No one is Fletch[er] (Ronnie Narker – oops, Barker !) in this film, but the character of ‘Genial’ Harry Grout (menacingly played by Peter Vaughan in the series) has become the softer, cardigan-wearing Spencer (Peter Ferdinando, looking quite a bit as he did for Tony (2010) – sadly, unlike other reviewers, IMDb is not much help, as has been found before, for checking these things). (Probably he has his reasons for carrying respect and having the ear of Governor Hayes* (Sam Spruell), but they are not visible, unlike the trophies of doing so.)

With the Grout figure as Spencer, his interventions (or attempts at them) and / or those of Hayes apart, the film is essentially the triangular form of father (Neville Love), son (Eric Love) and therapist (Oliver), which seems like some secular form of The Trinity. Possessive love (Love !), telling people what to do, disobedience, helping others to help themselves, envy, corruption, adopting final solutions (ends, not means) – almost a catalogue of The Seven Deadly Sins (and the smallest hint of the Classical Virtues in the midst).

People say that Jack O’Connell (Eric) and Ben Mendelsohn (Neville) were strong, but probably the more impressive scenes were joint work, the complex interactions between those in Rupert Friend’s (Oliver’s) threatened group : amongst whom, IMDb seems to help find at least Anthony Welsh (Hassan) and David Ajala (Tyrone). Screenwriter Jonathan Asser is reported as having run such a group, so one is necessarily prevented from querying the credibility or the dynamics within the regime of such a venture (even though it could still be a rarity), yet, at the same time, one wants to disbelieve – depending on when this is meant to be set – that this initiative would happen in a prison, but not be (or not properly) supported by the authorities.

One also relies on Asser for a notion of prison life, but, as has been suggested above, the portrayal seems almost second hand, and not visceral to the core, but only superficially, in that it echoes with HMP Slade in a way that the exemplars cited do not. Yet, in Porridge, we are carefully introduced to slang such as ‘snout’ (because comedy does not work best if the audience is lost), whereas here almost too few concessions are made – fail to catch what being starred up means (which, it appears, Eric views as a badge of honour**), and there are no second chances.

In fact, it has been said that the DVD release will have, if not exactly subtitles, then some method for making the fleeting explicable – quite apart from the fact that the medium also allows the action to be paused and replayed. If that is correct***, then one must judge for oneself whether such a move suggests that there is an element of misjudging what a general viewer grasps, as against accustomed reviewers (though they may have the luxury, if not of a screening that allows them to revisit in this way, then a so-called screener, effectively an advance DVD).


* May be spoilers beyond this point *

The violence in the film convinces, as does the anger and all its forms of expression. The setting and the degradingly impersonal admission process (when we do not know who Eric is) speak volumes, and, if one’s duties have ever taken one to a prison as a visitor, the aural and tactile sense of door after door being unlocked****, gone through, and locked again (so that there is level after level hindering one’s return) is frighteningly real, almost as being lost in a labyrinth is.

@GavinMidgley's @TakeOneCFF review is well worth a read (he found 'stock characters' and 'stretched' credibility) : http://t.co/oit4AbfWDZ
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 9, 2014

It may just be individual taste whether Friend, Mendelsohn and Ferdinando seem persons or stereotypes, in writing, casting and demeanour. O’Connell, scripted as a loose cannon in Eric, is fine enough, but does it carry a whole film – and would Eric do things just because he can, yet listen to a different voice (of Oliver) and stop (and how different would this voice really be, or is it that he has heard other such voices before ?) ? Rational enough that Eric later imputes motives with which he is familiar to question the reason for what that voice / Oliver says, but why back off from brinkmanship ?

The rest of the film purports to explore this Eric to whom we have been introduced, but how much more do we actually see ? – and what could we have been shown… ?


End-notes

* Can IMDb really be right that there are two prison governors, because the person credited as Governor Cardew (Sian Breckin) clearly ‘pulls rank’ on him… ?

(Needless to say, pulling rank – or claiming that one has the rank to pull – is a large part of this film.) When it comes to the three main characters that are identified, IMDb does not even seem to know that the common surname is Love.


** * Contains some spoilery, detailed comments *

He by no means has the smallest ego in the piece, but – from what one can gather – the lack of contact between father and son spans at least a decade, and nothing much is given about his time between then and what brought him to the young offenders’ institution. (It is unknown whether relatives (Neville knows that Eric is there and who he is) would be incarcerated together generally, or as here – maybe Asser knows ?)

It remains to be judged whether this is right about the film, but, when a high percentage of the prison population has untreated (or even undiagnosed) mental-health conditions, it treats the people whom we see as Porridge might. So they have personalities and peccadillos, but mainly not problems of this kind.

In our focus, a select few get a group version of what is delivered on a one-to-one basis in films such as Good Will Hunting (1997) (other examples abound, before and since, of therapy and cinema), the others maybe nothing, and is that what – or only what – Eric needs ? (The counter-attack that he launches on someone whom he wrongly thinks is approaching with evil intent hints that there is more going on.)


*** In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw handily tells us :

The film's press pack came with a glossary explaining to reviewers some of the other code-words: "kanga" meaning officer; "tech" meaning mobile phone; "kick off back door" meaning anal sex, and "straightener", meaning pre-planned fight.


**** At the crucial time, however, conveniently no clanking and clunking, and more like Peter Gabriel’s ‘drawers that slide smooth’ (‘Mercy Street’, from the album Us).


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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)