You say that, because you’ve been here for a while ~ Rose

This is a review of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 February

This is a review of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013), seen at a press-screening at The Institute of Contemporary Art (@ICA) in advance of its series
Catalan Avant-Garde

The season opens on 28 February 2015, and, with La Plaga screening on Tuesday 27 October, runs until Friday 18 December, the full programme being (all screenings at 8.50 p.m.) :

Saturday 28 February
Sobre La Marxa (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013) followed by a Q&A with director Jordi Morató

Tuesday 28 April
El Cafè de la Marina (The Marina Café) (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Sílvia Munt

Friday 26 June
Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What's Best for Her) (2013)

Friday 28 August
Born (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Claudio Zulián

Tuesday 27 October
La Plaga (The Plague) (2013)

Friday 18 December
El cant dels Ocells (Birdsong) (2008) followed by a Q&A with director Albert Serra


The physicality of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013) is evident before the first frame is seen, there in the sound of what could – emerging from a blacked-out screen – have been energetic sex, but is another form of exercising, Iurie* wrestling in a practice session at the gym.

In fact, the notion of the tactile, or the substantiveness of matter and of action, could easily be perceived as the theme around which this film is built – and, on the natural-world side, we are (perhaps inevitably) reminded of Terrence Malick, with (in another era) undertones of The Book of Exodus and Old Testament judgement in Days of Heaven (1978) (or even, before that, in Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919))…

However, not least as this is in ICA’s series of films, grouped under the heading Catalan Avant-Garde, it is arguable that the film also, and more subtly, meditates on the nature of choices, whether or not our own : some of them do not always prove to leave us where we expected to be, but, in retrospect, we can still very clearly trace them back to where we started**. It is probably universal to experience the feeling that we have striven to get somewhere (or have been propelled towards it), and almost everyone in this film not only says states what his or her story is, but also has to address it in some way.

This state of knowing why we are where we are is by contrast with our casual, everyday decision-making, where we might easily have forgotten our motivation (or the impulse for change) – much as we might have discarded our rough working for a plan, or a calculation. Here, our original aspiration, what it was all for, has not been submerged, so, if asked to account for living in (or not living in) X, we can frequently say straightforwardly that we moved to this house, took this job, because of Y. Here, all the principal figures know why they are where we see them, even if that explanation no longer really works as a sufficient one for why they have to remain, or choose to remain.

On this level, one is reminded more than a little of another Catalan film in this series, which screened twice (both times with Q&As) at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) : Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013). That said, director and co-writer Mar Coll comes at this question differently, and thus it is not from a choice that leads us elsewhere, but from other people’s expectations after a serious accident***. Here, Geni (wonderfully played by Nora Navas) is in the position of finding her relations to her life, her family, her job, her friends all in transition, because she desires what people want for her, but there are things about her now that they do not realize – or will not acknowledge : by contrast, La Plaga has several people on the verge of the unforeseen consequences of their actions, and of the plans that lay behind them.

A closer reference than that in Tots volem, although that film’s intense connection with the experience of the linked issues of physical and mental disability assuredly takes it out of the mainstream, is with the even more experimental film Sieniawka (2013), which also screened twice (with Q&As) at Cambridge (in 2013). The connection is largely in the blurring between acting and footage originally taken for pure (sic ?) documentary purposes, because we emerge from the unexplained happenings outside of a psychiatric institution, whose name (taken from its location) gives the film its title, to quiet, often almost painfully drawn-out sequences in it, before the film finally takes us out again :

One would have to be uncertain about calling Sieniawka a documentary, even in its long central part (where – one is told – it was filmed as it is seen), but one is likewise uncertain about what is captured, what re-created, in La Plaga. The distinction that one could perhaps draw is that it is of far less consequence, in the latter case, which is which****. Likewise because the performances / characters (as themselves), in particular, of Maria Ros and Rosemarie Abella are so strong, one feels for what is happening between them when one is in the care of the other, and more poignantly, since, as Rose tells Maria, neither really had wanted to be where necessity has taken them.

The film appears to unfold essentially chronologically, and some developments (though they are not always explained, not even later on) are shown in a sequential manner. However, it often enough floats free of requiring a structure – for those who watch a film such as Amour*** (2012), and do not desire everything to be spelt out, it will pose no obstacles. None, that is, beyond those of relaxing into trusting one’s intuition, and of learning not to concentrate too much on the detail of some screen-time activity or specificity (e.g. wrestling, or dancing) :

For the more that, at such moments, one observes La Plaga in what seem its intended broad terms (and filters out what is extraneous to the scene), the less one may pose oneself a great effort for low yield. That may sound like a quite negative comment, but it is the truest way to watch kindred types of film to this one, such as Sacro GRA (2013) – with, also, its placing of the rural in relation to the urban (and hints of Aesop’s Fables, with that of ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’ ?) – or Leviathan (2012), or Samsara (2011).

In essence, then, one could regard these films as long narrative poems, rather than sonnets, which one can hear in under a minute (and almost mentally analyse as they are being read). For that reason, they need to be taken in, as a whole, and without anxiety about, or over-attention to, the content (save in relation to its place in the general form) – for some, perhaps a different way of watching, and of being with, a film ?


End-notes

* Iurie’s name, in a sans-serif typeface, looks as if it begins with a lower-case ‘l’, and he was playing [a version of] himself. (Not that it matters much to an appreciation of the film, but so was everyone.)

** Quite a difficult read, in Samuel Beckettt’s canon from the early 1960s, but maybe one is reminded, in all this, of the schema of his Comment c’est (which Beckettt translated into English from the original French as How It Is) ?

*** I.e. that one can climb back and resume one’s life, and that, if one can, one should. In Amour (2012), Michael Haneke directs Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant in giving us the life after another (less clearcut ?) medical emergency, and, likewise, we have the hard kind of choices that Nora Navas (Geni) is seen making, under Mar Coll’s direction, in Tots volem.

**** The extent to which Sieniawka feels exploitative is one of the topics handled in the Festival review.


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

Strange transmissions

This is a review of Father and Son (2003)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 February

This is a review of Father and Son (2003)

Sokurov is often referred to as Aleksandr, but is here credited as Alexander. In any case, his directing gives us a screen-world that mixes (as T. S. Eliot has it*), memory and desire, except that it is memory and desire and dream… Dreaming, though, where son can talk to father from outside it (and vice versa), and ask what it is like, which Russell Hoban prefigured by publishing Amaryllis Night and Day in 2001 (hardly uniquely, since it is likewise the stuff of Ursula Le Guin and Earthsea, which has its roots elsewhere).

Ah, @bluenoterecords, but New York City (with The Peter Malick Group) is a great @NorahJones album before that... ! :)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 11, 2015

In no way repeating Mother and Son (1997), but not disappointing those who watch Father and Son (2003) by the strength of the performances or the writing, Sokurov dwells on the awkwardnesses in life that bring us so close or so far apart (as Peter Gabriel puts it**) : British and Russian politeness / society are not poles apart, and changing the subject is just as much part of (Chekhov or) this film as is suddenly talking about the weather.

A delirious moment, of nigh-febrile intensity, begins the film, bringing us at once inside the physicality of Alexei and his dad’s life and love, both for others and for each other. To this kind of soldierly behaviour, not only Britishness may not easily relate, and so find in it the homoeroticism that Sokurov seems to have wanted to dismiss [NB link is to a review that mentions Sokurov's reaction], even if there is quite intentional ambiguity about so much in what we see.

So, in a beautifully crafted and cut-together scene, where Aleksei Neymyshev (Alexei) talks to Marina Zasukhina through, and around, the narrow aperture of a window, we do not even know for sure – though we may surmise, since this is in a barracks – why the window cannot be opened more widely, let alone who they are to each other, or why Alexei’s father (Andrei Shchetinin) has also come to visit. Later, the script has Alexei almost stumble upon an encounter that almost mocks, perhaps, Shakespeare’s balcony scene, yet at the same time bringing out the tension and sense of daring in wooing, as in any interaction.

To say little more, because the film needs to speak for itself and to a willing recipient, the dialogue, and Sokurov’s tight direction of scenes, both keep at the human level. Even so, the filming introduces visual distortions, say, with the tram, or has us impossibly trying to follow ‘the action’ of Alexei with, and in the company of, his fellow military colleagues, wrestling and struggling in pursuit of exercise and expertise in hand-to-hand, unarmed combat – watching too closely, or trying too much to follow, and missing what else is in the film-frame.

Seen at @CamPicturehouse : thoughtful sound-design, a score meditating on Tchaikovsky, a restricted colour-palette... Father and Son (2003).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2015

If Chekhov is a struggle (because we cannot see, or relate to, what is unsaid in all that is said in, say, Uncle Vanya, or The Seagull), or if Pinter’s wordy silences seem awkward (which serve a similar purpose, at times, of making us aware of the underlying sub-texts to our lives and actions ?), that may disincline us to watch Father and Son. Yet one could still try it, but by giving oneself to 83 mins in the undiluted medium of cinema – without trying to understand how the reimagined musical scores or its interplay with the soundscape work, or the heightening and lowering effects with light : so, surrendering, as to a dream-world that is another’s life, to what the camera shows us, chooses to show us.


End-notes

* In the very opening of Book I (‘The Burial of the Dead’) of ‘The Waste Land’ (although only a cursory look at the Faber & Faber facsimile and transcript that Valerie Eliot edited soon has one wondering whether it is Eliot’s poem, or that of Ezra Pound, to whom (in 1925) it was dedicated, and who is credited : Il miglior fabbro). Whilst we are contemplating Eliot, the fact that filming took place in St Petersburg and Lisbon has given something of the effect of his ‘Unreal City’ (via Charles Baudelaire) in Book III (‘The Fire Sermon’, heading the fourth block of lines).

** To quote the lyrics of the track ‘That voice again’ on the album So (or is it So ?).

*** Symbolically, does either desire it – or, rather, to continue to peer through the crack, or through the bottom of the pane ? Cinematically, which is what is posing these questions to us, the effect caught is unnerving, electrifying, and perhaps infuriating both in and outside the action, as we try to address what we are seeing…


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

Un séjour avec soju ?

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 February

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014), watched at a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), on Thursday 5 February 2015

Introductory - other important Doona Bae roles :

With Air Doll (2009), Cloud Atlas (2012), A Girl at my Door (2014), a pattern ? : sex-toy / fabricant / girl becoming woman, @Doonabaefanz ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 6, 2015

As the Tweet (inevitably pithily) tries to say, there are some significant roles for Doona Bae (or, at any rate, those whose existence is easily known in the West) that appear to be linked (whether that reflects the nature of roles offered to, as well as accepted by, Doona Bae).

When Nozomi, the doll that Hideo (Itsuji Atao) buys in Air Doll (2009), comes to life (as played by Doona Bae), the doll itself / herself is a substitute for a failed affair, and Nozomi is rarely quite one with the world into which she emerges (and from which she ultimately departs) except to the extent that she makes a life for herself and finds others who understand her and her experience.

The idea of a doll come to life is, at heart, just as much a metaphor* – it is up to the viewer with what the metaphorical connection itself is being made – as it is in the case of the so-called fabricants in Cloud Atlas (2012), with Sonmi-451** proving the tenets of AI, in that these created life-forms do become wholly sentient, although only intended to be unemotional, robotic drones.

That said, setting apart The Animatrix (2003) (and its engaging depiction of The Rise of The Machines, desiring equality with mankind – as foreshadowed by Samuel Butler in Erewhon), it is one that the Wachowskis, elsewhere, largely wish to resist in the Matrix world (starting with The Matrix (1999)). For Neo appears to assert a primacy of humanness / humanity – although, in the eyes of The Architect (and on some other scale), Neo may just as much be [reducible to] a piece of code as, in Jupiter Ascending (2015), Jupiter Jones is considered to be genetically identical to the mother of Lord Titus.

However, in this film, Doona Bae (Inspector Young-Nam Lee) is not playing a doll who lived, or a replicant who discovered feelings (including sexual arousal), and became a rallying cry for generations to come, but is a woman, taking care of the girl of the title(not least in the original title, where she is named). Albeit at Lee’s door is not where we first see her, for she is being bullied, and there are some tensions built into that premise…***

In any case, the girl (Dohee) is a mirror to Lee, and she is played with such great plasticity by Kim Sae Ron that one could not believe that one or two other girls had not been sharing the part – an effect not accounted for just by make-up and hair. Lee’s identification with Dohee, and her concomitant compassion and malleability / indulgence, is obvious from the start, though not the depths of – or the reasons for – it.


Whereon hangs the film, were it not that :

* Whether or not one’s constraints are budgetary ones (according to Wikipedia®, the film’s budget was just US $300,000), what the film presents as a small coastal settlement is even more obviously unpopulated than it would be compared, say, to shooting in Seoul – at least, what we see must be a small quarter of Yeosu (which research suggests is actually a city, not a town)

* Even if the script wants to explain that situation away, by saying that Koreans no longer want to live / work there, and that only the person keeping the workers there are in hand is local : in that case, what need a police station, with not a few officers, at which Lee is the ‘station chief’, if the only significant activity is aquatic in nature ?****

* In fact, the cast is so thin on the ground that, apart from the denizens of a hair salon cum village hub, and the group of people who are momentarily present when Lee moves into supposedly temporary accommodation, we have already met everyone else. (Although Lee apologizes to her landlady for the inconvenience of her unexpected arrival, conveniently there is no sign that she is ever going to be housed anywhere else.)

* The world of this film, then, revolves unconvincingly around only the workers, Dohee’s father (who is in charge of the workers, and is the somewhat erratically written and drawn father of Dohee*****), Lee’s fellow officers, and a cashier of a supermarket in an unspecified location (but, in the locality, a police officer does not even recognize Lee whilst she is busy with her bottles of water).

Thank you, @CamPicturehouse and @jackabuss for having @THEAGENTAPSLEY : Doona Bae did well with a difficult role, as did young Kim Sae Ron.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 6, 2015

Doona Bae and Kim Sae Ron are both excellent in their roles. Sadly, theirs are the only ones with any substance, for not only is Dohee’s father a cipher (of parental drunkenness), but so is her grandmother – who seems strangely reminiscent of [a more aggressive version of] the one who is initially unsympathetic in Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket(2013) (which is set in Laos)…

NB Possible spoilers in this paragraph
As to Doona Bae’s character, it depends intimately, and even intensely, on that played by Kim Sae Ron, to the extent that it is questionable whether they are, apart from on the level of the attribution of dialogue, actually separable. That notion, if one were seriously encouraged to entertain it from the start to finish in the film, could have been its saving from its immersion in banality, as well as the need to believe that, although Lee is a police inspector, she is not only very naive in her personal dealings, but also lacking in being even plausibly streetwise.

By choice of film to appear in, Doona Bae seems in danger of not usefully claiming for herself the territory of the saintly fool, too good for this world, but forced to be in and of it [as in The Idiot (Idioot) (2011)] : it may suit her aesthetic to take such roles, but they do not ultimately flatter or, more importantly, use her talents. Yes, of course it is a delight to see her infectious smile break through, after sombre scenes where she is forced to be the celebrated guest at some grim event for her induction, but showing wearing ‘a mask’ can only be done so many times (even to the extent that spring water is turned into some sort of saké – or vice versa), however well Doona Bae carries it off, before it become stale.


This film, almost inevitably, reminded of Humbert Humbert (James mason) in Lolita (1962) and of the eye of the beholder, but also of many another scenario where one properly suspects that manipulation (masked by apparent innocence) is at work. For, no doubt for reasons relating to her own past, Lee trusts Dohee (for example, there is an un-ironic scene with tears, harp in the score, and Lee’s tender reaction), rather as Sean Connery does Tippi Hedren in Marnie (1964). However, viewers of, say, Catalan cinema may be reminded more by Dohee of Nico (David Solans) in Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), and doubt the wisdom of Lee’s faith (however much, as heavily implied, Dohee may be the imprint of a young Lee).

The reason being that this is one of those films that opens with a car, clearly being driven a distance, with what we know – from looking towards the front of the car and through the windscreen – is literal baggage in the back. And that, perhaps, is the downfall of any sense of (surprise at) the unfolding of the story, on which it seems to have depended, whereas it all seems – without suggesting dramatic irony – so patent, right from seeing the arrival in a place with a small-town mentality. In Peter Gabriel’s words (from ‘Big Time’, on his album So) :

The place where I come from is a small town
They think so small, they use small words
But not me, I'm smarter than that,
I worked it out


End-notes

* This has been a topos since, at least, Adam was fashioned from clay (Genesis 2:7), proceeding through the Greek mythology of Talos and of Hesiod’s Pandora, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and Pygmalion’s statue there, Paulina’s in The Winter’s Tale, Bernard Shaw’s reimagining of Ovid in Pygmalion (and its own reimagining in My Fair Lady (1964)), etc., etc.

** Doona Bae is also credited, by IMDb (@IMDb), as playing Sonmi-351 :

DOO- means STAR...NA- means BEAUTIFUL...So... 'DOONA' means 'BEAUTIFUL STAR' <3 It's perfect name for her <3 <3 <3 pic.twitter.com/19ITip5om0
— I Love DOONA BAE (@beautifulstar_B) May 18, 2014

*** The (apparent) failure to envisage any consequences of the isolated example of intimidation by peers is one that the plot seeks to gloss over by, much later, having Lee stated to be such a feared force (this fear seems little evident at the), and by locating the main time-period of the film outside term, so that nothing comes of it.

Maybe, but it did seem, at one point, as though the serious incident that we witness, where Lee’s mere show of authority is not taken seriously until it becomes referable to their middle school (and whether she follows it up seems doubtful – the plot just seems to have her forget about the issue) : Lee does not, at any rate (which seems to indicate a late shoe-in) raise the question with Dohee until it is unconscionably late, if something had been continuing…

**** It is hardly to be referred to on account of being a better film, but My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) at least avoids one feeling that Baran (Korkmaz Arslan), its police officer, is on anything other than a perilous, corrupt frontier (happily joined there by Govend (Golshifteh Farahani)). The world of A Girl is actually such a world, but with an implausible veneer of law enforcement, and of seeming to be a home to generally law-abiding folk…

***** Regrettably, both note-taking and IMDb let one down on crediting the actor and his role ! However, we are saved NB Link is to a summary of the plot by Wikipedia®, which tells us that he is Park Yong-ha (played by Song Sae-byeok).


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

Elixirs of youth, utilitarianism, and Sonmi-451

This is a partly completed review of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a partly completed review – it will certainly spill over into another posting – of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

#JupiterAscending is a stunning sci-fi adventure and comes to cinemas TODAY! Book now: http://t.co/LDBOhFIEai pic.twitter.com/8IOwrcSnpV

— Warner Bros. UK (@WarnerBrosUK) February 6, 2015

5 February

Someone (whose Tweet cannot now be located) was replying to an invitation from BBC’s Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) for comment, and described Jupiter Ascending (2015) as ‘baffling’ and / or ‘confusing’ (in such a way that made clear that this / these description(s) was / were not commendations) :

Well, if one watches a film such as Father and Son (2003), and expects it all to be explained and tied up by the end, then that ‘just ain’t life’, so Screen 3 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) this afternoon at 4.30 would have been the wrong place to be (if one thinks that this film (or, say, Caché (Hidden) (2005)) should not baffle or confuse, even though life can and does)…

Before Jupiter Ascending (#JupiterAscending), Cloud Atlas (2012) was a long, hard look at repeating patterns, and the related potential for our kindnesses and cruelties to reverberate beyond our own time. (Although that is also, in The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the explicit message at the end of the trilogy – even if some resent even the existence of the two companion films to The Matrix (1999).)

Almost necessarily, Jupiter Ascending (2015) does not seek to cover that ground again, but trust, deceit and betrayal, and the nature of reality, have been integral parts of The Wachowskis’ screen-worlds since The Matrix, and they are here, too. We may tend to call what used to be ‘personnel’ by the name HR. If so, we overlook what these film-makers keep returning to, the behaviour (and morals) of those who see their fellow human-beings as ‘resources’ (thus, the earlier film has Jim Broadbent (as Timothy Cavendish) exploited by his family, and David Gyasi (Autua, a free man in slavery))…

Yes, The Wachowskis have 'delivered an action film', but what and where is the action, and what levels of reality (mirrored by different grading of CGI versus live action) are we meant to perceive ? :

Much muchmore of an action film than Cloud Atlas (2012), or even the intense parts of the Matrix films, but no worse for that, @BBCFilm2015
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2015

That said, the amount of undiluted action is far greater, and it as though the proportion of threat, pursuit, and rescue in the time-period of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) and Chang (Jim Sturgess) had expanded proportionally to fill out the rest of Cloud Atlas. One will have to come to the action (and the nature of what action depicts / denotes on a cinema screen) at a later date, but it is not as if Lana and Andy Wachowski, always wearing their cine-literacy easily, have deprived those less keen on it of plenty of other insights.

Some key references (not exclusively to this one film of theirs) are :

* Metropolis (1927)

* Carry on Cleo (1964)

* Brazil (1985)*

* Akira (1988)

* Looper (2012) (mixed with that scene from North by Northwest (1959))

* Platonic Ideals / ‘The Theory of Forms’ / οὐσία (or ‘ousia’)

* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) / The Makropulos Case (Leoš Janáček (based on Karel Čapek’s play)) / Bernard Williams’ essay of that name**

* Free will v. determinism / the craze for 'genetic screening'

* Etc., etc. – and one should not doubt, when The Matrix (1999) alluded to Lewis Carroll and The Wizard of Oz (1939), amongst others – that these references are any more than coincidental !


So what, also, about these possibilities (arising from that Film 2015 questioning / Tweeting) ? :

Sean Bean just compared Jupiter Ascending to Shakespeare...will Danny, Claudia and Ashley agree?
— Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) February 4, 2015

Equally, since Redmayne(or was it Bean ?) mentioned Shakespeare to @BBCFilm2015, there's also The Casket Scene in The Merchant of Venice...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2015

As to the film more than twenty-four hours later, it is still a fertile ground for reflection, because its makers’ knowingness should never be taken for granted.

Might need time to bed down, @BBCFilm2015 - though not taking itself seriously is an asset, and the grandiose use of cathedrals / museums !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2015

Yes, it's easy to mock Jupiter Ascending, but god bless the Wachowskisfor making it. It may be nonsense, but it's *progressive* nonsense!
— Simon Renshaw(@SiRenshaw) February 4, 2015

Then again, one does not please everyone... :

“It shifts from a shambles to a fiasco.” @PeterTravers skewers the new Wachowskis’ film #JupiterAscending: http://t.co/VXKUL3KuSe
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 5, 2015

More to come, but, for those who like spoilers, here are some Tweets in the meantime…

@PhildeSemlyen It used it so well though! (Genuinely impressed) *Goes home to clean the toilet and sell my eggs*
— Sam Clements (@sam_clements) February 4, 2015

Flying crocodiles. A toilet cleaning montage. A woman who can conduct bees. I implore you, see Jupiter Ascending as soon as you can.
— Simon Renshaw(@SiRenshaw) February 4, 2015

#Dippy goes out in style! Catch @NHM_London in #JupiterAscending, our Location of the Month: http://t.co/QlvZqpmfzS pic.twitter.com/AkIbxB9kjO
— Film London (@Film_London) February 5, 2015

End-notes

* With even a little cameo from its own Terry Gilliam, an influence to which The Double (2013) also nods*, with what it has become fashionable to call its steam-punk feel. [Also in Paddington (2014), though perhaps distilled through Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter films (numbers 1 and 7 ?).]

** Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, was also rather fond of opera...


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

Hints of Schnitzler at Slapstick Festival

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924) with harp score from Elizabeth-Jane Baldry at Slapstick Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January (1 February, updated with commentary on the film / more of the introduction)

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924), as introduced at Slapstick Festival by Lucy Porter and screened with a new score from,

and performed by, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on Thursday 22 January 2015

The introduction
Lucy Porter’s rather scatty introduction – but we forgave her that for her enthusiasm for the film to come (with even an assurance of A raunchy sex-scene involving a boiled egg*) – conjured with names such as Warner Bros, Ernst Lubitsch and Marie Provost (who, as Lucy said, stole every scene)…

The Marriage Circle (1924), via @SlapstickFest at @wshed, sets standards that films 90 years later overlook : poise, irony, pacing, editing.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 23, 2015

We learnt, also, that it was Ernst Lubitsch’s second feature, after having come to Hollywood at the behest of Mary Pickford. [The screenplay was ‘drafted’ – so the word has it in the credits – by Paul Bern, after the stage-play by Lothar Schmidt.] Adolphe Mejou (Professor Stock) was to become best known for Howard Hughes’ The Front Page (1931), and, for The Birth of a Nation (1915) [directed by one of Pickford’s fellow United Artists], actor Monte Blue (who gives us the smooth, if guileless, Dr Braun) had been a stuntman.

More curiously still, Lucy dispelled the story that Marie Prevost had committed suicide and been eaten by her dog : it appears that (a little as in >The Artist (2011) ? - please also see below), she had actually ‘piled on the pounds’, but then dieted to excess, and succumbed to malnutrition. As Lucy commented, an unusual piece of information to precede a comedy, but all was well, because, when Elizabeth-Jane Baldry had been enthusiastically welcomed, they quipped again about that moment with the boiled egg !



The score
Even more so than exponents of the guitar, those of the harp love the form that their instruments take. Yes, sax-players, too, will exhale breathily through their instruments, and also use the sound of their opening and closing keys, and the rods and key touches that operate them, but a concert harp is large (so is, in its way, a theorbo – with its long, free strings), and hence, for example, tapping, knocking or running one’s fingers along the soundboard or body all have much resonance to them.

Composer and harpist Elizabeth-Jane Baldry is acutely aware, in her film-scores for solo harp, that cinema is not only a visual, but also a tactile medium, and so she has given great thought to being ingenious with the production not of every sound-effect (for this is not [attempting to be] live foley, and the best accompaniment to silent film is more like poetry than absolute mimesis), but the ones that psychologically speak volumes** (in a highly Freudian film), amongst which are :

* The springs of Professor Josef Stock’s exercise-machine (in which, to the exclusion of his younger wife Mizzi (Marie Prevost), he seems overly interested)

* A shutting series of doors (there are many opening and closing doors in The Marriage Circle) as Dr Franz Braun leaves the Stocks’ apartment

* Mizzi’s shock, as she depresses a cluster of notes on the piano keyboard, when she realizes that she has already met Charlotte’s husband

* Chimes that reinforce the sense of urgency as Dr Braun realizes that he cannot afford to wait for another taxi

* Tense moments when the telephone jaggedly rings and is answered to significant effect

At @wshed, @SlapstickFest gave us two wonderful things : The Marriage Circle (1924) and @oldweirdbritain's new score. Together ? Stunning !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 23, 2015

The film is a delight, but bring an intelligent piece of cinema alongside a score that has viewed the film with great intelligence and which is played with conviction and verve, and everything is enhanced, the knowingness of the screenplay and direction, the sharpness of the editing, and the depth of the acting :

Even knowing John Sweeney / @oldweirdbritain [Elizabeth-Jane Baldry], they amazed at @SlapstickFest with how they inform with their playing.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 23, 2015

The synergy has been demonstrated again and again, from (to name but two) Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) playing Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930) at Cambridge Film Festival / #CamFF 2014 (@camfilmfest) to Elizabeth-Jane with The Phantom of The Opera (1925, but revised 1929) at the curious St Bart’s Hospital Pathology Museum… !

To give just a flavour of Elizabeth-Jane’s skilled approach, because one really does need to hear it live, one can characterize the accompaniment to the opening titles as being suitably strophic, and then, in the opening scene (as Professor Stock (the hangdog Adolphe Menjou) considers the state of his socks), a hint of lullaby – odd, we think, because we soon realize that it is morning, not night, except that, yet the scene develops in such a way that Stock and his wife both take a turn to dive back under the covers !

And that is where Elizabeth-Jane weaves in what we probably realized, if at some subliminal level, was a calypso, contrasting with this scene in Vienna in 1923, but for a purpose. Later, comes tango, too, and what she usefully identified afterwards (since a name to put to it in the in-screen notes had been lacking) as the cha-cha-cha.

To those elements, often in varied form and more disguised than this description can suggest, she adds, then, a theme suggestive of displacement (as we switch from the perspective of the street to what turns out to be that of Stock), one of transformation (when Mizzi powders herself) and then re-engagement with the calypso (she drapes herself carefully on the chaise longue), and, just before it, captures the world-weariness of Dr Braun at his practice.

So, in using the exoticism of the calypso in particular, this lovely score gently let us in on the secret of a world that we can pretend to be exterior to, but with the frisson of interiority. If, as the film goes on to show us, Mizzi is careful about arranging many aspects of what she is about, even more so is Elizabeth-Jane, with her skilled performance evoking the shifting, sometimes playful, and always ironic world of the Vienna that we are shown :

Conveniently, of course, making palatable the infidelities and lascivious desires seem those of a libertine folk in another land (as, in its more patent way, does Menschen am Sonntag), and so enjoyable by licence, almost by proxy, as we might that suggestive moment, at breakfast, with a thick, dark coffee – and a boiled egg !


Now added : more commentary on the film itself

Nicely restored, and with only occasional use of segments from an inferior-quality print (or a few jumps within scenes in the latter part), what we were shown seemed a very complete survival*** of a film from ninety years ago : it was only those tiny technical imperfections that served to remind that it had such a provenance, because the film is so fresh.

By contrast, however much some may have talked of The Artist (2011) with the hope that its audience would be inspired to seek out films from the so-called silent era, this film and it have nothing in common : one can barely believe that anyone credited the latter as a modern silent film, or even as in genuine homage to the period. Indeed, the comparison is almost as little cogent as suggesting that Titanic (1997) was going to cultivate a real interest in marine engineering and / or biology.

So, for example, the contrasted, sparing use of inter-titles in The Marriage Circle, with some of them as ironic as There is more danger in dancing than in dining (and so serving another cause than reporting speech, or facts), has several implications : the film-makers expect an element of lip-reading (or of construing gestural language used for our benefit), and they throw us back both on our wits, and on taking as many cues as possible from the composition of shots, scenes and story, e.g. how light (literally and otherwise) is being used, and what it highlights or throws into relief.

“Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside” – Director Ernst Lubitsch #bornonthisday pic.twitter.com/MjpBbSCQGU
— BFI (@BFI) January 29, 2015

When Charlotte is at Mozart Gasse 12, not so much plucking as wrenching roses on her balcony, the dropped bloom (brought out, in the score, by a downward glissando) is more weighty than the apparent lightness suggested by what is visible, as the inter-title has advised us… Likewise, in the case of Franz Braun’s earlier arrival (with the parcel that we saw him carrying earlier – and which turns out to be flowers for his wife Charlotte), the scene has been set up by her singing Grieg’s setting of Ich liebe dich**** (‘I love you’) when Mizzi comes to call on her.

It develops with Mizzi accompanying Charlotte (though she does not know to whom Charlotte is singing), and is then punctuated by our knowing response to the inter-title Did you ever see a man like him ?, which sets out her words to Mizzi. The moment when Mizzi powders herself has already been mentioned, and there is a wonderful freedom and delicacy to how this scene is lit, before, with the collusion of her maid, we then see her, in a very staged way, work out how to comport herself on the chaise-longue, ready to ring the doctor.

His ultimately purporting, caught in guiltiness, to reach for Mizzi’s pulse is done with such knowingness, but we do not even know the best of it yet – that, as this is Wien (Vienna, the home of psychoanalysis), his partner and he specialize in Nervöse Leiden, ‘nervous disorders’. For this is 1923, and, in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler was to write his Traumnovelle, on which Stanley Kubrick was to found the screenplay of his Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (also for Warner Brothers).

For those still challenged by the new century, early in The Marriage Circle (1924), Charlotte has written to Mizzi, dating it May 25 / 23
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2015

As Brief Encounter (1945) also suggests (or, since then, Vendredi soir (Friday Night) (2002) and Ficció (Fiction) (2006), for example), we may be willing an outcome, but the films have other ideas, and we can be caught short by finding what they are :

In the case of Ficció, the considerable tension that has been built up for much of the film, and how it resolves, is a work of sublime restraint. In The Marriage Circle, by contrast, the closing gesture, although daring, releases us more casually, and in a carefree spirit, later caught also by that of Some Like It Hot (1959) : although the daringness to question norms is there, we are swept away from contemplating it overly much beyond as caprice, as a light ending to a film that has challenged our morality (in the six weeks or so from 25 May to 5 July), and found us wanting what ?


End-notes

* Meret Oppenheim, eat your heart out !

** In Elizabeth-Jane’s score for The Phantom, we had the sound of the unusual alarm, which warned of intruders in the cavernous parts outside The Phantom’s dwelling.

*** However, information suggests that, when The Museum of Modern Art did so, with funds from The Film Foundation, it ran to 103 mins…

**** To a text by Hans Christian Andersen, though commonly sung in German translation.


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

No cat got any cream

This is a slighting, bullet-point review of The Cat’s Meow (2001)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January

This is a slighting, bullet-point review of The Cat’s Meow (2001)

Dared The Cat’s Meow (2001) on DVD, picked up some time in Fopp’s (@FoppCambridge’s) £2 section for traded-in items. Surprisingly, its attempt at 1924 pleased Den Eltern (the principal aim in buying it some while back and now showing it), but (not in any order) :

* The production-budget was so low that players of sax and banjo were clearly miming, not just the singer whom first we saw

* One never felt that one was aboard a vessel of remotely the size of the one shown in harbour or at sea – momentarily, from time to time, as an unconvincing impression of both movement and the insularity of the action

* In fact, one was all too aware that the interiors were stage-sets, and that action had to be kept indoors (perhaps not implausibly for November, were we not cruising from San Pedro, Los Angeles ?)

* That said, cinematically, director Peter Bogdanovich had avoided, with all the suitable help (of Steven Perros, with a credit for adapting his own stage-play), making it look like a filmed drama

* Yet its dialogue increasingly sounded like one, and it always owed much of its attempt to be a closed world to Murder on The Orient Express (1974) (though not musically, of course, which Sir Richard Rodney Bennett scored so expertly)

* It never claimed to be (based on) a true story, and had the usual disclaimer, but it still liked to give a different impression (with its prologue and postlude)

* It says much that Joanna Lumley was the best thing about it, but, with the ponderous attempt at significance in giving the closing voice-over (as we faded to black), also nearly the worst

William Randolph Hearst

* Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard) was no Chaplin of interest, and Hugh Laurie (@hughlaurie) would have risen to the challenge better, as would even Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) in substitution for the dismal Edward Herrmann as WR (even if he looked alike) – and not just because of the obvious period link with Jeeves and Wooster

* It told its story well enough, but only with the sort of subtlety that takes in those who feel able to congratulate themselves on their insight into what is coming next on The Archers, so lights on faces in implausible or impossible places, and everything angled to oblige the eye to look in only the desired direction

* It is indicative why Bogdanovich was, prior to it, credited with TV movies (via IMDb (@IMDb)), and returned to them – this is just what The Cat's Meow most resembled...


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

Claire Martin and trio at Cambridge Arts Theatre

Claire Martin at The Arts Theatre, Cambridge,

with Dave Newton, Jeremy Brown, Steve Brown

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 January

This is a largely complete review of Claire Martin's gig at The Arts Theatre, Cambridge - with trio Dave Newton, Jeremy Brown, and Steve Brown

Linn (@linnproducts) recording artist and OBE-holder Claire Martin (@CMartinjazz) gave Cambridge, with its wintry feel outside The Arts Theatre (@camartstheatre), a breath of her infectiously enthusiastic and sympathetic approach to singing, which thawed out - even if partly with, and through, the blues - some affected by it (them ?) :

At @camartstheatre earlier, we did not so much welcome @linnproducts' @CMartinjazz to Cambridge as she did us to the world of her super trio
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Listen to Claire* on Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3blog's) Jazz Line-Up, or see her on stage, and there is no doubting that she is The Real Thing, with a passion for jazz and what she does, whether presenting what speaks to her, or, at a gig, doing the same through the medium of her voice. Amongst, in other places, the mark of her quality is the instrumentalists that she brings with her :

With Dave Newton on tireless form, and Jeremy Brown / Steve Brown effortlessly on bass and drums, respectively, @CMartinjazz sang with style
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Gareth Williams is a usual pianist for Claire, but his piano, though lovely, is somewhat introspective and even moodful, whereas Dave Newton, as he is at his best, was inspired, being both fantastically inventive and creatively exploratory. An excellent mix of trio, bass, drums and piano, and a real tribute to Claire that she knows the strength of these players and that the trio worked to a tee with her first time, a rich mix of four musicians who can swing it, cool it, give it soul or rhythm, and leave you joyful and carefree.

Speaking as one who loves Claire’s presentational work on Radio 3 (@BBCradio3blog), one cannot but wish that there had been the tiniest bit more of her warm personality to share with those knew to her and to her art : nothing much, as one can over-elaborate introductions and setting out the connections (it has been heard done in this very venue, but the second set was different), but maybe just a little phrase here or there, because, when Claire talks about music during broadcasts, there is no doubting that it is her own reactions and evaluations that one is hearing (even if, inevitably, filtered through the ears and views of her producer) :

If one thing was missing from @CMartinjazz at @camartstheatre, it was just nothing musical or interpretative, just a tad more chattiness ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Unlike other jazz-singers one could name, @CMartinjazz's always approachable in her take on music, and on the stage : no slickness, no side.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 18, 2015

Detailed observations to come (via the set-list)…



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

Nods and gestures : At Lunch 2 2015 with Britten Sinfonia

This is a review in progress of Britten Sinfonia's At Lunch 2 on 13 January 2015

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 January

This work in progress is a review of Britten Sinfonia’s trio recital At Lunch 2, given at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 13 January 2015

Two members of Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), with a guest pianist in Huw Watkins (also a well-known composer), performed the second in the Sinfonia’s series of At Lunch concerts this season at Cambridge’s West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH) : leader (Jacqueline Shave), and principal cello (Caroline Dearnley).


Kaija Saariaho (1952–)

The gestural language in which Nocturne (1994) begins – mediated so directly and tellingly, as a clean channel for this unfamiliar piece, by violinist Jacqueline Shave – resembles that of keening. However, it is only a point of departure for a highly expressive section, more open than the sparseness of a cry and its attendant hints of punctuation, and one where we first sense the way in which the piece is grounded in the instrument and in its technique.

On an over-analytical level, one just momentarily steps back from engagement with the work, and could be put in mind of the compendious nature of Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin*, Op. 1, but then, with the force of Shave’s playing and the power of the writing for violin, dismissing such references :

For, paradoxically, just as Kaija Saariaho overtly invokes convention, in and through a trill, she pulls us straight back into the body of the score, and then leads us to the first of several serenities, which suspend in the air, and give the soloist and us rest – in musical and commonplace senses. Whether giving us, next, a sequence as of a written-out jazz improvisation, or some rather obsessive figurations, Saariaho also sings.

Yet the singing is of a painful nature, and, when there are chimes in it, maybe they do not feelingly break through, but instead we are taken to strong echoes of Janacek in his quartet-writing (and all those taut, tangled emotions) ? On with the work, though, and a passage with adept left-hand pizzicato brings back in the sense of keening, with basic harmonies, before a cry that is like a deeply felt howling.

We end on one note, and – after it has faded and we have been left silent – to keen applause.


Claude Debussy (1862–1918)


1. Prologue

2. Sérénade

3. Finale

Commemorating (as well as coming near to doing so) the centenary of the start of, and events in, The Great War has helped bring attention to Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915), which means that it has recently been much played (less so the other two works completed from the six that Debussy had planned ?). Caroline Dearnley and Huw Watkins gave us the Sonata in the context of the Nocturne that we had just heard –
and that was equally true, later, of hearing the piano trio by Gabriel Fauré (which came after the second of Kaija Saariaho’s works) :

Solo piano opened the Prologue in stately wise, and then, when the cello entered, there was a sense of Debussy invoking faltering, before the pair played together as one, with a fleeting theme that, before it was whisked away, had a clear sense of yearning to it.

A faster passage followed, with every note in explicit articulation, giving the impression, as the recital itself did, of composers in the early twentieth century (and onwards) feeling how non-discrete life, art and music were (to name but a few relations), and daring more to relying on the contiguous, rather than the formality of development or exposition. Not that, after a burst of energy that became a crescendo, it felt unexpected to bring back thematic material and revisit it, but it was unfortunate that the duo had to pause, because one of cellist Caroline Dearnley's tuning-pegs, for a lower string, had slipped…

None the worse for it, and having clearly needed the instrument to be just right for it, Dearnley produced a soul-felt passage where, as if we were not already moved, she took us down to the cello’s resonant lower register, and there was a reassurance that we did not end the movement before, Dante like (?), being brought back up.

The opening of the central Sérénade gesturally employed pizzicatti, some of them, once we had heard another section of careful articulation, even resembling the twanging of a guitar : a complete novice to the intricacies of musical notation would hesitate to imagine how the score, even with markings, would precisely stipulate that effect !

Here, one soon felt, the heart of the work lay, with the feeling that Dearnley brought to it being just breath-taking. By contrast, Watkins’ accompaniment felt written as an aloof voice, almost an ironic commentator – yet this very quality in his part had the strange result of foregrounding the depth of the scoring for cello, but without us overlooking that this other perspective was there. In essence, it was akin to being given fragments from which we not so much inferred as intuited a whole – perhaps, even, in the way that, when full-length prints from the early days of cinema have been compiled, trying to re-create the known original running-time of the feature film, something has been lost ?

The last movement, marked Finale, has the effect of putting the familiar in context, for its opening is well known (in our sampled, chopped-about world ?), with the writing for piano inhabiting the world of the Etudes. A quiet and moody section followed, with slurring, and with Watkins bringing out a sound as of rain on glass, but which, in turn, gave way to march-like tones, and a theme that was conveyed with verve, drive and vigour. In a few brush-strokes, Debussy brought the Sonata to an end, with a smile from Caroline Dearnley.


Rest of review to follow…


End-notes

* Or of John Adams’ ambitions in Harmonielehre ?


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