Whiter than White Star

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

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6 October

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

You could not call it a Roland Klick* retrospective as such (Cambridge Film Festival did not), because (so I gather) many of his films had not been released in the UK. Not wishing to do a Jos Stelling, I decided on White Star (1983), and then, depending on how it went, maybe Supermarkt (1974).

However, I had, of course, not reckoned on making a mistake (going into Screen 3, rather than Screen 2), so missing the beginning of Leviathan (2013), and ending up with dubbed Klickery in Deadlock (1970), a film not on my list.

A desert, a guy who finds a dressed-up other guy, then takes more interest in his case and its contents, but hesitates – rock held high – to ensure that he does not survive, as if leaving him for dead were better. Second thoughts, going back, but the suited guy is gone, and holds him up. They drive off, arrive somewhere, only for the man with the upper hand to be easily overpowered. A mysterious woman. And so on, but all dubbed.


Did it seem bizarre, as the Festival write-up tells me that some had thought it ? No, not least because the word is overused, but really because it seemed arbitrarily wafer thin (to the point where I sneaked out, having stayed too long – until just after the title, because I had bizarrely thought it to be a preceding short that I had overlooked) who was in control. Hence ‘Deadlock’ ? Maybe, but the dubbing was killing me (even if subtitles were not then the norm) for its way of sucking the life (any of the film’s and mine)…

So Star, with its stark title, no longer seemed such a good choice, but there would be a Q&A with Klick. It, too, was supposed to be strange, but it seemed amazingly one dimensional in the way that Deadlock had threatened to be :

The opening scene is, I think, of Dennis Hopper (as producer Kenneth Barlow) trying to persuade Terrance Robay (as star Moody) to appear on stage in a club full of restless punks – either that, or of him, with his stooge Frank (David Hess), setting up for the latter to smash windows (which will later look as if there has been a riot), and arranging the foment of said punks. Oh, and, in arguing with the club’s owner, Barlow reveals that Moody is his sister’s boy. Nothing else do we need to know, and nothing else of significance emerges save from this starting-point.


Do we know why Moody trusts Barlow to be his producer, or why he goes along with this ‘White Star’ branding (with all its connotations of white supremacy, apart from those of space and of a burst of creation : it certainly is not Moody’s choice, though it is the best that the pair have to offer, even when Moody seeks to collaborate with a female vocalist (Sandra ?? Mascha ??)) ? Quite simply, other than probably having no other hope, no – since the conceit of the film is that Moody lives in Berlin**, the club would have been notorious, and he would never have agreed to try to play his synthesizer there.

The same objection is not dependent on being a denizen of Berlin. Since nothing in the film suggests that Moody is trusting (or, at any rate, trusts Barlow – except disastrously to take unspecified tablets in the back of a dangerously driven car when also ordered to change into his white suit), it hardly seems likely that he would not have objected to the choice of opening gig long before being there.


The only way in which this film works is if it is just a vehicle for a Hoppermonster, and we watch him barge through life like a giant game of PAC-MAN. Klick may not have hired him with that intention, and what he said about Hopper in the Q&A suggested that both that the man whom he had met before he arrived in Berlin, and what other people had said about working with him, had not prepared him for the reality :

Klick told the Festival audience (apparently, a story that he has told before), a coke story about Hopper, that, when he arrived in Berlin, the first thing that he wanted was cocaine, and Klick had to arrange something such that a man arrived with a briefcase every week with Hopper’s fix. The story went on : that Hopper was too high to act for the first part of the day, and too tired later on, but Klick had a clear two hours to get what he wanted from him (and, moreover, Hopper is scarcely off the screen).


Maybe, then, with the roles reversed, the film is a paradigm for making the film itself, with Hopper as the maverick star whom the director struggles to control, versus Hopper as the hell-bent producer, using all means and any to promote ‘White Star’ and ‘The Future’. A model of capitalism gone crazy in search of selling goods, but one that has really very little to say about why Moody goes along with it all and, say, sells the fittings of his studio (and shafts his black colleague) for Barlow to sell them for a song.

Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992), O Lucky Man ! (1973), The Color of Money (1986) – maybe (I don’t know) some of these films could have learnt something from Klick, and it is a helluva show from Hopper, but the ‘terrifying, unhinged performance’ (Festival write-up) is not enough, and Lindsay Anderson is careful to throw Malcolm McDowell into relief.


End-notes

* What sort of name is that ? I knew the phrase Das klickt nicht and the like, but still – perhaps he could develop and print a film for me…

** As we learn later, even if it may be a poor translation, since he is staying in a hotel.


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When we still had icebergs…

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5 October


This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek


The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.

Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.

One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).

Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).

Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.

Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.

Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.

Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.

Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.

No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.

Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.


End-notes

* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.

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

Julian Orchard ? : A Festival response to The Orchard (2013)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema with James Mackay

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6 October (updated 7 October)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema -

with James Mackay, at Cambridge Film Festival

Putting forward the work of prized pupils as if representative of a class or school, or taking the best figures to make claims for the achievements of the Tories in power (if not just inventing them instead, to make so-called welfare reform seem effective, even it is starving people into jobs), this is what is almost always nowadays called cherry-picking. (Cranes with a cradle and mounted on small vehicles are even called cherry-pickers, for no obvious reason.)

In The Orchard (2013), title and film alike, there is an attempt to distract attention from where the power in the latter comes from, by leaving out the word 'cherry'. Yes, we are meant to believe that the title derives from a real orchard in which a group of six amateur players (three men, three women) will perform an improvised version of Chekhov's play - even that is pretty vague, as if the instructions or invitation on which they are acting have been put through Waiting for Godot first.

However, it is hard to work out whether they are, in their factions, more heartily sick of each other than we become of the lot of them. Afterwards, we were told that all of the actors is performing a script, just a script where there is a good deal of bickering, largely disputation as to who will play which part and whether it has previously (in the film) been agreed - we were told in the Q&A that each, before and during shooting over just one weekend, was supported individually in playing a wholly unimprovised part by the directors, Clive Myer and Lynda Myer-Bennett.

That is as it may be, but none of it makes their carrying on engaging or with a plausible outcome, not even having them dine in costume. They have the excuse that they, the characters, are not professionals, but they want to treat what they have been asked to do as something to work towards, yet at the same time starting, on their opening evening, from such an open viewpoint, where female parts might be played by men and how to double is the least of their worries, that no one can reasonably believe that they will achieve anything, dressing as their characters or no.

The contrast is then with when they actually start looking at the text (which, previously, they have made almost a virtue of not having to hand), and we get cherries in the form of various translations of Chekhov. If, as we were told afterwards, The Cherry Orchard has outperformed any other play that we can think of, in numbers of times put on, it is small wonder that the touchstones of Chekhov's play will enliven the film, but they do not make believable that this factional troupe has somehow transformed itself and become inspired by, or just familiar, with their parts.

True, in the cacophony of their discussion and disputation when they have arrived (whose sound quality, maybe deliberately, was not very good, but such as to hurt one's mind with babble), we have every impression that they know the play and its characters. Yet, as noted, they refuse to go anywhere near the printed copies until the Chekhov is alive on their lips and in their acting. Maybe I blinked, but I do not know how that was meant to be credible.

In the overly long first part of the Q&A, before it was thrown open to the audience, we were told that Chekhov considered the play a tragedy. When I got to ask I question, I pointed out that it had been stressed to my class when we first studied it that he had called it a comedy (the Oxford University Press edition, we had been told, drew attention to this fact)*, but, rather than being comic, was it not toxic, because the same inertia that had stopped the family acting seemed to have infected the cast.

I was told that the directors interpret the play as being about 'change' - the change comes in because Lopahkin, who has had no one listen to him, buys the orchard to chop down for holiday homes. If that is 'change', it seems quite a regressive one to modern ears, even if, as in Uncle Vanya, there is much rhetoric about what the future will bring and be like...


* Postlude

I do not have OUP text, but I looked out my Penguin Classics text (Harmondsworth, 1959), translated and introduced by Elisaveta Fen, and she says that he wrote to Olga Knipper (an actress from the Art Theatre, whom he married) The next play I write for the Art Theatre will definitely be funny, very funny - at least in intention. Fen goes on to write (p. 28) : 

The play was altered and re-copied several times, but there was one point on which Chekhov remained consistent - it was 'not a drama but a comedy : in places almost a farce'.


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Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

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3 October

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

* May contain spoilers *

Piper (unclear why she is called that, but played, somewhat precociously, by Harley Bird) says the title words to this posting to Daisy* (Saiorse Ronan), who, rather clumsily / unconvincingly tries to reassure her that there is not a connection between her mother not being there and eating chocolate : as we may well know, in cases of a separation, children can look for an explanation and end up blaming themselves, finding a causal connection and a regret, e.g. If I hadn’t eaten chocolate, mum wouldn’t have gone. (Daisy probably blames herself for her own mother’s departure : her mother, we are told, loved this location, and we see a photo of her by a sundial, later seen atop a hill.)

Pure observational / empirical psychology. Later, Daisy talks about chocolate, too, saying what she thought she was doing by not eating it, but, much more than that, her depiction as a person with intrusive commands in her head, and who describes herself more than once as a curse, suggest that she may be meant to have (touches of) obsessive-compulsive disorder (better known as OCD). It is not merely that she is fastidious (calling the contents of the fridge ‘gross’, and claiming that cheese is ‘a lump of solidified cows’ mucus’), but that she believes that something dreadful will happen, if she does not do certain things, and we hear what is in her head, compelling her.

Certainly, Edmond (Eddie, played by George MacKay) knows that Daisy has an inner conflict, and seeks to encourage her that she does not have to do what she is telling herself, after he has toppled her, fully clothed, into the plashing current of the family watering-hole, and thereby makes a further connection with her**.

Shortly before, he has whispered the herd of cows away that puts Daisy off proceeding, and, when she clumsily climbs a gate with barbed wire on, heals her hand, magic elements no doubt from the novel, and which enliven a fairly inert story, which would otherwise be of type ‘upheaval plus making a dangerous journey to be with loved ones’***, e.g. The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003), etc.

Anyway, back at the OCD, we hear Daisy talking about the change in her way of thinking that she has found herself making during the course of the film, and we have long since seen her doing things that would have made the earlier Daisy squirm or scream. I doubt that this ‘progress’ is anything other than symbolic, although, with psychological treatment, people can learn to do things that would otherwise overwhelm them with disgust, but I do not know what it is meant to mean on a figurative level, as some may be confused by what she does and hears anyway

As, considered differently, a story about insurrection or war, there are brutal moments, such as the enforced ‘evacuation’ (though less harrowing, because of the sheer violence, than an equivalent scene in Sarah’s Key (2010), and later parts of the film leave one wondering, from the available evidence, what need there could have been for splitting up the family) and when Piper is under threat from two men, as well as sudden detonations and overflights of aircraft.

Such things apart, there is a fairly static presentation of military conflict by means of low-frequency notes in the score and shots of burnt-out cars or the debris of an airliner (although there is the failure to appreciate that a box of chocolates might not be so pristine that it even has a tag on it (a tag to play on Piper’s mind ?)). The strife, then, seems too staged, almost as if it might only be happening in Daisy’s mind…

That may be the answer to it. When we knew that Daisy was with the family for a summer, it all seemed a bit My Summer of Love (2004), and the representatives of (full) adulthood being largely absent in a rather Narnia way, until the trees shook (in Tarkovsky vein, or that of Looper (2012) maybe) and Something Happened (again, a bit Narnia). Fairport Convention performing Tam Lin, about a magical abduction, has already paved the way ?

If it is all symbolic, then the ending can be reinterpreted as seen from knowing the beginning, as the ending voice-over invites us to do. Probably a comparison with Beckettt’s novel Molloy is pretentious, but his fastidious character Moran makes a punishing journey (in more sense than one ?) and ends up transformed. Moran opened his part of the book with ‘It is midnight. It is raining’, and closes it with ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’. (Here, maybe that means that the end condition does not differ much from the starting condition, and maybe Eddie is no more than another aspect of Daisy's own personality, as there are certainly touches of A Beautiful Mind (2001), suggesting as much.)

With this film, it is all (for good reason) reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, too, with another dramatic transformation. That said, it is the words spoken over by Ronan that make one think that anything is significant, since the ‘journey home’ with Piper seems hare brained, succeeds against all the odds, and sees Daisy using excessive force and threats to protect her – unlike in Lore (2012), there is no great sense of something that needs to be done except in terms of telepathy and / or dream, or of Daisy being / becoming a different person because of what happens.

Coupled with the fact that the film, even at only 101 minutes, seems to drag, all of this makes me think that it will not do very well, as comments that I heard were that it was like Twilight, and at least they had had a free ticket…


End-notes

* Daisy is really Elizabeth, but has chosen this name for herself (although using both to introduce herself to her aunt) : not surprisingly, such renaming is not often unassociated with some turmoil about identity.

** Previously, she had declared, rather abruptly, that she did not fish, did not swim, but then decides to go along for the ride.

*** Of which, I take The Road to be another such.


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Visions of the Baltic

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2 October

The more that I think about the first in the sequence of Estonian short films, Maggot Feeder (2012), the more that I believe that I have seen it before somewhere, somehow… (Probably on the screen in the bar at Festival Central, which had been showing a loop of clips.)

Not that it matters, because it said things to me with the stark beauty of its story-line, the Doctor-Who-like horribleness and ferocity of the maggots*, the faces of the man and the woman, motile behind the forms that contained them, and (again from science fiction) the stacked pairs of eyes of the spiders – inevitably, given the subject-matter, the frozen setting, I was reminded of the exquisite brutality of Far North (2007), but this film ended with blossoming, fecundity, to replace the sterility of the man’s reign (over the woman and the creatures whom he bloodily kills).

A perfect fable of stagnation, destruction and renewal, inventively brought about in animation and foley where every squelch of blood and slurp of lightly stewed flesh was telling. A good way into another transgressive world, that of My Condolences (2013) :


Without giving away the big twist, the delight of a crooked family, running a covert business, and how they respond to an outsider in their guilty midst. What better plan to hit on, worthy of Fawlty Towers in its bonkersness, than devoting a page in the illicit journal of their activity to the wording of a tribute to a fictionally deceased neighbour ?

The stranger joins in with their desire to express their regrets, and is asked to assume the position of scribe and author, resulting in excruciatingly amusing awkwardness, because the family members continue to fear detection…


Olga (2013) has already, vaguely, been accounted for, as well as the errantly provided Happy Birthday played with the conceit that Marilyn might sing to Mr Jesus on Christmas Eve, and that Mr Jesus is a robot with a rival : it did not have much to say, from what I saw of it.


In Triangle Affair (2012), cats, people with arms for heads (who, amongst other things, clean windows and cycle as a trio along high-wires), and trams converged spectacularly, overshadowed and overseen by chalk-wielding birds (crows ? Krähen in German / chalk, la craie in French ??), who are perhaps also the architects of this elaborate, futuristic city.

Maybe, though, they have bored of its having a function, and wish to subjugate that function to their desire to have fun (or to destroy) : crows and Kafka (which means ‘crow’ in Czech) and Prague…


Finally, Villa Antropoff (2013) uses animated full-frontal cleavage, sexual acts and drug use to parody the interests and attitudes of New Rich Russians, a freedom to be expressive since Estonia is no longer a satellite state, in the Baltic, of the Soviet regime.

Not unlike Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, one can prove to have outlived one’s popularity, if one’s actions are taken to excess, and it is then on to the next party ! (Oh, and a black man, whose home coast has nothing but debris on it, manages to crash the party, maybe in search of the same, but is not kindly received, but surely no denigrating stereotype here.)


End-notes

* Though, of course, maggots turn into flies, outside fairy-tales.


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I'm a self-destructive fool (Thanks, Kate and Anna !)

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1 October

* Contains spoilers *

During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :

He has the self-delusion that [...]


According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.

OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?

As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?

In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :

If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.


Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?

Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?

Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?

What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.

For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.


On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.

In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.

It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...


End-notes

* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?


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What did you do during the Festival, Father... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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1 October (updated 16 October)


Thursday 19 September
5.00 (1) My Beautiful Country (2012) (Eastern view) (A mini-review)
7.25 (2) Hawking (2013) (A mini-review)
10.15 (3) Blue Jasmine (2013) (A mini-review)
(NB This one is not quite a review, and contains spoilers)


Friday 20 September
6.30 (4) The Taste of Money (2012) (Top 5 Features)
9.00 (5) Unmade in China (2012) (Review by Rory Greener (plus Agent's comments), or there is the review-cum-interview (with director Gil Kofman) by Rosy Hunt, Editor-in-Chief of TAKE ONE)
11.00 (6) Exposed : Beyond Burlesque (2013) (33 1/3)


Saturday 21 September
3.30 (7) Google and The World Brain (2013)
5.30 (8) Pieces of Me (2012)
8.00 (9) The Redemption of the Fish (2013) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)


Sunday 22 September
2.00 (10) Marius (2013)
(11) Shown with Fanny (2013) (Top 5 Features)
6.00 (12) Blackbird (2013)
(Reviewed with Only the Young (2012))
8.30 (13) Only the Young (2012) (Young Americans)
(Reviewed with Blackbird (2013))


Monday 23 September
12.45 (14) The Taste of Money (2012) (Top 5 Features)
3.45 (15) Prince Avalanche (2013) (Young Americans)
6.15 (16) Dust on our Hearts (2012) (German)
8.30 (17) Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure : John Otway the Movie (2013) (33 1/3)
(Reviewed with Sing me the Songs that Say I Love You (2012) (33 1/3))


Tuesday 24 September
4.00 (17.5) Estonian short films (Eastern view)
5.30 (18.5) Just Before Losing Everything (2013)
6.30 (19.5) Sing me the Songs that Say I Love You (2012) (33 1/3)
(Reviewed with Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure : John Otway the Movie (2013)
(33 1/3))
9.00 (20) Deadlock (1970)


Wednesday 25 September
11.30 (21) Upstream Color (2013) (Young Americans) (Top 5 Features)
3.45 (21.5) Absolute Beginners (1986)
6.00 (22.5) White Star (1981 - 1983) (Roland Klick)
9.00 (23.5) Thomas Dolby : The Invisible Lighthouse (2013) (33 1/3)


Thursday 26 September
2.00 (24.5) German short films (German)
4.00 (25.5) Eyes on the Sky (2008) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)
8.30 (26.5) Paul Bowles : The Cage Door is Always Open (2012)


Friday 27 September
12.00 (27.5) Sieniawka (2013) (Eastern view)
3.45 (28) Black Africa, White Marble  (2011) (Too concentrated on the next film to watch more than 30 mins, but what was seen was very good : this won the audience award for documentaries)
6.45 (29) The Man whose Mind Exploded (2012) (Review by Hannah Clarkson, TAKE ONE*)
8.45 (29.5) My Sweet Pepper Land (2013)
11.00 (30.5) Tridentfest (2013) (Review by Mark Liversidge, TAKE ONE, plus Agent's comments, and the following Tweet)

Lovely review, by Ben Graham, of Toby Amies' film about Drako Zarrhazar, The Man Whose Mind Exploded (2013) : http://t.co/2iJ0YslIoc
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 5, 2013

Saturday 28 September
1.15 (31.5) Surprise Film 1 : Sunshine on Leith (2013)
4.00 (32.5) Cold (2013)
6.30 (33.5) Nosferatu (1922) (with Neil Brand)
9.00 (34.5) The Forest (2012) (Catalan)


Sunday 29 September
10.45 (35.5) The Redemption of the Fish (2013) (Catalan) (Top 5 Features)
6.15 (36.5) The Orchard (2013)
9.00 (37) Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968) + Towers Open Fire (1963) + The Cut-Ups (1967)


End-notes

* There is nothing to add to Hannah's review, except that my interview with director Toby Amies will appear soon for TAKE ONE, and, for those who missed this single screening, there is a clip from The Man Whose Mind Exploded on the page for Hannah's review.


NB All links to reviews are now active, and titles with struck-through text were not watched in full (also indicated by adding a nominal 0.5 to the tally)...



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Giving the lie to Tebbit

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30 September

The poster for The Artist and the Model (2012) makes you hesitate - the shapely back cannot be that of Claudia Cardinale, unless it is a re-release...

The film is not, of course, about looking at Aida Folch's body (as Mercè), but about discovery, for, when we first see Marc Clos (Jean Rochefort), he is contemplating what looks like it could be a modernist maquette of a female form. He picks it up, looks at it, rejects it by throwing it down, and going on to look at a fish's head, a tree, all of which subliminally conveys the message that he will know a form when he sees it, and that it will arise organically.

Veteran actor Rochefort (The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)), at 83, has all the class to be Clos, to be believable as a man who poetically talking about creation, about woman, life, and whom we see working on sketches, painting, models with Folch as his muse - at a key moment, she is delighting in being seen, in being the spark of his energy, and cannot but smile. The film is essentially between Clos and untutored Mercè, and, in a preceding scene, he unfolds a Rembrandt sketch to her, and she begins to interpret what she first just calls 'joli[e]', and he says that she is not looking - he tells her how it was made, when, and what it means to him, and he awakens her.

Cardinale (Léa), though, discovers Mercè at the outset : having been his model, and still beautiful herself, she knows what feminine appearance in Mercè will provide Marc with good poses, and we see her learning how to adopt a pose for Marc, resume one, be a source not of sexual attraction, but of beauty.

With only hints of coloration when the film begins (and ends), it is otherwise in black and white, and this, along with a soundtrack of birdsong, the sounds of insects and leaves, heightens the attention on form, line, texture, and shape in Mercè's body. We utterly believe that Rochefort is an artist who is friends with Matisee, that he is sketching, applying clay, smoothing surfaces, as we watch, which is part of his own malleability as a cinematic artist.

Inevitably, one thinks of other films with a relation to art and to connections between the artist and others, such as Conversations with my Gardener (2007), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Scorsese's Life Lessons from New York Stories (1989), of which Nick Nolte is most compelling with the physicality of his large canvas, and Daniel Auteuil, with his gentle and humane observations and how he shares about life, love and art, whereas Derek Jakobi (as Bacon) shows us conflict between artist and model.

None of those quite compares to this portrait of Clos, although there are similarities to Auteuil as artist, and care has been taken (with Hockney as one of the advisers) to make everything as believable and realistic as possible in an immensely beautiful film.


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Surprise on Leith

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29 September

Yesterday's Surprise Film 1, which Tony Jones had said was a world premiere, turned out to be Sunshine on Leith (2013), the musical with songs of The Proclaimers.

No one expects great depth from musicals, I guess, but the way that the film started, with one voice in a personnel carrier, then a voice in harmony, from two young soldiers who proved to be friends and one of whom was the boyfriend of the other's sister, was evocative - understated, unexpected, it set the tone for the whole film. Many a musical weaves its course around the songs, as Ben Elton might agree, and it is not unusual that their lyrics drive the story, but these, taken from a stage version, seemed a good fit.

In Screen 2 at Festival Central, the quality of the sound was excellent, such that the clarity was there whether it was Jane Horrocks singing, or Peter Mullan, whose voice I quite liked. Mainly charting the ups and downs of the relationships between those two as a couple, and between the existing couple with their daughter, and between her friend and their son, as set up on a blind date. Strain causes travel for one couple when they split up, and the past catches up nastily until differences can be reconciled.

In a blaze of onlookers willing the remaining pair not to be stubborn and back into each other's arms, and then symbolically re-enacting the 500-miles song with a ranks of them moving in formation, the situations and the music that establishes them culminate, having built throughout the film, whether mocking up a proposal and marriage ceremony in the pub, or bemoaning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, as a type of female ambassador in one of Edinburgh's galleries.

I am no great fan of musicals, by and large, but this one did it for me : it felt right, it cheered without being sentimental, and it faced up to some of the things that come between those whom we love and us.


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It left me cold !

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29 September 2013

* Contains spoilers *

Definitely the word film that I have seen screened at this year's Festival was Cold, a film from Turkey that was, frankly, a turkey, and which, although it could have been filmed in the same snow-laden river-sited city as Kosmos*, one of my top three from the Festival in 2011, it in no way occupied the same space.

Oh dear, Cold (2013) at @camfilmfest - trying to bring Chekhov's sororial trio to Turkey, mixing in The Idiot, and larding with domestic v.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 28, 2013

So what am I getting at ? Well, the title-characters of Chekhov's Three Sisters - one of whom is the very striking Valeria Skorokhodova as Balabey's desire - have taken their parlous state to heart, and found that prostitution in Turkey may pay for their future.

Said Balabey is a person at whom the audience was early laughing, although the mention of taking his pills should have alerted them to the fact that he has not only either some sort of social phobia or related learning difficulty, but also a mental-health condition (we also know that he has been in hospital) - they were laughing at him outright, not partly with him, partly despite him, as in the film of Dostoyevksy's The Idiot at last year's Festival.

Balabey has much in common with (Prince) Mishkin, not least lack of self-awareness and self-confidence, and a huge streak of self-destructiveness. Thinking that a woman paid to sleep with him reciprocates his feelings for her is an insight that only we have, and it, just as woman, whether he actually does ever sleep with him (rather than talking about prayer, her beauty, and trying to slope off when she is in the shower), is only sure near the end. Even the man, referred to as some sort of chief, we arranges and pays for the first liaison is laughing at his expense.

It seems common knowledge that the place that we are shown, where patrons / diners take a table, and then one or more women are called, by name, to go to the number of that table, is merely a staging-post for the seedy hotel (wallpaper peeling off the wall, etc.), one of whose rooms we see - for some reason, Balabey and his chosen partner always end up in the same room, which I would believe was for symbolism of the room number (22 ?), except that it clearly simplified the shoot and gave a (bogus) sense of continuity of the encounters into the bargain. So far, so good with the tawdry aspects of Dostoyevsky, except that that novel actually has a sense of ambiguity about whether the Prince is risible, or a saint.

Point already made that women and sex with them are bought and sold, so hardly surprising when Balabey's sexually frustrated brother Enver both takes it out on his wife with his fists (although the erectile dysfunction appears to be his fault, not the wife's lack of flirting or sexual provocation), and has recourse to the same venue as his brother. Neat ending to Balabey's enduring attraction, such that he even dynamites a bridge** to prevent escape to Moscow via (a boyfriend in) Georgia, to have Enver and friends hire the sisters for a house-party in which another sexual failure leads to shooting into the air, demanding that the sisters have sex with each other, and one of them being brutally killed ?

As life is cheap, most of all female life, the two others are killed as witnesses, only leaving Balabey to find out and to strap Enver to the railway-line, camouflaged with snow, and for the express (has the bridge miraculously been repaired ?) to go through***. All sewn up, you could say - but only in the sense that Terry Gilliam's massive animation foot coming down and stamping on everything provides a resolution...



End-notes

* I have checked, and it was Kars again.

** As another viewer agreed, he has already said that he checks the railways-line, and that trains stop or proceed on his say-so, which means that destroying it was overkill.

*** My fellow viewer concurred that nothing tells us how this is possible, both as to getting Enver there from the side of the crude grave, and the operation of a railway service. He was still included to give the film 4 out of 5 for highlighting the domestic and other violence.


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A matter of Marseille

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

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26 September

This is a Festival review of Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)

Daniel Auteuil has a reason or two to love Pagnol – he was in films such as Manon des Sources from the mid-1980s, but he is also from that area, Provence.

The trilogy that he is making, of which Marius and Fanny screened last weekend and César is still in production, are less bucolic, being set in Marseilles (or, as in French, Marseille, without the ‘s’), and with a veritable maritime feel, almost a whiff (with Fanny’s seafood) of the ocean, which makes for a real freshness to both location and characters.

The story in these first two parts contrasts the fun-loving liberation of the jazz and cinema age with the Roman Catholic attitude to sex (and children as the evidence) before marriage, the desire for a partner and for children with a pull to explore the world. In all of this, Auteuil’s direction is deft, composing shots and a treatment of Pagnol’s writing that always draws the viewer in, and with a careful use of music.

Previously, he worked with Jean-Pierre Darroussin in Conversations with my Gardener (2007), and the other actor is here as a man, Panisse, who acts to save a situation when César (Auteuil) has insulted him by misinterpreting his motives, despite years of friendship going back to schooldays, and initially and violently seeks to oppose what is for the best. The quartet of major players is completed by Raphaël Personnaz and Victoire Bélézy as the other two title characters, and all are so strong, working with the grist of Pagnol’s original, that the result would be thoroughly engaging were they not supported by the likes of Marie-Anne Chazel, and by the old port and the ocean that it gives onto.

César, though, is not a violent man, though he does tend to tease people beyond their limits, and, after a grumpy start, he comes alive on screen when he shows Marius how to make an aperitif with four different ‘one-thirds’ in the same glass. When Marius disappears, as he all too frequently does, and abandons the business, his father just frets over him, addressing the absent Marius rhetorically as ‘mon petit’.

The first film, Marius, teeters around what he wants, and ends with a decision, whereas Fanny (and its title character) has to address what remains – at heart, both are driven by Marius not wanting what he has, and wanting what he cannot have, the latter in such a way that he becomes totally hateful, and is transformed. In all of this, César and Panisse show what grace and love they have, even for Marius and where his desires lead him.

All in all, a fine cast working in a lovely free manner together to create this drama, which so far has run to some 210 minutes, and whose conclusion is likely to be a tour de force.


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Who says 'avant que' (except at 'A' level) ?

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25 September 2013

That is my only question about Avant que de Tout Perdre (2013), translated as Just Before Losing Everything : why the archaic construction, when, in the film, the closest that the French dialogue gets is the simple, everyday form ?

Otherwise, its length makes sense, as does how it unfolds, the palpable tension (the suspense left me needing a Scotch), the dynamics. It, and Léa Drucker as Miriam, are excellent. It speaks for itself - watch the film !


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If you’re naked already, what is exposure ?

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25 September

Some of the performers in Exposed : Beyond Burlesque (2013) really seemed like artists, rather than performers. My companion at the screening and I both valued Mat Fraser and his partner Julie Atlas Muz, and we were shown several excellent excerpts from when they gave their show in Amsterdam.

If there are such things as production values, they were high in the recording of Muz and Fraser’s work, rather than shot from beneath the stage, with sometimes wild foreshortenings and indifferent lighting. Even seeing these two under the sheets together or snuggled up on the sofa felt good – they were a couple who belonged, and they had things to say and do.

This is not to denigrate the other performers, but to say that the comedy, agility and inventiveness of Julie and Mat were simply of a different order, and that the compilation of them with eight or so others, who had unequal contributions to make both as to amount and standard, only demonstrated the variety of reasons for which people employ nudity on stage.

Perhaps it was also simply that, of all those who gave explanations of what draws them to appear on stage, these two were at home with who they were – it is not to say that they did not intend to challenge or even provoke, but, when the others did so or talked about how they felt about themselves, they seemed restless, in flux, even angry, almost as if working out their needs on their audiences.

I say ‘almost as if’, but never was the ‘I slayed them to-night’ thinking more evident than in the power, rather than vulnerability, that others described gaining from becoming naked before an audience, as, for example, when one act put a stage dagger into her vagina, and used black insulation tape to wrap herself up in a bondage net.

Obviously with any person’s stage-show, he or she will know what the onlookers do not about the course – or likely course – of what they will see, but when, in another case, a drag queen feigns to cut up a volunteer from the audience in a bath, and to attach her vagina to his crotch with a staple-gun (the most extreme thing shown), one wonders for whose benefit it is on the spectrum of performance.

The same performer, with the spirit of All About My Mother (1999), had breast implants during the course of the film, but otherwise remained male - he commented, as if what he had described having experienced already were not enough, that he would get more attention, abuse and violence (or the threat of it) on the street. Yes, of course he looks how he wants, but at the same time he know at what cost...


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Festival walk-outs

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25 September

Last night was a mistake - I had intended to see Leviathan (2012), and only realized, too late, that it was not a short prefacing it, but Roland Klick's Deadlock, which had few takers.

Not in itself indicative of anything, but it was not the film that I had wanted to watch, I didn't want to go into the other film after the beginning and catch up, and I was not engaging or in the mood to engage with a dubbed film.

This afternoon, the staginess of Absolute Beginners (1986) was the turn-off, a film that I had always thought would prove, as I had gathered, to have relatively little to say and say it with scant subtlety. The enforced cheeky jollity of a Soho on a stage-set did not chime with my mood, and Patsy Kensit dancing sexily did not persuade me that I wanted to see more of a film with an Alfie-type voiceover, but none of the charm, that I could see, of how Michael Caine plays it : compared with his world, this seemed naive when pretending to be knowing, so I walked at around 30 minutes.

And, yesterday again, the Estonian shorts - I had been compelled by Maggot Feeder (2012) and My Condolences (2013), but Olga, in her car-park, did not have that effect. Even though I knew that it was building slowly to something, coffee called, and, as I guessed, I was not back before the end. It meant that I missed the beginning of the next shown, which had in fact been intended to be The Birthday (2011), but what was shown (and this explained a lot) was Happy Birthday, an animated skits on Jesus and robots.

That's all so far...


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Drowning the piglets

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

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25 September

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

When, after the film, I encountered @mob61uk, I hesitated to elicit another one-word review - mine was, in its true sense, Awesome...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 25, 2013

We agreed that it was well made (as, at any rate, we did about The Taste of Money (2012)), and @mob61uk assented to my assertion that Amy Seimetz was excellent (as Kris).

I then propounded that, as many a film does, it treats of mental ill-health - here, the appearance that Kris had a breakdown and lost her job is belied by seeing how she had been deliberately infected, thereby rendered incapable of independent thought, and had been manipulated to cause her to obtain multiple amounts of credit, and use the equity in her home, on the pretext that she was finding the ransom for her kidnapped mother.

The financial excess, the wild behaviour, would easily have landed her with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and with the two chunky tubs of tablets that she puts on the table in front of Jeff when first they get to talk properly, saving them, as she puts it, 3 to 4 weeks. He does not quite understand what it might matter, what the implications might be, but does not seem put off.

One level on which the film works is a bit like that of Contagion (2011), of tracing the infection back to its root, and, thereby, of validating the experience of Kris (and others), even down to the pigs. Or The Matrix (1999) - when Neo is first captured by Agent Smith and, with the help of two other Agents, a literal, living bug is put into Neo's body, getting it out is as wrenchingly disgusting as when the deceiver makes Kris vomit. Not the only similarity, because there is feeling, when Jeff is directing Kris through the building at work to where the car is, of Cypher or others directing, say, Trinity to an exit, and of the same sense that the real feels unreal.

Back further, we have such touchstones of <i>Madness in Movies</i> as Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) being framed in <i>North by Northwest</i> (1959) (so everyone else seems mad, and he to them, for not believing him), likewise exploiting James Stewart's weakness as Scottie in <i>Vertigo</i> (1958), or, on the other hand, Stewart being credited by a psychiatric Ingrid Bergman in <i>Spellbound</i>, or Sean Connery (Mark Rutland) looking out the psychological basis of Marnie's (Tippi Hedren's) behaviour, because he loves and believes in her.

In Upstream Color (2013), Jeff is an Ingrid or Sean to Kris. They wear each other's identical ring, and there is more than a chemistry between them, because, through each other, they can trace the pig-farmer, and, just as he seems able to project himself into places and to observe people unseen, so Kris sees him, and looks right through him.

I think that this is really a tremendous piece of work by Shane Carruth of writing, directing, producing and starring in this provocative exploration of the nature of reality, and I can see myself hoping to watch it again very soon.


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