Sunday, 14 September 2014

The lady's not for turning ! or, Saying when you are wrong

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)

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

14 September

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014), which was shown at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse) in Screen 1
at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September, and followed by a Q&A

Tony Benn, even when just fighting with the limitations of the law, and of parliamentary practice, to become the MP that he had been elected to be by the constituents of Bristol South East (a ward that later disappeared in Bristol South), has a fascinating story to tell, one which, in this respect, had been so often trivialized at the time as a rich boy believing that he could possibly speak for the ordinary people.

This film deliberately does not rely on other people to narrate Benn’s story, as some documentaries would (as if for taste of variety in the telling*), for, when someone is speaking about what happened, it is Benn himself. (Apparently, he had been wary of anything being shot that might be seen to be eliciting a reaction through sympathy, wanting to stand rather on his words and his record.)

Director ‘Skip Kite’*, answering a question from the auditorium, said that it had been his decision that it was best to hear just from Benn himself (and rhetorically asked why, when one could listen to Benn, one would want to have someone else talking about him) – just as had been getting Benn to read his choice, for Benn, from Auden and Shakespeare (Benn’s family had been surprised, because he was not a reader of poetry), filming him in Southwold (and other places where he had given public talks), and, most importantly, the staging of much of the filming :

When not filmed in his actual kitchen (we were informed in the Q&A that it had been the only part of that property then capable of being filmed in), Benn spoke in what was also confirmed to be a film set (at Ealing Studios), with enlarged front pages of newspapers on one side, hanging as if they were military colours. Though in fact – more often than not – they reminded us (as they gently changed around and became updated) of the scurrilous way in which he had been treated and represented in the British press.

No one watching Tony Benn : Will and Testament can doubt that he was prepared to stand up and be counted for what he believed. *Certainly, his life and work had been an encouragement to the creative team that was represented at Festival Central, who had united under its director’s assumed name of Skip Kite : they all said how much they had learnt from Benn and valued meeting him in making the film, but how every meeting unfailingly had to start with ‘a cuppa’ !

Without venom or great resentment, Benn told us how there had been times in his family life when the doorbell was rung at regular hours throughout the night, and his wife and children were followed in the hope that they might make a mistake or otherwise let something awkward slip. He well knew that, when he was dubbed in the press The most dangerous man in Britain, his principles would not be easily contended for, and, of course, he became a convenient target for people’s class and political animosity. Yet in later life, when we saw him after his record-breaking Commons career (back at Parliament, for a cuppa), he was almost rueful about being viewed as a kind, grandfatherly figure… but still believing himself to be ‘dangerous’.

It also shows that, whatever one thinks of what Benn said or represented, one can – as much of the publicity for the film suggested, e.g. on the film-poster – consider his integrity apart from his politics and policies. Talking factually about how he had asked what a mark was on the pavement, when being shown around Nagasaki and having been directed to it, he said that he had been told that a child had been sitting there and been vaporized by the A-bomb : he had clearly been moved by this experience, and it lay at the root of his conviction of the evil of nuclear weapons.


Tony Benn : Will and Testament does show his remarkable will, that of paying the cost of contesting what he thought morally wrong – for example, whatever one’s beliefs about the rights and wrongs of The Miners’ Strike might be (in 1984 to 1985, and a theme of several Festival films this year), one can scarcely doubt that he meant it when he said how proud he was to appear at the annual gala at Durham Cathedral or pictured on a miners’ banner (and alongside heroes such as Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan).



Likewise, when Benn says that he came to realize that he had been wrong in government to work on setting up nuclear-powered power-stations in the UK, because he had failed to appreciate that plutonium, the principal by-product of uranium fission, would be used to make warheads for more nuclear weapons. Several times in the film, he says that he had had to admit that he had been wrong, and that he thought it only right to do so.

That said, a comment on Michael Foot’s leadership and how the dimension of his CND stance at the 1983 election** helped (along with the jingoism of the recapture of The Falkland Islands from Argentina under Margaret Thatcher) lead to another term of Thatcher government could have been elicited, but appeared passed over.

And, surprisingly, one Festival regular said that he would not attend the screening because of its subject, and one guesses that it must likewise have attracted, or kept away, those with leanings to the left or, respectively, lacking them, thereby giving rise to an audience that was generally interested in Benn and how he was to be portrayed :




To those not interested, whether because not holding left-wing views or not wanting to follow their history through a major figure, one has to suggest that they are mistaken in not watching this film. It has much to say about humanity and what makes life worthwhile, whether Benn’s shock at the death of his brother Michael in the Second World War, and his love for, and loss of, his wife, Caroline Middleton DeCamp (to whom he proposed within ten days, because she was otherwise returning to the States) – or his saying that what mattered to him most about Concorde, when he was Minister of Technology, was the people who built it.




End-notes

* Let alone on t.v., where people pretend to remember what their first thoughts were about x (where x could be anything from children’s programmes to a giant of British comedy), when one guesses that they have seen it since, and that they have been ‘guided’ as to what their recollected response was, typically We had never heard anything like it….

** According to Wikipedia®, the party had the lowest share of the vote since 1918 (though some appear to blame the SDP for splitting the vote and letting the Tories in).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 12 September 2014

A less-than-divine comedy ?

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014)

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

12 September

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014), which had its UK premiere at
Cambridge Film Festival

According to one who also struggled with Amour Fou (2014), but not in Screen 1 at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse), but at Cannes, the film had been billed as a comedy.

Admittedly, a few people did laugh occasionally, but laughing at the manners of the early nineteenth century from the perspective of two hundred years later, and (not necessarily the same thing) seeing the film not as in earnest, but as pastiche, was clearly – if it was one – a conceit that seemed to have been largely lost on the Festival audience (this was the first Festival screening, the UK premiere) :

Yet watch this film as if it were a serious portrayal of the times and miens of the age, and it is literally tedious, i.e. one could not wait for its long-winded vacuum to be refreshed by the buzz and tang of reality in the Picturehouse bar, or on St Andrew’s Street – anywhere, really, but the world of director Jessica Hausner.



From this perspective, it is a lifeless piece about love and death – which soon leaves one craving the relative complexity, affectionate Russian (versus German) lampoonery, and tears of joy of Woody Allen’s own Love and Death (1975). Maybe that was the springboard for this pale story, about a man (Heinrich), who is to and fro between two women with his indecent proposal and a ludicrous – even if period – hat.

Except that the word ‘ludicrous’ connotes laughter, not cringing at the notion that such a whining bore, let alone a poet of talent, should be entertained by any except the most pretentious family : melancholy may still have been the fashion (despite a good work-out in places such as England from the mid-sixteenth to early-seventeenth centuries, with Richard Burton even publishing his guide-book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621), but this Heinrich seems to be almost feigning it as a bargaining tool for what seems, through notoriety, to be a way – if an extreme one – to gain attention for his works.

God forbid, but maybe we were meant to relish Friedrich and Henriette’s implausible patronage, even if, because clearly strained financially, they are lesser nobility / land-owners. Not that one has gone to research the social interaction, the salon life, of Germany in this age (when, in England, Austen would have been preparing Pride and Prejudice for the press), but it seems scarcely likely that any but a Goethe (active at this time) or a Schiller (who died in 1805) might be revered as a person, not just for his or her works, and treated as an equal.

For patronage has ever been an uneasy relationship, but the derogatory opinion of scribbling, and the desire to prove that Shakespeare’s poetry and plays are enobled by really having been produced by such a one as the Earl of Oxford (as beyond the ken of a grammar-school boy from Stratford-on-Avon), have been ever with us, and they linger. Exceptions may lie in real aristocratic patronage, such as what – for him – appear to have been the taxing times for René Descartes (and other scholars and thinkers), at the beck and call of Christina, Queen of Sweden (as Beckettt alludes to in his early prize-winning poem ‘Whoroscope’).

Or, in tribute to the great director, his account of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 – 1798) in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) through the medium of Donald Sutherland – let alone Josef Haydn, languishing first at Schloß Esterházy, then at Esterháza (broadly 1761 to 1790), Johann Sebastian Bach, restricted at the court of Cöthen (1717 to 1723), or Wolfgang Amadeus, running away from service to the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg (1773 to 1777) to Vienna.

In film terms, at any rate, we have another Sleeping Beauty (2011), which defies us to stay awake, and taunts us if we do so and hate it : there, as a student waitressing to pay her way through some course (as part of which she is required to study games theory), Lucy / Melissa (Emily Browning) is short of money. Yet that film is not one about how she is trapped into a form of (or what is little better than) prostitution.

At best, it is her acknowledging to herself what she must have known all along (there have been clues enough) : she is not special, nor is she, though, a Sonmi-451 (in Doona Bae), coming to consciousness (in the visualization of Cloud Atlas (2012)) and stirring up a movement with consequences, any more than Heinrich has an original bone in his body, with his longing for one woman (or the other – it does not matter much to him) to accompany him in his quest for immortality.

In relation to this film, we have scant notion of what Heinrich’s writing might be like – unless the text of the two songs to which we are ‘treated’ (fortepiano and voice, twice each) might be inferred to be his (see below). And many a celebrated Lied has started as an unremarkable poem, from which a musical talent has crafted a finer creation (although also ones by Goethe (Heidenröslein*) or Heine (the settings in Schwanengesang, D. 957) have also been not unequal to being set well).

Those who are acquainted with the plot of Die Marquise von O. (The Marquise of O), but forget that its author was Heinrich von Kleist (to whom our Heinrich does turn out to bear a striking resemblance, physically at least), may be surprised to find Heinrich appearing to pass it off as his own… But would it, any more than if we had been confronted with, say, William in Love, add anything that a version of the real story of Kleist is being told here in semi-disguise (although aspects of Kleist’s life and work have appeared in at least a dozen other films) ?

Well, try comparing this with Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut’s film based on a novel, with a woman in between the two title-characters, and there is no knowingness, no depth, in Heinrich’s wheedling**. Even on the best interpretation of Amour Fou, namely that it wishes to depict for our amusement the foibles of the bourgeois classes and their dangerous flirt with the arts, it has nothing much to say, least of all with its – apparently hypothetical – suggestion about the facts at the end (which, given the preceding confusion and implausible sudden certainty, does not actually surprise, because one had surmised the position to be quite arbitrary).

And one doubts that, ready to laugh, the clumsy consummation of something that was meant to be beautiful (and to transcend the misery of life) either has one laugh – or, if what is felt seems an inappropriate reaction, choke it back.


End-notes

* To which Das Veilchen, a setting of which (twice) we hear, is Goethe’s companion piece : to judge from Wikipedia®, it appears that Mozart's is the most celebrated setting...

** The film is set, if only in static words, in the era of post-Revolutionary France, and amongst the chatter of those who stand to lose concerning the changes to make taxation general, but even that background feels unimportant, if the film wanted to say something to us about our own times. Nothing, in any terms, seems to amplify (by taking us beyond it, in a running-time of what felt much longer than the advertised 96 minutes) the general description given in the Festival’s printed programme…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 6 September 2014

In this cold, it’s paradise*

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

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

6 September

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

As a rarity, Iranian (2014) was interesting, a film dangerous to its maker Mehran Tamadon to have filmed – but could it, for all that, have been better, maybe much better ?



As narrator (over scenes inside a mosque, or of religious veneration on the street), he tells us that he has tried for three years to obtain the agreement of Iranian clerics to spend time in a house together with him, an atheist, so that they can talk about what it is to share a space (the house, which here is his mother’s house, outside Teheran) and what that might be like in The Islamic Republic of Iran – making house rules for the use of the shared parts of the house, which may or may not translate into what should be permissible for people to do generally in that country.

So when four (understandably but regrettably ?) unidentified clerics, two of whom seem more senior to the others (and is referred to as Haji Ali), accept his invitation (and, during the course of settling in, then bring along their families), do we imagine that he would want to be prepared to counter, for example, facile arguments or debating techniques (not least when one of the other men, slighting him comically on camera, asks how he ever read philosophy (when he cannot follow the instructions for ritually washing himself))…?

(Having tried the ritual, he is asked if he felt Incredible joy : twice he took it back to the refreshment of the water (rather than any spiritual quality), and, when he resisted probing as to whether the ritual in itself had been beneficial, he was told Maybe you need to be more attentive, as if the ritual were inherently beneficial and purifying, if he would just notice. Rather pompously and insultingly, around this point, Tamadon is also told (by the cleric on the right (Tamadon is on the left), who is the main interlocutor) You lack knowledge.)


Possibly, grateful that the men are there at all, he falls into the trap of being too nice to them**, and then this felt like a bit of a wasted opportunity, for, although at the level of intelligent undergraduate debate, it was good enough, there are things that anyone should be wise to :

* Not allowing the other participants to define the position that one is defending (or attacking from)

* Not allowing extreme examples or cases to be used, or false dichotomies (as if the choice is only between A and B, and there is no C, etc.)


In this film, Tamadon only weakly defends the assertion that his argument is for ‘secularism’ – the others say the word a few times, and, by attrition, he accepts it, and then ends up with a false label to what he is seeking. This label is then, necessarily, used against him.

For he also allows his guests to refer to the case of naked protesters in Holland (although, to be honest, Das englische Garten in München is where people are allowed to be freely naked outdoors and in public) and then to brand him with dictatorship, under the guise of having made a claim for secularism, because he says that he had not been proposing for nudity to be allowed – this line of argument had, after all, started with the requirement in Iran (whether or not part of Islamic law as such, or of the law of an Islamic Republic – this dis disputed between him and then, and not resolved) of women being veiled.

There was much good humour, not least when, on arrival (and later) the idea of avoiding religious taxes is invoked in relation to Tamadon’s mother’s largely unused property (since his sister and he both live abroad). But too much of the humour is allowed to be at Tamadon’s expense, and the theatricality of one cleric, in getting him to answer a broad Yes or No question, and his then falling into some trap based on the bogus notion of an excluded middle, and even calling him ‘cunning’ more than once.

For, no, if he were even a good debater, let alone a cunning one, Tamadon would say So what if 98% of those who voted 34 years ago voted for The Islamic Republic – two generations have been born since, and how many people who voted then are now alive ? Instead, he weakly says that his parents voted for it, but they did not know what it was going to be (and any such appeal to the individual case, Tamadon’s or anything that was not a generality, was just jumped on).

Against which, science and scientifically established fact kept being invoked – a woman singing (only allowed if a woman sings to an audience only of women) is said to evoke lust in men, and that men are more inspired to lust by, say, seeing a woman’s bare head. Tamadon’s arguments for self-control then sounded regressive, because the high ground had been taken by asserting a scientific basis for the claims, not least when the argument is that it is necessary men’s inclinations must be shielded by women not singing or being unveiled :

We were really in the puerile territory of judges who say that women had it coming with rape or sexual assault because of how they dressed, as if The Accused (1988) had never existed. These debaters are arguing that when a man is attracted to a woman it almost automatically and unavoidably ends in adultery, and this in a society without the loosening effect of (too much) alcohol, and whatever the film may have meant as its message is lost on such thinking.

This film is maybe not the only opportunity that there will be to argue the issues properly, and, when it came to what music could be played in the living-room, with the agreement of the five men, it was interesting that there was not a uniformity of view amongst the other four, and a willingness to allow in that special situation what could not and would not be sanctioned in society as a whole : an indication that, doctrinally, there was more room for movement, with one cleric who stated the official line, and yet what he could personally permit / accept there.

There was a good feel generally to seeing the shared life for these few days, and the prints on canvas, of the men’s libraries, that were used to decorate the walls gave a sense of their influences and viewpoints. However, all of these things were too little to outweigh the substantial poverty of good argument.


End-notes

* Of the fire in the garden, whose flames had been likened just before to those of hell.

** There are, after all, liberties that guests sometimes have, but hosts do not, and vice versa.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 4 September 2014

Stigmata and sacrifice

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

4 September


* Contains spoilers *



Can one put one’s finger on what is so affecting about this film ? A young girl, Maria, just at confirmation age, who idolizes Bernadette, the au pair, and who is being pushed in certain directions by her family and the church :

We see Maria objecting to the rather tame music that the sympathetic PE teacher is playing – seemingly not for the first time – to accompany her class’ exercise on the hoof on the basis that it contains ‘satanic rhythms’. Just before, we have seen her urged in confession, and with similar descriptions of music characterized by Fr. Weber, to denounce it. Whose life is she leading that she should want to sacrifice the landscape, or her own life to heal her younger brother Johannes ?

The chill is in the zeal with which Maria’s mother, at the undertaker’s, talks of seeking canonization for her daughter – almost as if she sees past her daughter to a saint, although we have seen her treat Maria abusively for her selfish ill-will on at least three occasions. Kein Wunder that her husband leaves the table and goes aside to stand in quiet thought – and the mother finally breaks down in proper tears…

Is the mapping of Maria’s last days on the elements of The Stations of The Cross something that is partly imposed, from the mother’s eye view, after the event ? – although, theologically, one knows the injunction to Take up one’s cross daily, and that identification with Jesus is the stuff of The Imitation of Christ.

But does she, in the tears, finally realize that the contented smile that she had in the car, after she has humiliated her daughter and, by stopping in traffic with a provocative ultimatum, secured her compliance by sheer power-play is just another aspect of the domination of Maria's life and memory that she craves now ? Perhaps.

Yet, although one wonders that, at the third hour (by the hospital clock) and as Maria’s heart fails, Johannes finally speaks, at the age of four, to call her name and to ask Wo ist Maria ?, we are emotionally with Bernadette in the preceding scene, not wanting her to refuse food and make ready to sacrifice her life. The horrible liturgical humbug is, though, that Maria’s mother says that the sacrament of communion is received when the wafer touches the lips (although Maria chokes on it, and it has to be unceremoniously whipped out of her mouth by a nurse) :

Unnoticed by us, we connect with the first scene, and Fr. Weber’s dogmatic assertion that life begins not, as suggested by one of the confirmation class, at birth, but at conception. Here, we are at the other end of life, and, in urging this hypocritical beatification of her daughter, Whatever one may think of the pro-life position (and choosing an age in weeks up to which a pregnancy can be lawfully terminated does seem somewhat arbitrary), Maria’s mother is invoking similar clear-cut definitions of life and death, right and wrong, holy and impure.

The key thing to notice (third stumble) is that Bernadette, not Maria’s mother, is her sponsor for confirmation, and how, even so feverish and ill, what is on Maria’s mind to pour out to Bernadette is how she believes that he mother does not love her, and to feel responsible for what she sees as a lack of love.

The film is a masterpiece. It is so powerful, second time around and as one tries to link each station of the cross to the tableau in hand, that it deserves a much greater audience than it had at either screening at Festival Central : this time, no laughter at the hard-liners in church and family, no treating of this as some sort of risible entertainment at the expense of real people who do have such faith and dogma.

And a profound emotion for Maria, believing that she is doing as she should for her mute brother’s sake…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 3 September 2014

Marks along the way

This is a review of Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) (2014)

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

3 September

This is a review of Stations of the Cross
(Kreuzweg, which means ‘way of the cross’) (2014)

Forget the cinematographic limitation that actually gives one nearly fourteen single takes in tableau style (only eleven where the camera simply does not move) : after the first, where one has one’s doubts*, it is more liberating to the inventiveness of writers Dietrich and Anna Brüggemann (he directs) than one could imagine – not least as the structure mirrors the fact that when the way of the cross is set out, in or around a church, an image to capture the frozen moment in time usually accompanies each step along it, for purposes of contemplation.

That restriction of a static camera-position, broken only incidentally in those few places, does really concentrate the mind and the emotions wonderfully on the amazingly telescoped ambit of the film’s story, starting with a final lesson with the priest to prepare for confirmation. *As that is the first scene, maybe it is not important that at least one (maybe two) of the candidates does not seem to contribute to answering the questions posed by Father Weber – certainly the girl at the far right-hand end of the table does not, and does nothing other than look more or less straight ahead, occasionally moving her hands, and she seems (as, to an extent, does the boy to her right) like a makeweight. (She does not appear again until they are in a pew together for the confirmation address.)

A small hesitation (even if it did make one doubt that the Oulipo-type richness-in-restriction was going to be effective), because the rest of the film is a compelling account of a very short period in Maria’s life, who is one of the candidates, and whose family is part of a fundamentalist Roman Catholic church that names itself after St Paul and rejects changes such as those brought in by The Second Vatican Council (so they still use Latin forms of absolution, etc.). Some in the audience were, rather inappropriately, laughing, as if this were a broad comedy, seemingly unaware that such beliefs (and the systems that keep them operative) are part of life in continental Europe**.

The film cries out to be watched. There is a second chance to do so at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) / #CamFF 2014 on Thursday 4 September at 2.30


Why should it be seen ? Here are some observations :

* Lea van Acken (Maria), Florian Stetter (Fr. Weber), Franziska Weisz (Maria’s mother) and Lucie Aron (Bernadette) are exceptionally strong – with the only hesitation about cast being as already mentioned

* The clarity of the script and of its delivery mean that one senses all the nuances of Maria’s family and its belief-system, not least her relationship with the dominant mother, and her attempt to fit in with the high demands of living the good life within their church

* Key scenes are at the doctor’s and, afterwards, when Maria is with Bernadette, the au pair

* Before them, the conflict (external) of a group photograph during a walk, and (internal) of Maria’s confession prior to confirmation – the energies, the dynamics, are often laid bare as much by how things are spoken, as well as by what is not spoken

* The power of this film grows and grows – if it does not have tears rolling down one’s cheeks in the closing tableaux, perhaps the film never can achieve that, but it certainly can




For a spoilery Postscript, following that second viewing, click here






End-notes

* Please see below (where asterisked).

** One doubt here : whether they would have sung the sort of chorale that we hear in the service, and seemingly have approved of Bach’s Chorales, although he was a Lutheran. (Some opposition to Vatican II has also rejected music in worship as a whole.)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 2 September 2014

Don't mention Beirut ! I mentioned it once, but I think that I got away with it all right...

This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)

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

3 September

This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Funding apart, there really is little point in having a film set in a country where all the cast speaks English, but they are supposed to sound as if they speak it with the accent of that country.

To that end, Rachel McAdams (who was not identifiable even as a non-German, despite being the love interest in Midnight in Paris (2012)) was alone worth the sole language coach’s fee, whereas Willem Dafoe desperately drifted, but that was better than the respected Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, despite his German name, sounded most often like the best of Richard Burton than any Günther Bachmann.

What was, McAdams apart, the point of this exercise, where Germans such as Nina Hoss (Irna Frey, and who played the lead in Barbara (2012)) were in no way matched by the non-Germans ? One has no doubt that Hoss could have spoken English with less of an accent than the one that the non-Germans were not picking up…

That apart, however nicely the production was put together, more of the same with the script (maybe to be laid at author John Le Carré’s door) : one big dénouement (perhaps predictable) to account for why a man who, under Russian torture (as Günther observes), confesses to crimes and who anyway fits the visual image of the dodgy muslim fundamentalist (until he trims some hair), can prove to be actually more like Prince Myshkin than a jihadist.

Frankly, if that is what one takes from the film, that a man who admits that the non-organization that he heads has no status will not be done over in seeking to protect this Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) and that said Karpov needed some love, then that is not worth the price of the ticket.

Ah, but one forgets the original soundtrack ! As Hamburg is the home of a sailing nation and a commercial centre, accordion slowed down so that sea-shanties became unrecognizable, incorporating the sound of also slowed data-transmissions into composition, and otherwise imitating Arvo Pärt’s procedure of tintinnabulation – all of that must have made it worthwhile after all.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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You have to make a move, you have no choice

This is a review of Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014)

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

3 September


This is a review of Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014)

* Contains non-specific spoilers *

The film only tells you about the 26s and the 28s, but the Internet reveals that there are also the 27s, although it fails to explain what the numbers of these ‘numbers gangs’ refer to : in relation to the 26s, some of whose members in the film refer to being Americans and to the number of stars on the flag (which flag ?), the dollar symbol is shown, which appears to connect (although there are dollars other than US dollars).

This is by the by. The film toys with the idea of neighbourhood, having all the significant characters converge on a tiny area, and, in this microcosm, showing how pointless the sectarian divisions are, not least when one ends up with father against son (though they do not know each other) (and with the undisguised parallel in chess). For all that, it is fairly routine and not all that interesting. What is interesting is that the film-makers expect us to maintain our interest, because everything is shown quite neutrally, in a man who kills another out of a (pretty pointless) family feud – with a grotesque paying of respects afterwards – and then shoots a boy, just because he can claim to be a householder who is protecting his interests.

This is not only a far cry from the utter barbarism of the gangs in prison (a building which gives us the film’s title), but seeks to have us ‘on side’ for the failings and future of the chess-playing son. The film leads us back to the drama with which it opened, and we recognize it for the first time, but the experience in between has been too hollow to make this amount to anything : our only connection has been with unearthing some disappearances, and, later, the shock of realizing how they have been perpetrated.

The chess has been there as a floating symbol of peaceful competition and endeavour, but it is too weak to sustain this narrative, where, we are told towards the end, You have to make a move, you have no choice – in fact, such references test the story beyond breaking-point, and leave us just with a glib quotation about how there is, in life, no such thing as a standstill. Maybe a documentary about the long standing and the elaborate tattooing of these gangs, if that had been possible, would have been a better endeavour…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Flaws that stopped one sleeping

This is principally a critique of Before I Go to Sleep (2014), not a review

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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2 September (updated 26 November)

* Contains many spoilers – this is principally a critique of Before I Go to Sleep (2014), not a review *

A film such as Cell 211 (Celda 211), despite having a flaw at its centre that was challenging to spot, deserved a release (and, at least on DVD, got one). However, to Before I Got to Sleep (2014), the following Tweet sadly does apply :



As to plausibility, if one wanted a digital camera, one would do well to buy Christine’s make – it is apparently indestructible ! But, on other matters, the question put mainly to Steve Watson, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, at the Q&A on Monday night at Cambridge Film Festival / #CamFF 2014 follows.

Premise : Christine does not remember the previous day, and sees no one, every day, but the person whom she takes to be Ben (because he tells her so)
Question : So what does reason does Mike have to pretend to be Ben [which, in fact, he may do out of guilt, but clearly resents doing] ?

An immediate answer was not forthcoming, which, accepting that writing the book had been some while ago, was fine. However, the best that director / writer Rowan Joffe and he came up with (slightly later) was that of cementing the memory by repeating a version of the past, because Christine’s forgetting is not certain.

Nothing, though, could address the fact (put to Steve) that, if Christine woke up with a sudden memory of the real Ben and being married to him, nothing that fake Ben could do to pretend to be he would make him look like him – and, if she remembered that she was married to the real Ben, he would have to persuade her that he is also Ben, and that he married her after Ben 1 and she divorced…



The book and film’s reality and need is that it wants to present the to us as much as to Christine man who is really Mike (Mike 2) as Ben, and so have us believe that he is her pre-injury husband. Yet, if Mike wanted to pretend that there are images of him marrying Christine, i.e. proof that he is her husband (and so legitimate), he would have done it photographically, not physically.

The images are so patently cut together that they would never convince anyone, let alone a woman staring at them because she cannot remember the events that they show : the film gives us what appeared to be a dishonest close-up of what a crude job it is, with a cut-line between their heads, whereas a medium shot shows the heads touching, or, at any rate, so close that there would be no white space in between

* * * * *

As to the positives, with a variation of date rape, any woman could wake up in bed with a man, not knowing who she is or why is there, and drugged into accepting that she has no memory and that he is her partner… Or we could ask, as philosophers in the past have, how we know that the external world exists and that we are not ‘brains in a vat’ : receiving sensory data with no senses, beyond having those stimuli, to perceive the world that we apparently see and feel …

So it is not as if the film / book does not pose questions. (Though, as Hugh Taylor (Festival supporter and regular put it), it is not as if it is not full of holes, and turns Nicole Kidman into that traditional character of the helpless woman.)

Nonetheless, there is such a spoilery list of things to consider (most of which were evident during or just after the screening, and just condensed into the criticism implied by the question posed) that one must wonder what Watson / Joffe thought they were doing regarding a plot that worked. Not an exhaustive list, but the more obvious ones, follows :

* Mike 1, even if he has good reason to suspect Mike 2, seems to act fairly strangely for a doctor – contacting Christine out of the blue, without her husband’s knowledge (and encouraging her not to change that position), and expecting her to trust him

* In fact, her levels of trust are worryingly high (given what she later fears about him, albeit curiously having been taken to a remote reservoir), and indicate that the issues below (of getting her discharged) should, from the point of view of her vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, have made that extremely difficult without very convincing bona fides

* How does Mike 2 have Christine’s telephone number, if, as we are told, she was discharged from a hospital / home (unless she has some contact with it or equivalent day services) ?

* And how does he have the photographs of Claire (with which he stimulates Christine’s memory of Claire), and would he not have been using photographs of her taken with the man who is really Ben (to trigger memories of those times, too, before the attack) ?

* Maybe some questions of acquired brain injury would be considered a psychiatric issue (under the provisions of s. 1 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended)). If it were thought one, to protect the interests of a person with no memory from exploitation, signing them off to an appropriate place for her care and aftercare would almost certainly have had to be part of the discharge (please see below) – not to somewhere where she is at home all day and almost never leaves the house :

* What does Christine have for lunch ? How does she get vitamin D or exercise, for example, if she does not leave the house (she cannot leave the house, because she does not know where she is ?) ? How are her dental and health needs met, etc. ?

* And, although we only see a period inside term-time, what happens in the holiday ? Can their lives really be confined to a house that is as central to this fantasy as François Ozon’s is in In The House (Dans la maison) (2012) ?

* Neurological tests should have established what (important) part of her amnesia is from the injury, what from the fear-memories of the attack, if she came to this house as recently as four years ago : the film makes scant distinction

* The simplest divorce, where there are no real assets and no children, can be a paper exercise. However, with a wife with a son and who, because of her problems with memory, almost certainly lacks capacity, it is just not clear on what basis one would straightforwardly be obtained. (Out of the possible ones of adultery, ‘unreasonable behaviour’, desertion, two years’ separation with consent, or five years without consent, probably the last, being the time spent in hospital(s).)

* Whenever exactly it happened (the film seems a little unclear, maybe because Mike 2 is lying about the divorce ?), it would have been a major event in any hospital / care home, and almost certainly involving The Court of Protection, because of the need for someone’s valid agreement, to make sure that Christine’s interests would be represented, to what would happen to Adam and how the assets of the marriage would be divided :

* Her share of any proceeds of sale would be held on trust for her, again supervised by the Court, and yet we seem to have the house passed off as where Christine has always lived with Ben…

* Again according to Mike 2, Christine was in hospital / care when he came for her and discharged her – so who was he somehow pretending to be with his forgeries, and why, if that was Ben, he would not have been her next-of-kin as her former husband, so why was he allowed to take her ‘home’ (unless we are to suppose that the hospital / home has somehow forgotten that significant legal step in Christine’s life) ?

* Why would her actual next-of-kin (probably her elder parent) not have been contacted – or is that the nature of Mike 2’s forgery, e.g. to pretend, say, to be her brother ?

* If the attack on Christine was as violent as we see, not only would blood be all over the room and the corridor, but pathology would also have established that it did not take place where her body is found :

* Mike and she may have been checked in under assumed names, but they had met before (maybe there), and no proper police enquiry would have failed to link the injured body to the hotel (because of the blood and a sheet from a hotel), and hence to the people who had occupied it

* One reason is that there are laundry-tags or codes (even if removed), and missing sheets from hotels that night and the type and size of the sheet in which she has been found wrapped would have narrowed the field – just using a hotel sheet, in itself, did so much to implicate Mike

* He did not seem to premeditate the attack, since he was attempting to get Christine to agree for him to call Ben to tell him of the affair, and then got angry and violent towards her with the phone when she tried to stop him : he left her, for some reason naked (would someone have recognized her clothes as such ?), where it is clear that the sheet that he used to clothe her would have been from an airport hotel in the vicinity

* If Claire has been contacting the last place where Christine was an in-patient, why would they have been telling her what she reports about Christine – and why does she not tell Christine that she has a grown-up son ?

* Has Mike dummied up a forged death certificate for Adam (in case Christine has the energy to go through the contents of the tin ?

* The fact that he tells her that she has remembered Claire before is not conclusive that she has not had a memory of her real (former) husband before, but maybe chloroforming her and relying on her having forgotten in the morning is a sufficient remedy for someone intent on living with the woman whom he nearly killed and who is frightened of seeing him every morning – perhaps just for the occasional times when (as we see) her levels of trust lead to intercourse…

* The film also seemed confused as to when Adam was said to have died / when Christine was attacked in relation to it (but maybe because of Mike 2’s lies again)

QED ?

Whatever the quality of the production (with Colin Firth having to contain his role much of the time to give us a shock - and, to go back to that question in the Q&A, the shock that he gives us is precisely because, for our benefit alone, he needlessly pretends to be Ben, rather than being himself), the plotting is just not worthy of it.


With a 36% rating of Rotten on the Rotten Tomatoes web-site from critics, and 50% from audiences, here is a link to what some of even the most positive reviews admitted...




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

This is a review of Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013)

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

2 September (updated 17 September - Tweets added, 10 January 2015)

This is a review of Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013)

Some may be disconcerted by the subtitles seeming to be in advance of the dialogue, although largely they lag (if not synchronized) : if that seems like it is a problem to your sort of viewing (of course, it may not be deliberate (please see below), though that seems unlikely), read no further :

Do not make a date with your second chance to see a screening of Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) at Cambridge Film Festival / #CamFF 2014 (Thursday 4 September at 6.00 p.m. in The Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College)

Those staying with this review can safely be told that there are lots of black-outs, big pink capitals that announce the advancing months, jump-cuts and quick cutting, and both a skilful use of a limited number of locations and an unshowily impressive performance by Patcha Poonpirya (Mary). Nor will it spoil things to know that an incoming head teacher turns Mary’s school’s status from day to boarding, stores and promulgates his own-branded coffee and soup, and that (not introduced by him) her fellow schoolmates wear tops that, in autumn 2012, state :

SCHOOL
1983
SPORT DAY
SENIORS


Yet, although set in and around a school, with Mary's best friend Suri, it is not a coming-of-age film, but one that challenges the notions both of what we expect from cinema and of what we think that reality is. If that is still seeming like a little too much, some of us may be doing some rearranging to be able to watch the film again, but please feel free to alight now.

Nothing draws attention to a budget that must be modest, except that one continues to nudge oneself, impressed by the quality of what one sees, with its search for photography’s magic hour, for (in the title of a series of booklets) Calculating Future Probability, and for recognition that The mouth does more damage than the hand. The film plays to its limited resources, with sly repetitions, variations of light and angle, and that disjunctive use of text.

Which is where some make much of the fact that, centrally on the screen, and most often with a click as they appear, are words, mainly not in English script, but with an unvarying line that appears underneath : Expand / Reply / Delete / Favorite, which may mean little to those who do not Tweet, but which would (before Twitter changed its format) be the line beneath only one’s own Tweets* (i.e. broadly short, public messages (a maximum of 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation), as one cannot delete another person’s Tweets, only (broadly speaking) choose not to see his or her Tweets any more).

What seems of much more interest than whether these are real Tweets from an account in the name of Mary Malony is the fact that this film is steeped in cinema, so much so that Mary’s form has a class – announced by a painted board in the background – in which her film-script is being discussed. Not in the knowing sort of way (which some might associate with Holy Motors) that tries to make you feel that you ‘should’ know all the references (or admit your inadequacy), but that uses film as a dynamic and creative medium, whose capacity – if we enter into it – is enhanced by the image that we watch is writ so large, and being able to explore cinematographers and directors’ works when one learns how they have been an influence on what interests one (though that latter feature is not unique to film).

Here, although the quiet pulse that ran through the film was that of Jean-Luc Godard (those incongruous scenes where the paramedics suddenly appear, the moodily evocative setting of the disused railway-lines, and a US diner full of bike helmets and cake…), it was nonetheless pleasing to have confirmation in the form of open acknowledgements, towards the end, of him and of Nouvelle Vague.

Director Nawapol Thamrongrattanrit has not just absorbed Godard’s key work, but has given it a fresh, strong spirit, and this film is sure to have filmgoers revisiting it to share his enthusiasm.

On again, at the very least, on Thursday 4 September at 6.00 p.m. in The Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College

Postlude

Watching a second time did not bring very much more into focus, but was more of a battle - albeit a successful one, maintaining the original view of this film - with a sceptical inner voice, which sought to argue that the film was not as strong :

Just picture how it feels to get a friend to watch something that one things highly of, and then seeing it through what one imagines are his or her eyes.

Quite a test to pass - and it also gave a chance to catch the subtitles and the midline Tweets that were in English !



Postlude by Tweet :




End-notes

* The question being : how could these be the real Tweets of another person, if the person reading them has the privileged option to delete ? That said, @marylony, the Twitter account that the Festival booklet names, does exist...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 1 September 2014

Am I my brother’s keeper ?

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

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

1 September

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)


As with the version of pool being played in Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), one does not need to know about the winning moves of chess to watch this film : one is not required to understand them, although it features chess.

The film invites comparison with Good Will Hunting (1997) (where, as a viewer, one does not need to understand mathematics) for a relationship that is at its centre, that between Nico (Nicholas Albert), played by David Solans, and Julio Beltrán (Julio Manrique), even down to the fact that the motives of both participants in the therapy are mixed : Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is effectively blackmailed into it, and his client, passed to him in desperation, is hardly what Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) had been seeking from Dr Lambeau’s contact.

This is an adaptation of Ignacio García-Valiño’s novel, and its evocation of Cain, the first murderer and the one who gave his name to a mark, deceptively plunges us into what apparently concerns us, some mistake with a contract, and attending a posh business party, where the daggers (or the excuses) may be out.

Dream-laden footage of gently curving wide roads in the suburbs have already given us a notion of this sort of milieu (as against the narrow streets where Beltrán’s practice is located), yet it is really about coming home to the shock and uncertainty of an apparently bloody incident, and with a trail downstairs and into the very heart of the grand cliff-top property where the family lives. Nico’s seeming lack of care, and even taunting of his distressed father Carlos Albert (José Coronado), ends up with the latter calling a chance contact for whatever help there is, short of putting Nico in the reformatory.

We see greater evidence of Nico’s provocations of and angry outbursts at his father, not softened by the Mahler adagietto playing in the car during the scene, and we sense that his mother Coral (Maria Molins) thinks him the more and more lost, if he does not get help. Contrariwise, everything – including what Andrew, a respected former colleague, has to say – has been telling Beltrán not to commit himself to the approaches that the family are making, and to say no.

Yet, in his effort to see how he can assist, he is as driven as J. J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974), and takes the chance of even involving Andrew against the latter’s better judgement – as for Gittes, does it also represent a challenge that, for reasons of his own, Beltrán cannot resist ?

Seeing his interactions with others, such as the staff at school or even his own sister (Patrícia), who manages the practice, it is clear both that he dispenses with the formalities, and that he does not suffer fools gladly : he has time for Nico for those same qualities, and for having a very high IQ, as well an ability for chess…

Classifying this film as ‘a thriller’ misses the richness of chess as a metaphor, not least how Andrew’s (Jack Taylor’s) lavish premises with a covert entrance are fully enlivened by Jesús Monllaó’s direction, where Alice’s sense of another world (through the looking-glass, and with its own rules), and of competition on equal terms, are evoked again and again*. (Here, there is even a little twinkle of Hogwart’s, as of the magically gifted…)

There is also a competitive gesture that makes Will Hunting’s therapy a challenge to Maguire, and which figures in Beltrán fascination for trying to fathom Nico. As Son of Cain unfolds, with its deliberate play of light and dark spaces, we will find that, in this sense, it aspires to what we most admire about Hitchcock’s best suspense, that of a taut unwinding, as of a spring.


End-notes

* Just as Scorsese did, as his film built to The Nine Ball Classic in Atlantic City : the epitome of The American Dream.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 31 August 2014

Two Days Plus Xanax

This is a spoilery follow-up to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)

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

31 August

This is a spoilery follow-up to a review of Two Days, One Night (2014)
(Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

* Contains spoilers *

L'enfer, c'est les autres
Huis Clos ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This quotation was chosen, because, in the film (if not in the play), it is Sandra’s thoughts about herself and about what others, including her husband, may be thinking about her that are now at the root of being off work.

That and the inhuman approach that Sandra’s boss, Dumont, has cooked up with the connivance of the foreman, Jean-Marc, of requiring her fellow employees to say whether they would rather receive a bonus of 10,000 Euros than for her to return to work (when sixteen have done the work of seventeen during her absence, albeit by doing three hours’ overtime, and when Jean-Marc prejudges the issue, by saying that Sandra is no longer up to the job).

‘Bonus’ has been used to translate the French word prime, which, in practice, can serve to mean, when qualified, terms as diverse as ‘severance pay’ (prime de liceniciement) and ‘productivity bonus’ (prime de rendement), so Il a eu une prime en récompense de son travail (‘He received a bonus for his work’). Despite how some of the colleagues talk of spending ma prime, it does seem to be in the nature of a one-off payment, of which there is no future guarantee, and not a pay-rise (for which there is the separate word une augmentation - as, at least, the term is used in France).

As Sandra is forced to approach each of her colleagues, she hears their reasons why they have already spent what, for all that we know, they only recently knew that they would be getting, and have not yet received. It is almost un fait accompli. The deviltry is in making it seem as if they decide, when Dumont (with Jean-Marc) has (as emerges late on) arbitrarily set one against the other (sc. the bonus against her returning to work), and two main questions arise in consequence :
(1) The overdose that Sandra takes in despair – is it so unrealistic, as two matriarchs were tutting after the screening, that she could be out and approaching the last few employees that night ?

(2) If Sandra wanted recourse in employment law, what claim is open to her (in the UK, as against Belgium, this would be unfair dismissal) - though, when so many of her colleagues have to work au noir, could they risk being involved ? 


(1) Well, Xanax, which is used to treat anxiety, is one of the few medications that states (in the patient information leaflet) :

'If you forget to take a dose, take it as soon as you remember unless it is time for your next dose.
Do not take a double dose to make up for a missed dose.'

The article linked here talks about the risks of overdose, including having to take 975 times the maximum human dose to reproduce the cardiopulmonary collapse that is found in rats at this level : it lists, as manifestations of overdose, ones that include somnolence, confusion, impaired coordination, diminished reflexes, and coma.

Although death has been reported as an outcome of overdose, since Sandra said as soon as she had taken the tablets what she has done, and Manú starts by trying to induce vomiting when the ambulance is being called, it does not seem improbable that Sandra could escape severe symptoms, and be able to discharge herself quite quickly.

(2) As to employers' practices in the field of mental health, they may be harder on our attempts to make a recovery : we see Sandra buoyed by how many support her, but understandably does not wish to betray colleagues on fixed-term contracts by accepting the offer, as it is put to her, of reinstatement in her post.

Dumont’s folly, if he actually values Sandra after all (rather than is trying to manipulate her to do as she does), is to think that she sees things as casually as he does, and to say that he will instead not renew the contract of someone working on a fixed term : although he is technically right that this is not a dismissal, she has been represented as having had no protection from being dismissed anyway herself, in a world where employees can vote against someone ready to return from illness…

Whether that is possible in employment law in Belgium does not much matter, for the film – without being over-specific that it is set in one country rather than another – asks us to accept that it is so (or effectively so*).


End-notes

* In fact, a briefing on employment law in Belgium from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer suggests that, for dismissals made before 1 April 2014, it was open for blue-collar workers to ‘claim that their dismissal was not based on their performance or attitude, or on economic reasons and, if the employer could not prove otherwise, they were entitled to an extra six months’ indemnity’.

In the law operative for service since 1 January 2014, there now appears to be no (or less) distinction between white- and blue-collar workers, and for it to be open to all to require written reasons for dismissal within two months (as well as to receive a specified minimum notice).

In conclusion, it does not appear, in Belgium of recent date, that an employer could succeed (except for the reasons stated) in lawfully seeking to dismiss Sandra in this way in these circumstances.



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