Showing posts with label Locke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Locke. Show all posts

Monday 22 July 2019

Stop trying to hit me - and hit me ! ~ Morpheus

A response to re-watching Kill Bill : Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 July

A response to re-watching, but on a cinema-screen, Kill Bill :
Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004)


For Jim 'TAKE ONE' Ross






In Kill Bill, Tarantino has set himself not only making a revenge story into a film, but also one where he has delayed addressing what happened that gave rise to it at least until the beginning of Vol. 2 (2004) - even if he does not completely do so until Beatrix Kiddo ('The Bride' / Uma Thurman) has tracked down and confronted Bill (David Carradine), whom we do not even see until Vol. 2.



Suspending the full account for what we have seen for around four hours (since Vol. 1 (2003) is very nearly two hours, and Vol. 2 is longer) puts an especial need to represent the 'chapters' of the film (and parts of them) in a way that makes them varied and discrete, because Tarantino has to maintain our interest in what we see, without our really knowing why we are seeing it.



In Vol. 1, Tarantino cannot resist the bloody fountains that are loosed by decapitation (Boss Tanaka / Jun Kunimura) or severing an arm (Sofie Fatale / Julie Dreyfus), and, whatever anatomical truth there may be in such depictions, he knows that he needs to keep the imagery fresh : so, for example, he switches into monochrome during the onslaught by The Crazy 88s ; when O-Ren Ishii first witnesses killing, he has it rendered in anime ; and The Bride’s first meeting with Hattori Hanzo¹ is quirkily in the style of a picture-story.


There is humour here (as well as passion), but there is more in Vol. 2, and it is more overt - for example, Gordon Liu (who headed The Crazy 88s in Vol. 1) as the amusingly tetchy Kung Fu Master Pai Mei. What remains covert and unexplained – and just as a given (apart from when alluded to in the edgily hilarious stand-off with Karen (Helen Kim) and the pregnancy-test) – is the exact purpose of Bill's having, at his disposal, the killers of The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad : because Tarantino wisely does not flesh it out, and Bill appears both a dilettante and fairly irrational, it seems to operate not as a commercial venture, but a vanity-project. (Which seems quite fitting.)


 When, as if to make a statement by their full deployment (though, for the reasons given, it is unclear what that statement would be²), they attack The Bride and her wedding-party, the squad comprises three other women and Bill’s brother, Budd (Michael Madsen). By the time of the opening of Vol. 1, two remain active (O-Ren (Lucy Liu) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah)), so it is not as if this is an outfit that one can never leave, because Budd (Michael Madsen) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) are in forms of domesticity, and, in Vol. 1, The Bride indeed meets (and kills) the latter in a stage of motherhood that is consistent with having quit from working for Bill soon afterwards.


We all deserve to die ~ Budd
[before he qualifies his utterance]


As we would expect with Tarantino, by Vol. 2 we have looped around on ourselves in this respect, and dialogue has forearmed us, at least, that The Bride’s daughter also survived the shooting (now called B.B., and played by Perla Haney-Jardine). (We know no more than that, or how Bill brought about the current state of affairs, but it must have been the influence of money - as in Chinatown (1974), a film-reference that has greater relevance below.)


Even without knowing the film itself, we may well doubt whether Bill’s influence as a parent is for good when we hear that one of those from which B.B. makes a choice, when she asks if her mother will watch a video with her, is Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi’s Shogun Assassin (1980) : at the same time as Tarantino also appears to be evoking the dubious battle, in Chinatown, for Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway’s) daughter Katherine, born to her own father (Noah Cross), he somehow satisfies us, at the end of the film(s), that The Bride and Bill have wholly different motivations, and that her motherhood will be very different from his fatherhood.

John Huston, James Hong, and Belinda Palmer in Chinatown (1974)

For all the deceptions that Evelyn Mulwray practises on J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), and his indulgence of them (not patiently borne), perhaps we have good reason similarly to believe that she would have been kinder to her daughter than Noah Cross will be…






As co-creator with Tarantino of the character of The Bride, Uma Thurman carries us along with her.


Not unusually for the genre of revenge in film (or for its motives unfolding slowly and backwards), this story of a suffering figure, whom we see bloody and beaten, resembles the opposite of hagiography, or of the purpose of an allegory such as that of Constance in Chaucer's Clerk's tale in (The Canterbury Tales), because The Bride expressly endures to kill those who would have killed her and for that motivation :


She is identified strongly with motherhood only towards the end of Vol. 2, and, despite her having a daughter, killed Vernita Green (albeit not as intended) in Vol. 1. Vernita talks of somewhere else to go for a fight (as, later, Bill does), but means it only as a distraction from their murderous plans, whereas, in moonlight and unexpectedly fallen snow, O-Ren provides another an unexpected venue for their fight to the death (although, as she admits, she expected to have tired The Bride out indoors, with The Crazy 88s).



Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest, and, like a forest, it’s easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in ~ Hattori Hanzo


Ashen when, Christ like, The Bride defeats the grave and cheats death, but still slogs it barefoot to rendezvous with Budd and Elle, she stands for some different force : driven by retribution, and, although she is calm, her serenity does not resemble that of The Annunciation from the predella of an altarpiece by Veneziano³, but the bloodiness and brutal energy of the deeds in A Miracle of St Zenobius, which, accompanying the former, helped form part of one whole :



For the life of the flesh is in the blood : and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls ~ Leviticus 17 : 11a [KJV]


As if abiding by some code of honour (and in a scene that involves too much screeching⁴), we have seen Bill persuade Elle not to kill The Bride in her sleep. Yet, as we find at the close of Vol. 2, it is not, except on his terms, a sense of fairness such as suits him (as does her being in a coma, and the humiliations to which it subjects her ?).

The familiar Orwellian allusion will not escape us when we see that Bill is in Room 101 in the complex where The Bride finds him - just as, by firing a dart at her, he does not allow her to escape saying that she did not believe that marrying Tommy Plympton would actually work out.


Although the immobility of The Bride's bottom half is alluded to by Buck (during his coarse briefing to the sex-client who wants to sleep with her), she is arbitrarily still accorded use of her arms and torso. Having freed herself from Buck, she is seen exerting herself to retire to the back-seats of his Pussy Wagon, and willing strength to exist and make itself manifest in her lower body - a scene that Tarantino and Thurman's characterization has given such emphasis (through voice-over and her repeated injunction to her big toe) that we know, and should keep recalling, how extraordinary are the powers, now and later, with which she gains control of her physical body.



Talking to The Bride at the close of Kill Bill, as well as saying – an understatement ! – that he over-reacted when she disappeared, Bill claims that motherhood was not going to change her nature as a killer.


By the incidental bite of a mosquito (as she is a form of Sleeping Beauty), The Bride woke to a full and vivid awareness of the enormity of the horror of what happened to put her in a coma⁵. We have since seen her screw her energies to kill all those who denied her motherhood and would have stood in her way, as it turns out, of getting not only to Bill, but to her daughter.



The conundrum that the film poses is whether, by doing all that she did, she has actually proved him right.






Epilogue :



There is an entry for Kill Bill : Vol. 3 on IMDb, but, unless you have guessed, you might not wish to know what it tells you...


End-notes :

¹ It is just ‘one of these things’ about Kill Bill that The Bride is so easily able to enlist the services of Hattori Hanzo (Shin’ichi Chiba (Sonny Chiba), who also tutored the cast) just by alluding to the debt that he owes because of his former disciple (whom Hanzo himself readily identifies as Bill) – presumably, this is why he went into retirement, and breaks a sacred vow to come out of it (Bill, yet only through expedience, is surprised that he did).

² Beyond, that is, the impact in the internal world of the film(s), although voice-over tells us that, in news-reports, the killings went by at least two names – despite hearing the police chief’s pronouncements at the scene, we are simply not invited to consider in any detail what it would actually have looked like for four weapons to be used against less than a dozen unsuspecting people.

In the first film, we not only see the devastation, but also the plea from The Bride to Bill ; in the other, after the two have talked, the camera retires to a safe distance, up and to the left of the chapel, when the four assassins are entering, so that the episode becomes aural, not visual (as we have already seen, what was to be seen).


 ³ Domenico Veneziano (Domenico di Bartolomeo da Venezia) (1400-1461) ; painter ; Italian artist. Church of Sta. Lucia dei Magnoli, Florence : both panels are now in The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

 ⁴ The 'marked-on' nature of Daryl Hannah's attire signifies more than it may seem. She may come good in her last couple of minutes on screen, but otherwise, unless Tarantino saw something in her in The Tie That Binds (1995) (or her role as Morticia Addams), she both seems an odd choice (as Sean O'Hagan put it, in The Observer, Tarantino's latest chosen candidate for career resurrection), and nearly did not carry it off. (Nonetheless, Kill Bill may have led on to other things for her.)

⁵ Although Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (Hable con ella) (2002) may look more like coma-care ?




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 26 August 2014

Tu existes, Sandra !

This is a review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (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)

26 August

This is a review of Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)

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


This film has all the qualities of 12 Angry Men (1957), i.e. self-interest meeting a desire for justice, but, to paraphrase what people still say, this time the struggle is personal. (It turns out that that reference is one also made by Peter Bradshaw (in his five-star review for The Guardian).)



Cleverly mixed with that personal importance is an element of impersonality, introduced by the documentary style of the blocking and shooting, which naturally makes us incline – much of the time – to sensing ourselves an observer to what Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is doing and reacting to. And so the moment when we have first have a smile from her is very effective – it has built upon the opening shot when she is sleeping, and then on our seeing her tension, feeling her tortured breathing, and witnessing her reliance on Xanax to cope with anxiety.

That smile is amongst several important moments in the car, where the intimacy of the space, because we have been out and about so much with Sandra (and with her husband Manú (Fabrizio Rongione)), gives us gives far more engagement with Sandra than we ever have with Tom Hardy’s shut-in Locke (2013) (even if that, too, is deliberate) : here, it is not that we are shut out, but that the arc of the film keeps us waiting until Sandra speaks to Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev), and we can confront his raw nakedness, guiltily recalling her past kindness to him (which even Sandra cannot quite have expected, or cope with).

Until then, there has been perfect politeness, even in refusals to help, and the spoken French has that polish much of the time, so that, when there is an eruption, it is there, too, in the language. When that moment with Timur – and the smile – comes, the restraint that has been upon us floods us with emotion at the same time, and the film-making has effectively, by its distancing and delay, caused us to have an experience of what the worst of depression can be like : as if removed from one’s own life, and with one’s capacity to relate to one’s family and situation suppressed.

In Rust and Bone (2012) (directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes numbered amongst its co-producers), Cotillard gave us one sort of rehabilitation, where mental adjustment to a huge change in life is part of the picture : here, the mind (and its vulnerabilities) is at the centre of things, with doubts whether someone can come back and do the same job as before, let alone how others’ words and negativity – however unintended – can undermine one’s feeling of worth and one’s belief in the point of what needs to be done.

When Sandra is woken by the phone and talks to her colleague Juliette, she is, from the start, trying to talk herself into an attitude towards what is happening (which some will recognize in We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013) - screening at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 / #CamFF), though the position in which Sandra finds herself only becomes visible to us with time. In the meanwhile, we guess at what she has been through, though her demeanour, gait and posture are indicative…

The film has much to show us : tell people that they can have something, and see how quickly that influences them – just as it does Henry Fonda’s fellow jurors to want to wind up their deliberations quickly, because establishing the truth is costly of their time. Without didacticism in the writing, because there is a wealth of responses to Sandra, we see that there can be this tendency, even when people have not yet got what was promised, and might well ask themselves at what cost (or what it says about them that they so readily make what they did not have before indispensable).

The additional dimension here, revealed fully towards the end, is that of some players who have been keeping their cards close to their chests, and seeking to get what they can. The film helps us to value qualities that have emerged in Sandra and her colleagues learning about each other, and from which she can take comfort. Ultimately, it offers no easy solutions, but it asks us the things that we can countenance for our convenience, an ending that takes us close to Robert Guédiguian's The Snows of Kilimanjaro Les Neiges de Kilimandjaro) (2011)(from Cambridge Film Festival 2012).

If you wish to read more, there is now a new piece about employment rights and Xanax...






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

Venus in Fur - or Martin Clunes naked ?

This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (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)

5 June

This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (2013)



Once one has seen Mathieu Amalric look amazed – with boggle eyes – a few times, it ceases to be nearly as amazing. Just as his looking as perky to please as a spaniel, or a couple of other states evoked by the face, does not really effect a transition in what is a dramatically flat situation, of switching between a handful of modes. And, regrettably, Emmanuelle Seigner has to do much the same - a bit as if the full schema of Eric Berne’s Games People Play had been limited to toppling over between a few mood-states (not the whole gamut implied by the principles of transactional analysis) :

Though, for those who praise Locke (2013), the lack of anything going on is a virtue, and here, except for a fairly predictable game, nothing is (actually) of a game-changing nature. (If it were, Martin Clunes, say, would be out of a job in a film such as Staggered (1994) – for many a best man’s prank is many times more elaborate than what happens here.)




Yet what is of great relevance here is that what Polanski has directed feels little like a film, but a film of a play (as with August : Osage County, which (throughout) struggles a little more not just to be a series of interiors). We could even cut out David Ives altogether, as middleman (qua author of the play), and go to this seminal novel – if one did not suspect that its claims to importance are as overrated as those who say that Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a towering work of world literature… (Although one scarcely insists that a middling text cannot be transformed to make a dazzling screenplay, of course.)




By contrast with what, from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is called variously a novel and a novella (of uncertain length), what about the enterprise Stanley Kubrick embarked on (with Frederic Raphael) in what proved to be his play film – broadly adapting Arthur Schnitzler (Traumnovelle) in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ? Given what Polanski has given us, even what IMDb tells us about Venus in Furs (1969), in all truth, sounds as though it has more ‘going for it’ (currently rated 5.8, versus 7.2 for Polanski), if one forgets that the first and second sentences, together, seem confusing ! :

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death.




This is Méret Oppenheim’s classic, provocative piece, Object (1936), (which is owned by MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)


The very opening of the film, with the boulevard, the trees, the train, wanted to be promising, but even the conceit that followed straight after, as we veer right, was much more akin to Mary Poppins (1964) than anything to which we would ever give our heart or soul** – or maybe we would give it willingly to what might present as a patent French confection, such as Amélie (2001), but has actual depths.


Ultimately, one judges for oneself (by going to a screening, maybe staying to the end, although more wildly tempted than either of the characters, perhaps, just to leave), but the triangle of forces of Polanski, Amalric and Seigner have been brought to bear on the Ives text in such a way that even saying Putain de merde ! seems not quaint, but outlandish. And it is not that Vanda's (Seigner's) oscillation between ditzy initial presentation and divinity is not done with some force, some panache, but that is half the problem :

For Polanski too ostentatiously relies on Alexandre Desplat’s rather nasty score to add something that just is not there in the script, with the result that any attempt at dramatic irony (which, in any case, is rarely best employed as a sustained gambit ?) more closely resembles a strong sense of predictability – and also merges with one's not caring what happens.

As mentioned², the plot requires Thomas (Amalric) to be alone when Vanda arrives, but there is no sense at all that anyone else has ever been there, let alone a string of unpromising auditioners – and these two, by the direction in which one moves at the other’s direction, do not even know their stage left (as seen from the stage, facing front) from their audience left (as seen from the auditorium, facing front). Are they film actors, pretending to be actors, pretending to be, respectively, writer-turned-director³ and actor… ?


Or something more archetypal, more primal, though that notion vanishes as soon as one tries to rely on it too much, let alone when we have had thrust in the face of our credulity all the outfits and other tat that are suddenly brought into this place… ?

As already suggested, people drifting in and out of roles, and the resultant power-play, seems so stale, especially if it is Carnage (2011) again, but light on the (would-be) levity ?


End-notes

¹ Note that definite article – in French, one cannot just say Vénus à la fourrure, any more than, in Italian, one can have Grande Bellezza on its own (The Great Beauty (2013)).

² That film ends in reverse of its beginning, and so does this one – a well-worn way of symbolizing that the spell cast by The Prologue at the start of Henry V, or by Prospero, has been broken by or at the end.

But, one has to ask, to what effect use this device, and was it not, in all likelihood, just to tweak the play’s opening by being in Vanda's view-point as she enters, rather than her coming in and surprising Thomas, already there ?


³ Though, as Thomas labours the point, he has adapted, not written, the text for the play, so that we can sense – as if we do not abundantly – his pliant nature, poorly masked by inflexibility as a strategy…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 5 June 2014

The ruin of me

This is a review - in a Tweet - of Blue Ruin (2013)

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

5 June 2014

This is a review - in a Tweet - of Blue Ruin (2013)




Should you want further justification, or to argue that @THEAGENTAPSLEY should have stayed in Screen 3, bitterly, to the end, then Tweet !




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