Showing posts with label Sarah's Key. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarah's Key. Show all posts

Monday 10 February 2014

Delivered of a burden

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012) (seen at Saffron Screen)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 February

This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012)

Viewed at Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen), in Saffron Walden (and on a recommendation from @amandarandall5)


Am I so much as... being seen ?
Play, Samuel Beckettt


The Patience Stone (2012) is a film that could be set anywhere, in any time, in case one wants to read in condemnations of where it appears to be set and its rules and religion, but the simple fact is that it acts as an inverted One Thousand and One Nights, where the nameless man and we are both an audience to his nameless wife’s confessions : only the film has to interest just us, to stop us cutting off its head by walking out, although we suspect that the husband, willy-nilly, can hear every word…

With all the adeptness and beauty that Zrinka Cvitesic brought in the role of Danica in My Beautiful Country (2012) to a bedbound Ramiz (Misel Maticevic), a film released in the same year, Golshifteh Farahani tends to her husband, who appears to be in a coma : at the start of the film, she is doubting what she has been told, because the mullah said that her husband would be well in two weeks, and it is the sixteenth day, with him not better, and her running out of money for serum.



Birds*  that emerge from darkness on the curtains to a point of maximum light and then back toward shade open the film : they tell us at all sorts of levels that there will, although this is essentially a chamber work (set primarily in the woman’s house and grounds, but also her aunt’s former and present flat, and the street), be a journey, and the film will waver between light and dark.

(Sadly, there are two places where the quality of digital image-capture, as against so beautifully done on film in Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013), lets the aesthetics of the film down, and it verges on pixellation - briefly, both times, in the scene in the basement, and when Farahani is first lit by the light of the hurricane-lamp. That said, the criticism draws attention to how very good the image was the rest of the time that these stood out as momentary exceptions.)

Necessarily, with a man in a coma and despite conflict going on, one is tied, but the inventiveness of blocking the scenes in the principal room is anything but limited, and makes not just for variety, but also for some very striking and even beautiful angles. The man (Hamid Djavadan) and Farahani are in this with such conviction, that, apart from visits from the mullah and a soldier, and time with her children, and her aunt and her family, we barely realize that we are thrown back on their resources.

As a sort of Scheherezade, the woman has a voice, but not for telling stories, such as one that might narrate what happened to the stone of the title that her aunt is reminded of : the account of how she became pregnant might even be from the Nights, with its questionable, but inventive, solution to a practical problem.

It is the final part of what she has been telling her husband throughout the film, and not without reason – so much that she has already related, both of the present and of her past, sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes as if to him within her head, has built up to this revelation. Spurred on by what her aunt has said about the stone, she has continued her confession, even down to having let a visiting cat eat one of her father’s fighting quails and getting a scar by her right eye about which her husband, who maybe has never properly seen her, has never asked.

The very shocking end of the film is ambiguous, and could represent two or three possibilities, on different literal or figurative levels. Twice, once when we think that she might really go away for good because of the impossible conditions in which she is having to leave (and for which she blames her husband), she tells him to ‘Go to hell’, and there is much frank language about sex, including the insult that got her husband into the fight with which he lies wounded. She has had, often enough with her aunt’s advice, had to make her way in this difficult culture, and the film celebrates female ingenuity in getting around male oppression whilst still pretending to be subservient.

The film is thoughtful, throwing one back on one’s preconceptions, and (not knowing much of the woman’s reliance on her aunt) we do not understand at the time why she tells the captain ‘I sell my body’, because his reaction is the last thing that we imagine she wanted : it goes back to the woman’s place, as the aunt expounds the male psychology.

All that the woman has been bottling up, keeping inside – that is why Beckettt is quoted at the head of this review, because, not least in the trilogy of plays* that The Royal Court (@royalcourt) is reviving, he writes (Not I) a part for Mouth, who cannot seem to stop talking, but who is, as the characters in Play are (a man, his wife, and his lover), looking for a response to this flood of words. Hence the quotation, where the Man momentarily interjects the possibility that there is not even an observer to what he is going through by telling his story : as with our lead, he has no name.

Here, that confession is to a man who may not have the conscious faculty to hear it, but for whom the truth is being laid out with candour (as that trilogy of novels taught Beckettt to do). It may not sound much of a basis for a film, but with excellent realizations of Max Richter’s music (which was such a strength of the rather disregarded Sarah’s Key (2010)), carefully wrought cinematography from Thierry Arbogast, and, as well as from those mentioned, lovely performances from Massi Mrowat (the soldier) and Hassina Burgan (the aunt), it is electric.


End-notes

* A twitcher would know what they are, but maybe ducks – thoughts were of M. C. Escher’s panoramic mirror-image.

** Though not written as a trilogy, unlike Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and maybe not even for performance together.




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

Thursday 3 October 2013

Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate

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

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


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.




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

Thursday 3 May 2012

The Dave-ings of an Arranged Mind (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 May

[Very much] following on[, going forward,] from the first piece [of its kind] in this series - which is no more one for having the same title than constituents of many a t.v. series - here are more [random] jottings that nevertheless cohere (or do they?)


What do all or any of the items in this list have in common (if anything)?:

1. Frank Key

2. The Florida Keys

3. Sarah's Key

4. Gonville & Caius

5. Frankie Goes to Hollywood

6. St Peter

7. Sara Keays

8. Key to the door

9. Major Keys

11. Sarah Keay

12. Alicia Keys

13. Aldous Huxley


By all means submit your answers - on a postcard only* - whilst waiting my inventing some...


End-notes

* Submissions (or falls) by any of the following means will, in especial, be harhsly punished:

Arsebook

e-mail

Twatter

facsimile

Link-tin

telemessage

Bookface

psychic transmission

Zen's Reunited

hymn-numbers

text-message

smoke-signals from St Peter's


Monday 23 January 2012

Peter Bradshaw dismounts from War Horse

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


23 January

Why quite at such length (six full paragraphs on 12 January), as some of Bradshaw's reviewing is distinctly on the 170-word side (OK, I am talking about the brevity with which, in comparison, he wrote - allegedly - dismissively about Sarah's Key!), for something that he really didn't like and gave two stars to, I do not know...

However, Bradshaw has done a decent job of demolishing Hobby Horse, I mean War Horse (whilst acknowledging what was good about The National Theatre production):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/12/war-horse-spielberg-film-review


Saturday 3 December 2011

An appreciation of Sarah's Key - and not for what it isn't

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 November

There are times when I curse myself for having used the time when Kristin Scott Thomas signed my programme for me after her informed performance of Pinter's magnificent play Betrayal that I bothered her with how uniformly useless the UK papers' reviews had been - she didn't need to know (as (a) the run in the cinemas trounced their shallow views and (b) even if it hadn't, the DVD market was sure to pick up on it), and I could have said something other than thanking her for this film that they were too inadequate to appreciate.

So forget what they wrote, and their comparisons (which shouldn't have been made, even given the proximity in time) with this other film The Roundup, with which it clearly shares so little.

This is not the Kristin Scott Thomas French film that this time disappoints, it is better than Leaving (although I think that that film is very fine) and at least as good as I've Loved You so Long. Yes, one can always quibble about the plot, but Sarah's Key pulls no punches in doing justice to the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, from which it sprang.

And here some of these so-called UK film writers / critics got lost, by ascribing to the film what it is in the book (although, of course, it could have been changed), and by not understanding how Julia Jarmond is engaged in what happened to young Sarah Staryznksi, not least because she has a life within her that her husband views as a nuisance, and in her wanting to follow her story, wherever it goes.

The film ends with a truth: that what is shared as a story, goes on, and Julia's character, played with an enormous amount of integrity and with great respect to the times through which Sarah lived, wants to bring that truth, both husband Bertrand's family and to the family with which she feels such a human bond in the person of Sarah herself. Yes, she sometimes thinks that she has hurt and has done wrong, but she has actually healed, and has helped others to view their lives differently.

So forget all this rubbish about what happens 'in the third act' - films are not plays, and do not fall into acts, whether three or five. This is a vibrant and living piece of cinema, which transcends all this nonsense about acts.


I will watch this film on DVD, but I am glad that I had the chance to see it on the big screen, where it could touch audiences - I could here the silence of engagement in the screens in which I saw it. It is also a tremendous novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.


Sunday 6 November 2011

By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (3)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)







8 November

Here, in one place (I think that only three are on
Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...


OK! Then Nicholas Barber at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/sarahs-key-111-mins-12a-2333119.html#disqus_thread

Who, just for the moment, seems to have disappeared my comment...*

And I can't find it on Rotten Tomatoes as a review...



End-notes




* Not even there in a saved copy of the web-page (as checked, including its source, on 18 March 2012).




Sunday 11 September 2011

A posting that has lacked a title (until now)

More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



11 September

I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.

As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...

To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.


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