Showing posts with label The Hairdresser's Husband. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Hairdresser's Husband. Show all posts

Thursday 28 July 2022

Movies you consider to be absolutely PERFECT… You wouldn’t change a single thing about them : #UCFF's Four Films

Movies you consider to be absolutely PERFECT… You wouldn’t change a single thing about them

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

28 July

Movies you consider to be absolutely PERFECT… You wouldn’t change a single thing about them : #UCFF's Four Films













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

Friday 26 January 2018

Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)


Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].



However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...








Some film-references :

* Calvary (2014)

* The Dressmaker (2015)

* The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)




End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).




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

Monday 2 December 2013

Life after war : Sixteen (2013) at Bath Film Festival

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm)

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


2 December

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) [and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival]



95 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 15


A rating and review of Sixteen (2013)



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Wrongly, Sixteen (2013)* felt like it might be just too many things jostling for screen-time, which usefully put one edge – as to whether the enterprise would succeed – in the way that Jumah (Roger Nsengiyumva) must feel, and which John Bowen’s effective score accentuates (more on that later), for we have :

* A love story

* A child soldier from Congo (who, as with many who have been in conflicts, probably has something like post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD))

* The love between a mother and her adoptive son

* Petty crime that has got out of hand

* Reaching a time (the sixteen of the title) when the future has to be considered

* Fighting one’s own battles


I swear that these do all fit together, and the unifying force is that soundtrack, which – as I put it in the Q&A – moves from disturbingly menacing to uncertain to sensual, when Jumah is asked to give his girlfriend Chloe (Rosie Day) a haircut, and back again, and which has an otherworldly quality to it : writer / director Rob Brown, who has worked with Bowen before, said that what he was after with scoring the edit was understood by Bowen, but that a sound such as that of Brian Eno and others had been mentioned. (I also heard Peter Gabriel's sort of open chords.)

In my opinion, the score tautened one’s awareness of the past that Jumah brings with him, and fed a sense of how he must be feeling into what we saw – someone being attacked might have one resonance (in, say, a film like Witness (1985)), but here we were aware (from sources such as War Witch (2012)) of the brutalizing world in which he had been forced to live. Except with very low-frequency growling, it did not mask its presence, and it partly distanced us from the early shock of some events, just as Jumah might have been in situation but not wholly present in them.

This sort of character was what Brown said that he had been aiming at, and which had drawn him in other film projects, effectively someone who had certain experiences and for whom living is difficult. As a foil to him, Day’s portrayal of Chloe was perfect – one sensed that, beneath her confidence, she did, as she told Jumah, want to be helped to feel positive about herself, and that she, if she can be helped in return, has resources of trust and validation that can help him heal.

Above these two, Rachael Stirling, as Jumah’s mum Laura, acted exceptionally well how she sought to bear with him, from the moment when she comes into his bedroom and Chloe and he are resting in each other’s arms to wanting to hold him back, and not knowing what he might do : that moment when he decides who he is and what he wants feels so unstable, and we cut away to her with no certainty what might happen.

The atmosphere of the film, with this excellent score, is electric, and one even feels that, as with War Witch’s title-character Komona, there may be some sixth sense in play for Jumah to be in the right place several times. This is not an easy ride much of the time, but that tactile quality of the hair, and all the feeling that comes from the other great film with that theme, Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990), plus the tenderness between Chloe and Jumah, soften it sufficiently.


End-notes

* There are two films this year with that title, so IMDb designates this Sixteen (I) (2013).




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

Monday 30 September 2013

Giving the lie to Tebbit

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


30 September

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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