Thursday 16 January 2014

Match Point re-made with a Macbeth split in two

This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)

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2 November (watched on DVD)

This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)
* Contains spoilers *

It was highly commercially successful, but that fact provides me with no reason to have liked Match Point (2005), whose flaws outweighed the Dostoyevskyian tones that it brought to re-entering the territory of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989).

By contrast, I believe that Cassandra's Dream (2007) is not merely leaps, but bounds, ahead, and cannot relate to the admittedly many critics who pan this later film, thinking it a falling-off of quality from what I do not detect in the earlier film : it is not merely that we are willing Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as the Raskolnikov-like Chris Wilton) to get caught, but - despite Allen's valiant attempt at a plot with a twist - he would have done, and he failed to command my attention in the way that Martin Landau does (as Judah Rosenthal) sixteen years earlier.

Dream gives me many more things to like - Sally Hawkins as the older (?) brother Terry's (Colin Farrell's) wife Kate, a convincing portrayal of mental ill-health and of addictive gambling, the allure of Angela (Hayley Atwell) as the other brother Ian's (Ewan McGregor's) girlfriend and his vaulting, reckless ambition, a soundtrack by Philip Glass, a creepy, self-obsessed Tom Wilkinson (as Uncle Howard)...

A perfect crime to do the generous Uncle Howard a favour (generous, but at whose cost ?), but, just as Wilton is under the pressure of denying the voices of his victims in the night, it is really all too much, and what one has steeled oneself to (and still nearly does not do) will not allow one to rest : the two parts of the Macbethean psyche are divided against each other, and one seeks survival at the other's expense.

What the brothers wanted and gambled for they find themselves having never valued very much when the time comes, and, just as they did not heed Cassandra at the outset, so they do not at the close. The words of Uncle Howard, differently meant, could almost be hovering on the air :

In the end, all you have in this life that you can count on is family




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

Wednesday 15 January 2014

What if we read the book from 1853 ?

A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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15 January

A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)

77 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 11 / M : 10 / P : 12 / F : 10


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)







If you think that, as films go, 12 Years A Slave (2013), despite its emotive content, is just an average piece of film-making, and patchy in places, you are almost damned before you open your mouth : people refuse to separate the content of a film, when it is such as this, from the worth of the film itself, even if it does function in large part as a medium for the story (or message).




Of course, what happens is objectionable (either crime, or people turning their eyes from it), but one cannot make out that slavery exclusively resides in the cotton-fields of Georgia, not, say, in tribes in Africa long subjugating each other's people by war or raiding, and with the well-known example of the people of Israel in captivity in Egypt. In the same way, The Roman Empire had freemen and slaves, and that goes back two thousand years, such that the New Testament is talking about slaves obeying their masters almost as a given (and which is a source for the preaching heard in the film).



The same director's (Steve McQueen's) film Hunger (2008) evokes The Maze Prison, but making a feature about the IRA hunger-strikers in the early 1980s was likely to make a modest gross at the box office (IMDb reports $154,084 at 5 June 2009 in the States, with $1,980 for the opening weekend (5 December 2008)), compared with the relative distance that one has on events 130 years earlier in Slave. As to a powerful piece of film-making, one may think that Slave does not pull any punches, but, compared with Hunger, it is all of these things - mainstream, stereotypical, and stylized in a very conventional way - and feels like a betrayal of that earlier aesthetic.

There are also scenes in the film (of which follow a few) in which McQueen seems to revel as moments, whether or not they work with the film, and so lose its direction and weight :

* For no very good reason (when he would not help her as asked), Northup, when he brings Patsey back to the drunk Epps as requested, tries to pretend that he has not whispered to her to make herself scarce (which he could have done at any point), and a ludicrous chase, in and out of the piggery, ensues - does it do any more than show Epps as gross, and that Northup is capable of a tactical misjudgement ?

* When Northup makes a request for a letter to be carried to his family, he certainly is - it is only by conceiving that he had worked out the lies of his cock-and-bull story beforehand, in case he was betrayed (but, then, he would not already have written the incriminating letter), and that he catches Epps at a good time, that it is credible that he escapes punishment or death by his excuses

* It is clever, but very foolish reasoning (as in any workplace), to contradict and show up your overseer in front of the owner, because, even if you demonstrate your cleverness by proving him wrong and that hardly justifies him finding fault to have an excuse to lynch you, you must know that he will not see it thus Your slick nigger ways

* A more subtle enemy might have got at Northup by breaking the violin that he has been given, and then showing it up as his ingratitude - that approach might have got Ford on his side and against Northup, where this one of finding fault to provoke a fight did not

* Patsey is almost definitely flogged out of deeper motives than whether she went to a neighbouring property for a bar of soap, and no one wants to flog or see another flogged, but can the irrational zeal of Epps (for once in tune with that of his wife against Patsey, whose urging renders him impotent to the task and makes him involve Northup) be yoked to the explicit reasoning of spelling out the doctrine that a man's 'property' is his to do with as he wishes (as Epps' wife would be, since she has no rights except through him, and so he early on chooses Patsey over her, if she wishes to exert herself) ?

* The uneasy moment when other men whom Northup finds on the way to the store are being strung up - maybe just scene-setting that lynching is a part of life (though that seems contrary to a film whose ethos is not to make everything normative), but a lost opportunity, with Ford's wife (who declared, when Northup and the fellow woman slave arrived, that the latter would soon forget her children) to set up some other resonance

What does not seem like a betrayal is simply lifted from someone else's vision (that of Terrence Malick) :



The vision was in the cinematographic ethos, for example the gorgeous close-up of the caterpillar that, although Epps (Michael Fassbender - also in Hunger as Bobby Sands) denies it, is causing the blight of his cotton-plants : it feeds into other moments of the film, but not in the absorbed way that the wide landscapes do of Days of Heaven, and so makes the downright ordinary photography seem gratingly poor and uninspired.

The film contains four main moments of extended dialogue, first with the weeping woman who has been separated from her children (when sold with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor)), then when Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) makes a request of him, then when he makes a request of a white former overseer with whom he is working, and finally when he makes the same request of Bass (Brad Pitt). Certainly, the first two (whether or not the conversation is written out in full by Solomon Northup's memoir Twelve Years A Slave (in which he was assisted by a local writer, David Wilson)) sounded very stagey, trying too much to imitate the manners, language and diction of the age to be more than artificial - even if people ever did talk to each other in that way, it sounded more Shakespearean than from the mid-nineteenth century, and one felt that one was being told that these were Important Words to Heed : for example, How came you there ? How is this ? Tell me all. (I doubt it, but maybe some sort of attempt at Brechtian alienation, as when Northup arrives home and says I have had a difficult time these several years ?)

Hans Zimmer's soundtrack sought by means of rumbling, low-frequency percussive sounds, which would not have been out of place in Peter Gabriel's Millennium Show Ovo (e.g. the machine music of the track 'The Tower That Ate People'), or even The Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999), to impart a sense of menace or the like, but it lacked subtlety for a composer who had scored Inception (2010), and sounded derivative :



If this film is remarkable, and breaks ground, it would be good to know in what way, and how one's understanding is advanced beyond that of Alex Haley's t.v. series Roots in 1977, or even the t.v. film Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984) and the slavery strand in Cloud Atlas (2012).




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

Sunday 12 January 2014

Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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12 January

A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17


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)

Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses



We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.

We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?

Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)



Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.



I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?

Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.

She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…

Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.

What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.

Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.

As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.


End-notes

¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.



³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.

**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.





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

Saturday 11 January 2014

Towards a critique of the Klee show at Tate

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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11 January


















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

Friday 10 January 2014

Power in his clenched-up fist, held aloft

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9 January

This review of The Phantom of The Opera (originally 1925, but revised in 1929) was of a special screening, with a world premiere solo harp score written and played by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, at the Pathology Museum at St Bart’s Hospital on Wednesday 8 January 2014, the first of four such screenings put on there through Silent London (@silentlondon) (with a complimentary portion of freshly popped popcorn, and a Hendrick's gin (with tonic, if required)


Declaration of interest : Trust me that I am being impartial, though Elizabeth-Jane and I are friends (as a consequence of having met at Bath Film Festival). However, this means that I cannot – because it does not sound right – adopt my usual approach and call her Baldry…


To-night’s introduction to the film, by Pamela Hutchinson from Silent London, made clear that it had had a chequered history, not liked by the first audience that saw it, re-made by adding some comic elements (and still not liked), before getting to what we have now, with a grand scene at the Paris Opéra, which pays homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (in fact, with an empty threat), in what we were told was an early type of two-part Technicolor. Predicting it where it was going was not easy, with films such as The Third Man (1946) having given certain expectations of underground chases with water, whereas, as referred, the Poe mention suggested a false trail.

What it does meditate on approaches, but veers away from, the subject of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946), whether love can redeem all and make physical disfigurement beautiful (with the singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) as a healing Christ-figure), for then an index-card pins down exactly who The Phantom (Lon Chaney) is : something that only the force and energy of the mob (not exactly storming La Bastille, but almost), not the not-so-organized official means (which the very end of the film quite forgets about), can address. Roughnesses such as these may owe their existence to that troubled production history (and, doubtless, many have written much about its genesis), as, for example, this issue of continuity : when The Phantom goes off with one of his displayed pair of schnorkels (the need for two seems fanciful), then returns, deed done, and dons a hat, he is not wearing his mask, but, when, hat on, he is at the organ, he is wearing it.

The jauntiness of a man in full evening dress walking into water, over his head, and casually subverting a plot to find him. The sphinx-like fingers that had, by rising and falling, acted as some sort of unexplained early warning system. These elements and more were literally marvellous for their free invention – they almost floated free of wider considerations of plot or even character, and subsisted for their own pleasure.

Not really a story, either, of the vaulting ambition of Faust (it is presumably the Gounod version of which we see extracts on stage, but it could be that of Berlioz : the familiar motif of Gretchen am Spinnrad, in any case), despite Christine's being keen on being a star* and having The Phantom as her Master until, like Pandora (or Eve), she disobeys and sees who he is. There the parallel with the Cocteau story runs out, since she looks to Raoul to save her, and, for her, it is not going to be loving this creature in order to have a career.

So the index-card (perhaps where the story was re-worked) does all the work for us, and takes away the initial intrigue or ambiguity of The Phantom, when the pretty young dancers are busy being startled in their tutus, and where it could easily be a story from an episode of Scooby-Doo : Which way did he go ? Didya see him, Scoob ?, with the wicked Old Owners (with one of them in disguise as The Phantom) frightening the New Owners with a story, so that the latter, to be rid of it, will sell it back again for nothing. (Later, there is casual talk of 'another strangling.)

The story simply is not going to cohere and be any one thing, and why should it, when it is was hardly unusual for a film to be written as it went along (cinema has always been a wasteful business : just think, now, of all the feature-length films made, and how few get distributed) ? Whether the lengths to which those working on the film went were unusual, others would know better than I, but IMDb credits the characters of Carlotta and Raoul’s brother as only existing since the 1929 version).

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry’s accompaniment for solo harp does allow the film to cohere, and it is clear that she had thought carefully about times whether her part was to be more evocative, or more imitative, and there were important moments that she had to address in some way, such as when the man in the box is first seen by the new owners, and when, girding their courage, they return to find him somehow gone. The mirror into The Phantom’s realm was especially rich, when she had two types of material, one for the slightly dreamy Christine going through to him, the other for Raoul, shut out when the mirror has swung back** (and how fitting that the universal symbol of vanity should conceal from her the origins of her success, as the law from Pip how he comes to be a gentleman) : the alternation made clear that, however penetrable the barrier, Christine was in another world.

For a film of 93 minutes, the score is bound to use whatever one calls them of themes or leitmotifs, and the effect is as in sonata form, that one hears what one heard before, but, in between, one has heard other material, and the effect (even if the repetition were scored and played note for note the same) is that one pays attention to it in a different way. Elizabeth-Jane’s structure of themes led one unshowily through the film, though not to say, as many will know the harp from effects such as the glissando and from virtuouso concert-playing, that the accompaniment was not without its appropriate drama and grandeur (that Technicolor scene on the steps, or the seemingly playful folly of Christine removing the mask).

Using the physical architecture of the instrument, tapping and strumming on the case, and running and sliding her fingers along it, Elizabeth-Jane in no way limited herself to the traditional way in which a pedal harp would be employed, and she is no doubt influenced in her choice both by work as a recitalist and composer, and by playing works by other composers such as Graham Fitkin (who wife Ruth Wall plays his work in her repertoire). The music and its playing were daring and inventive, and the great round of applause that she received at the end of the work, and again when reintroduced, are testament to how much Elizabeth-Jane had enhanced people’s enjoyment of this silent master, with her varied layers of interpretation, and her witty and inventive performance.


End-notes

* Philbin showed herself, if not coquettish, then easily bought by flattery in her visual responses to what she hears her Master promise her : one momentarily thinks that she is not going to be taken in by it, and she then falls head over heels in love with her stardom and adoration.
** One finds it a little hard to stir much for Raoul [de Chagny] (Norman Kerry). Here, he knows that Christine has gone out of sight, behind the mirror, but, other than huff and puff a little, he does nothing, and seems to make nothing of trying to follow it up. A mere man might do no more, but it turns him into something of an anti-hero, and The Phantom, who is willing to fight for Christine’s love and capable of doing so, seem more appealing, which is all to the good of the dynamics.

And then there is when Leydoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) and he, after the farcical holding of their hand in the air against the strangler’s snare, find themselves at The Phantom’s mercy, as the room of mirrors burns them and they strip off :






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

Stale old arguments about Scorsese

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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10 January

The Times (in an article entitled Cathedral defends showing ‘debauched film of Christ’s life’) reports as follows regarding Bath Film Festival's (@BathFilm's) screening of director Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis (and with score by Peter Gabriel) :

Members of the congregation have protested that the 12th-century Gothic Cathedral is to be used for an “appalling film” that “tackles the theme of debauchery”


Are they thinking, maybe, of another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, which certainly does 'tackle' that theme, and appals in its literal sense (from Old French appalir to turn pale) ? Have they seen it, or are they like the protesters (placards saying 'Down with this sort of thing') penned by Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan in Father Ted, who made more popular, through interest and intrigue, a film that they had not watched, The Passion of St Tibulus from 1995 ?

The appendix of the 1996 edition of Scorsese on Scorsese* (one in a Faber & Faber series to which The Agent is addicted) is devoted to the film. Here are some quotations from a statement that Scorsese made at a press conference :

When I read Kazantzakis's book, I didn't have the feeling that it would be deeply offensive to anyone, especially because I know of my own intent.

[...]

Among the boys who I knew when I was in the seminary, one is now the head of an order in Chicago called the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, and happens to be a great fan of Kazantzakis's book. And I know that the book is used in seminaries as a parable to argue about and discuss. This is how I hoped the film would be received.

[...]

A black minister wrote a letter to the New York Daily News, saying he loved the film, was going to use it as a study guide in discussion groups, and that he felt most of the people talking about the film had not seen it. He said they adhered very much to the word of the Gospel, but not to the spirit.


After the event, read more here about it and the film, if you wish...


End-notes

* Faber & Faber, London, 1996.




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

Tuesday 7 January 2014

I put aside childish things

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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7 January

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
93 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 17 / P : 15 / F : 15



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)





When Sean Penn (Sean O’Connell) and Ben Stiller (Walter Mitty) finally meet in this film, it is at the quiet point around which the world turns – Penn, who could so easily have outclassed Stiller in that sort of way that older actors can, just casually reveals that he does not always take a shot when he ‘is in’ the moment of it.

As a photographer, capturing the oftentimes fleeting, he knows what it is to have to wait for his subject to come to him, but he speaks against this idea that we ‘capture’ so much, with our camera-phones and the like, that we are too busy capturing to be there. (That irritating advertisement where a couple ‘shares’ that they have just launched their pastel-hued candle-boats, and straightaway get back an evauluation of how wonderful it is.)

This is not a notion that James Thurber, the writer of the four- or five-page story on which this (and the preceding) film is based, would have rejected. Although he fought for his own career, he also recognized, as Stiller wants to do in his closing credits, all the hands through whom one’s work passes and to which it is entrusted.

I also do not think that he would have been too bothered, unless one ascribes some arcane respect to his original creation (who is not so much a character, as a behaviour), by the action-hero figure that Mitty pictures himself to himself as, which seems quite in line with the ‘ta-pokka, ta-pokka’, and had more than fifteen years before he died in which to get used to Danny Kaye as Mitty – that said, those of an anxious temperament, might find the noisy character that he becomes, lifting up the pavement as if he has hammer-drills in his heels, something that it is welcome he discontinues, and that heavy ticking noises also subside.

This is not a film where we are really invited to know whether, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), he gave up the life that he desired to conform and provide a wage, but it is touched on. (And then Mitty has a chance to do some big things after all, and he does, although he only day-dreams it happening, become a younger version of himself – hair, looks, etc., to reflect well-being) What we do see is that his mind races ahead to encounter some new possibility, and that he was not ‘in the moment’ but outside it, as if as a way of coping with it.

Thankfully, a careful script from Steve Conrad acknowledges that, when someone says that someone else ‘zones out’, is just a phrase, not the only phrase, and does not convey very much of the experience, which, at the appropriate time, Mitty tries to put into words, and is understood. In what is almost an entirely telephonic contact with Todd Maher (Patton Oswalt), who is trying to explain why the bits that Mitty just skipped might be important to a functioning profile that will let him send ‘a wink’ that he agonizes about sending (only to find a problem when he finally does press the enter key to contact Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig)), Mitty talks about what has made day-dreaming less frequent.

All the while, we are whirled up in an adventure, as to whose status, given that Mitty has not re-emerged from it, we feel reasonably, but not totally, settled. Then, when Penn and Stiller meet we have this beautiful moment where they bicker, take offence, listen to each other, and pitch into a riotous football game with sherpas before the setting sun. Something different, something apart from life, even if Stiller has actually been landed on a glacier by helicopter (presumably, not flown by his screen pilot) : a moment apart, a positive version of that endless journey to discover what is best not known in Apocalypse Now (1979), because the real horror is the casual, uncaring dismantling of an iconic publication.

We do not dwell there (although a cock is snooked at Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), who tried to belittle Mitty, but just resulted in endearing him to others), because we turn to relations Melhoff / Mitty, but there is a tribute to Mitty’s care for the work of its leading photographer. In between, Stiller has been allowed to present convincing enough evidence of his credentials on the skateboard, and there is just sufficient of his past with his sister and his parents to see who he is now. A certain fastidiousness, keeping a tally in his cheque-book, and so on.

On the side-lines, but engagingly playing a mother whose need to have, in perpetuity, a piano which we are not even certain that she still plays (or desires to play – the so-called elephant in the room) figures large is Shirley MacLaine. A warm portrait to which she brings real affection, as well as acceptance and care.

This is a Mitty for our century, a man who takes his imagination and turns it into seeing what is possible, rather than being held back by whether he can get the train there. He is not everyman, so his solutions are not everyone’s, but the cinematic glories of where he goes make this film shine – although one has to wonder whether some Icelandic influence has gone into the caricature of Greenland (Melhoff, knowing Mitty better than he thinks, checks that he knows that they are different places…), which is, if not exactly dismissive, is scarcely flattering, with men drinking huge beers all day from glasses shaped like boots and, even at their smallest, they are still huge.




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

Mira Schendel at Tate Modern - Part III

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


7 January
This is Part III of a review of a current exhibition at Tate Modern of the work of Mira Schendel (Part I is here, and Part II is here), which is due to finish on 19 January 2014

Room 7 is where Schendel’s work begins to get interesting, foreshadowing the work in Room 12, just as do the two works that appear in Room 8, in the series Little Trains, the installation in Room 10.

We are told that the installation of pieces in the series of Graphic Objects emulates the installation in The Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and where she made use of the transparency of the rice-paper. Whether it is meaningfully claimed that ‘transparency’ had a special usage that Schendel made of it is unclear (pun intended), but this is what the room guide asserts :

Schendel’s concept of transparency was derived from the writings of the German philosopher, poet and linguist Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973), who used the word to refer to human consciousness, experience of time and to a form of the spiritual.

Maybe some significance is lost, and also in not following word for word the philosophy, poetry and lyrics, but the work’s strength, in being an accretion of smaller works, is by positioning them in relation to each other.

In a similar sense, Variants 1977 makes one aware that one could be shorter, or taller, and perceive the installation somewhat differently, inevitably looking through one of the ninety-three panes (one is white on black), or not looking through it except by bending or standing on tip-toe. It does so more effectively than the installation in Room 7, and, as the room guide says, it is a constellation or cloud, a sort of Cloud of Unknowing.

Here, the panels are very small and they interpose a sense of depth, with what is near overlapping, at different points, central and far others. It is beyond proper description of photographic representation, and just deserves to be seen.

Little Trains are sheets of rice-paper that hang loose on a thread, and the smaller, in particular, of the two in Room 8 evokes an oriental mood, as if not so much kimonos as samurais. They consist less in what they show than what we can project onto them, and similarly, with some of the Transformables that are hanging nearby, we are meant to look less at their resemblance to strands of DNA (or some other biological material) than at the patterns of varying shade that they cast. Sadly, these are not hung in such a way to make much of that aspect.

Max Bense was the only one who understood that...these things [Transformables] didn't function as objects, because all that mattered was the light and shadow, a continuation of some drawings of mine, those done on that ultra fine, transparent paper.
(1970 - 1974)*


Room 9 is passed over, because it contributes, with its Calculations, Circumscribed Letters and Typed Writings, as much to what matters about Schendel as the Monotypes and Graphic Objects. Room 10 contains an installation, made for the 10th Bienal de São Paulo in 1969, called Still Waves of Probability - again, it achieves its aims by repetition of the same (or similar) material, and here, as we walk around it, it becomes more or less permeable to our sight, sometimes seeming dreach before our eyes, sometimes seeming as if nothing intercepts the view of the other side of the room.

It means more than this attempt to describe it suggests, more than what Schendel said (as quoted in the room guide) that it meant to her, and more than in the Biblical text that she chose to accompany it (from I Kings 19 : 11 – 12**), in black on Perspex :

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.


One might relate to the work without the text, or without the words being understood in a Judaeo-Christian context – say, as the search at the sub-nuclear level, and what gives matter mass – but it speaks in these gradations of very loud and powerful, yet very quiet and peaceful, and with all the changes of state in between. Arranged before the other installation, and with the sixteen works (akin to the stations of the cross, though not in number ?) that constitute Homage to God – Father of the West (1975) en route in Room 11, this is the richest part of the exhibition.

Again, one might not relate to a Hebraic God – as number 11 has it, The living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – but there is the notion of a family line and of protection, to which we all, in varying ways, can relate in thinking about the group of people of whom we are part have fared. For others, the stark statement of number 12, God is love, will make it harder to relate to these works, but, as the room guide makes clear, the church was what permitted her to survive, and it could be seen as quite a personal statement, as was, say, her participation in the São Paulo Bienal, which others thought right to boycott.

As a thinker and an artist, Schendel was quite clear about making her own choices of what was best for her conscience and for speaking through her art. Arranged on either side of walls tapering towards each other, this is a rare twentieth-century statement of faith, and rewards attention for the bold marks and the consequence of her choice of medium***.

As to the tail of the exhibition, what appears in Room 13, with its concentration on day and night, is subject to quite a bit of interpretation, manipulation even, where the room guide says ‘They [tempera and gold] also refer to the determination of the Self’. Of them, and of the concluding trio of series in Room 14, I say that they are not on a par with the striking pieces that occupy Rooms 10 to 12 :

Itatiaia Landscapes feel like a rehash of a series of the Mononotypes in Room 6, whereas, a little in the way that the Roy Lichtenstein show had him persevering to the end with his Benday dots, making landscapes (I recall that being true of another Tate one, and, whilst I could be thinking of Damien Hirst, I think that it was probably not) : it could have been Miró, because nothing pf his that was shown transcended, for me, the four triptychs that were displayed in pairs of two…


Even if one ultimately thinks that Imogen Robinson is harsh about Schendel's works in her Review : Mira Schendel at the Tate Modern for Just A Platform, it is of interest to find comments where she echoes finding pretension in the curation and the claims made



End-notes

* Taken from the exhibition's chronology of Schendel's life.


** The words are well known from the ending of John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.

*** Where it falters is with the curatorial choice of translation for the description of number 16, Der Geist – rendered The Ghost, the word ‘spirit’ might have been a better choice.




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

Monday 6 January 2014

The deceptive allure of the rhyme

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




7 January


Hot or not ?



As can be seen - because the question was asked a year ago - it couldn't have been...


But ponder, when you next hear yourself saying


That's way too much ?


why it no longer sounds right to you to say :


That's far too much ?


Torching one's dreams ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 August

This is a review of Foxfire (2012)
 

* Contains spoilers *

The flaws in this film, if they are flaws, are few and slight (and listed below), and do not detract from its narrative power : it runs to longer than one thinks that it has done, and does so almost easelessly, without ever letting one acquiesce in a view.

As to that observation, those who expect a film to let them know where they are have a sense of being uncomfortable in the unsettled feelings that the film engenders, because they are strong ones – nothing to do with a moral compass (a phrase for which there should be scant time in the cinema), but rather that films are not sermons, and it is questionable whether one should look to the former for what an effective example of the latter might make clearer.

Some things are uncertain – and remain so for most, or all, of the film. Our toe-hold is the town of Hammond (Mammond, as I slipped Freudianly on the keyboard…) in the mid-1950s, which does not seem have much to commend it to anyone much, let alone spirited teenage girls who had more than an element of what I am told* is called misandry, the complement to (if that makes sense) misogyny. Small wonder, if an uncle seeking not only to sell an old Underwood (which he had left out to be collected), but also to get more money for it and sex, too (from Maddy (Katie Coseni)), had been typical male exploitation in and of their lives !

That said, in branding themselves (in more sense than one) Foxfire, they came to stand for a sort of purist attitude towards men that meant that, when - late in the film - Rita (Madeleine Bisson) dated a man and was seen in the cinema with him, it was an expellable act from their commune / refuge. Maybe they had had that stance all along (although initially flirting when buying ice-cream did not seem prohibited, and it was also clear, from some stings,& when the joehad been pitied, not despised). However, Margaret** (Raven Adamson) called her father's girlfriend, who seemed a steady one, a slut, and then one was unsure what was going on - was it a reverse Oedipus complex, where the mother had been loved / sainted / abused, or just a resentment at being landed with grandma, 100 miles away*** ?

(Grandma certainly seems to have been given a tongue-lashing, if we think that Margaret is a reliable historian. In fact, all the hints are that no one can be such in this life, in particular the magic of the closing moment, which surprises and undercuts the narrative. At times, this narration was grating, but I can conceive that it was meant to be, and thus to distance from too close a connection.)

At any rate, without seeming didactic, literary analogues such as Orwell's Animal Farm, and Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, are enrichened by the properly shocking story that Foxfire tells...


The Agent’s bit of nit-picking

Court-room
Was ever a judge and a court scene such as this - but who is telling the story ?

Having a car
Even if it was normal and likely, was it necessary and affordable ?

Letting
Margaret upsets and deliberately spoils the expectations against how the letting will be carried out, for her vision of what the shared home will be, but maybe not plausibly to the lessor's agents...

Records
How do the type-written records and they typewriter end up where they do ?

Register
Was everything really accurate for what was said, and where it was said, in its time ?



End-notes

* Thanks to @MarkOneinFour.

** For unknown reasons, known as Legs (unless as a corny joke to reflect the fact that she was relatively short, whereas one would have thought, if so, that a name that drew attention to 'ideal' female body-image was hardly consistent).

*** Conceivably, Legs might have originated in the fact of her walking from grandma's back to Hammond, after Margaret's father had sought to exile her there... It matters little that the film does not explain, and it is probably a virtue.




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

The Enchanted Places

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

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


6 January

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

On the IMDb web-site, reviews have been written of Leviathan (I)* (2012) as if the expectations of the writers had been specifically outraged by a film that was meant to be 'about trawling' and they had sat down to a nice study, full of facts and figures, of life and scenes at sea.

No such problems, I suspect, were likely to get in the way of Hors Satan (2011)'s finding the right audience, which would be that of demonstrating the worth of this film to those to whom it might appeal, but without a similarly large budget for trailers :

Just as an opening comment, the comparison is relevant, because the films are - partly as if they are creatures of where they are set** - apt to be both ambiguous, and not to be understood as being 'apart from' what we might normally think about life : neither film explicitly requires us to say how we judge what we see, but, in the case of Hors Satan, we might find ourselves reaching out for a list of similar words to try to describe its world, such as pagan, resurrection, healing, reverence, worship, and The Sun, alongside death, protection, police, and punishment.


It is a shock to realize that the male lead, David Dewaele has already been dead for nearly a year (27 February 2013). When we properly meet Alexandra Lemâtre (Elle) and him, as Le gars (which just means 'the guy' (or lad), we are unclear who they are to each other, although we learn that he looks out for her (and also that she may be abusing his desire to do so ?), and that it is not because of any aversion to sex that he keeps rejecting her suggestions of physical union. They are the nearest thing that ech of them has to any other.

The film has a place, La Côte d'Opale (on which Calais is just 50 miles north of where Dewaele was born and died), but nothing much tells us how long the status quo had existed, and the film rests content with that, by giving us this place that looks onto the sea and, for example, where, although she scorns him, he shows her how actions have averted catastrophe. And, although this is not some Godardian telling of something as unreal, it is on the edges of what we know, to entrance us with its power and / or shock us with its morality.

Treat it as literal or figurative, but the film shows a world where there are other forces, and it is likely to appeal as that of Kosmos (2010) or Postcards from the Zoo (2012) (Festival review)



Postscript

Glancing, a few weeks late, through @PeterBradshaw1's 'The Braddies', there is Dewaele in his choice of best actors in The Guardian...



End-notes :

* Called Leviathan (I) (2012), because it is one of (in this case) two films with that title released in that year.

** If, that is, they themselves do not create (or co-create) their setting.





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

The panther in our head

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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29 December (watched on DVD)

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)


94 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16



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)

Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.

It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)

Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!



In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)

The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.

It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.

Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...

At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.


End-notes

* In 'To a Louse'.




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