It is rare that one sees a film with the same sense of awe and pleasure as one experiences looking at a great painting in a museum where one can linger and examine the brush-strokes without people in the way. This film by the French/Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung is such a film. It is a 'must' for anyone of gastronomical inclinations, anyone training to be a chef, any true 'foodies', and experts on traditional French cooking. But it is also a film with stories, with happiness and with sadness. The film is set in the 1890s or first years of the 20th century, in provincial France. It seems to have been filmed entirely on location and the interiors take place in a traditional manor house. There is no electricity, and light is all from sunlight, candles, and oil lamps. There are no phones or other interruptions to the tranquillity of the setting. The cinematography is exceptional, with rich natural colour and ingenious camerawork (congratulations to the camera operator!) There is no sense of the existence of the outside world, and no one travels outside the bubble of their existence. The house is that of a famous gourmet, Monsieur Dodin, played quietly and magnetically by Benoît Magimel. For twenty years his cook Eugénie has lived with him and together they have created some of the greatest dishes of France on a daily basis, and invented several classic dishes as well. She is played by Juliette Binoche as a quiet, understated, and proud woman. Magimel has been in love with her and asking her to marry him for all that time, but she refuses to marry, even though they are lovers, because she prefers things the way they are. She does not really want to become a wife. She and Magimel have in a sense grown together into one person, and can communicate perfectly well in silence with an occasional glance or remark, or even a sound of approval or disapproval over a dish. Sometimes 'Mmmmm' is enough to convey paragraphs' worth of meaning. They discover a very young girl named Pauline who is a born gastronomic genius, and she enters their circle. She is played to perfection by Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire, who is also naturally able to communicate by silence and with her eyes. Everything about this slow and dreamy film is magical. But best of all is the endless demonstrations of preparations of complex dishes. And when making a pot au feu, for instance, Magimel does not extract separate garlic cloves, but cuts the garlic boldly in half and places those carefully with cut-side up down into the pot. Magimel has a circle of five friends who are also gastronomes, and they frequently come for special dinners. They exchange stories about food. One refers to an incident which took place in 1364 with Pope Urban V at Avignon. To the group, this might as well have been yesterday, because as gastronomy is eternal, food and wine tales are also ageless. At one point Magimel and Binoche drink a bottle of 1839 champagne; it had been shipwrecked and lay at the bottom of the sea for 50 years, but when recovered in 1887, Magimel had bought three bottles of it at auction. They drink the most splendid wines every day, and at one point Magimel is drinking Chambolle-Musigny and says it is his favourite burgundy. As for whites, there is for instance the best of the Puligny-Montrachets. (A bottle of the 2021 is for sale on the internet at the moment for £747.60 in case you are interested.) There is an amazing scene where the men are together and eating ortolans, with napkins entirely covering their heads. Ortolans are small rare birds, said to be the finest of all game birds. When President Pompidou lay dying he had his last meal, at his special request, of ortolans. I have never eaten one and don't feel comfortable about eating rare creatures. Ormeaux yes, ortolans no, because they now farm ormeaux on the coast of Britanny, so that is OK then. In Magimel's kitchen all the pans are copper, and there is even a special copper 'turbot pan' shaped like a turbot, and large enough to hold one. We see the turbot dish being prepared. The stove is a large black aga. The kitchen is large and there are plenty of surfaces. The garden supplies endless vegetables. The film is amongst other things a continuous stream of demonstrated recipes, showing every aspect of the chopping and preparation of every ingredient. We see it all so clearly that if we had the ingredients and time and patience we could recreate some of them just from what we have seen and heard in the film. At one point we see every stage of the preparation of a Baked Alaska; the subtitles say 'Baked Alaska' but in the French dialogue they do not say Alaska, they say 'Norwegian'. (Alaska means nothing to the French even now.) The home made ice cream is made in a sunken area full of chopped ice. We are treated to the information that the vol-au-vent was discovered by accident. The group then decides that the story may be apocryphal, but that they don't care because they love any story about food whether it is true or false. All of these people are able to concentrate so profoundly upon food and cooking because there are no distractions, life is quiet, and nothing need interrupt the preparation of even the most complicated dish. It does not matter if a dish takes hours to prepare, as the dish is more important than time. This film is a food-lover's dream. I have not discussed the personal dramas that take place because it is difficult to do so without spoilers. What a triumph and work of art this film is! It can teach you to savour food, love cooking, and above all, eating.
Reviews
20 Reviews
The Elusive Corporal
(1962)
Jean Renoir's last film
15 April 2024
This was a very fine swan song for Jean Renoir's directorial career. It is both serious and humorous at the same time. The film contains a great deal of original news footage relating to the Second World War and the Occupation of Paris, much or all of which seems not to have been made public elsewhere. In order to blend in seamlessly with the news footage, Renoir chose to make the film itself in black and white. The original title of the film is LE CAPORAL ÉPINGLÉ, and the English title is a translation of that. Young and little known at the time, Jean-Pierre Cassel was cast as the corporal, and that worked perfectly. The story starts with the surrender of the French to the Nazis, and we see the surrender documents being signed in the very same railway carriage which was used for the Germans to sign their surrender at the end of World War I. Then we see the Nazis marching into Paris and from an oncoming sea of German soldiers Renoir cuts to an oncoming sea of bedraggled French soldiers. Despite the fact that France has surrendered, the French soldiers are being imprisoned in camps and treated as prisoners of war. The story starts there. Cassell becomes a serial escaper, escaping over and over again in ingenious ways, but is always recaptured. It is funny but also tragic, because all the imprisoned French are wasting away with insufficient food and brutal punishments. The film is historically informative and has particular value for that. But the human relationships and interactions are fascinating and the film is absorbing and enjoyable. The daring and imagination shown in the escape attempts is often astonishing. The story is based upon a novel by Jacques Perret, and that in turn was based upon real people and events. Certainly this film fills in a gap in our knowledge of the French experience of defeat. And Renoir has made a testament to human resilience and ingenuity.
Poor Things
(2023)
A terrible film, perverted, dismal, and wicked as well
15 April 2024
This is an example of exactly the sort of film which should never be made. To start with the most obvious, the film is so over-saturated with weird obsessive sexuality that I would classify it as pornography. Little if any of the countless sexual episodes can be justified as "necessary to the story". But they do seem to be necessary to the twisted psyches of the people who made the film. Who is the pervert? The director? The writers? The producers? Somebody certainly is. Or all of the above? But there are other serious things which are objectionable about this film, which go far beyond the subject of sexuality. One could consider the film as a kind of transhumanist fantasy, thrilling to those people who think having people made of pieces of flesh sewn together in the manner of the Frankenstein Monster is perfectly acceptable. And as we know, it is the dream of transhumanists that we will all one day be combinations of human and machine, with the emphasis on the machine aspect. In other words, the offensive "humanity" of humans must be eradicated at all costs, and people reduced to the level of robots. The Frankenstein Monster-style character played by William Dafoe is put forward as a perfectly normal fabricant. As for the main character Bella Baxter, played with such brilliance by Emma Stone, we are meant to accept her too as "normal'. She was "made" by the mad scientist Dafoe from the body of a woman who drowned herself while pregnant, with the brain of the foetus implanted in her instead of the adult woman's destroyed brain. So she is a child-woman. But "that's OK, nothing to be seen here, move on. Everything is perfectly normal and under control." Yes, control is the key. Whoever wants the public to swallow and respect such garbage would like to see a public consisting also of fabricants. And as for the brilliant art direction and special effects, which are gaspable, they purvey a nightmare world of semi-darkness, of lurid colours and fantasies: in other words, a purely A. I. world. Everything about and in this horrible film is entirely fabricated, and one wonders about the people who made it. From which sinister lab did they emerge?
Thunder on the Hill
(1951)
Released as THUNDER ON THE HILL, superb early Douglas Sirk
14 April 2024
This film is based on a play, entitled BONAVENTURE, the title of which refers to the lead character, the nun named Sister Mary Bonaventure. But the film was released in 1951 as THUNDER ON THE HILL and has been released on DVD and Blu-Ray recently under that title as well. The story is highly dramatic, indeed can properly be described as a melodrama, and is powerfully directed by Douglas Sirk. It is set in the county of Norfolk, 8 miles from the city Norwich. Enormous floods have made the land impassable, so that some travellers cannot reach Norwich and they take refuge in a large convent, where they are welcomed by the sisters, who feed and shelter them. Amongst those taking refuge there are a policeman and a woman prisoner, as well as her female guard. We learn that she is on her way to Norwich to be executed for murder, and is due to be hung by the neck on a gallows the very next morning. But she will be late for her own execution, because there is no way to get to Norwich, and the phone lines are down so that a police boat cannot be summoned either. This sets the scene for a high intensity situation. A very saintly young nun feels instinctively when she meet the supposed murderess that she is really innocent. The nun is played by Claudette Colbert, and the condemned girl by Ann Blyth. The cinematography is terrific, evoking moods and atmospheres with every shot, and is by William H. Daniels. The combination of his camera work, Sirk's direction, and standout performances by the actors (Gladys Cooper play the Mother superior) make the drama immensely powerful. This is a major early work by Douglas Sirk. And it focuses intently on questions of guilt and innocence, and highly emotional scenes with a great deal of tension, as the confrontations play out one after the other, things are revealed, and there are surprises in store.
Outside the Law
(1956)
Entertaining fifties B thriller
13 April 2024
The noirish theme of the returning G. I. is perpetuated in this film made as late as 1956, more than a decade after most had returned from the War. In this case, Ray Danton plays an Army Staff Sergeant who has been called back from Europe to help the U. S. Treasury crack a counterfeiting case which has been plaguing them for 15 years. Danton had been permitted to join the Army as a condition of his parole, having been imprisoned for a minor offence when younger. He has done well in the army, been promoted, won a medal, was wounded, the whole lot. He is now offered the chance to have his "slate wiped clean" for his earlier crime by cooperating in solving the case. The head of the enquiry team in Washington is his own father! They are severely estranged and tensions run high between them. The reason why Danton is considered important is that he knew a member of the counterfeiting gang who was recently murdered. He is asked to call on that man's widow (played by Leigh Snowden) and see if he can glean any information on the gang. It turns out that Snowden had only known her husband for three months before he left for Europe and is ignorant of his criminal activities. But she is jealously watched by another member of the gang. Things get violent very fast. Will our hero survive? Will he fall in love with the pretty widow? Can the villains be traced? And can the case be solved? The film is competently done and all is eventually revealed.
The Bridge
(1991)
A masterpiece of cinematic art
29 March 2024
This film disappeared soon after its release and I can hardly believe that it is only now, 33 years later, that I have been able to see it again on a private DVD. It is a genuine masterpiece of British cinema. It has atmosphere reminiscent of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and the emotional intensity of BRIEF ENCOUNTER, with which it shares the theme of an overwhelming love which is suppressed and rendered impossible by circumstances. The film is set on the Suffolk coast in the 19th century and concerns the Victorian painter Phillip Wilson Steer, who spends the summer there. Steer is perfectly cast and played by David O'Hara, who beautifully underplays every scene, thus contributing to the film's amazing subtlety. But the outstanding performance is by the female lead, Saskia Reeves. It may well be the best thing she has ever done. She displayed at this early stage in her career that she knows how to act and convey overwhelming emotion without saying a word, one of the most difficult tasks in the acting profession. She was at this age hauntingly beautiful. As someone who is only five foot four inches tall, one never knows this from the way the film is shot, though I believe it was a handicap in her career. Some of Britain's best supporting actors appear in the film as well: Joss Ackland, Rosemary Harris, Anthony Higgins, and Geraldine James. As the desolate Mrs. Todd, whose husband and son are drowned at sea in a storm, Geraldine James is magnificent in her grief and her poverty, upheld by a pride of the sort one finds in Greek tragedy. This incredible film was directed by Syd Macartney, whom I knew fairly well in the early 1990s. He is from Northern Ireland and immensely talented and so effortlessly amiable. The failure of anyone to take any notice of this film upon its release was a terrible disappointment to him. There is no question that he was and is one of the most talented directors England has seen in decades. The artistry and genius he shows in every scene of this film has, in effect, been lost to creative cinema. He was one of the most noted directors of television commercials, for which he had his own company. And he has directed countless television dramas over the years. But he should have been the next David Lean. He was catastrophically under-appreciated and should have won many Oscars and gone on to make so many inspiring famous films. Syd has more talent and inspiration than any ten other directors put together. But we live in a world where the best are often not seen for what they really are, and where mediocrity is prized above all else. This film is so powerful and tragic. If only everyone could see it. Apparently it has never been available on DVD commercially. What a terrible loss to British culture and to British cinema!
Unearthly Stranger
(1963)
A truly superb science fiction film
29 March 2024
This film is a forgotten classic. It was a low budget independent film released by Independent Artists, and the interiors were shot at the Independent Artists Studio at Beaconsfield. The direction by John Krish is excellent. I knew John Krish in the mid to late 1960s, and was invited to the premiere of his wonderful film DECLINE AND FALL OF A BIRDWARCHER (1968), which was based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. The premiere was held at the Paramount Cinema (then a single screen) on Lower Regent Street. The film starred the fascinating Geneviève Page and had a supporting role for Patience Collier, who lived in Holland Park and whom I knew slightly through her daughter. Krish himself lived in Hampstead. I never saw him after 1972, and had no idea he had lived to be 92, or I would have looked him up. He was a very fine fellow. This film is extremely exciting and imaginative. The lead role is played by John Neville, who does a brilliant job. The ideas in the film are decades ahead of their time, as some of the concepts discussed are only coming to be understood now, such as awareness of plasma. (I shall not here enter a long discourse about the scientific ideas.) The script was by Rex Carlton and Jeffrey Stone, and I wish they were still alive so I could ask them the sources of some of their inspiration. The film takes place mainly within the Institute of Space Studies in London. (There is no such institute in the UK, alas. If only!) The Institute has a department which is studying a highly advanced way of travel in space and other worlds by means of disembodied transport of the mind and subsequent manifestation in bodies which alternate between visible and invisible. The head of the department is mysteriously murdered, and scientists working on the same type of project have been murdered in Russia and the United States. John Neville takes over as the new head of the department. A short while before in Switzerland he had met an irresistible young woman named Julie and hastily married her. I had not seen this film, which was made before I knew Krish, and as there were in those days no video cassettes or DVDs, there was no way to do so as it had last been in the cinema a few years earlier. So it is only now that I have seen the film and been shocked to see the actress Gabriella Licudi (aged 21 at the time of shooting) who plays Julie. She is so like my old intimate friend Caroline Glyn (who died young so long ago) that I "nearly fell off my chair", and it was like going back in time, truly a sci fi experience in itself. Great praise must be lavished on the entire cast of this film, Neville, Gabriella, Patrick Newell, and Philip Stone. They make a lot of scenes entirely believable which were otherwise frankly on the edge of believability. The characters come to realize they are up against something far beyond their comprehension, that their work is being thwarted, sometimes by murder, and that there are "powers" at work of a mysterious nature. There are a lot of dark and atmospheric shots, especially in the beginning, of portions of London which no longer exist, such as the old Clink Street, the wharves, the warehouses, the lack of proper lighting, the emptiness, the lack of cars, and the paucity of people. Younger people alive today in London cannot conceivably imagine what London was really like in 1963: it was another universe. So these glimpses which those few of us who are still left so dramatically remember are a welcome reminder of the true "traditional London" of those days; it was before "swinging London" came into existence, which only commenced in August of 1963. It was so much easier to make a suspense film in those days, as the exterior locations naturally existed. This film is a perfect example of how important it is to keep menace invisible, and to avoid unnecessary special effects. At one point I was afraid we might have some horror intrude into the picture, when John Neville opens the coffin of his predecessor to try to find out how he really died. But never fear, there was no horror. We are shown the inside of the coffin and it is merely full of bricks; the real body was being kept secret by the intelligence services. Now, that is how you build suspense.
A Young Woman Missing
(1953)
A tragic tale from Norway
27 March 2024
This is a sad and tragic tale. It was released with English subtitles as A YOUNG WOMAN IS MISSING. The film is interesting in several ways. For one thing, it shows what life was like in Oslo a few years after the Nazis left. Everyone wears their overcoats indoors most of the time because there is not enough heat for the houses. The streets and many homes are extremely grim and desolate. The story concerns a young married woman named Eva who suddenly vanishes. But we do not then have a police investigation film, instead we have a series of flashbacks which explain everything step by step. Eva is a very naïve country girl with little education. She has a sweet nature. She is married to an archaeologist. In fact, there is one exterior scene where we see them both coming out of the new Kon Tiki Huset, an archaeological museum created by Thor Heyerdahl. Eva's husband Dr. Berger is heavily intellectual, and his social friends are also. Eva feels crushed by their supercilious put-downs, due to their being intellectual snobs without even realizing it. She feels inadequate and worthless. But she has worse problems than that, of which her husband has been blissfully unaware. And through the flashbacks of her history told by her previous lover, a drug addict, we learn the full horror of what Eva has gone through and continues to go through. We are therefore the horrified viewers of what morphine addiction was like. The film then turns into a tale of addiction, and what it does to people's lives. Can Eva be found? Can she be saved? The performance of Astri Jacobsen as Eva is very touching. The film was directed by a woman, Edith Carlmar (1911-2003), who was also an actress, and she appears uncredited in the scenes in the pharmacy. It is doubtful whether a man could have directed this film with the same amount of empathy. Carlmar later appeared as an actress in a feature film and also subsequently a mini-series about the author Knut Hamsun, one of Norway's Nobel Prize Winners for Literature.
21 Days Together
(1940)
When they were young for three weeks
3 February 2024
This is a superb British proto-noir thriller starring the young Laurence Olivier and the young Vivien Leigh before they were married in real life. What charmers they were then. Later they both became so mannered, but here they are fresh young things, and they are hopelessly in love, and Fate is against them in a big way. The film contains some fascinating location scenes of the Thames in 1937, and a daily cruise boat sailing from there to Southend-on-Sea and back, as well as a London devoid of traffic. The film is based on a story and play by John Galsworthy, 'The First and the Last', and the script was jointly written by the director Basil Dean and Graham Greene. It must have been Greene who added all the angst of sin and redemption and Catholicism. The film is powerfully performed and directed. Vivien Leigh convincingly portrays a Russian waif émigré with big innocent eyes, a girlish voice, and a 'lost' look. Olivier successfully portrays an impetuous, reckless, and innocent young man. He does not look at all like Laurence Olivier, instead he looks like the character. The fresh young Olivier, wholly spontaneous, is something of a revelation. Leigh was 24 but seems 20 and Olivier was 30 but seems 25. William Dewhurst plays the Lord Chief Justice of England and died shortly after shooting was completed. For reasons no one knows, this film was not released until January 7, 1940, after Leigh had made her big hit in GONE WITH THE WIND. So it sat around in a can for nearly two and a half years. That is a puzzlement for such an excellent film as this. Olivier accidentally kills a man who had attacked him with a knife. A defrocked priest robs the dead man of his ring. Another man steals a wallet and picks up some dropped gloves which are a clue to the murder. What will happen? Who will pay? Will Justice catch up with anyone? Do the lovers only have three weeks of happiness? Watch and see.
Bat Out of Hell
(1966)
An ingenious vintage mini-series from Francis Durbridge
10 December 2023
This 1966 mini-series for the BBC has been restored and its five episodes last two hours. Francis Durbridge (1912-1998) was one of the cleverest thriller writers. He is most famous for his character Paul Temple, Detective. Durbridge always comes up with more twists and turns and surprises than other writers. Here he does not disappoint. Dudley Foster brilliantly plays the dour police inspector who is trying to solve an impossible crime. The two plotters are Sylvia Sims and John Thaw, both very good. It is strange to see Thaw as a young man, so utterly different from the famous Inspector Morse which he later became. In this series, we have a dead man who comes to life, a dead man who then becomes dead, a schemer behind a schemer behind a schemer. And there is the mystery of what does 'Bat out of Hell' mean? It is inscribed on a woman's bracelet. Hard to figure. And then a woman who owns a sweet shop is murdered. Now why was that? Were her wine gums too strong? Or was her fudge not sweet enough? I doubt that anyone will figure this one out in advance, it is worse than a Rubik Cube.
Days of Hope
(1940)
An amazing portrayal of real events of the Spanish Civil War
17 November 2023
This film is based on one chapter of André Malraux's novel L'ESPOIR (HOPE) published in 1937. The Spanish title was SIERRA DE TERUEL and the two English titles used from 1945 on were MAN'S HOPE and DAYS OF HOPE. But the French title is ESPOIR ('HOPE'). The film was directed by Malraux himself, aided by the Russian Boris Peskine. Malraux also co-wrote the screenplay. The film concerns real events which took place at Teruel in north-eastern Spain in 1937, and was shot on location in 1938, with a Spanish cast and more than one thousand local peasants. The film is so realistic it is practically a dramatized documentary. The film was financed by the Spanish Second Republic. Malraux himself joined the Republicans in 1936 to fight against Franco. He was a commandant of an air squadron, and hence the extremely dramatic shots of aerial combat and the story focusing on a brave bombing raid. A great deal of genuine 1938 war footage is used, which is well integrated into the drama, and some of which seems to have been of the actual bombing raid itself. The film was finished in 1939 and shown a few times in Paris. As a piece of history, the film is priceless, because it is entirely authentic and was made only months after the real events. The Vichy regime in France and the Franco regime in Spain seized and destroyed all copies of the film which could be found. But one print secretly survived, which surfaced in 1945, and was shown in Paris then. The film I have seen was of that one surviving print which was restored in 2003. The film was never entirely finished, and there are frequent bridging texts linking the filmed episodes in order to make the story continuous and complete. These texts are original, as it was clearly impossible to film everything called for in the script because of the Franco regime's control of Spain. Although the film certainly had propaganda value, I would not call it a propaganda film, because its integrity is too great for such a categorisation. The language of the film is Spanish, but I have seen it with English subtitles (from Movie Detective). This is as far from a Hollywood war film as anyone could get. Everything about the film's look and impact is real and authentic. Whether the story has been somewhat romanticised or not we may never know, but that hardly matters. One feels one is really there in those small Spanish towns with deserted streets and a few straggling Republicans sharing a single military rifle and otherwise only having their hunting rifles, and precious few of those. They search all over town to find a single car which they can 'borrow' for a daring raid. Brave men suddenly fall dead and others survive, showing the randomness of war. The aerial scenes are amazing. They need to blow up a crucial bridge and a new air field. At one point a plane is flown by a man who has not flown since 1918, 19 years earlier; he crash lands because he was not allowed his two hours of practice to get back in the swing of things. But he survives to continue to serve bravely. We see incomplete planes in an improvised hangar with their fronts off, waiting for the engines which never arrived. Everything about the war waged by the Republicans was improvised, for lack of funds and supplies, in their struggle against Franco's army which was so amply funded and supplied by the Hitler regime. Even the way to the enemy airfield is only made possible because a local peasant from the adjoining village leads the pilot of the bomber by means of spotting the lanes and fields from the air, interrupted by clouds. This film was influenced to a certain extent by Russian cinema, with some dramatic shots of the heroic 'people'. But mainly, action dominates. No one appears to be acting, and although most people in the film are amateurs, that only adds to the realism. What an amazing film this is!
Allied
(2016)
Brad Pitt sleepwalks through an entire film
6 April 2017
This film has a powerful story, many stunning scenes, and Marion Cotillard. But it also has Brad Pitt. Big mistake. Not only does Pitt seem to have had his face worked on, so that it can show little emotion anymore, but he is also apparently not Brad Pitt anymore. Is this a zombie who has taken his place? He plays opposite Marion Cotillard in countless intimate scenes, she tries every device she can think of to wake him up, but still he slumbers. A cardboard cutout of the Brad Pitt we used to know would have been more effective. Considering that this is a film wholly dependent upon the relationship between Pitt and Cotillard, the result is a disaster. The chemistry between them is so far below absolute zero that we are in a deeply frozen universe. Meanwhile, an enormous crew and the director Robert Zemeckis (famous for FORREST GUMP and BACK TO THE FUTURE) struggle to hold back the Red Sea so that the entire cast do not drown in a sea of indifference. We have the excellent Jared Harris, beloved of all MAD MEN fans, adding his resonant voice which is as soothing as hot chocolate, but lacking closeups, so that we can barely see him. We have Gary Sinese, an old chum of Zemeckis. We even have Simon McBurney. But still there is no thaw. We have great scenes. There is sex inside an old car in the middle of a sandstorm in the desert (lacking however any continuity link to the succeeding scenes, which is both an editing and a directing lapse). There is a birth of a baby in the open in the middle of an air raid. There is a man landing on a sand dune by parachute, seen from the air as he descends (astonishing camera work) which is ostensibly in Morocco but was really filmed in the Canary Islands, where all the North African locations were simulated. (There are in any case no such sand dunes near Casablanca, just for the record.) And there is a plane coming straight at a house but which misses its roof by a whisker and crashes across the street. That street is Willow Road in London's Hampstead, where so much action takes place. I could not make out whether the house was meant to be that of my friend Rupert Sheldrake, but I must go have a look at his roof to see whether it is damaged. Later when we see baby Anna taking her first steps, with the wrecked German plane in the background, it is on a hill far from Willow Road, but then this is only a movie. This is a film which should have been fantastic. But it has no pace, it is in fact languid and lingering. It is meant to be a powerful thriller and intense personal drama, but where is the editing to keep it going, where are the intense angles, and above all, where is the hero? Sound asleep, of course. Yes, there are plenty of spectacular setups. Many people worked their butts off giving us great sets, great props, great clothes, wonderful period cars. There are searchlights and anti-aircraft guns slaving away for our benefit, there are Sten guns, Nazis, stern 'V Section' spooks, uniforms, pistols, the whole shebang. But where are the pace, the intensity, and the excitement? All the elements are there, but we wait in vain for it all to move us. This is a passionless film. I also think Steven Knight's screenplay was greatly lacking in any true cinematic sense, and that he is just not a natural writer for the screen, despite having numerous credits. What a waste of a wonderful opportunity this is. And all that money spent on it! Zemeckis rolls scene after scene onstage as if he were producing a variety show in a theatre, or reading from Steven Knight's shopping list, and expects them all to adhere. But they are episodic rather than unified. We go from one outstanding setup to another. But we do not do so quickly enough, there is not enough glue, and above all, the nearest thing to a meaningful Pitt which we see in this film, vaguely and in the distance, are the ones on Jared Harris's face, remembered from MAD MEN, where we all learned to find them endearing marks of his individuality. Marion Cotillard deserves an Oscar for trying. But she might as well be kissing a film poster, and even a rag doll would be more responsive to her embraces. All of her plentiful allure is just so much water thrown at the desert sands, disappearing instantly and leaving no trace. If one pretends all the flaws are not there, one can still just about enjoy this film because of its dramatic and tragic story. But its lack of vigour just makes it look so contrived.
Arrival
(II) (2016)
A pseud's film
20 March 2017
This film is a complete failure. It leaps from one ludicrous affectation to another, straining for 'meaning' but having none. The director Denis Villeneuve can deal with reality, as witness his film SICARIO (2015, see my review). But when it comes to spacemen, forget it. He has not got a sci fi bone in his body, or should I say his brain, as the film has been made by somebody who is clearly bone-headed. He thinks he can achieve profundity by having lots of loud music which drowns out the actors' voices, by having them mumble and whisper, by most of the scenes being so dark you have to peer through the gloom (all the better to see nothing, my dear), by having one of those identikit Hollywood children who lisps like an infant and cannot speak clearly, by not really showing his aliens except through a haze, by pretending to be something of a philosopher, with all the assiduity of a drunk ranting in the street. Amy Adams plays the female lead, and she at least articulates her speech, even though she has been encouraged to say everything in a near-whisper, so that we struggle to make out what she is saying, especially against the 'mood music'. As for Forrest Whittaker, who spoke perfectly clearly in THE BUTLER (2013), he has been reduced to an incomprehensibly mumbling hulk. I think I more or less understood about half of his lines, or am I just being kind? The idea that he should play a tough Army colonel was a serious instance of miscasting. He looks too nice to bark out orders such as 'move out!' But we can't understand his dialogue anyway, so in the end it does not matter. The stock scenes of tanks and soldiers with assault rifles attempting to deal with incomprehensible aliens from another world shows that Hollywood has not moved on since the 1950s. Everyone in the film seems to wear battle fatigues. But what about the fatigue of us, the viewers? There seems to be no end to this meaningless rambling film as it wanders around seeking for answers and finding none. The camera lingers so obsessively on the face of Amy Adams that the film is essentially an Ode to Amy. She seems to be the subject of about half of the shots in the whole film. Was the director in love with her? What is that all about anyway? Amy's leading man is played by Jeremy Renner, who get almost no close shots, much less closeups, and seems to have been cast in order to play the thankless role of a nonentity who would not steal too much attention from Amy. OK, OK, so the film was made in Canada, and Villeneuve is Canadian, and maybe it is not technically a Hollywood product. In which case, it is simply worse than Hollywood. All Canadian aliens should hang their tentacles in shame. A single scientific buzzword has been thrown into the dialogue, 'nonlinear'. That is all the science we get. (Nonlinear equations are increasingly important in modern physics. Don't even ask what they are, this is a film review.) There are mumbling remarks about the puzzling nature of time, but even on the rare occasions when we can hear them, they don't make any sense. Somehow Amy Adams is meant to know the future, or is it the past? It is not clear at all what she knows, although we are told she speaks Farsi, Mandarin, and many other languages. But no matter how many languages you can speak, if you have nothing to say, you might as well keep your mouth shut. Having the aliens look like octopuses is sensible, since serious writers on extraterrestrial life have been suggesting such creatures since the 1960s at least. Octopuses have big brains, and so hyper-intelligent super-octopoid aliens probably do exist on many worlds. That at least was not nonsense. But just about everything else was. And once again China is misconceived as being run by a general called 'Chairman of the People's Army'. Come on, folks, can't you get anything right? But the most ludicrous single thing in the entire film is the suggestion that a spaceship lands in the Sudan, of all places, and we are expected to imagine that the Sudan has a proper government. Hahahahaha.
Secrets
(1924)
A partially preserved Norma Talmadge silent melodrama
15 August 2013
This is an impressive melodrama which is now difficult to see, because the DVD is made from a very poor print, apparently the only one surviving, with about a third of its footage lost. The modern subtitles which have replaced the originals are also partially illiterate, which does not help. For instance, 'adversity' is spelled 'adversory'. Some idiots at work there! But the film is worth watching for those interested in cinema history and in Norma Talmadge as a sparkling star of the silent screen. She does very well in the lead role here, playing a character named Mary Carlton. The story begins with her as an old woman in the 1920s. Her husband is lying ill in bed, believed to be dying. As he sleeps, she goes to rest in her room and gets her diary out of a drawer, and reflects upon her dramatic and perilous life history. Suddenly we are back in 1865 in England, and she is a young girl from a wealthy family getting ready for a ball. There is an amazing scene, largely satirical, of her dressing for the ball. Anyone interested in costumes really must see this to believe it! Words fail me in attempting to describe it! Then she has a confrontation with her stern parents who have discovered that she has been writing love letters to John Carlton, an employee in her father's business, whom her father has consequently just fired. Her father says: 'No daughter of mine is going to marry such a nonentity!' So Talmadge elopes and does so, rather impractically, in her hoop skirt. She and John go off into the darkness. Then suddenly we are in the wild northwest of America in a log cabin, having lost a huge amount of footage. John has somehow antagonised some ruffians called 'Jack's gang' and they come riding through the snow to 'get' him. Talmadge's baby has been ill and the doctor has just left. A huge gunfight takes place, with John and one other man besieged in the cabin, and as Talmadge retreats to the back room to see how her baby is doing, she holds a small mirror to its mouth and sees that there is no breath, and that her baby has died. She sits there holding the dead baby in a state of shock while the gunfight is proceeding. Talmadge is very effective in her acting throughout the film, and in this scene she portrays the tragedy and pathos very well. Then a huge loss of footage occurs, but an inserted title informs us (from notes or perhaps the script) that John won the fight and defeated Jack's gang, despite being hugely outnumbered, and becomes a local hero. Then we are suddenly back in England again years later, where John's infidelity with another woman is exposed, and the woman comes to confront Talmadge and demand his freedom, saying that John and she love one another. However, Talmadge sees her off and reclaims the penitent John, who sheepishly admits that he has lost all his money 'again' (we missed the earlier occasion or occasions in the lost footage) and that they are penniless once more. Talmadge says they will fight together to survive, as they have always done. She has meanwhile met up with her parents again, and satire once again rears its head as the father says to his daughter that he had always wanted her to marry John Carlton. She looks at him with a mixture of amazement and contempt. Soon we are back with her as an old woman, as the doctor enters to speak of her husband's condition. As IMDb does not permit discussion of endings, I cannot say how it all turns out. Considering its poor state of preservation, this film now is very much a specialist's viewing experience and the general public would not wish to put up with the missing sections and the bad print. But for those of us who see beyond such things, it is worthwhile, and would have been a very impressive film at its time of release. It is also a particularly fine example of Norma Talmadge's talent as an actress.
'For a happy girl, you say such sad things'
6 April 2013
This is one of the great poetic classic films of the 1960s. Much of the dialogue is pure poetry, the scenes exude an overwhelming atmosphere of longing, memory, and loss, and the central performance by Sarah Miles is one of the finest of her career. The screenplay was written by Edna O'Brien, with more than a whiff of the Celtic Twilight about it, based upon her short story 'A Girl by the Seaside'. O'Brien's talents as screenwriter and dramatist appear to have been overlooked and forgotten today, as she continues to bask in the admiration of the lovers of her novels and stories. But she definitely had this other string to her Gaelic bow, and it was a pity that it did not continue. I must be one of the few people who saw the off-Broadway production in New York of her powerful and emotional play THE GATHERING many long years ago now, which proved her worth as a playwright. Producers in Britain never wanted to look at it, possibly because writers belong in boxes, and O'Brien's box has always been firmly labelled 'novelist and writer of stories'. Speaking personally, I think her most impressive book (and I have not read them all by any means) was A PAGAN PLACE, which tells us more about the real Ireland than we ever dared to imagine. Those of us who are only part Irish, with a dash of that blood added to us as if it were Worcestershire Sauce (if such an English reference may be forgiven, for I know of no Irish sauce other than their wit), have often wondered what it must be like to be genuinely Irish. O'Brien tends to answer such questions, though her main purpose is to explain to everyone what it means to be a woman first, an Irish woman second, and an expatriate Irish woman last, for she lives in London, not in her old pagan place. This magnificent film is so evocative that it positively sings, and some of the Irish songs on the sound track are therefore most appropriate. I saw it when it came out, and never forgot the wonderful scene where the director Desmond Davis (whose best film this probably is) filmed the dancing Sarah Miles in a rapid retreating dolly shot down the main street by night of the small Irish fishing village on the coast of County Clare where this film was made. That wild cinematic moment truly captured the exuberance which Sarah Miles was trying to live once again by revisiting the village and her youth, after an absence of a few years. Miles was 25 by the time she made this film, but she easily managed to look 17 in the flashback sequences, of which there are many. She is one of the few actresses who ever managed perfectly to sustain looks of innocent ecstasy on her face and make us believe it. It is a positive crime against world culture that this film has never been released on either video or DVD. After years of searching, I finally managed to obtain a DVD of an off the air broadcast of the film which was shown long ago by Thames Television, a British company which only existed between 1968 and 1992. The O'Brien – Davis partnership continues to be well known by the survival and availability of their joint film GIRL WITH GREEN EYES (1964), which features such startling performances by Peter Finch and Rita Tushingham, and is a brilliant work of cinema as well. But this film in my opinion is superior even to that one. O'Brien's deeply unsettling and hair-raising, but scintillating, screenplay for the film THREE INTO TWO WON'T GO (1969) has also never been available for us to see, as that film has also never been released on video or DVD. I haven't seen it since it came out, but once seen, you can never forget it, although the story makes for an uncomfortable memory. This lyrical film alternates between past and present and concerns the story of Sarah Miles's character. She was an orphan whose father had been a fisherman, and she worked in the small hotel seen in the story. It is owned by the character played quietly and thoughtfully by Cyril Cusack. He had been her employer then, and now that she has suddenly and unexpectedly returned, he is her host now. It is the end of the season, and the little hotel cum pub is about to close for the winter. Miles is its last guest. The film opens with her rushing down ecstatically to the seaside, walking barefoot in the sand and wading in the gentle surf. As the evening draws in, she explores the village, seeing the same old shop and pub signs with their Irish surnames which we also see in flashbacks. This is a very remote place, with 482 inhabitants, as we later learn. Miles has come in search of her lost love of years before, the young seaman Colin, played by Irish actor Sean Caffrey. Can their lost love be resurrected? Does he still idolize Miles as she has idolized him all these years? ('It's always been you, Colin, it was always you.') Or will reality throw a cold towel over Miles's head and smother her in further, choking disappointments? Miles, desperately lonely and abandoned in London, reluctantly married one of the most horrible types of Englishmen, an arrogant, opinionated, self-regarding ass. She has fled from him in a desperate attempt to recover her true identity. But can this be done? The anguished desire to recapture lost dreams pervades this film, which is a true work of art and has lost none of its poignancy today. In America it was released as TIME LOST AND TIME REMEMBERED, and also released as PASSAGE OF LOVE.
Oviri
(1986)
Marvellous biographical film about Paul Gauguin
17 April 2012
This film, set in the mid-1890s in France, is an excellent drama based upon Gauguin's return from Tahiti with a wagon load of canvasses which no one can understand and few will buy. There appear to be three language versions, French, English, and Danish. Guess which I chose. This film is so good that it is a great pity that it is little known outside Denmark, and on the DVD box (I got it from German Amazon) it says 'only for sale in Denmark'. Frankly, I only discovered by chance that the film existed, because I was curious about the early career of Sofie Grabol, having seen her in THE KILLING (see my review). This was her first film. She was 17 when she made it, successfully playing a girl of 14 with big innocent eyes. Gauguin takes a studio next door to the studio occupied by William Molard, and Grabol plays his daughter Judith Molard, who falls hopelessly in love with Gauguin, but he only treats her like a daughter. Grabol is marvellous, and shows her great acting talent already as a teenager. Paul Gauguin is played by Donald Sutherland, and it is certainly the best performance of his which I have ever seen. He has complete command of and understanding of the character, and carries it off brilliantly. And that ain't easy! The film is really wonderful, beautifully directed, with excellent art direction and cinematography. The screenplay third draft was written by Christopher Hampton, which must have helped a lot. The film was produced and directed by Henning Carlsen, who since the death of Carl Dreyer has been the leading Danish film director. Back in 1966, he electrified the world with his stunning film of Knut Hamsun's harrowing autobiographical novel HUNGER (SULT in Norwegian), starring Per Oscarsson as Hamsun. (I was once taken to the actual flat in a run down area of Oslo where Hamsun lived when he was starving, as related in this story, by Kjell Wik, who was a Hamsun expert. Nothing like seeing where it all really happened!) In 1995, nine years after OVIRI, Carlsen filmed Hamsun's PAN with Sofie Grabol, in her second film, playing Edvarda Mack (see my review to come). From this you may gather I have always been a Hamsun admirer. Why would the Danes be interested in Gauguin? It is because his wife was Danish. Indeed, my wife and I have a self-portrait by Gauguin's brother-in-law, Frits Thaulow, a Norwegian who married the younger sister of Gauguin's wife. In OVIRI, Max von Sydow plays August Strindberg, who becomes acquainted with Gauguin during this time through the Molards. As one might expect, von Sydow is brilliant as usual. He and Gauguin have interesting discussions. Edgar Degas appears in the film, played by Yves Barsacq, but he just pops in from time to time to buy one of Gauguin's paintings, and is gone in a flash, without talking to anyone. Strange, but presumably this is accurate (?). The film shows Gauguin visiting Copenhagen to ask his wife for money, but I believe this is fictionalised, and that there was no such visit. Certainly it is true that they were bitterly estranged, and this is shown very well. The replicas of Gauguin and van Gogh paintings used in the film are very good quality indeed, and most convincing. All of the cast are excellent, and this is a truly superb film about Gauguin, which should be seen by anyone interested in art history or the lives of artists, or for that matter, by anyone who just wants to see a powerful drama about a great artist who refuses to conform and goes his own way.
The Bridge
(2011–2018)
Terrible casting ruins this mis-produced series
16 April 2012
Believing the hype that this Swedish TV series would be as interesting as the recent Danish ones (see my reviews of THE KILLING and BORGEN), I ordered the DVD of Season One (10 episodes). I need not have bothered. I forced myself to sit through three episodes, hoping for improvement, but it only got worse, much worse. The main thing wrong is that the Swedish woman detective who is the lead in this series is played by a woman who cannot act. Sofia Helin certainly gets my award for The Most Irritating Actress in the World, and that says something! She is enough to make me turn off any DVD or boycott any cinema. She has no business being an actress, and should retire in disgrace. There may be some who think she is 'sexy' (which seems to be the only thing that matters these days, as talent is so much less valued), but I have rarely seen a less 'sexy' woman either. Even more bizarre, starting from this rock bottom of non-entity and non-talent, she is then asked to play a role of a woman detective who is very clever but suffers from some form of autism or Aspergers Syndrome. This compounds disaster by utter folly. To say that it is impossible to feel even the slightest twinge of sympathy for Helin's character, with the improbable name of 'Saga' (and this series certainly is a saga of producers' incompetence), would be to understate the case. Helin is enough to make you want to rise from your chair and strangle the television set. Not that that would do any good, because she would still be out there, threatening to bore and irritate everyone to death, though torturing them first by means of ten episodes. The Danish detective, played by Kim Bodnia, is very good and also sympathetic. But he is wasting his time, and so is everyone who watches this travesty. The directing is OK, and it is the producers who must be blamed for everything that has gone wrong here. As has become the fashion these days nearly everywhere, we are treated to endless shots of the most gruesome and ugly scenes. We get to look again and again at people sliced in half, with the camera lovingly dwelling on the states of the severed entrails, and a discussion of the meat-saw which was used to bisect the women. As usual, there is a psychopath at work, though I am inclined to believe he is not only a character in the series, but probably a producer as well. I am sure this series will be very popular viewing in witches' covens, pathology departments, and mental hospital wards for the incurably insane.
Shaun of the Dead
(2004)
Hilarious anarchy, the Marx Brothers meet Val Lewton
15 July 2011
This is a wild film, which carries comedy into realms of anarchy hitherto undreamed-of. The humour is very British, and many of the characters are 'slobs' of a type only found in Britain. It is not that other countries do not have slobs, but British slobs are strangely different from, say, American slobs. This film sheds a great deal of light on slobology, and the variants of slobs which occur in Britain, which have never been the subject of sufficient academic study. One would think that the armies of sociologists marching into a Glorious Future intended to be ruled by automaton-like regulators who will determine our every move in our daily lives would have turned their attentions towards slobology, but this seems to have eluded them in their zeal to oppress people who are not slobs. Indeed, it is even possible that the sociologists and their disciples the social workers are themselves closet slobs who are afraid of coming out. But Simon Pegg is not afraid of coming out, indeed he is not afraid of anything, even crowds of murderous zombies. The film works because of the marvellous comic abilities of Simon Pegg, around whom the entire phantasmagoria of the story evolves. Much of the film takes place with the few sane slobs left in the country (Pegg and his girl friend) surrounded by hordes of dead people who have come back to life and wish to bite living people, infect them with their virus, and turn them into zombies like themselves. This film is thus a kind of insanely funny homage to the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), the classic psychological horror film from which the world never recovered, and which touched the ultimate nerve of our insecurities. There is no way to purge fear better than by laughter, and mocking the zombies in this outrageous farce is a good way to lay them to rest, at least temporarily. There are deep psychological reasons why this film was so successful which go beyond its anarchic humour and zestful production. Pegg is also an excellent Everyman, in that he is totally immune to recognition of his own faults, and who does that remind us of? Pegg is also not afraid to look ridiculous. All of us are ridiculous, but most of us do not wish to appear so. Pegg is thus a kind of miraculous super-slob, someone so clueless, but possessing an intermittent animal cunning, that he is echelons above the rest of us in both folly and survival capacity. He is thus very like a king's fool in a mediaeval royal court. As he wades calmly through seas of threatening zombies, batting them with his cricket bat and bashing in their skulls (the only way to destroy a zombie, so we are told by real-life British television presenters used in the film, is to destroy the brain which has been infected, for nothing else can kill them), Pegg is simultaneously heroic and idiotic. He is heroic without knowing it, because he fights his way through the zombies without fear, but he is an idiot because his only plan is to go to his favourite pub The Winchester and take refuge there with a pint of beer, imagining it must be safe from the zombies because that is where he always goes to relax and unwind. So the film is really a celebration of idiocy, done with good humour and affection. The real reason why Pegg does not feel fear is because he is too stupid to do so, and the closest he comes to fear is a state of mindless apprehension, and worry of the 'will I miss the train' sort. The film is thus, in its wider sense, a commentary on the whole of British society, which in a state of apprehension stopping far short of fear because of mass stupidity, is wading through the bankruptcies and financial contagion (another form of zombieism) towards economic doom and social collapse. Most British slobs depend on a mythical thing called 'the State' to support them. When 'the State' can no longer do so, and when the bail-outs inevitably come to an end, the slobs will then possibly become hordes of angry zombies thronging the streets, as we see in this film. This film might thus be likened to the ancient Biblical prophets, in its warning that the zombies are coming, or the end of the world is nigh, or whatever. But then, there is always The Winchester, and a couple of pints, to save us. The supporting cast and the direction of this film by Edgar Wright are all superb. The script by Pegg and Wright is brilliant. The film is a classic, not just a 'cult classic', but a real one. And anyone who doesn't agree can have his head bashed in by a cricket bat.
A Blueprint for Murder
(1953)
'Don't touch my feet!'
15 July 2011
This is a superb and sophisticated murder mystery. Joseph Cotten is in peak form as the lead man, Whitney Cameron, who is called to the bedside of his young niece, who is dying in hospital. The child dies of mysterious convulsions, crying out 'Don't touch my feet!' The plot thickens from there. This is a first rate early fifties noir with Cotton, Jean Peters as his sister-in-law, and Gary Merrill as his lawyer friend. It is excellently directed by Andrew Stone and should be better known than it is. The story is cleverly developed, and the mystery lasts up until the very end of the film. The question is: who poisoned the niece with strychnine, and why? And who will be next? Cotton is urbane, reassuring, and very solid in the main role. Jean Peters is rather more arch than usual, with a character portrayal which is intentionally ambivalent, just to keep us all guessing. One does not know whether she is a femme fatale or not, and the whole point is that no one knows, even within the story. This is a most ingenious whodunit which will not disappoint any viewer.
Alamar
(2009)
A film set in 'the place of origins'
13 July 2011
Once in a while, a film appears that restores one's faith in the cinema as a medium, and reminds one of its possibilities for opening a window on a magical world. This is one such film. The film is unconventional, and proceeds at a slow pace certain to madden even further the maddening crowd. But for those who like to know more about 'real life', especially in unfamiliar surroundings, this slice of life provides a unique vision. The main characters are a man and his son, and the man's elderly father. It seems that the man and his son really are just that, whereas the grandfather is an actor. The man is a Mexican 'of Mayan Indian descent', though he does not look like a Lacandone to me, so he must be from another tribe descended from the Maya of this particular region (the Lacandone, who are pure Maya, being much further inland, living in depths of the forests), and his son has come to visit him on the Mexican coast from his Italian mother, who lives in Rome. It is the boy's introduction to a timeless way of life which in many respects is thousands of years old. The setting is the remarkable Mexican heritage site of Banco Chinchorro, a coral reef in the sea near the ancient Maya centres of Quintana Roo and Cozumel, in the Caribbean off south-eastern Mexico. The father and grandfather live the lives of simple fishermen in a hut on stilts just off the shore. The film features a great deal of undersea photography showing them spearing lobsters on the seabed without oxygen tanks, but only snorkels. The young Mexican director Pedro Gonzalez Rubio, who studied at the London Film School, has made this amazing film with himself as writer, cameraman and editor, and apparently the assistance of only two other people apart from the cast. He says he wanted to show life 'in the middle of the sea, in the place of origins'. He certainly succeeded in doing that, for there is a timeless quality to this film. It makes such a difference in a feature film which is not a documentary to see real people doing real things in real places rather than the perpetual parade of illusion which is what feature films normally are. The life portrayed here in the house on stilts and in the sea, the lack of any watch or clock, the entire immersion in 'what happens naturally' (often personified as 'Nature') is a salutary lesson to us all, prisoners as we are of a rigidly systematized and over-structured reality which is really a false reality. The people in this film are living a dream, and it is a true dream, whereas we are living a nightmare, and it is a false one, a monstrous parody of life invented and enacted by maniacs. One of the touching emotional details in this film is the friendship between the boy and a wild egret whom he names Blancquita. Although the little white bird has yellow eyes, when the boy draws it, he gives it blue eyes. Frigate birds and a young crocodile also feature as characters in the film. Rubio is a poet, and his filmed poem is a masterpiece.
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