Change Your Image
j-hoyles
Reviews
Longford (2006)
Bravo Channel Four
This is a brave and accomplished piece of work, thoughtful and engrossing throughout. Not since reading about Mary Bell have I been so moved to think and feel about so-called evil girls and women, with the cross currents between do-gooders and evil-doers so expertly explored.
Of course Jim Broadbent was brilliant as Lord Longford. But Myra Hindley was also played with incredible subtlety and power. As for Ian Brady he was magnificent, bursting through my TV screen like a combination of Sade and Heathcliff.
There was a lot of hinterland to all this which raised the film above mere docufiction. Hindley under the influence of Brady told us that "evil can be a spiritual experience too". The shadow of the Divine Marquis as well as Baudelaire's FLEURS DU MAL hung over this production. You can and will think what you like about all this, but for me the main message was neither the portrait of a psychopath nor the bumbling career of Longford, but the demonisation of the woman criminal and the ghastly nature of public opinion in its lynching mood.
Men can be evil psychopaths and sometimes get parole, but the great British public will always need a female monster as their ultimate totem of evil. Judaeo-Christian culture's obsession with Eve (=Evil) demands no less than this scandalous superstition. Later our country had the intelligence and courage to release Mary Bell. Myra Hindley was left to rot in gaol, her only solace the Open University.
Congratulations to director Tom Hooper and to channel four for reminding us of all this.
Caché (2005)
Political evasion bordering on the criminal
For me this film was disgracefully evasive. It left me cold, bored and annoyed. Obviously this is because I wanted Haneke to develop the politics behind what is I suppose meant to be a psychological thriller. No audience today will want to pick up the flimsy clue concerning the Paris Massacre of 17 October 1961. Unfortunately I was actually teaching in Paris that year.
In their struggle for independence the Algerian FLN had called a demonstration against the rising tide of fascism within the French establishment. Papon was Chief of Police and responsible for the massacre of 200 North Africans. Papon had been Vichy's Himmler under the Nazi occupation. How on earth did he get the job again under De Gaulle! The fascist OAS was planning a coup d'etat with the connivance of the Paras and extreme right-wing politicians. All that in an attempt to keep Algeria French. Obviously news of the massacre was suppressed in the western press. I was on the spot and only remember hearing that a few demonstrators had been thrown into the Seine.
All that politics was left out of Haneke's film. Personally I was totally untouched by the wretched palaver of Auteuil, Binoche and company. The Algerian should have killed them all, not himself. The games with the video, stalking, terrorism etc belonged to a film like LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, with its obsessive fetishisation of memory and forgetfulness, rather than to anything by Bunuel (critics have compared Haneke to Bunuel). Bunuel at least knew his Chiefs of Police down to Papon (see the banning of L'AGE D'OR and the end of PHANTOM OF LIBERTY).
What a pity! I did admire FUNNY GAMES and THE PIANO TEACHER. Haneke has a genial anarchist streak in him, putting aesthetic time bombs in the parlours of the genteel. The executed cock and the suicide spurted blood over us in crude slasher-like fashion. Those shocks told us nothing about 1961. And English-speaking people are more likely to be sick over cruelty to animals and Arabs than politically enlightened.
Well, perhaps I have got it wrong. Maybe the film does address burning issues like identity, memory, islamophobia, terrorism and western guilt about colonialism. But I want to know what Haneke has to say about the policies of Sarkozy concerning social exclusion in the suburbs. After all Sarkozy is a latter-day Papon, an ersatz Le Pen. And he could be the next French President! It is my opinion that the Algerians, the Arabs and the Third World will not submit to Sarkozy's wiles. It is to be hoped that they will rather strike back. That is all us pawns in the insane project of Bush/Blair imperialist terrorism deserve. Maybe Haneke agrees with me! Unfortunately he doesn't communicate it in HIDDEN.
Hadaka no shima (1960)
Join the happy few
Amazing! Let me join the happy few who saw this film when it first came out. It was in Paris. I was a student. It was L'Ile Nu I think. And I have never forgotten it and never seen it again. That's over 40 years ago! And now it is coming out on DVD and most people will never have heard of it. So my dear golden oldies who were young in 1961, rejoice and tell everyone. This is pure cinema with no frills, worthy of comparison with Dreyer, Bresson and O'Flaherty and a lovely companion piece to Shindo's ONIBABA. That onibaba grass stayed with us over the years as did that naked island. Talking of films lost but not forgotten, I can draw a comparison with MERE JEANNE DES ANGES (same subject matter as Ken Russell's THE DEVILS)which I saw in Leipzig in about 1962 and which I have never seen since. What a coincidence! That Polish film (MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS)is also coming out on DVD. Real poetic cinema is trickling through the mishmash.