Monthly Archives: July 2013

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Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Tony Richardson(UK 1962) Tom Courtenay

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Karel Reisz (UK 1960) Albert Finney; Shirley Anne
Field; Rachel Roberts

Viewed: 11 July 2013 and 14 July 2013
Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £5

Retrocrit: pride and prejudice

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were both novels written by
Alan Silitoe. Silitoe was one of that generation of post war British
writers who chronicled the lives working class people in the 1950’s
when they were being told that they had never had it so good.
Silitoe’s novels were keenly picked up by the new wave of British
film makers epitomised by directors such as Tony Richardson ( Who
directed Loneliness)and Carol Reisz ( director of Saturday Night and
Sunday morning) These film makers, like Silitoe, were driven by
ideological opposition to the traditional British class system; they
were committed to listen to rather than to gaze patronisingly at
Britain and the voices of her workers.

A contemporary film critic wrote of
these directors:

….when they came together, we
felt they had an attitude in common. Implicit in this attitude is a
belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the
significance of the everyday.

Both Loneliness and Saturday night
which were also scripted as films by Alan Sillitoe, share one
critical attribute: attitude. They were iconoclastic products and
were perceived as such at the time. The intention of Alan Silitoe’s
writing was to give the lie to the contemporary smug propaganda messages that Britain was somehow a fair and pleasant land. As far as
Sillitoe was concerned Britain wasn’t even one land, he saw two
lands, governed by two codes. It was a feudal society of controllers
and the serfs, serfs chained not to the land but to factories shifts
and poor housing. Reisz and Richardson’s films stay true both to
this iconoclasm and to the moral vigour of Sillitoe’s writing. It is
not betrayed.

These films shocked the usual suspects
at the time were made. Ealing Comedies they were not. And when we see
these films today, they’re not only a voyage into another country,
they also resonate as a cry of pain for something that is about to
be lost ; even if what was lost was hardly noticed as everyone was
too busy watching the telly. These films are no cosy up Hovis style
nostalgia fests of terraced housing, enamel signs and chimney stacks.
The films capture and express working class life in the early
sixties. It’s a culture of full employment and extensive family ties
but it is also a culture of resistance and resilience. What Sillitoe
foresaw and foretold and is captured in both films, was the loss of
working class Pride. And that is the source of the pain. Because it
was a pride that was on the point of being undermined and destroyed
by the fostered desires of consumerism and the dependancy culture of
the Welfare State.

Noises off: Trainspotting and the skag
boys wait in the wings.

The protagonists, Colin in Loneliness
and Arthur in Saturday Night, are complex characters; spontaneous and
generous, twisted and two faced, but they have an intrinsic pride,
born of their class, that cannot be bought. Colin burns a one pound
note in one scene. However destructive their pride, it defines them,
and this pride, for all its fault lines and even bad faith, lies at
the core of their being. As Arthur says: You don’t let the bastards
grind you down.

So the two films probe not physical
landscapes but psychic landscapes. Attitudes shaped by social
conditions class work and graft. In their focus on these relations
Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson are closer to films made today in
developing countries that are still characterised by social and
cultural matrices of the kind we no longer have. The contemporary
Western movie industry has desire at the root of its narratives,
rather than struggle of one form or another.

Of the two films Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner is the more politically radical. In fact it’s not a
very well made film. It has a clumsy structure based on flashback,
which fails to deliver tension, and it is over reliant on the use of
the hymn Jerusalem in the soundtrack. But Richardson’s casting of Tom
Courtenay is inspired and is enough in itself to carry the film.
Courtenay’s skewered meat body look, hungry mien, misshapen head and loose
mouth, in themselves define the film’s theme of defiance and
resistance. As an actor of working class origins, Tom Courtenay has the authenticity necessary for the film to deliver Colin
Smith’s punch into the solar plexus of middle England: the refusal of
the petty thief, Borstal Boy, to play the establishment game.

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning is also superbly acted. Albert Finney, as Arthur and Rachel
Roberts as Brenda, came from hard backgrounds that made them able to
work in the grain of their characters. And it shows in their
performances. Unlike Loneliness, Saturday Night is an exceptional
film not just because of the acting but because it is suburbly
crafted. The editing energises the action and always adds a
dimension to the narrative. With confidence and verve Reisz and his
editor, Seth Holt manipulate Freddie Francis’ superb cinematography
to shift the film through its gears, energising the tension between
images as the film cuts from the close and the intimate to the wide
and impersonal. The point here is that the dynamics of the editing
serve to heighten awareness in the viewer to shifts in perspectives:
from the bed to the factory, the pub to the kitchen. The way the
film is spliced sensitizes us to the different codes that operate in
these contexts, deepening and sharpening our understanding of
relations within the film. The main story is the moral rendering of
an extramarital affair. But this explicit narrative thread is never
allowed to dominate the scenario. It has to take its place within
the context of the images and cameos of working class in Nottingham
that Sillitoe Richardson and Reisz have woven together to produce the
film.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning both retain the raw
power of film to shock and make visible things that otherwise we
would not see.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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The Bling Ring Sofia Coppola (USA
2013) Katie Chang; Israel Broussard; Emma Watson,

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 9 July 2013
Ticket: £8

The prefatory announcement at the start
of a film that it is “based on a true story” or “inspired by
actual events” engenders within me a certain sense of foreboding.
It’s true there have been some wonderful films so based, such as
William Wyler’s ‘ Ace in the Hole.’ But often film makers, when
trying to exploit a true story, are overburdened by too many facts,
overwhelmed by a need for authenticity, and are often unable to take
full possession of the narrative develop it as their own story.

So I wondered what Sofia Coppola would
make of the 2009 LA celebrity burglaries, planned and carried out by
teenage girls? What might she offer up to the Gods of film by way of
a spin on what it means to be young female and American?

In ‘Spring Breaks’ Harmony Korine
offered up a voluptuous transgressive take on the American female
psyche, and with all guns blazing the girls came out on top. In
Bling Ring likewise, it’s girls on top; but whereas Korine
understands the significance of his protagonists, Sofia Coppola’s
plot gets lost in translation, and is unable to come to terms with
the forces at work in the situation.

As I watched Bling Ring I found myself
starting to have ‘Wizard of Oz’ moments. Rebecca, the main
character, started to insinuate herself as a sort of re-incarnate
Dorothy. She is swept away not by a Kansas twister, but by the LA
whirlwind of celebrity worship. Perhaps celebrity fetishism is more
accurate descriptive label of her condition. All those teenage
hormones, Rebeca’s sexuality is displaced away from the insecurity of
the adolescent body and transferred onto comparative safety of
celebrity designer wear. Rebecca meets up with Marc, a sort of
composite Tin Man/ Lion/Scarecrow but in fact an honorary girl, and
she leads him and the other protagonists, the Munchkins, as they
follow a make over Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard’s castle, in this
case the Los Angeles A list celebrity homes and a series of fetish
driven burglaries.

The form of Bling Ring resembles a
fairy tale. But not the darker sort of tale as told by the Brothers
Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, but rather a redacted Disney Story.
A sort amalgam of Oz and Ali Baba that takes place in LA,
re-imagined as a Never Never land of palaces and princesses. The
treasure troves that are buried deep in the heart of the fairy
mountain are replicated in Bling Ring, as being buried within the
inner crypts of the female celebrities. The houses of these female
celebrities resemble biomorphic stand-ins for their own bodies,
replicating in visual detail both the externalities of face and skin,
and the carnality of the secret vaginal passages that lead to the
womb. Within the inner womb sanctum’s of the female celebrities the
girls get the pay off – the stuff. Amidst rows of shoes dresses
perfume jewellery bags the girls achieve a proxy orgasm, sexual
energisation cathected onto the designed clothes and possessions of
the objects of desire. The actual taking and possessing of the stuff
is of secondary order to the primal connection with the Fetish in the
form of the possessions of the celebrity goddesses.

If you visit the British Museum will
find something similar but more dignified in the cargo cult fetishes
of the tribes of New Guinea.

The problem with Bling Ring is that
although all these powerful forces are set at work, Coppola seems
barely able to cope with them. The fairy tale, the fetishism the
biomorphic resonance of the architecture are all present, but under
her direction remain possibilities rather than realisations. In
relation to Bling Ring being a dystopian fairy tale, Coppola sketches
the outlines, but then abandons the idea, retreating to the safety of
a mechanical playing out of the facts.

The music in Bling Ring is interesting
and even suggestive. It is mostly rap and hip hop in style but
without angst or anger. When you castrate this sort of music, it
starts to sound like nursery rhythms which is what I heard. This
made me feel that the Bling Ring would probably have worked better
imitating the form of the Wizard of Oz and been devised as a musical.
A dysfunctional musical driven by rap bursary rhythms might have
provided Bling Ring with a rich suggestive architecture of illicit
desire intention and motive.

The structure of the film further
weakens the impact of its symbolic cues. Coppola’s scenario employs
the tired old formula of the flashback. It presents the various
scenes as perspectives from police and psychiatric interviews with
the protagonists after they have been caught. This device slows the
film, destroys what little tension there is in Copolla’s script and
breaks up the psychic integrity of the action.

Sofia Coppola’s film comes across more
as more an endorsement of celebrity life style than any sort of
attempt to probe the strangeness of its distorted realities. She
prefers to gloss over the soft wiring of her material, treating it as
a narrative rather than an opportunity to unwind the psychic
disturbances at the core of the displaced energy of mainstream
America.

Sofia Coppola had a strong subject
with great potential but overloaded by a need to be authentic she
falls victim to the curse of basing her movie on ‘true events’.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Like someone in love Abbas
Kiarostami (Fr Japan 2012) Tadashi
Okuno, Rin
Takanashi, Ryo
Kase

Viewed: BFI London Ticket price £7.50
(c)
Adrin Neatrour writes: Like having an
idea such as smashing the glass
Like someone in love is the third film
that Abbas Kairostami has made outside Iran as a self exiled film
maker. Kairostami decided to make his films outside Iran because the
political religious regime had made it almost impossible for him to
work inside the country. Kairostami’s films have always attracted
the hostility and censorship of the Iranian authorities who even
destroyed the master 35mm negative of his 1978 marital drama, the
Report. Had he persisted in film making there he would certainly
have found himself under house arrest or even imprisoned, a fate that
has befallen other Iranian film makers.

But what’s an exiled film maker gonna
to make films about? Kairostami has always made his films in Iran
and his subject matter has always been set in an Iranian context. Can
you take the fish out of water and expect it to breath and to make
films?

His films may have been set in Iran but
at the heart of his films lies Kairostami’s intelligence. His films
are not mechanical products; each is the outcome of a process of
thinking – thinking about images.

One of the concepts at the root of his
thinking is the idea of oppositions, oppositions that you can see in
people. Oppositions such as in – relationships – man and woman;
age – old people young people; life and death, knowledge and
ignorance, individual and family. And of course the context of
Iranian society with politico religious forces shaping the social
matrix, provided Kairostami’s films with a wide range of fault lines
to examine and probe.

So what’s he doing in Japan? Like
someone in love…what a strange title for his film. It’s the name of
a song, an old jazz standard. What does it mean, what does it point
to?

I think that in this film Kairostami
has created a new take on the old Japanese idea of the Floating
World. Famously represented in series of nineteenth wood cuts, the
Floating World was the name given to the transient world of pleasure
created by geishas prositutes and clients in nineteenth Tokyo. A
world of impermanence. In Like someone in love, Kairostami
revisualises the floating world as a series of multiple planes of
light that drift across the screen, the reflections and refractions
of modern Tokyo that float over the images of his characters,
obscuring them but at the same time placing them in context of night
and pleasure.

Tokyo is realised by Kairostami as a
series of surfaces. The bars the streets and clubs present a dazzling
beguiling field of vision for the eye. Japan’s culture is overlaid
with Western technological forms that it has made its own. It looks
like the West but it isn’t; and Akiko, Kairostami’s girl protagonist,
always looks like someone who she isn’t.

Kairostami sees that a whole range of
social relations have been absorbed into a new floating world of
impermanence; he also sees that he is an outsider peering into this
culture, through a glass darkly, trying to distinguish image from
reflection and reflection from image. And once the reality of the
glass is admitted then it too becomes part of picture, and also
there will come moments swhen the glass itself will crack

This is a mirror crystal world, and
within it Kairostami projects a love story – of sorts of the sort
that might reveal some of the critical stresses at work in this
society.

Kairostami loves cars as settings in
his films. Many of his films use scenes inside automobiles. He
revels in the contradiction that amidst the frenzy of life, it is
often inside a car, the symbol of movement, that his characters find
the stillness and space.

In Like someone in love, there is a
typical Kurostami moment of interaction in which like a brain surgeon
he penetrates through the hard surface presented the skull into the
deeper soft tissues of the brain. During the taxi ride taken by Akiko
to her new client, Kairostami inserts a scene which is brilliantly
conceived as a series of verbal phone messages picked up by Akiko
from her grandmother. The grandmother’s unsentimental prosaic words
project in full relief not only the growing void separating young and
old but the characteristic emptiness of mobile communications which
increasingly serve the dysfunction of not communicating.

It is the economy that Kairostami
brings to his understanding of Japan that lights up the movie. Using
only simple settings the interior of a car, the interior of an
apartment, the interior of a club he coaxes the surfaces of this
floating world to separate a little and to see the forces at work
that maintain the tension in the glass images: relations between men
and women, old and young, the new and the old, between the imported
culture and the older traditions.

It might sound complex but it is all
done very simply almost without us realising it, until we start to
pay attention. As in the scene where Akiko lies asleep in bed and
her very elderly client, selects a record from his album collection,
plays Ella Fitzgerald singing Like someone in love. The camera pans
off him to the dining table, set for dinner for two, plates knives
and forks and two long stemmed empty wine glasses, and Ella sings:

Everytime I look at you I’m as limp as
a glove, feeling like someone in love…”

For Kairostami, it’s time to break the
glass.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk