Monthly Archives: October 2013

Filth Jon S Baird (2013 Scot Ger Swe ) James McAvoy

Viewed Empire Cinema newcastle upon Tyne 17 Oct 13 ticket: £6.40
Now here’s a funny thing: when I left the cinema after seeing
Filth, protagonist Bruce Robertson’s catch phrase: Same rules apply
– kept on ringing about in my head. Whenever Robertson did the
dirty on some poor sap who crossed his path, he would quip: ‘Same
rules apply’ Although I didn’t quite get it at first, the phrase got
me thinking about Rules which I presume is what both Director Jon
Baird and writer Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, intended.

The opening sequences of Filth introduce two locations : the
bedroom and the police station, settings which provide much of the
film’s action. Bottoms up and bottoms down you might say; sex and
power lie at the heart of the film’s concern. In the opening
sequence of Filth we see a sexy woman provocatively dressing and
talking about power being the ultimate turn on and how she keeps hold
of her policeman husband by playing the tease. The scene providies a
significant cue that sex as a power tool would play hard ball in this
scenario.

The second sequence of shots introduces the protagonist Bruce
Robertson of the Edinburgh CID as, during a breifing for a murder
case, he leeringly appraises and evaluates his rivals for promotion.

In the screen tradition of Touch of Evil, LA Confidential and Joe
Orton’s Loot, I had thought that Filth would feature police
corruption in its narrative. But in the same way that at a given
level Welsh’s Trainspotting is not about drug dealing, so Filth is
not about police corruption. It’s not even about the police.
Although its key setting might be the Edinburgh CID, this is not
central to the situation that Baird set ups and develops. The plot
hinges on the manipulations and gambits made by Bruce Robertson in
his attempt to secure promotion to the rank of Detective Inspector.
As a promotion competition the plot could be set inside any corporate
body: Amazon, BA Systems, Ford or some large Council.

Filth is grounded not so much in particiulars as in universals.
Same rules apply. Filth is not concerned with the particular
relations and practices engendered by the police in their role as the
interface between Society and the Law. Filth’s focus of concern is
raw competition; the battle between men for scare resources: the
battle for Promotion. An indivisible prize only one man or woman can
win.
In Filth. Baird probes the state of our society in a manner that
might be philisophically grounded in the writings of Thomas Hobbes,
the 17th century political philosopher. Although Hobbes
was writing to justify the state, his ideas can be transposed to any
level of catastrophic social disintegration. In the 20th
and 21st centuries Welsh and Baird realise that it is the
break down at the micro level of social ordering which is leading to
chaotic social conditions. The disappearance of collective
institutions, with their values and structures, in the face of
attack by sociopathic individualism. A collapsed social situation
that is well summed up by Hobbes: “it is manifest
that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all
in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a
war as is of every man against every man.”
The moral consequences of this break down of social order provides
the framework for Filth. In vacuum caused by break down of the moral
order, the sociopath fills the gap. In persuit of promotion Bruce
Robertson is at war with everyone, and as war has become the default
state: same rules apply.
As is the case in the bedroom where sex is persued both as a war
strategy and as a basis of personal identity. With sex and power
linked, sexual relations also become located within the chaotic
conditions of the war of all against all and become the centre of a
dysfunctional self identity. Like drugs sex can be both adictive and
subject to what Bill Boroughs calls the bitch of tolerance: you
always need more of a substance to get the same effect.

As Filth develops Bruce needs more sex. Detached from feeling,
his power play sex becomes an increasingly isolated masturbatory
ritual . Sex drives Bruce into a kind of blindness, a black hole
through which light neither enters nor leaves.

As constructed by Baird and Welsh Filth is a dystopian fable
grounded in the breakdown of the micro order. interesting
that at the beginning of the film the audience were laughing at the
slightest sugestion of a smutty joke or risque reference; at the end
of the movie, there was not much laughter. Hobbes is worth
quoting again as he summerises human life in relation to the
conditions of the war of all against all: (quote) ‘ in this condition
the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.’ Which is a accurate desciption how Baird and Welsh have
mapped the moral career of Bruce Robertson.

So: Same rules apply….what does it mean? It’s
telling you there are ‘no rules’. So watch out.
Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (USA 2013)
Cate Blanchette
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd
Oct 2013 Ticket £8.20

Blue Jasmine got me thinking about
clowns.

In the Music Halls when disaster struck
the cry would go up: “Bring on the clowns!” The idea being that
clowns would divert the audience’s attention from whatever it was,
that had gone wrong. Treating the funny men and women as a
distraction does less than justice to their artistry and genius. In
particular those who have dominated cinema such as Chaplin and
Keaton, whose ranks also include Woody Allen.
But Cinema today has less space for the
wise fool. They are crowded out by films that exploit either
spectacle or emotions or desires.
Films of course are signs of the times.
They say something about the states of mind and psychic moods that
underlie the social matrix. The tsunami of apocalyptic films
flooding over our cinema screens attests to the insecurities and
fears that characterise our world.
And then there’s films like Woody
Allen’s latest movie Blue Jasmine. It doesn’t really seem to know
what it is. Perhaps appropriate in that it mirrors a society where
many people don’t know who they are. Also, like many of us, it is a
film that would like to be taken seriously. Indeed the final shot of
it’s A list star Cate Blachette sitting in a public place without her
make up and showing her age, stakes out Blue Jasmine’s claim to be a
drama, perhaps even a tragedy. But the problem is that the preceding
hour and a half of its footage have made any such claims ridiculous.
Comparisons have been made between the
plot line of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car named Desire and Blue
Jasmine. Comparisons have been made between butter and margarine.
Time usually sorts these things out; and as with butter and
margarine, any comparison between Blue Jasmine and Street Car is a
case of at best an errant judgement; at worst a cynical marketing
ploy.

Williams play, filmed in 1951, is a
testosterone soaked wake up call to America about the dangers of the
delusional states of sentimentality pedalled by Hollywood and Madison
Avenue. Tennessee Williams pitched Streetcar at post war audiences
who had not yet totally embraced the consumerist ethos. The
collective psyche was at a turning point and audiences were prepared
to hear out Williams play. But whatever understanding you had of
Streetcar, it was not an advert. Williams was not selling anything.
It was a moral statement.

In contrast Blue Jasmine looks and
feels like a life style advertisement; and it is assembled in a
similar way to those adverts for glossy consumer products that
preceded it on the screen. Like a advert or a cake for that matter
Blue Jasmine is an assemblage of a number of key ingredients. The
Hollywood recipe says: mix into the script one good looking lead
actress on whom to hang the story; add sexy locations – New York San
Francisco; fold in moody music in the form of a sultry jazz sound
track, and sprinkle with products flaunting a pantheon of desirable
consumer goodies: BMW Dior Versace etc. Blue Jasmine is a product
of a mass communication industry where material desire is now the
bed rock of an audience’s expectations.

Blue Jasmine is styled like a
commercial so how does it work dramatically? It’s flashback
structure, which seems de rigour for lazy film-makers at the moment,
is flabby and delivers little tension as it builds up to the big
revelation that Jasmine it was who shopped No pun intended) her
husband to the Feds. As a wannabe tragedy Blue Jasmine poses as a
morality fable based on the Bernie Madoff story, (Jasmine’s husband
Hal even has a passing resemblance to Bernie and I wonder if Woody
lost a bundle of money in Bernie’s Ponzi swindle). But the ethical
posturing of Blue Jasmine is not strong enough to overcome its
stylistic provenance. That last shot, onto which so much is staked,
the naked face of the A lister, is supposed to flag that Cate’s
character, Jasmine is paying the price for her collusive badness, as
she descends into alcohol fuelled madness. But her wretched
condition doesn’t seem to be the result of any personal moral crisis,
any moment of confronting the truth about herself. Her downfall is
not the consequence of her self condemnation. Her madness is the
result of her loss of her enviable life style and a failure of her
make-over as she tried to pass herself off as an innocent. The
lesson of Blue Jasmine is that if you collude in your husband’s
criminality, even if you find out he’s cheating on you, don’t shop
him to the cops,or you’ll lose everything.

Ok so Blue Jasmine is a drawn out life
style promo which is unconvincing as a drama. But none of this would
matter very much if it were funny. Blue Jasmine is not very funny.
The issue of its unfunniness goes right to the core of the assembly
of the film. Cait Blanchette has all the qualities needed to sell
the movie. But she is not a clown. And Woody Allen’s scripts
usually demand a clown, as the lead roles are alter egos of Woody
himself, and and without a clown they don’t work: it’s like Hamlet
without the Prince.

Woody Allen as a performer was a
natural clown, and the clown corresponds to a certain sort of
archetype. The clown courts disaster without meaning to and always
find themselves in the shit; clowns always falls flat on their face
because they think they can do something very very well, but can’t do
it at all; and clowns fail to understand the situation they are in.
The clown’s face mirrors their mental state: alert idiocy,
irrepressible optimism, and well meaning if occasional malicious
incompetence. Allen and Diane Keaton were funny because they were
clowns who knew how to work the clown material. Cate Blanchette
lacks this gift. In consequence her relations in the film with Ginger
and her boyfriends lack bathos; the running gags about her work and
relationships as a dental receptionist are clumsy and vacuous.
Without the clown persona Blue Jasmine
is reduced to being a plodding stylised comedy of manners, a genre
which it doesn’t fit. I say “Bring back the the clowns!”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk