Monthly Archives: April 2014

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Calvary John McDonagh (2014 UK Ire)
Brendan Glesson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 22 April 2014
Ticket £8 20

Forgive them father…

Calvary opens with a quote from St
Augustin about the fate of the two thieves crucified on Calvary on
either side of Jesus: that no presumptions should be made about the
fate of the first thief. A suggestion that inspired Sam Beckett’s
Godot. It is also the basis for the proposition that underlies
McDonagh’s film examining: the relations of hope to despair,
innocence to guilt, salvation to damnation. And Calvary is a rare
thing a film grounded in a proposition.

The core of the film is its ‘Rock’,
Brendan Glesson’s Father Lavelle, a good priest and a good enough
imperfect man. The film’s moment pivots on his performance: his
physicality his psychic integrity his energy. And Gleeson plays out
the scripted function of his role, that of holding the film together
as a theorem of cosmic relations, like one of the old heroes of Irish
myth.

The proposition that McDonagh’s script
puts to the audience is that an innocent has to die in order to
balance the psychic scales of evil. Christ – suffer little
children to come to me, died to save the sins of the world; Father
Lavelle will die to save the sins of the Church that suffered little
children to be buggered. An old story an innocent sacrificed in
propitiation to the powers that that oversee the playing out of the
life force. Calvary’s script, in its mapping of Lavelle’s
psychological movement towards his execution, is in step with
elemental religious and initiatory ideas about the path individuals
take when confronted by forces endemic in the nature of the world.

fear – questioning – rebelling –
rejecting – chaos – understanding – acceptance – compassion –
forgiveness

denial of self
Steps of this kind were taken by
Christ as he moved towards the cross. In terms of today’s lifestyle
ideologies that stress ‘overcoming’ not acceptance, ‘self assertion’
over acquiescence, they are less than fashionable. But it is the way
that Lavelle chooses.

But it is not just that the moment of
Fr Lavelle that is unfashionable in an aspirational culture. The
metaphysical connections that link his fate to the fate of his killer
Brennan oppose Western rationalism. The purpose of a rational
system of justice is to establish: that a crime has been committed,
to find the offender and to punish them for their acts. These
linkages are the crux of contemporary justice, the basis justifying
law and punishment. Calvary invokes another order of Justice. Its
explores another inner human urge: to tear open the curtain of reason
and to find a more primal idea of justice. One for which Necessity
not rationality, defines the nature and the form of Justice.
Necessity as a quasi judicial formulation is of course derided (but
of course often resorted to, in disguised fashion, by established
judiciaries) but the derision betrays the fear of the friends of
rationality that the forces that drive ‘necessity justice’ lurk at
the edge of the shadows of our nature, ready to enter the light as
soon as vigilance wavers.

The metaphysical notion of necessity is
well symbolised by the scales of justice. The idea that there is
such a thing as cosmic balance. That such a balance can be put out
of true by events or occurrences, and that humans as significant
elements in the cosmos can play a central role in the realignment of
the scales. Human sacrifice stands as one example of the logic of
law of necessity. A victim is needed: a victim does not have to be
the guilty party. Sometimes necessity prefers a virgin or an
innocent representative to rebalance the scales; another victim to
mediate the reharmonising of our psychic and physical state with the
cosmos. A restoring agent.

There are signs that not only in
religious psychology but in our own basic responses that something of
this response is hardwired into our brains.

McDonagh as writer understands
‘necessity’, and that it is the central idea in his script. But he
seems to be a little embarrassed by it as a film maker. Embarrassed
to the extent that this idea so cogently stated in the confessional
scene becomes progressively overlaid by other images in the main body
of the film, only emerging in clarity in the penultimate beach
sequence. For much of the film Lavelle seems lost in a comic book
world of contemporary stereotypes; abandoned by the film in a series
of partially misfiring comic cameos.

McDonagh substitutes a new grouping of
moral mutants to replace the old standby caste of traditional Irish
Country dwellers. Father Ted’s congregation has been superseded by
characters transposed from the world of Irving Welsh. They are
larger than life and scripted to provoke canned studio audience
laughter.

The main body of his movie suggests
that McDonagh hasn’t thought about the nature of film: that you can’t
script two big ideas at work simultaniously through the same material
without having a filmic solution. His idea of Lavelle and his idea
of a ‘Welshian Ireland’ with all its moral implications, cannot just
be spliced together as one entity. To succeed in interweaving two
themes you need to think in terms of film, and how film holds ideas
together. On the basis of Calvary, McDonagh doesn’t understand this.

Glesson holds his ground amidst this
Channel 4 type bean fest but his presence is too often swamped and
overwhelmed. The film, mostly shot like a situation comedy,
struggles to find a filmic form to make the encounters anything more
than obtrusive cameos that disengage the viewer from the film.
These sequences often seem little more than a opportunity for writer
director McDonagh to flaunt his skills at one liners and stand up
repartee, rather than carve the film out into its own space.

As mentioned above the delimiting
factor of Calvary is the manner in which it is shot. It is shot
like sit com. This can be an inflexible structure for a film with
thematic propositions, as the material has no unifying hub; the edits
flit from face to face scene to scene shot to reaction creating an
agitation that is difficult to control. McDonagh seems to have
fallen for the current fashion of interposing long landscape shots in
films, so show that the film maker is in touch with nature or natural
forces. In this case the conceit only leads to confusion in the
audience, a feeling that they may have zapped the remote to an Irish
Tourist Board promo. There are of course many ways in which Calvary
could have been worked filmically: a point of view, a voice, a
shooting style that invoked a ‘seeing’ in the viewer. As it is
McDonagh took the line of least resistance, and the film pays the
price.

Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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The Past (Le Passe) Asghar Farhadi
(Fr; 2013) Benebice Bejo, Tahar Rahim, Ali Moustafa

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 8th
April 2014; Ticket £8.80

ExileNT

Farhadi’s film The Past, left me
with the opposite set of feelings from when I had viewed his earlier
movie a Separation.

Separation, set and filmed in Iran,
left its plot unresolved in the hands of the couple’s daughter.
Resolution of the plot was suspended, the film leaving the audience
on a note of the possibility of hope in the figure of daughter Termeh
and the choices she was about to make in relation to her life.
There was also in Separation an underlying but palpable optimism
engendered by interactions with the agencies and institutions of
Iran. They were painted as being mediated by people, not
automatons. Despite and in spite of the heavy hand of religious
authority there was determination by people to live between the cogs
of the bureaucracy which gave life a wary degree of freedom, vitality
and unpredictability. The manner in which film was shot, from the
opening shot of the replication of documents from under the glass of
a photocopier, to the presence of the hand held camera. lent insight
and edge to the way social relations were seen and represented.

In Separation the process of living
never seemed a matter mechanical contrivance. Islamic diktats
provided the psycho social constraints within which individuals had
to fashion their own solutions and subjectivities. A creative
process.

Cut to the Past.

The Past feels like a mechanical death
trap. Farhadi’s machine of exile. The Past feels like the film of a
man exiled and reduced to going through the motions of being alive
when cut off from the mainspring of his home life force. The Past
communicates as a film of entrapment, the kind of entrapment that we
choose for ourselves. An exile facing nothing but the perversity of
the self. When socio-religious forces impose, those feeling
imposition work within the interstices of life to find free movement
particularly in thought When we entrap ourselves within psychic
mechanisms of our own making, there is no way out. We cannot even
think. We experience a mental entombment. And this is the picture
that Farhadi paints of exile in France. French society (in no
significant respect different from any other Western society) as a
deterritorialised subjectivity. Fahadi’s subjects, both native and
exile are doomed to recurrent failure of the body and soul, locked
into pointless replication of their emotional emptyness. They
resign themselves to going though the motions of living, as
incapable of movement as the woman on life support, on whose image
the film appropriately ends.

Another situation
As with a Separation Fahadi begins the
Past with a situation that centres around the issue of uncontested
divorce between two parties. In Separation the situations expressed
contain several narrative lines; none of these lines ever take over
the energy and forces at work within the scenario.

In the Past however the situations
comprising the emotional and social forces that contain his subjects
are quickly consumed by the narrative, that entraps the protagonists
into the unwinding of a sort of whodoneit (more accurately a
whyshedidit). The situations are gradually taken over by one event in
the past, the attempted suicide of the wife of one of the
protagonists. The plot development, with its contemporary
Scandinavian intricacies) takes over all the relations in the film,
and spreads though the scenario like a cancer, until with only the
mechanics of plot revelation at work, nothing else is left alive in
the film. Everyone is reduced to being a cipher of the plot.

The Past moves from being observational
to purely reactive. As the plot is subjected to increasing emotional
amplification; its only recourse is to increased melodramatic acting
out by the actors. Fahadi leaves himself no space to develop the film
other than the conventions of soap opera.

This default to soap may have been a
deliberate artistic decision. A parody of the poverty of European
dramatic expression if so Fahardi doesn’t make this clear. Perhaps
it was a business decision; to bow to the pressure of the production
companies that he should make a film with a plot that would comply
with the conventions recognisable to Western Audiences.
But whatever the reason, the
consequence for the Past is that this form simply takes over the
film. And the Past yields decreasing returns as the situational
aspect of and relations in exile are glossed over. The real
problems are thrown overboard for the melodramatic machinations of
the plot within which every one becomes a puppet attached to the
apron strings of soap necessity.
In accordance with its soapy structure,
The Past is shot in the style of industry standard set ups. The
camera is mounted on tripod or steady-cam, stable and recording shot
and reaction to shot, mostly in confined interiors. The nature of
the confined interiors do introduce an element of claustrophobia but
not sufficient to counterbalance the constraining conventions of TV.
For a film of two hours duration the standard camera work becomes
another impoverishing element that is locked into the film, as if the
director had given wanting to think and had decided just to push
through the set ups.

There are features within the scenario
that suggest Fahadi had a original glimmering of another movie.
The rain: the incessant rain experienced by the exile, both real and
metaphorical. Fahadi’s delight, particularly at the start of the
film, in slight mistakes, corrections and missteps, all
characteristic of actual life and pointing to associated states of
mind. And his scripting device that exploits the idea of
individuals needing to return to go back to finish or clarify
something incomplete. A Dostoevsky type of compulsion and
determination to get to something underlying. A device that invoked
reflective issues that were lost as melodrama won out.

The Past felt like a movie that started
out as one thing, the situation of exile; but ended up as an other, a
series of events pressed into reactive drama. As in Separation
Farhadi tries in the Past to balance the scales of his discourse on
the perspective of the child. But in the Past his wise child Fouad,
simply does not have the necessary freedom of Termeh in Separation,
to make a real contribution to the balance of the script. He is too
young and too overwhelmed by the mechanics of the events to have a
real voice. So the film dies back and ends without a thought to
sustain. The final shot is a close up, of the clasped hands of the
man and his deeply unconscious wife. Perhaps a little like Fahadi
himself, in exile torn between life and death.

On a final note the script does have an
elementary confusion at its semantic core. Celine the comatose wife
is repeated referred to as having committed suicide. But she has not
committed suicide, she attempted unsuccessfully (as far as the script
reveals) to commit suicide. She is still alive. I often feel when a
movie presents a basic inconsistency at its core, it is a sign that
there are deeper problems with the material, personal or structural,
that were never resolved.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson
(USA 2014) Ralph Fiennes, F Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe.

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon
Tyne; 1st April 2014; ticket £4.00

Time codes

Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel is
a anodyne vehicule for an admixture of Sfx and strong set design.
It’s also a chance for a number of established Hollywood stars to
earn easy corn playing out the cartoon like characters who front the
predominantly red decors. In cinematic form it is sort of retake
on tried and trusted studio box office favourites such as Lumet’s
Murder on the Orient Express. It is formulaic movie making. And a
good formula like a good recipe can be a risk free way of getting the
bums on seats and making a buck for the backers. To that extent it
is very successful.

With the formula there are no real
surprises. The pleasure lies in how it is done and at least in its
engagement with its audience allowing a sort of soporific easement of
time. In this respect at least Anderson and or his producers have
recognised that GBH, as an exercise in simple pleasing, weighs in at
100 minutes. so doesn’t outstay itself. There are a lot of films of
two hour plus duration, that are simply temporally challenged. So in
this respect, Wes Anderson has known how to cut the cloth.

The cast go through their two
dimensional impersonations with an enjoyable aplomb, a wink here and
a nod there, keeping the audience amused. And amusement sums up the
pay off for the audience, Wes Anderson playing off his characters
against sets and settings expressive of Hollywood’s notions of a
vanished aristocratic past. It’s an old trick most memorably
effected by Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Kind
Hearts had a good measure of black humour and the self effacing
performances of Alec Guinness, so that it not only transcended its
formulaic mode but also made it a very funny film. GBH is not funny,
only humorous. During the screening the biggest elicited laughs were
for Gustave’s use of expletives like “fucking’ and “shit’ . The
laughs being the audience’s perception of expressive disjunction
between Gustave’s usual manner of discourse and suave self
presentation, and the crudity of his real thoughts when actually
spoken.

There is at the core of the script,
based on the Stefan Zweig stories, an entangled temporal confusion.
The Zweig stories are set mostly before the first world war in a
disappeared world. Wes Anderson and perhaps his producers seem to
have been unable to decide in which era to set the script: either
just before the first world war (authentic and in keeping with the
scenario and sets and source material) or just before the second
world war (inauthentic and out of keeping with the sets and source
material) The film gives the impression of a manic battle between
these two alternatives, which ends understandably with a schizo
outcome and a script that opts for one time and a scenario that is
opts for another. Everything looks and reads pre-1914, but the
scripted references are all to the 1930’s and the rise of German
fascism.

The schizo relation between the makers
of the film and their material is caused mainly by the framing
devices used to structure time. There are three time frames in the
movie: the opening sequence, with a contemporary setting in 2014
comprising a piece to camera by an author explaining his work and an
event in the past that occasioned a novel; the second time frame, set
some 50 years earlier perhaps c.1960 in which we see the same author,
now seen as a young man, being told the story of the hotel by the
current owner; finally the time frame of originating story which
features the owner as an adolescent. Setting the first piece to
camera in the actual present, locks the other two time frames into
position, leaving the original story set in the 1930’s immediately
before the second world war. In terms of the age of the hotel owner
and the author nothing else would make sense in terms of the
arithmetic of age. But this era, is totally out of kilter with the
Zweig novel Beware of Pity, one of the key works upon which the
script is loosely based. This novel is set just before the first
world war, a war that implicitly according to Zweig, ended an era.
All Zweig’s referents: the class structure, the codes of conduct and
honour, the patch work geopolitical shape of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the dress codes and fashions of men and women are retained by
Wes Anderson, who then tries to pass them off in the movie as
representing Europe in 1939. Which it doesn’t.

This temporal schizoid lesion buried
into GBH gets in the way of the flow of the film in as much as it
doesn’t permit the script to properly celebrate the unique madness
and eccentricity of the period immediately before the first world
war. The script has to permit the intrusion of attitudes and
invasions of style that are not at one with the mis en scene and the
SFX. I think GBH is a lesser film , less entertaining less funny
because Anderson failed to sort out his time codes.

As a lesser but not irrelevant concern
it also takes the audience for a ride. The script either holds them
in contempt for not recognising the difference between two historic
eras. Or it renders its audience or certainly some of them into a
state of confusion or stupefaction as to what exactly is going on in
relation to GBH’s time frames.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk