Monthly Archives: April 2025

The Return      Uberto Pasolini (It, Fr, Gce, Uk;  2024)  Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 April 2025;  Ticket: £13.25

all face no space

Uberto Pasolini’s movie ‘The Return’ is dominated by ‘faciality’. The film comprises:  face face face face then more face, all framed of course in big close up.   The face that is the principle object of Pasolini’s camera is that of  Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, the king of Ithica who is returning at last from the Trojan War.  Fiennes’ face heavily sculpted by the make-up department resonates with the affect of ‘redemptive suffering’, or something like that, which cues the dominant thema of Pasolini’s script: the idea of the returning war vet – of which more later.

The issue with the Fiennes’ face is its invariance. Its used by Pasolini as a sort of touchstone of his movie, his visual leitmotif which is returned to again and again. But  the effect is that this close-up that is supposed to say something like ‘redemptive suffering’, at each repetition says less and less until finally completely devalued it says nothing. It has become a parody of itself. 

Fiennes’ big face shot is characteristic of ‘The Return’ which is dominated by use of the close-up.  In similar respect to the ‘Odysseus’ affect,  Juliette Binoche’s ‘Penelope’ gets the same sort of treatment: repeated default big close shot of her face expressing something like the eternal stoicism of women.   Telemachus (Odysseus’ son) and Penelope’s suitors are filmed for the most part up close, with the editing cutting from face to face to maintain the flow of dialogue.

‘The Return’ is a film which has at its core the confrontation between the Odysseus’  and his family and the antagonists, the suitors.  In respect of understanding oppositional relations, they need to be located in space, space we can see.  It is space that is implicitly involved in the creation of dramatic tension. Tension is expressed in body language, in proximities and distances, in the containing environment that is the carapace of action and re-action.  Tension needs  space.  In abandoning space or reducing it to subsidiary element, Pasolini effects the deintensification of the dramatic play-out of his movie. Tension is not created by intercutting from one face to another whether it be angry aggressive mocking sneering; without spacio-temporal referent faces become vacuous signifiers of manipulation not action.   

Of course in order for dynamics of any given space to be understood in a movie, it has to be viewed on a big screen, ideally one that fills the viewers field of vision.  But a lot of films made today have the look of products made to be viewed on a phone or a home TV monitor.  Space and the concomitant action contained therein simply don’t register small scale.  On small screen, critical elements of the interactive detail of action simply become background; the eye scans the image which takes about five seconds (perhaps even less on a small device) quickly exhausting all the information that it can gather from the shot. The eye then wants a change of shot.  The human face as image on a small screen has an immediate impact.  Although the image is absorbed just as quickly, because reading faces is one of the things we do regularly, each face is read as a message with a particular emotional or perhaps occasionally cognitive meaning. Small scale projection: faces are easy for to read; wide shots may simply fail to register.   

The reality is that ‘The Return’ like many contemporary movies has not been made for its comparatively brief short first theatrical release.  It’s produced for the long run: to be available on-line on demand, filling out TV schedules and as a sort of time filler material on smart phones.

That’s entertainment.

‘The Return’ is a retelling of Odysseus’ return to Ithica.   In answer to the many ways in which the story might have been adapted Pasolini’s script opts to reduce the story to a one dimensional idea of the traumatised vet.  Odysseus in ‘The Return’ represents the returning soldier, broken burnt out by war, like a US vet coming back from Vietnam or Iraq.  Pasolini renders Homer’s multifaceted myth in one emotional key  indelibly stamping it with imprimatur of Fiennes’ face.   

As a director Uberto Pasolini (unlike his namesake Pier Paolo who also directed films based on Greek myth) doesn’t look like he knows what he is doing with his movie.  This might have to do with the fact that he was beholden to a potpourri of financial backers, each supplying a commissioning editor with their own interests to champion. 

There’s no vision no singular perception shaping of ‘The Return’.  Pasolini only offers us ‘a face’.    Odysseus’s home is depicted as a monumental Wagnerian Castle, but if this is the vision why not give the film a Wagnerian feel?   Pasolini’s attention to costume and prop detail is minimal as if its enough to dress up his  male actors in loin cloths and old blankets, and his women in one or another type of wrap-about. There is no imprint of a stylistic sensibility in the scenario, simply a satisfaction with the scripted thema of the returning vet.  The actors playing up as the suitors never look anything other than hirelings from the world of soap opera, unable to to move on from the look of ‘the Sword-and-Sandals’ epics churned out by Cinecitta in the 1950’s and 60’s.  But in the case of these movies the cod inauthenticity of the productions (such as Hercules, 1958, starring Steve Reeves) was part of their attraction and charm.  In  ‘The Return’ the disjunction between the acting, the contemporary nature of the dialogue simply creates a disassociation between the theme and the means Pasolini uses to realise his theme. 

The returning vet is an issue that has been well covered by Hollywood and other Cinemas, but if this idea was to dominate ‘The Return’ Pasolini perhaps should have set his film in the present times where it might have made a claim for some sort of authenticity, rather than looking as it does a mismatched hotchpotch of disparate elements.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

The Bad Seed     Mervyn Leroy   (USA; 1956) Nancy Kelly; Patty McCormack

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6^th April 2025; ticket: £7

to have and to have not

‘The Bad Seed’ is a title that did the venerable journey through various expressive modes.  It started life as a novel by William Marsh, was developed into to Broadway play, then made it to Hollywood as a feature film, and finally adapted for TV remakes  a couple of times  In all its first three forms ‘The Bad Seed’ was a huge success. A best selling novel, a long running Broadway show, and a successful high grossing movie, finishing in the top 20 US box office for ‘56.

‘The Bad Seed’ as a realised idea certainly struck a chord with its audience.  It may   be partially accounted for by a fascination with the disjunction between the well brought up pretty little eight year old girl (Rhoda) and the cold blooded murders she commits.  But perhaps to some extent its appeal to the audience was partially embedded in its setting.  ‘The Bad Seed’ takes place in ‘The Suburbs’, in a generic representation of the real estate developments that were becoming the preferred homes of millions of Americans.  Increasingly wealthy in an increasingly confident USA this expansion of the suburban way of life represented a psychic deterritorialisation as people turned their backs on their ethnic roots and embraced a new form of identity founded upon the burgeoning individualist consumer culture – represented most completely by the automobile – the mechanical bride.

 

Interestingly there are significant alterations to ‘Bad Seed’s movie plot that make it distinctly different from both the original novel by William Marsh and the Broadway play which stayed true to Marsh’s work.  The Production Code Association (PCA), basically Hollywood’s movie censor, was hostile to any movie adaptation of ‘The Bad Seed’.  So when Warner purchased the rights the PCA insisted on one major change. Both novel and play conclude with the mother (Christine) dying (committing suicide after poisoning her murderous little girl) and the Rhoda surviving the poisoning, and able presumably to continue her merry dance of death.  Mervyn Leroy’s film treatment reversed this outcome: now Rhoda’s mother lives (somewhat improbably) after her suicide attempt and Rhoda who survives the poisoning is subsequently killed off in a final coda, struck down by a falling tree in the middle of a huge thunder storm.

So ‘poetic justice’ a la PCA sort of triumphs (the bizarre post end credit sequence in which Christine after addressing the audience, bends Rhoda over her knee and smacks her bottom, may or may not have been Leroy’s gesture of contrition, as if murder deserved at least a formal smacking) though not in a very convincing manner.  The bolted on changes to the original story line look what they are: formulaic genuflection to the requirement of movieland propriety.  Actually the ending with its primal earth shaking lightening and cracking thunder works to re-inforce a feeling that grows ever more insistently in the course of the film that what is at work in the scenario is the force of evil.  Within the suburbs evil lurks.   This makes Rhoda in some respects a precursor of Regen (The Exorcist) and to some extent the films of David Lynch.  John Carpenter was certainly influenced by the film and novel.

The fundamental changes that the PCA insisted on (They were probably responsible for removing from the script earlier examples of Rhoda’s crimes that come up in both book and play but not the film: killing her pet dog and her babysitter. In the movie she is suspected of killing an old lady by pushing her off the fire escape. For a child to kill

her pet dog was simply off the Hollywood map; to kill an old woman, just about ok.)  actually make the film a more resonant critique of the forces at work in America in the 1950’s.

Both book and the play revolve around the problem suggested by the title: “The Bad Seed’.  At issue is whether Rhoda’s murderous psychopathy has been inherited. In book and play it’s revealed that Christine was an adopted child, and that her biological mother had been a serial killer who was sentenced to death by frying in the ‘chair’.  In play and book the central issue revolves about Christine’s fears that Rhoda has inherited a bad gene from her grandmother (a recessive gene that determined her bad nature!).  Christine undergoes nervous collapse at the thought that she has passed on bad seed to her daughter.  But the movie is different, the inheritance issue never gains persuasive dramatic traction.  The script treats the issue with diffidence. It’s never revealed (did I somehow miss it?) that Christine’s mum was a serial killer.   In Leroy’s scenario Christine breaks down at the thought that her mother was wicked, but beyond her own insistence it is never convincing that she has strong reason to blame inheritance for Rhoda’s character.  A kind of vacuum envelops the issue of bad seed.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

But if nature is not responsible for Rhoda’s behaviour then it must be the environment, and Rhoda’s environment comprises the new kind life styles that are evolving in suburban America.  The suburbs are the source of psychic instabilities whether they be intro or extra – verted.  Could it be that ‘Evil’ ‘Psychopathy’ call it what you will, oozes out of the ‘burbs’, like dark blood from an infected wound?  With the pressure they exert on people to conform to the all American ideal, with their materialistic ethos and spoilt children the suburbs are incubators of the bad seed.  In its comfortable setting in the concerns of the characters, these elements are all present in ‘The Bad Seed’ which of course has a significant Hollywood precursor in ‘Mildred Pierce’.  Like ‘The Bad Seed’ ‘Mildred Pierce’ is dominated by a twisted mother daughter axis, set in the midst of American plenty.   Rhoda feels like a younger model of the precocious spoilt Veda, Mildred Pierce’s daughter.   Both ‘Pierce’ and ‘Bad Seed’ are unusually for the movie business female dominated scenarios, less concerned with action more focused on state of mind, the states of mind that were coming to define American life. 

I think Leroy’s direction is self absenting.  Like fellow Warner director, Michael Curtis (also director of Mildred Pierce) Leroy is experienced enough to know when to engage in Cinematic manipulations and when to let the script speak for itself with seemingly minimal direction.  Coming from the stage, the script is adroitly fashioned to represent the key characters and ideas.  It doesn’t necessarily need big production heightened camera work or deft splicing.  Leroy is happy to stay a lot of the time in long or medium shot, enabling the viewer to see the interactions and relations, and the camera movement when it happens, works with effect.  ‘The Bad Seed’ has a stagey feel, but what we are seeing is theatre; and in contemporary life it is theatre that has come to provide the role model for many of our relationships.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

 

 

Monsieur Verdoux    Charlie Chaplin (USA; 1947)  Charlie Chaplin; Martha Raye; Maryilyn Nash

Viewed: dvd

no more Mr Nice Guy

In movies the dead speak.  And of course besides M Verdoux and his victims there is some one else who dies in this film. 

As Chaplin’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery past the gravestone of Monsieur Verdoux, the eponymous subject (based on serial killer Henri Landru) provides in voice over a short justificatory explanation of his journey to the grave. The Voice relates how he’d been a bank teller for 30 years before being summarily dismissed. With a family to suppor (comprising as we later find out, a disabled wife and young son) he had resorted to a series of business transactions involving the liquidation of wealthy women.  Monsieur Verdoux explains that for him this was ‘a business’, but a business in which one needed some luck – which unfortunately he didn’t have.

The use of the word ‘liquidation’!  It has a double meaning: one of converting assets into cash;  the second, a vernacular euphemism, meaning to kill without compunction.   Using the word in this manner sets up the philosophical consideration offered up to the audience by Verdoux during his trial for murder at the end of the movie.  Delivered with Chaplinesque panache it’s his ironic rapier thrust into the heart of contempary hypocrisy where he points out that the Capitalist system produces vast industries for the production of armaments and weapons with the consequential need to foster wars of mass destruction and the slaughter of millions. In contrast Verdoux points out that he is being tried and condemned for the death of a few people. Verdoux concludes that he is a mere amateur by comparison.   The point made is not to justify his actions, but to place them in the context of a moral counterbalance.  Just a thought.

Verdoux is a black comedy centred on Charlie’s superb playing of the killer. His play out of the clown murderer is immaculate: his precision in action – such as preparing the poison –  his balletic balance – his mobility of face  – allied to the soothing British charm of his voice are all compressed into the character, the clown intent on the business of marrying and killing rich women for the sake of their money. There are a couple of unconvincing scenes in which Chaplin in the style of Harpo Marx has resort to Sennet style slapstick routines in going after a potential women victim.  But in his controlled expression of comic purpose Chaplin has never been better.  And of course the blood money from his dark deeds has ‘an innocent purpose’: it’s used to maintain Verdoux’ disabled wife and son.  Verdoux, a selfless dark Harlequin. 

There are wonderful highlights – Verdoux counting the victims’ money –   Chaplin breaking through frame and full face addressing the audience as to the nature of his ‘work’ – the sequences with Martha Raye.  There were also strange holes in the scripting: in particular the death of his wife and son, announced precipitously by Verdoux raising the unanswered question as to whether they had died natural deaths or had he killed them, unable to bare the brutal reality of not being able the continue to care for them? This question is left hanging on Verdoux’ coat-tails.  And the bad luck?  This seemed to entail, not his getting caught but rather his decision to invest his ill gotten gains in stocks and shares before the  market crashed.

What is central to the emotional feel of Chaplin’s ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ is its complete lack of either sentimentality or regret, both in relation to the inner scripting of the film and to its outer metaplay of Chaplin’s own career trajectory.   There’s one apparent exception.  Verdoux has no doubts no stabs of conscious in relation to his ‘liquidations’ whether it be the wealthy women or the cop who gets wise to him.  They all have to die.  The apparent exception is ‘The Girl’, a waif whom Verdoux sets up as a victim, a lab rat in effect, to test out the efficacy of his poison.  He nearly carries through with her murder, but stops at the last moment when her story and her goodness touch his heart.  She is spared as Verdoux affected, obeys the dictates of  his conscience.   You might say: “Sentimental!’  But no Chaplin countervails this moment in a later scene where he meets up again with the waif, now come good, who tells him her fortunes have changed because she has married an arms manufacturer and business is booming!   They’re in the money!

So no sentimentality is the order of the day and this of course applies to Chaplin himself in making ‘Verdoux’.  The film in which he makes the decision once and for all to kill off his alter ego, ‘The Little Tramp’.  Without regret without compassion in cold blood.  His time is up.

Verdoux now exemplified the times, the man of the moment: as amoral as the arms manufacturers and like them, a good father and husband.   

Chaplin did not have to make of himself an unsentimental serial killer.  He chose to adopt a persona that was the complete opposite of ‘The Little Tramp’. After Verdoux there could be no way back to the innocence of a character who was now out of place in a world without innocence.  

 Verdoux is not caught.  He is discovered. He could have escaped but he choses to give himself up of his own free will to the police.  There’s no bathos nor pathos,  simply his calculated decision to chose certain death.

The scenes comprising Verdoux’s last moments are cool and completely lacking in emotion, not tragic, simply timely, and these moments equate with Chaplin’s own disposal of ‘The Little Tramp’.  It’s time for him to go and he’s dispatched with the same equanimity with which one might discard a pair of old worn and holed socks.  Verdoux initially refuses the rum he’s offered, then commenting he’s never tasted rum and might as well try it, picks up the glass and necks it.  He faces the priest, no last rites, simply responding with a contained dignity to the visitation.  Then the final shot: head held high without hesitation he walks past the camera, turns with his back to us and walks to the (unseen) guillotine.  And as he moves away from us towards the place of execution a guard either side of him, we see just the merest hint of that ‘walk’.   A walk towards the end.  For Veroux and ‘The Tramp’.

Black comedies about serial killers were choice filmic morsels of the post World War ll era. Besides ‘Verdoux’ there was also Robert Hamer’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1949) starring Alex Guinness.  It tells of a disowned son murdering his way to an inherited Baronetcy.  But it’s difficult to imagine any one wanting to make black comedies about the serial killers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, men such as Ian Brady, Fred West and Peter Sutcliff.    For some people, in the age of the self-made image,  to be a serial killer has become a (self fulfilling?) career choice: killings perpetrated in order to become famous or rather infamous.  The era of increasing hostility by some men to the changed and increasing status of women in society appears to be linked to increasing murders of women, usually women in relationships, but many carried out simply as a function of ingrained sexual hostility.  Chaplin had his own axe to grind with money chasing women and with Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, but the film stands as dark metaphysical fable of ‘business’.  Likewise ‘Kind Hearts…’ works as satire on class prejudice.  But I think in our contemporary charged psychic atmosphere it is no longer possible to see these films as grounded in metaphorical or social concerns, as black comedies with unusual settings.  The form taken by the narratives of quasi justified serial killing, for many people will outweigh any parodic or satirical intent of the film maker.   The which makes the public exhibition of the titles problematic. Programmers will have to weigh up moral psychological social political as well as artistic considerations in deciding whether or not to screen these titles.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk