Star & Shadow

Apostasy   Daniel Kokotajlo (UK 2017)   Sioban Finneran

viewed Tyneside Cinema 30 July 2018; ticket: £9.75

like shooting fish in a barrel

It’s not clear whether Daniel Kokotajlo’s film Apostasy refers to his own actions in making this movie, to something in the script or both. If apostasy refers to his own actions in leaving the Jehovah Witnesses and making this film he would have been better to have produced a documentary rather than this limp dramatic statement. A scenario that betrays its BBC provenance, shot to look like a low budget soap opera and a script that is content to do nothing more than stitch up subjects as bigoted narrow minded obsessives.

As if! As if Jehovah’s witnesses were different from any other closed group based upon exclusivity of their own belief systems: not possessing metaphysical beliefs but possessed by metaphysical beliefs. Cue as exemplars: Scientology , Seventh-Day Adventists, Branch Davidian, Mormons, Plymouth Brethren, these latter being the subject of 2013 BBC Documentary which portrayed them as a secret reclusive sinister cult.

For some reason the BBC decided it did not want another documentary about cults. By way of a change a drama would be better. Daniel Kokotajlo as film maker would be legitimised by his status as an ex ‘Witness’ thereby having license to make his film, which would be shot in a sort of documentary style. The BBC to have the best of both worlds.

The problem is that Kokotajlo’s approach to his material is embarrassingly crude. the only idea in his the script is to set up the Witnesses as men of straw and then to proceed with gusto to knock ‘em down. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The problem with Kokotajlo’s writing is that he is probably too close to his material to see it. We don’t know his motive or state of mind in relation to the making of Apostasy. Perhaps Kokotajlo intended his film as a final act of disassociation; perhaps he wants to caste judgement upon the ‘Witnesses’ as they have judged him; perhaps he just wants to exploit elements of their beliefs that will make a good soap drama. As is often the case those closest to their material often singularly fail to understand critical elements of their subject. Sam Fuller as a script writer director, was a perceptive commentator on America. But as an ex GI who survived three beach landings during world war 2, his war movies are his least successful films. Likewise the films shot in the 40’s and 50’s Hollywood that endure both as outstanding movies and germane critiques of the USA were mostly made by émigré directors.

In relation to Kokotajlo’s depiction of the Witnesses: their inflexibility of belief their hierarchic structure and their rejection of the world. These are not in the least surprising.   These are the characteristic defining features of all religious and ideological cults. It would be more surprising if the Jehova’s Witnesses were not like this. That is the point: their practice of life cuts them off from the mainstream culture and social relations; their practice of life means that often the choices and life styles of mainstream society are closed off to them. This is the point: that they live in and are sustained by opposition to the world. In return they are rewarded by a dogmatic epistemological monopoly of ‘truth’ and the eschatological certainly of being the ‘elect’. In the time of the ‘New System’ the Jehovas Witnesses will inherit the earth. Commitment is until death: death but a temporary state.

Kokotajlo’s script is built around the situation of two young sisters Luisa and Chloe. Each in their own way epitomise the dilemmas as seen by outsiders to the Jehovah cult. Luisa is excluded not because she has become pregnant, but rather because she choses loyalty to her boyfriend rather than to the Witnesses.   But although Luisa’s trials continue throughout the length of Apostasy the real issues never enter into the script: the nature of her relationship with her boyfriend, how she understands her situation. What we see is that her attempts to reconcile herself with her faith are interrogated by a patriarchal elite. But in movement as directed by the script, not by any internal dynamic. Luisa is more of a puppet, whose strings are pulled any which way by the needs of a script that has to deliver a steady supply of moments.

Intertwined with Luisa’s story is that of her sister Chloe.  This latter strand is the emotive ploy used by Kokotajlo to construct drama about her death, death which is caused by her refusal to have a blood transfusion. But this ultimate demonstration of faith and commitment by Chloe is stragely handled by the scripts mechanics. It is glossed over, never allowed to emerge into full light, a death bured in the shadows of the writer/director’s uncertainty.

There is an empty centre to this strand of the drama which is filled out by an implicit dishonest invitation of the audience to act as judges.

The above paragraph points to omissions evasions and lacuna in the script. On its own terms Kokotajlo’s script evades key areas of concern. A number of things troubled me. Firstly although prohibition of blood transfusion is a core belief of Jehovah’s Witnesses, there is never any explanation of the reason for this. Strange that something at the heart of the film, at the very centre of Chloe’s (and perhaps her mum’s) decision to refuse transfusion, is simply omitted. For some reason Kokotajlo is happy to leave this core feature of faith unexplained? Why? Chloe’s death is likewise short changed.

One moment Chloe has collapsed at a party. Cut! Next shot, mum is walking away from the hospital having been (we presume) with her daughter when she died. The omittance of Chloe’s death, either as a scene or even as second hand account by mum to someone else, seems an act of filmic apostasy.  This is a core moment. The supreme moment of justification:   Chloe is in hospital where a blood transfusion can save her; but Mum and perhaps Chloe validate their beliefs and refuse medical intervention.   Kokotajlo passes over the core event with silence and a cheap cut. An act of dereliction in a film that is supposedly about a religious sect who have core beliefs about the precise nature of death. So not only is their no accounting of the manner of Chloe’s death, but the nature of her funeral and the disposal of her body is also ignored.  Simply omitted by Kokotajlo. Core to all religious belief is the manner of disposal of the body. Given that the Jehovah Witnesses place so much importance on the blood, how was Chloe’s blood actually or metaphysically disposed of?   As the script develops Apostasy seems ever more to be the work of a charlatan: a charlatan film maker.

Finally in the script much is made of Luisa’s delicate understanding of her mother’s position in relation to helping her. Luisa understands that her mother is under interdiction not to directly hand her anything. A no touch rule. This pantomime is carefully played out until the final sequence where mum asks Luisa for a glass of water; inexplicably Luisa drops everything, including her baby to rush off and fetch water. This crassly scripted piece of nonsense then allows Mum to scoop up baby and try and make off with her: a crude device to end the film on a moment of sub prime melodrama.

Perhaps Kokotajlo thinks he has made a film about the Jehovah Witnesses. He has not. He has made a TV style close-up dominated film, that is a no more than a soap opera with a cardboard Jehovah Witness backdrop.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

First Reformed            Paul Schrader (USA 2017) Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfield

viewed: Tyneside Cinema 17 July 2018; ticket: £9.75

old man’s film

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed prompted me to think about the relation between the primary framing of a film, the way in which a film frames its content; and the difference between subversion of frame and betrayal of frame.

Subversion is radical reframing of a film’s material that is designed to produce a complete shift in the audience’s perception of what they have seen ( or perhaps what they’re seeing). A radical undermining of a movie’s premises. Subversive reframing is most often experienced as a mechanical script device wherein at the end of the movie (or perhaps at some strategic point in a movie) the audience suddenly understands the narrative has been a dream; or that a narrative that has been mediated through one understanding of its primary frame, is suddenly inverted and seen through a new unexpected perspective. We understand what we have seen differently with new illumination.

Bunuel and Godard were masters of radically subverting frame and filmic form, with political or social intent. They both produced films that presented a particular proposition wrapped in a particular genre or stylistic statement that they subverted to open up the material to reveal a quite different perspective: Simon of the Desert and Contempt, in different ways, both have this quality of shifting frame: challenging the audience to radically reappraise what they have experienced.

Alongside exploiting the capacity of film to subvert itself there is the capacity of film to betray itself: to disrespect the audience in an act of directorial bad faith. In filmic betrayal we see a director shifting the energy of their film to transform the way it is understood, but motivated by cynical or exploitative intention. We see betrayal in its mundane form in some Hollywood movies such as the gangster films of the 1930’s after the introduction of the Code, where contrary to the moral logic of the film, the forces of law and order and false morality come out on top. Script writing under the influence of ‘bad faith’ conforms narrative outcomes to the dominant forms of political and ideological correctitude. Other forms of bad faith pander to commercial considerations or the self image of the director as reason for betraying the dynamic framing their films.

Schrader’s First Reformed is an act of betrayal.

The first shot is a very slow track into the eponymous church.   In this shot two core aspects of the movie are opened up.

Firstly through this shot the movie introduces itself as a carefully crafted stylistic construct.   This formal visual introduction is confirmed in the body of the movie in which the choreography of Schrader’s scenes are constructed in camera in a style reminiscent of Japanese director Jasujiro Ozu. Like Ozu Schrader constructs his master scenes using singular shots from an immobile camera.   The static camera frames a space, often an unremarkable domestic setting, in which the characters are located, in which they interact and through which they pass in and out of vision.

Ozu’s method of filming, in particular Tokyo story, creates a primary frame that references something about the nature of time and something about the way in which the things that happen in life are never fully seen. First Reformed composed in like manner, references nothing about time, but does point to an endemic formality that shapes interpersonal relations in the culure, as well as the idea that there are areas of life that are closed off. His austere framing with his camera, makes a statement about the way in which Schrader sees the nature of reality in which he locates Ernst the priest.

Secondly, the opening shot introduces the church, the First Reformed Church, a skeletal white structure, which is more a mausoleum than a church; a repository of God that is more tourist attraction than place of worship.   This church is a building mired in the past. Yet for all that it is a backwater, it is in this place, not in the corporate world of full on Christian evangelism, that Ernst has been sent. A dying priest in a dying church.

Schrader’s movie, as in its shootiong style so also in content, has a recognisable starting point.

First Reformed’s protagonist, Ernst takes his cue from Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The which it is hard to believe that Bresson’s movie did not initially inspire and inform Schrader’s decision to make First Reformed. In the opening section of the film Ernst, like Bresson’s padre, reveals he has decided to keep a daily journal to enable him to minutely trace his inner spiritual life. Ernst like his Bresson forbear, elects to handwrite his thoughts and also finds that his thoughts gather about his physical rather than spiritual state. Both priests are deathly ill. Both priests have been given their livings in appropriate backwaters where they will be out of the way.

Bresson’s subject, made radiant by H L Burel’s cinematography is increasingly abstracted from the world. His destiny is to move towards grace. But Schrader’s subject, whilst he might want to leave the world, finds his destiny to be in the world as he is drawn the deeper into interaction with the exteriorities and complexities of life.

The scripted forces Schrader sets in motion make for a powerful interplay of conflict opposition and contradiction: the sacred and the profane, the physical and the spiritual. Ernst is increasingly aware of and disturbed by man’s desecration of the earth. He is aware that he is dying and progressively racked by self doubt and feeling of inadequacy, is pushed into action in the world.   He comes to see the need for his action in increasingly violent terms. Aernst moves into a crisis as inner logic draws him on into to some defining act of violation of all that he outwardly represents.

The nature and the means of his intended act of redemptive violence momentarily hold centre stage. As the commemorative and rededication service of the First Reformed Church attain their climax, the tension locates itself in the body of Ernst: will his action be directed against destroying himself or himself and others? And will his act be private or public.   As the tension mounts Schrader chooses to unravel his plot in a denouement of bad faith anti climax and betrayal.

Schrader having set in motion inexorable forces of logic that demand resolution on the terms that he has nurtured, suddenly adopts a narrative solution borrowed from old Saturday morning cinema serials such as the Perils of Pauline: with a bound Ernst is free. Schrader’s script ditches everything it has developed to plunge protagonist and audience into a Disneyesque fantasy.   Ernst finds redemption in a mystical union with Mary the wife of the young man whom he had counselled before his suicide. Ernst experiences a vision of oneness with life.   The audience are subjected by Schrader to a magico realist sequence in which Ernst and Mary’s merged and intermeshed bodies commune across the skies like Mary Poppins. Instead of ending with a death foretold, First Reformed ends with Ernst and Mary locked in an unending kiss whilst the steadycam revolves about them.

This ending does nothing except betray the framing premise of First Reformed.   It may be Schrader thinks he is making some sort of statement about the redemptive nature of love. But if his idea of love is chocolate box schmaltz, then Schrader’s scripting looks like the desperation of an old man frightened by the forces he has himself has unleashed. A director who is desperate to pander to the American palate for mushy food and soft landings, who has nothing to offer but betrayal and Sleeping Beauty happy ending.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Leave no Trace            Debra Granik (USA 2018) Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 12 July 2018; ticket: £9.75

in the valley of the iPhone…

Leave no Trace: what does Granik’s title mean? Having viewed her movie did it point to something about the nature of personal relations in contemporary American society: they leave no trace? A people so self engrossed they are no longer able to have an emotional effect upon each other, a people only able to leave a footprint in the sand?

Americans (but also other Western cultures) as a people who’s existence is marked out by a specific sort of individualism, who have lives that comprise a series of markers: mobile phones stylistic affects gestures trinkets and stories. Lives defined by externalities not internalities.  Lives that are present in the cloud of knowing but leave no earthly trace.

The question that comes to mind is whether Granik as a film maker functions as a passive medium a voicing for the spirits of the age? Or is she making films as a observer who sees something about nature of contemporary relations that she wishes to transmit. Is Granik a passive or active agent?

The proposition Granik introduces is simple. A father and his daughter alone in the world. Their journey is scripted to take them through various experiences in various milieus: the idyll of the forest, psycho-babble land, suburbia, and finally after some trauma, munchkin land. Granik locates her two subjects as individuals rather than a relational pair. Context is sketched out sparsely in the script, just enough perhaps to give us some bearings on father and daughter. Will is shown to be a Vet, perhaps entitled to some support from the relevant government agency he visits, and there is an indication that he might suffer from PTSD.   His wife and Tom’s mother had died some time back and with his daughter he has chosen that they live a survivalist life style out in the woods.   His choice is linked to his dislike of social engagement. He prefers to be alone and bring up his daughter Tom (Tomboy?) on his own terms.

When she was about nine my sister used to get a UK girl’s comic called Bunty. Tom reminded me a little of the heroines of the Bunty comic strips. Mostly these comic book girls were like Tomboys: pubescent asexual decontextualized honest determined observant achieving girls.   Heroines taking on unusual events and situations but acting out against familiar reassuring backgrounds. Bunty heroines were ultimately two dimensional, characters successfully designed to enrapt the attention of its readership and provide a suitable moral role model.    Granik’s Tom fits this model. We see no internal life. With the camera regularly pointed at her face, Tom exhibits the default expressions of contemporary female leads, staring unyieldingly back at the director. A contemporary female construct.

The core of the film is a relationship between father and daughter which is carefully depicted as low in emotional intensity. Hence perhaps Tom’s name ( a boyish moniker) which carries no disturbing feminine resonance.   In Leave no Trace this relationship is located in place (the woods to begin with) not time (context). From the first shot of the movie (lichen hanging off the branch of a conifer) the camera is as interested in probing the wonders of the location as in defining the father daughter relationship at the heart of the movie. Distraction rather than attraction as the key to the way the scenario is played out. As if Granik’s film like a cultural filter is a de-intensifier that neutralises ‘seeing’.

In Hollywood films today there is very little ‘seeing’ suggested or called up in the scripts or scenarios. By seeing I mean that the audience ‘sees’ directly what a character sees and hence interprets what is seen through direct mediation with the material. Usually but not necessarily, ‘seeing’ will involve shots that represent direct point of view of a character, as well as direct voicing of the person. Films that represent seeing develop a language of visual intelligence that exploits both scripting and camera sensitivity to facilitate direct mediation.

Like Spielberg and most other Hollywood directors of this generation, Granik is not comfortable or perhaps even interested in this type of filmic language. In an age colonised by the image and most comprehensively overwhelmed by a deluge of advertising messages, we are adept and more comfortable reading signs not people.

So Will and Tom are filmed engaging in actions and doings that give witness to their bond. They feather wood to make fire, they play chess, they practice escape routines, they prepare food, they lie next to each other at night, close but non-reactive. The inner is substituted for the the outer. Granik’s camera keeps us on the outside of the relationship. We see them do stuff. But there is no seeing in the film, there is no point of view from which Tom sees her Dad or her Dad sees her. We are in a film where neither of the characters looks and sees who the other is. They are objects to each other. Will (sic) the father doesn’t see his daughter who she is, as a growing person, changing all the time. Tom has no seeing of her Dad’s pain. Closed off they don’t see one another. In a sense although there are no iPhones in the movie, it is as if the smart phone’s phantom cultural presence extends right into vacuum of their relationship. A vacuum that is the product of the culture. The iPhone is simply a product that transposes self absorption onto the externality of a screen information system.

The irony is that on the terms of Granik’s script, smart phones are banished from Will and Tom’s domain, but that the quality of their individuation depicted in the relationship, the absence of presence, suggests each is an emptiness, an emptiness premised on a culture that legitimises being through possession and desire. Tom’s emptiness a function of her unformed nature; Will’s emptiness a function of his burnt out formation. Each in their own way is waiting metaphorically for an iPhone to fill the emptiness.   Granik’s film is a coded message to the smart phone generation, old and young: smart phones are Ok, they are just what we have been waiting for. To fill the vacuum.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

On Chesil Beach         Dominic Cooke (UK 2017) Billie Howie; Soairse Ronan

Script: Ian McEwan

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 29 May 2018; ticket £9.75

Let them wear the hats

Chesil Beach is a 18 mile shingle strand connecting the Isle of Portland to the Dorset mainland.   It is very particular place with a characteristic geomorphology that has both psychic and a mythic resonance.

Sometimes the opening shot or montage at the start of a movie defines something about either the film’s purpose or its ambition. The opening shot of Cooke’s On Chesil Beach (co-produced by BBC Films, more of this later) , is a medium wide shot of a beach, followed by some half a dozen shots of waves breaking and various angle shots of the sea shore. Establishment shots that establish nothing. Shots that could be shots of any beach anywhere. Stock shots. And by the end of the film we understand that these shots presage a film that has little ambition and no originality, that is happy to employ a tired format that re-enacts a series of cameo sequences that have been seen many times before. Cooke’s movie would have more appropriately titles: ‘Stock Shot Beach.

John Osborne was a playwright and screen writer who has cast a long shadow over the scripting of British films. His acerbic representation of class in his 1956 play Look Back in Anger (later filmed in 1959 by Tony Richardson), still provides the average Brit film maker with a default position on interclass male /female relationships.

 

Film scripts like McEwan’s Chesil Beach are play outs of the same stereotypical individuals and situations that characterise Osborne’s writing. McEwan’s script replicates Osborne’s bitter perception of upper middle class characters with their sense of superiority and their contempt for the lower orders. In Anger as in Chesil Beach these combine to make the women (often known as: ‘Mummy’) unavoidably (if sometimes apologetically) snobbish; and the men (often known as: Daddy) aggressively assertive of the prerogatives of their status.

The situation in Chesil Beach, as in Osborne’s drama, is of a young male from a lower social order getting off with a female scion of a better class of person. The device of class tension with its stock characterisation is what Cooke’s Chesil Beach offers up to the audience by way of the context to the playing out of the script.

Other than this it is difficult to see what Cooke’s Chesil Beach is about other than where it is coming from: it is something from the BBC (dominant co-producers) drama department. We are told, through a caption, that it is: 1962. This has one meaning: Cozzies and Sets. Proper dresses, ties and period cars that tell that this is a BBC production, and the BBC do ‘period’.

‘Period’! For all the difference it makes Chesil Beach might be set in the ‘1930’s’. Although Chesil Beach is tricked out with scripted referencing to ‘jazz’, CND and the Berlin Wall, these are surface reflections that play no part in the fabric of the film.  J.P. Hartley’s catch phrase in the Go Between that, ‘ …the past is another country…’, has been taken to heart by BBC producers to mean a sort of licensed inconsequentiality. Find a pretty boy find a pretty girl, wrap them in fixtures and fittings then let them find their way towards sex. As long as it’s a sentimental journey, the audience will buy the ticket. McEwan and Cooke are on message. On payroll.

In short Chesil Beach has both the form and the content of a cynically manufactured product. It is designed to tick the boxes of commissioning editors, and buyers of international film TV and on-line rights. Intelligence and thinking in the making of film. TV /online thinking, is purely along the lines of exploitation. The audience are conceived as passive receptacles rather than active engagers in the material. As passive receptors, they are screen fodder to be manipulated.

Annotating manipulation. Feminism, in its commercialised orientations, has become corrupted in many ways, becoming part of the diktat relating to commercial expressive narrative products. The scripts and scenarios flowing out of Hollywood and Europe have adopted a women and children first type of moral maxim in relation to female protagonists.  This results in the scripting of childish pusillanimous narrations in which the women characters ( as yet the producers haven’t really come to terms with gender benders and migrated gender protagonists, but they will) are carefully plotted to emerge from their ordeal odyssey or quest as the winners in any given situation. Sometimes, as winners will know, winning has costs, but this idea seems to be lost on most contemporary film makers working for the multiplex or TV ticket. In the bad old days of TV and film Westerns the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats, just in case the audience didn’t get the plot. Today with the predictability of sexist moral stereotyping, the women might as well don the white chapeaux.

On Chesil Beech is dire in this respect. Florence is a saint. A woman who exudes love and whose warmth charms all those with whom she comes into contact. She is just a little uncertain about penetrative sex. (But otherwise in the script she seems happy with physicality).  Edward on the other hand, is not a bad guy though the scripts adumbrates an underlying violence in his nature; and in relation to the crassly shot wedding night sexual tryst, Ed is scripted all the bum notes, of course. And Ed’s behaviour makes him the transgressor whose actions, it is suggested, are punished for the rest of his life. Florence of course does very well and, without Ed, has a dazzlingly successful career in classical music.

It all ends in tears at the Wigmore Hall. But this pay off is like the junk food eaten at the movies: designed to sate the emotional appetite for as long as it takes the audience to leave the cinema or go and fix themselves a drink.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk