Film Review

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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

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Manhattan Woody Allen (USA 1979)
Woody Allen; Diane Keaton
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne; 13 March 2014; ticket: £5
retrocrit: Dark clouds over Manhattan
Viewed today Woody Allen’s Manhattan
provokes thoughts about the dark magical forces that forge the
twisted links in the relationship between life and art. The pact
with their daemon, that an individual makes, when wresting the
creative out of the actual.
At the core of the movie is the flip
flop relationship between Woody Allen and Tracy, a seventeen year old
high school girl. This relationship bookends the script as 43 year
old Allen struggles to establish a relationship with women his own
age, in a culture that he characterises as emotionally regressed.
His fictive mildly transgressive relationship with Tracy who is a
minor, points to how the later complications allegations and
developments of Allen’s relationship with his family (Mia, Dylan and
Soon Yi) are all cut from the same clothe of his life: late twentieth
century infantalised culture. And just as part of the Manhattan
script takes in an ex wife ‘tell all’ subplot, so too could Woody
Allen’s current circus of relational atrocities with its child abuse
allegations and intra family marriage irregularity, all too easily be
absorbed into the Manhattan script, without Woody Allen pausing for
breath or a gag.

My feeling is that Woody is avoiding
personal territory these days as being too close to the knuckle.
However he did outline Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi racket in Blue Velvet
without letting the material get up front personal. Did Woody or
his family give money to Madoff?
Allen’s daemon aside, Manhattan proves
Woody Allen as a consummate movie clown. Both in the traditions of
Harold Lloyd, Groucho and Stan Laurel and of later ‘directed’
understated performers such as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Allen of
course has a perfect complementary foil in Diane Keaton. In Manhattan
it’s his performance that stands out as he plays off not just Keaton
but Meryl Streep and the very straight Mariel Hemmingway. Playing
himself, as clown’s must, he personifies the core clown ideas:
innocence and self delusion, an inability to prosper out in the world
on any terms but his own. Hence the inevitability of failure, but a
failure that never results in disillusionment; just the reverse,
failure it is that sustains energises reinvigorates faith in being.
The gags and one liners are a wondrous flow of ideas and throw away
wicked associations. But it is the clown in Woody that allows the
writing to communicate: the exaggerated changes in body language.
the use of eye muscle tension and eye lines as expressive gestes and
the micro regulation of voice, in tone and pitch and attack.

It’s interesting to note that in the
long opening montage of Manhattan the views of the city tend to be
intimate shots. There is no shot of the Twin Towers. Allen’s NYC is
old school, the prewar city.

And the whole movie is beautifully
shot, old school, on black and white stock with Gordon Willis giving
the shots and sequences a look based on a minimal uncluttered
aesthetic. As director, Allen’s two strongest points in Manhattan
are that he trusts the cinematographer to deliver the signifying
classical optical contents of the shot and uses the script
performance and sound track to counter-vale the visual element. The
Manhattan scenario is characterised by a number of long static
carefully composed shots that establish the idea of a mood, the idea
of a stability, the idea of a classic aesthetic. But Allen uses
these visual attributes as the contrasting dynamics that drive the
film’s development.

For instance there is one early big
wide shot of Woody and Tracy in Woody’s first and grand apartment
with its spiral staircase. It is a still shot that frames the
performers’ movements, and is of long duration. The protagonists
movement within the set which has the aesthetic of shadow play. But
the shot is used to offset the banality of the relationship between
Tracy and Allen. The pettiness, the self serving but truthful nature
of Allen’s dialogue, heighten the interplay between the image and
the script, creating the sort of inner tensions that energise
Manhattan and shift it out of the realm of self indulgence.

The characteristic feature of the film
is that Allen manipulates the sound track and image tracks so that
they interpenetrate and offset each other. The call of Gershwin’s
lush compositions that flood romantically over the screen are
counterposed by the unromantic calculating nature of post ’60’s
relationships that manipulatively unfold in the dialogue between the
protagonists. The worlds of Gershwin and Allen are poured together
in a sour cocktail that is like an emulsion that blends temporarily
before separating into its separate and bitter components.

Woody Allen’s life has become a
parody of his own films. Allen a little like Oscar Wilde ends up
trapped within the confines of his own art. Sometimes there is
nowhere else to go except self parody. And sometimes parody like
paradise turns out to be the interesting but unavailable illusion of
the clown.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Wake in Fright Ted Kotcheff
(Australia 1971) Donald Pleasance; Gary Bond, Chips Raferty

Viewed ICA Cinema London 10 March 14;
Ticket £6

Signs of the times: delirium tremens

I think the title Wake in Fright points
directly to the intention of the film and probably, but in a
different context, of the book which I haven’t read.In relation to
the film, the title seems not so much a description of anything in
the film but an injunction. It’s an injunction to wake up and see
what’s in front of you. Ted Kotcheff’s movie is directed not so
much at the Australia of the early 1960’s when the book was written,
but more urgently as it found itself in 1970 at the end of the long
blood drenched Vietnam war characterised by the slaughter of
innocents. Murders now forgotten.

Viewed from 2014 Wake in Fright is an
allegorical rendering of the forces of nihilistic destruction that
have been unleashed many times in recent history: Bosnia, Lebanon,
Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan to name but a few.

Wake in Fright chronicles the delirium
of the male when he enters into the world of the dead, or the world
of war. The subsumation of the individual male identity into a
murderous quasi tribal collective psyche.

We see the mild mannered teacher John
Grant enter the craw of a male dominated mining town. As the script
develops he is stripped of his thin outer socialised veneer, his
teacher persona.

Drink, serial ritual drinking a common
element of hazing initiation, breaks him down, replaces the civilised
with the instinctive. His judgement eroded, his perception debased,
his psychic responses are concentrated into a limited number of
survival reflexes. Like a Viking Warrior, he enters a state of
delirium which is his only protection, both from himself and others.
Psychically life is replaced by death as an energiser. In Paul
Virilio’s phrase: the right to live is replaced by the right to die.

Grant is stripped of his money his
clothes and his possessions and enters the final series of drinking
bouts that reduce him to an automative appendage of the collective
male machine. Grant played by Gary Bond is a sort of satirical
inverse of James Bond. The screen realisation of the Bond persona is
a fantasy male figure par excellence. The man who is always in
control. He is intelligent urbane calculating, and has sex appeal.
He is an appendage of the the consumer culture which with its
Ferraris, Computers, Aperitifs etc can festoon him with baubles of
desire. John Grant represents the other pole of reality. As he
enters the fog he is bereft of desirable attributes, there are no
products of desire with which to associate. The alcohol is not so
much a product, it’s a gateway to death. And yet the statement in
the persona of Grant has a resonation deep in the male psyche. This
is what is real; it is more real on its own terms than Bond, this is
what it means to be a man to accept and respond to life: to live in
the delirium of the male. Out of control, indiscriminately
murderous, brutal and psychotic. The history of documented combat
killings: Mai Lai in Vietnam, Haditha in Iraq, and numberless other
unrecorded and unattributed slayings almost unremarked in everyday
life attest to the reality of the delirium.

I did wonder if Gary Bond, who plays
John Grant, had ever been considered for the eponymous part in the
Bond franchise?

If so his association with Wake in Fear
will have killed it off.

In Wake in Fear Ted Kotcheff gives most
vivid expression to this male delirium in the sequence of the
kangaroo hunt in which Grant takes part. These creatures frozen
immobile transfixed in the beam from the mounted headlight on the car
roof, offer themselves as sitting ducks to the guns of the hunting
party. The ‘roos are slaughtered amidst the sound of hysterical
laughter and merriment. The men are lost in an immediate trance in
the spasm of the killing. They are proto hunters engaged in a magical
ritual. In inflicting death, and it is the finality of death that is
important (there is no appeal from the death wound inflicted), the
hunter becomes an elevated being and acquires for himself the magical
protective mantel of their slain victims. Savage. And perhaps it
was like this inVietnam and Iraq and out on the streets.

The ‘roo hunt is depicted as fuelled by
alcohol but the conditions for the delirium are established through the scenario. The physical
proximity of the men and the singing of songs, that are little more
than chants, with strong repetitive motifs, are all strong bonding
elements creating the conditions necessary to the state of collective
male delirium. So although alcohol is a driver in Wake in Fear, fear
itself, with its adrenalin rush, or drugs or righteous belief systems
have the same effect.

The structure of Wake with Fear is
symmetrical in form. It ends and begins with the same shot.

A big wide shot of the isolated
community in the middle of the outback where John Grant is the
teacher.

In the opening sequence he leaves. In
the final sequence he returns. Outwardly we can see no difference in
him. Like the vets who return to their communities, unless they are
injured, on the outside they appear the same. It is within where we
cannot see what it is that the delirium has wrought or writ.

Wake in Fright belongs to an era when
the concern of significant film makers was to seize consciouness and
engage with the world in whatever manner. Numbered were the days.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Her Spike Jonze (USA 2013) Joaquin
Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johanson

viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle upon
Tyne; 18 Feb 2014; ticket: £4.00

Loony toons

As I watched Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ my
question was: what was it selling?

Initially it looked like advert for the
ideology of personal development wrapped up in a Guardian Angel type
fable, the role of the disembodied presence being appropriated by an
Operating System called Samantha.

Spike Jonze’s (writer and director)
scenario posits a world in vague fuzzy future peopled by characters
borrowed from a Bill Viola photo installation of the mid naughties;
the ‘Her’ characters file past us on the way from one place to
another their faces and comportment defined by a sort of sedated
slo-mo contentment their voices resonating with anodyne honesty and
reassurance.

For reasons know only to himself,
Theodore Twombly, Jonze’s male protagonist is named for the American
abstract painter, Cy Twombly who died in 2011. Perhaps Jonze owns
work by Cy who is a lyrical and even romantic painter. Perhaps Jonze
intended the use of the Twombly name as some sort of gesture or
homage. Cy Twombly certainly as a painter developed and built on his
work during his long career; though whether his later work is
preferred to the earlier, or vice versa, is a matter of taste.
Unlike Spike Jonze, Cy Twombly would not have confused development
with the changes brought about by ageing and experience.

The self development ‘sell’ hawked by
Jonze amounts to no more than rehashed Californian self help mantras.
One of these mantras intones that relationships when they fail, and
perhaps even when they don’t, constitute a kind of disease that needs
a fix. There is a current of contemporary developmental psychology
thought that sees relationships as problematic from the point of view
of ‘individual growth’. The theory is that in relationships
dominances develop leading the co-respondents to sabotage each others
potential, each trying to suppress or undermine or exploit the other.
In a culture that adopts individualism as its key value the belief
is that the operant function of a relationship is promote ‘the
potential’ of the self. The individual is more important than any
grouping: dyadic triadic or collective.

And everyone has ‘potential’.

Relationships can make ‘real’ change
in individuals impossible. It is no surprise when Alan Watts, one of
the original ‘gurus’ of the California alternative personal growth
trail puts in a voiced appearance.
(“The
only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it move with
it and join the dance.” Alan Watts) Watts was certainly one of the
thinkers most influential in promoting the ideology of perpetual
personal change and increasing acceleration, that Jonze is selling in
‘Her’. In as much as the object of the questioning and programmes,
such as they are, is to make the individual feel ‘good’ about
themselves, the movement quickly becomes an ideology of narcissism.

To
the extent that this is a film about talking about relationships,
‘Her’ targets a female audience. Talk in the form of dialogue covers
the film wall to wall: (in the same way that mindless destructive
action wall to walls in the ‘boys’ movies) it is the stuff of soap
opera, soap opera talk. Spike Jonze’s dialogue is like retreadings
from Friends, Desperate Housewives etc. The critical point is the
vacuum within which all the talk-talk happens. Soap operas are
located in parallel universes, designed to resemble real life, but
have no such connection. ‘Her’ takes place in such a parallel world.
A sort of fuzzily defined future where Computer Operating Systems
possess Artificial Intelligence, and the characters work in soft
communication industries: Theodore works for a company that writes
personal letters for people, implying intimate communication skills
have died.

‘Her’
dialogue has the surface look of being about something real, but
lacks the context that means that it can signify anything actual.
Context is everything in relation to dialogue. Where dialogue is
detached from contexts that give shape and depth to meaning, then
what is spoke in the situations contrived by the script, is
disconnected from grounds about which we might care or understand.
Simply put without context situations are meaningless, without
consequence. And all the emotive cross referencing self questioning
and self agonising that Jonze inserts into the ‘Her’ dialogue between
his protagonists is spurious. ‘Her’ context and setting are vaporific
and lack significance. The dialogue signifies nothing more than an
exaggerated swollen sense of self importance.

‘Her’
is about selling narcissism wrapped up in the myth of personal
development and change.

And
it’s all wrapped up.

‘Her’
is a prime example of the inflated ambition of contemporary film
making. Woody Allen once used to know how to make concise funny
Romcoms. Interestingly most were set in NYC which gave them some
kind of context, as did Woody’s jewishness. And Allen knew how to
deliver a film in 90 minutes. Jonze takes over two hours to deliver
‘Her’ and his film is tortuously slow lacking in basic filmic
tensions and laboriously tedious in coming to its conclusion. During
the screening sometime in the middle of the movie, the dialogue was
punctuated by loud snores coming from some one asleep in the stalls.
That about sums it up as there’s lot of slo-mo in Her,
much of the film passes by in Spike Jonze’s comatose state of film
making, accompanied by a load of dreary tinkly music attributed to
Samantha the Operating System.

And lastly a question to which I don’t
know the answer. Samantha the disembodied OS, at the end of the
script passes, with her new chum Alan, onto another higher plane,
another dimension of existence, leaving Theodore behind. She has
migrated in accordance with her destiny.

OS/OT = operating system = operating
Thetan. Is this an allegorical movie driven by the belief system of
Scientology?

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Lift to the Scaffold (L’Ascenseur pour
l’Echafaux) Louis Malle (1958 Fr) Jeanne Moreau; Maurice Ronet

Viewed: NFT London; 7 Feb 2014;
ticket: £7.50

Change in the Rules of the Game.

Nineteen years on from Renoir’s The
Rules of the Game, after a world war the German Occupation and the
infiltration of Coca-Cola culture, Louis Malle makes The Lift to the
Scaffold. At it’s simplest his film states simply and objectively
that the rules of the game have changed: it’s a new game, with
shifting ambiguous rules.

Lift to the Scaffold is a shock wave
that jolts us out of the cosy world of traditional social hierarchies
and the striated conventions that define them. It shakes us out of
class bound notions of ownership and personal relations into the post
war world of the 1950’s which is already being shaped by
contemporary modernism. A world always on edge where money defines
identity; a world with fluid boundaries defined by personal desire
accelerations separations and object fetishism. A world that at
that time of the film’s production was in embryo but projected by
Malle into its maturity.

And like Renoir’s movie, Lift to the
Scaffold is also a satire on social relations.

Renoir’s satire in keeping with the
times is a gentle probing. He puts into relief the strange,
sometimes hypocritical amusing contradictions that result from the
different behaviour codes followed by two classes of people living in
close proximity as masters and servants. Malle’s satire is more
savage and pitiless. Renoir’s protagonists, in particular the ruling
class, are able to control events by containing them within their
world. Malle’s protagonists have no such power and the satire
derives from the manner in which actions by the protagonists veer
completely out of their control resulting in exaggerated unintended
effects that overwhelm them. Effects enlarged and given greater
visibility by the cool detached acting style that gesturally
characterises the playing out of the scenario.

This difference between the two films
is highlighted by the killings that are important but not necessarily
defining events in the two scripts. In Rules of the Game the murder
is a crime passionel, motivated by jealousy: an old fashioned sort of
provocation. It is viewed in the film as an embarrassment rather
than a crime, a mistake that can be justified contained and explained
away. The killing in ‘Rules’ is done from a distance without the
killer and victim being in close contact: Andre will have had no
idea who shot him. Contrast with Malle’s script. Here the two
murders are close up and personal, with eye contact between the two
parties. As if Malle understands that within the new social matrix
sexual and murderous relations will be two unpredictable sides of the
same coin: power. Malle’s killings are in complete opposition to the
bungled events of ‘Rules’: political assassination (perhaps mediated
by passion) and kicks. In Lift to the Scaffold the killings are acts
of individuated will. And both murders satirically spin out of
control of the perpetrators exposing them to the capricious forces of
fate and satiric irony.

Renoir’s script is devised using the
classical unities of time and place: events unfold at a leisurely
pace building up to the climax. In Malle’s script the lack of
unities gives brilliant defining form to the movie. The protagonists
although fatefully entangled are physically separated in time and
space. Two of the main characters Florence and Julien, never meet
face to face. Their unseen actions effect each other from a
distance. Just as today the wild interplay of separated individuals
on social networking sites can set into motion accelerated forces
moulding possibility into certainty, so the actions of Malle’s
protagonists just as certainly accelerate them into the precipitation
of the events that eventually consume them.

Of course Malle works with new social
types: arms dealers, disaffected rebellious kids, veterans with a
grudge and sets them against a new emerging milieu of incessant
motion and transience: highways, motels, modernist office blocks, the
city streets (Moreau’s endless mythic walk through night time
Paris)or any place whatever. Malle locates his characters in a
world not only in relation to their social strata, but more in
relation to objects (or absence of objects as in the interrogation
scene). Objects burrow into the course of the action, not just the
cars, which are caressed and admired like a lover, but pencil
sharpeners, cameras, card filing systems, revolvers. Louis Malle
directs out attention to object fetishism and the world of Vuitton,
BMW, Apple etc waits in the wings.

In filming Lift the the Scaffold Malle
used his camera in a way that builds on the expressive ideas of
Rossellini de Sica Visconti and other Europeans. The Camera as
directed by these film makers doesn’t only work to create affect
perception or movement; it is not a slave to story or the manipulated
affects of emotion. It might do some of these things but its
principle function to enable the audience to see, to be invested as a
seer. The audience is not asked to invest in fake emotional
symbolism. The cars the guns the bars the highways the clothes the
office blocks can all be read as signs, not so much part of the
narrative but signifiers connecting the film to the world we live in.

Before ‘Lift’ Malle had worked with
Bresson on ‘A man escaped’ ( Un condamne a mort s’ est echappe;
1956) . And one of Bresson’s formal concerns carries over into this
film, his determination of a specific type of acting style needed to
make films that were about seeing. The role of the actor is to
reveal something to the audience. This cannot be achieved by the
actor flooding out the audience’s emotional channels, overwhelming
them by manipulations. It is achieved by the actor building a certain
type of relation to their role which is not a becoming. The actor’s
task is to show, in one way or another, how their character is a
construct in a particular situation. The scenario the script and the
structure of a film are an apparatus which allows the actor to take
up varying positions in relation to the material allowing the viewer
the spac to be a key interpretor of the material.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Out of the Furnace – Scott Cooper
(2013 USA) Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson

Viewed: 4 Feb 2014 ; Empire Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne; Ticket: £3.95

Disneyland invert

The opening sequence of Cooper’s Out of
the Furnace takes place in a drive in movie and introduces us to
Woody Harrelson’s character Harlan. Harlan gets annoyed at something
or other (much of the detail in the film is elusively blurred). In
response to his stirred up emotions, he rams a hot dog (“Goddam
food makes me sick!”) down the throat of his lady consort, before
beating to a pulp the gentleman who has protested too much. Woody’s
visceral reaction to whatever it was that upset his guts is so
extreme its statement of excess becomes funny. It announces that
‘Out of the Furnace’ is going to lead us deep into the Hillbilly
swamplands of parody; an opening preemptive clip that’s bourn out in
the movie’s development

Cooper’s film expresses America as a
kind of inverted Disneyland.

And in this inverted Disneyland Woody
Harrelson plays the part of a demonic Jiminy Cricket. The voice of
the anti-conscience. Perhaps it is the creation of this dark Gothic
archetype that explains the allure of the film to its audience.
Harlan as the internalised voice that psychically legitimises the
violence of the enraged Id. In infantalised cultures defined by an
imperative for immediate gratification (and celebrated in the adverts
that precede the movie) frustration is intolerable. The urgency of
desire legitimises violence towards anything or anyone who is
perceived as a barrier to desire. As Harlan says when he first
meets and gives Rodney the look: “I got a problem with everyone”.

Harrelson’s performance as an
internalised psychopath comprises the film’s core. Even when not up
on screen like a shadow he’s still present. Hard eyes (hardening of
the muscles around the eyes is a trick Harrelson does very well) with
lips and skin stretched face, he exudes an implacable necessary
desire for doing only what he wants to do. Harlan’s psychopathic
counter conscience is offset with Russell and Rodney, the ‘good’
brothers, in a scripting device that splits off multiple
personalities into discrete characters. The rustbelt Pennsylvanian
setting of the film, photographed as a beautifully contrived
dilapidation, is no more than a picaresque back drop against which to
set the play out of the internalised personality forces at play in
American culture: Destruction and Accommodations.

The limitation of Cooper’s Out of the
Furnace (Furnace – presumably a metaphor of America, or a play on
Griffith’s intertitle line in Intolerance: Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking?) is that from his narrative he is able to produce
no more than a parody of the American Gothic genre.

The dialogue lurches from cliché to
cliché comprising one liners we’ve heard before in some other movie.
The scripting elements: the damaged war vet, the bare knuckle
fighting, dying old father, all tread well worn narrative paths
without deviating from the familiar. The scripting device that
exploits the idea the Mountain Men reflects the ultimate parody of
distancing. It spatially removes the schizoid psychopathic cultural
forces, destruction and accommodation, from close-up (Zimmerman’s
slaying of Martin – Florida 2012: Dunn’s slaying of Davis – Florida
2913. Both these killings appear to have been triggered by the
infantile rage of the killer when their will was opposed by young
blacks. Both killers took legal refuge in Florida’s Stand Your
Ground Statute.) to faraway. The Mountain Men become distant
phantoms removed from day to day life. ( ‘Some of them never bin down
from those hills’). Out of the Furnaces’s Mountain Men are caste as
sort of Zombie creatures, removed from mainstream psychic conditions,
who prosper in their own middens. Of course this device of the
‘other’ (Hillbillies, Mountain Men, Swamp Men) has been prodigiously
over exploited by Hollywood from Boorman’s Deliverance and a host of
movies since. Cooper again brings nothing new to the idea, only
replication and repetition.

The final sequence of film abrogates
any moral claims Cooper might make for his movie. Folded into the
film is a subplot with a racial dimension. In one of the opening
scenes in the movie Russell has a black girl friend. During the
stretch he serves for drunken driving, she leaves him for the town’s
black police chief. Although apparently in love with Russell, she
choses black middle class respectability over white trash life style.
The sexual competition between the two men is suggested but muted in
the script. The image projected by Out of the Furnace is one of a
matured interrace relations in which racist white attitudes have been
completely eroded by liberal progressive states of mind. The problem
is that this liberal optimism is countervailed by the film’s core
proposition of the schizoid character of the white American. And in
the penultimate scene, where Russell is chasing and gunning down
Harlan, the black cop in pursuit orders Russell to put down his gun
and not shoot. Russell disobeys and kills Harlan. This resolution
is dishonest and points to the difficulties white film makers have
with race. The filmmakers lose their nerve and the plot. The only
moral outcome for the plot was for the black cop to have killed
Russell and Harlan to have escaped. The reality of the American
Psyche is suppressed rage, which in the film is represented by
Harrelson’s Harlan. This demented schizo force is the one that
eludes escapes and elides with the good, and the logic is that it
should escape. Every slock horror film script writer and director
knows this and intuitively understands the logic, even in parody,
that this is what has to be. Cooper for whatever reason doesn’t get
it.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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American Hustle David O
Russell (USA 2013) Christian Bale; Amy Adams; Bradley Cooper.

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne 28 Jan 2014
Ticket:£3.95

Hanging in/out

After two hours plus in the cinema I
found it difficult to understand what Russell’s American Hustle was
about except style and mood. It’s a relaxed laid back type movie
personified in Bale and Adams who comprise the performing axis, and
the excuse for the plot to crank through its laborious machinations.

Set in the 1970’s, it is based
loosely (very loosely I suspect) on a conman and con woman entrapped
by the FBI and whose skills are used to expose high level political
corruption in New Jersey and Washington. But all
the plot shenanigans are played out in an inconsequential manner that
became progressively perfunctory. The script initially lends the two
protagonists voice overs giving some insight into Irving and Sydney’s
states of mind. This device is soon abandoned leaving the audience
to gaze at the surface of the movie: the costumes and haircuts, the
music and the square dance of the personal relationships that pivot
around Irving’s wife and girlfriend.

American Hustle is little more than a
bland exercise in style. It is laboriously scripted with cliche’d
one liners borrowed from a previous jaunts into the Con-land genre
such as the Sting and the Grifters. The dialogue represents a
stereotyped cod American philosophy of survival captured all those
years ago by W C Fields: “ Never give a sucker an even break.”
How long can they go on recycling these gash lines?
American Hustle is almost completely
lacking in on screen tension unless you count the extreme décolletage
of the outfits worn by Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. Bursting out
of the costumes, their tits threaten to pop out completely at any
time. But the scenarists decide not to do a take on this particular
gag line, and the tape or whatever, does its job. And, in the final
scenes in which the plot has bestowed upon all the players smiling
faces and happy MacDonald family hour, the ladies mamories are
appropriately and symbolically nicely tucked up inside their bras.
The tension is over and so is the film.
American Hustle: tit’s haircuts
costumes and 70’s music all the way down the line. Everything on
the surface. Judging by its face American Hustle is an exercise in
borrowed style from a bygone epoch, the usual Hollywood retro refuge
when the material has nothing much else going for it. A surface of
contrasting haircuts and coiffure, frocks and flairs and whenever the
script or haircuts or costumes start to flag, Russell fades up some
70’s grooves David Bowie, Donna Summer Elton John to keep the
audience interested. American Hustle a sales pitch for a 70’s
select CD.

In a filmic sense American Hustle is a
dead dog, a tired stylised exercise of genre Hollywood output. But
there is one particular thing of note in the scenario and that is the
psychic make up of the main characters. They replicate in their
identities an increasingly opperant feature of Western identity: the
schizo ID. Each of American Hustle’s main characters plays out a
schizo personality; no one is whom they seem to be. Irving is and
Sydney are professional cons whose presentation of self is at the
same time both a fabrication and a deeper assertion of their real
selves. And the FBI agent and Roslyn also move into variant schizo
identities of the people they start out as representing. American
Hustle’s main characters are all schizos and symbolise the forces
that are at work in a culture where leisure has replaced work and
status as the loci of identity.

Embedded in the core of the film’s
characters is the idea of duality of identity. As the characters
move between different strata and social networks they shift identity
to accord with their needs and purposes. ID is changed: just like
changing a frock. We live in the land of the quick change schizo
artist. But of course this ID schizo shift in the movie replicates
what’s become the default option in the West. Increasingly
individuals operate across a number of discrete domaines such as work
leisure and in particular on-line worlds. In step with this de facto
separation there’s a tendency to create and adopt variant ID’s to
interact with each network of people. This schizo tenancy in
fronting contemporary identities can be slight or radical, but
overwhelming forces are at work driving the process. Schizo
identity claims have become part of the deep game playing that is
used sometimes to effect successful manipulation, but that often ends
up as a sort of compulsion to control all the parameters relating to
the presentation of self. And American Hustle on its own somewhat
anodyne terms certainly uses this schizo feature of contemporary life
as a playing out factor of the film.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen (2013
USA) Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt

Viewed: 14 Jan 2014, Empire Cinema
Newcastle; Ticket £3.95

As presented film, Steve McQueen’s 12
Years a Slave is little more than a soap opera tricked out with
predictable contemporary graphic violence. The big stars Brad and
Michael do their movie gestural facial acting without ever breaking
sweat. Ejiofor is a competent lead figurehead, but without a voice, who
takes us down the overlong narrative from its beginning until it gets
to its end. ‘!2 Years’ is a typical product of that Hollywood
production line that turns out noble but anodyne films.

But it is something more: it is also a
betrayal of its source material.

Camera replaces voice.

Steve McQueen’s movie ’12 years a
slave’ is based on the book of the same title written by free black
Northerner, Solomon Northup, about his experience as a slave. It is
remarkable work, both as literature and as document.

Published in 1854 and written in the
first person, it is a harrowing terrible account in which the author
explains how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. An
ordeal of brutal beatings and humiliation, a vicious existence as a
non-being that lasted 12 years before somewhat fortuitously Salomon
contrived his own rescue.

This classic work of American
literature might have seemed a natural fit for black UK director
McQueen. An opportunity to make a filmic statement out of a strong
clear black voice harking from the shadows of the nineteenth century.

Significantly though McQueen chooses
not to use Northup’s voice as the dynamic form holding the story
together. McQueen’s camera replaces Northup’s voice. Image
replaces insight. The clarity and understanding of Northup is
replaced by a mish-mash of camera angles that represent only
McQueen’s technical decisions. The camera replaces voice promoting
uncertainty of origination; and McQueen’s semi flashback structure
which looks cobbled together in the edit, replaces Northup’s straight
time line.
McQueen renders the material from
Northup’s book in the same way cheap hamburger producers render meat.
His film ends up like a pattie of cliche’d images palatable to the
taste of the consumer. ’12 Years’ is not so much a film more a soap
opera or TV mini series, whose scenario was designed to manipulate
Northup’s observations to pander to the prejudices of contemporary
audiences and Oscar juries. For the director who made Hunger, ’12
years’ looks like a sell out to the usual suspects. ’12 Years’ is
refusal to take on the contextualised material on its own terms.

’12 Years’ is the voice of a man:
Solomon Northup. A man of his time with perspectives informed and
fashioned by his age. As a voice of a man, if you do not respect it
but instead manipulate it for your own ends, then you are little more
than a mountebank. A thief laying claim to a false legitimacy of
ownership. Instead of writing his own script and filling it out with
his own retrojected contemporary conceits McQueen goes through the
process of dishonestly representing Northup’s work as something that
it is not.
Opportunistic fabrication characterises
McQueen’s film.

This is the voice of man. Solomon
Northrup’s account of his experiences in ’12 years’ retains its power
and more because read today it surprises us at every level. The
first thing you hear in this voice is a sensitised intelligence
grounded in character and experience. Intelligence as a resource
that is refined throughout Northup’s suffering. The second thing
that strikes the reader is that Solomon’s ‘intelligence’ informs not
only his intellect but also his emotions. This sort of intelligence
is difficult to understand. The pain inflicted on him by the white
race produced in Northup neither anger nor hate but compassionate
insight in the hollowness of the white psyche; an understanding that
a corrupt social system produces corrupted vicious individuals to
represent it. Like both Primo Levy and Nelson Mandala he rises
above the cesspit system of racially structured degradation and
annihilation arriving at a state of mind in which he sees clearly the
nature of evil. Finally Solomon Northup[ is sustained during his
torture by his faith in the Lord. It is faith that carries him
through. His ability to call on an externalised power (whether
projected or real) endows him with the psychic stamina to sustain
hope and finally take his chance. His faith in the Lord and the New
Testament is strengthened even by the slave owners selective use of
readings form the New Testament to their slaves. Northup sees at
once that it is an abusive attempt to justify what is indefensible
in Christian terms. These readings, judged by Solomon Northup to be
a distorted self evident insult to intelligence, are by McQueen’s
script exploited as an opportunity for cheap theatrical parody.

And in choosing the option of
theatrical effect and the spectacle over voice, McQueen’s film is
not true to the spirit of the book. The lie replaces the true.
But the betrayal of Northup’s spirit
extends into fabrications of the actual text that McQueen finds it
necessary to introduce. When Solomon regaining his freedom, returns
home after his 12 years, the film represents that his wife Anne has
remarried and her new husband is with her when she greets Solomon.
This is not in the book. In the book Northup writes that when she
heard he had returned, his wife Anne ran home from work into his
arms.

There are many ways of honouring truth:
literalism is but one. It can be honoured in the word in the spirit
in the practice in the structure. McQueen chooses none of these. He
seems to have taken a road in the development of his scenario in
which piece by piece what is true in Northup’s book has been
gradually discarded. All that remains is pastiche soap opera. In
which case why lay claim to Northup’s work? Instead like Tarantino,
fashion your own Slave story script and do what you want with it !
Make it film that panders to whatever values of history, history of
film and entertainment and indulge whatever anachronisms you want:
have your escaped slave call home on a mobile.

In this scenario of ’12 Years’: the lie
replaces the truth.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk