The Man Who Knew Too Much

1934, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The first of the half-dozen breezy thrillers that Hitchcock made in the 1930s, the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much clocks in at just over 70 minutes. Hitchcock found an extra 50 minutes of material for his 1956 remake, a very different kind of film, as much a study of a family under pressure as it is a thriller, but the snappy pacing and memorably ghoulish touches are more to my taste than the expansive 1950s take on the material.

Hitchcock wastes no time plunging us into the action, with the film's precipitating crime - a shooting death in Switzerland - taking place just a couple of minutes' in, before we've really learned much about protagonists Bob and Jill Lawrence, who manage to become embroiled in international intrigue without knowing why. Before we know it, we're back in London on the trail of the criminals, who've kidnapped the Lawrences' daughter, and it's here that the film really comes alive, as the pursuit takes us to the studio streets of Wapping.

While the film is best remembered for the scenes in the Albert Hall, it's the earlier sequences, in a bizarre revival hall and a creepy dentist's office, that give the film a darker twist; while both sequences have comic touches, they both ultimately descend into often brutal violence. The film's latter sequences, centered on a lengthy shootout with the police (which did not make it into the remake) could have been lifted from a Warner Brothers gangster picture of the period, except that the key shot is fired here by a woman (Edna Best), helping prove that crime certainly doesn't pay.

The film was Peter Lorre's first English-language role; he didn't spend long in England, appearing the following year in Karl Freund's wonderful Mad Love for MGM, before shuttling back for Hitchcock's Secret Agent. Hitchcock seems to have felt the need to up the ante on Lorre's already unusual appearance by giving him a skunk-like hair stripe, though no-one dares to mention this unusual feature to the sinister mastermind.

I was amused to note that David Cairns and I picked the same shot when choosing screen captures to illustrate the film; his shadowplay write-up is highly recommended. The shot in question, with half-a-dozen fingers pointing at a bullet hole, has a mate in Hitchcock's 1936 Sabotage.

Summer Hours

2008, France, directed by Olivier Assayas (Original Title: L'Heure d'été)

Funded in part by the Musée d'Orsay, Olivier Assayas's film functions both as a drama of family life and as an allegory for French concerns about the preservation of the country's patrimony. The set-up is a little artificial, given that the two of the three siblings at the heart of the film live at opposite ends of the earth (Shanghai, New York): while this serves the film's dramatic purposes well it nonetheless creates the sense that the family, even by French middle-class standards, is hardly typical. That said, it also allows Assayas, resolutely international in outlook himself, to explore the idea that France's influence spreads in different ways in the modern world - not simply through art but through design and business sense to take two examples.

The film is bookended by two gatherings, the first a final extended get-together at the old summer homestead, with children running between tables while adults open wine, smoke cigarettes, and recall the history of the house, the second a teenage party to give the place one last whirl before it's sold - a sequence very obviously reminiscent of the epic party at the centre of Assayas's 1994 L'Eau Froide/Cold Water. Assayas films both gatherings with a remarkably mobile camera, sweeping through gardens and around corners inside the house, constantly following his characters, whether they're playing or taking a careful inventory of the place (the conversation between the matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) and her eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) prefigures a later visit by museum curators browsing for treasures).

I was struck by critic Adrian Martin's comment on a blog post at Girish Shambu's site that Assayas, among other directors, is "comfortable only with adults and older-teens-who-are-already-adults: the teen part of [Summer Hours] is its weakest, and the little kids are just anonymous bodies who tear around playing indistinctly." It's certainly true that the youngest children are entirely anonymous, but I would be interested to understand how he concludes that the teen sequence is the weakest element of the film: not only did it seem to me full of life, and an appropriate way to celebrate what the house represented, but it also felt like a successful update of the concerns of L'Eau froide, set among a very different generation of teens in the 1970s; these teens feel like our contemporaries, not like those of the earlier film. But it also seemed a somewhat misplaced criticism, for this film's concerns are those of adults, not teens: how to preserve youthful memories long after youth has passed, how to keep families, in the broadest sense, knit together, or how to negotiate the delicate terrain of family finances, concerns that the teenagers at the end of the film can barely conceive of in their lazy, hazy celebration.

The Bank Job

2008, UK, directed by Roger Donaldson

Although it's entertaining enough as a caper, and zips along so briskly that it's essentially impossible to deal with the plot holes as they occur, The Bank Job is disappointing as an evocation of the 1970s, particularly given that Roger Donaldson's previous film, The World's Fastest Indian, captured a certain atmosphere of devil-may-care innocence, specific to that story's setting, rather well.

The production team gets many of the details right (the clothes, the cars, the street signs, even if the blue truck in the image above looks to be the production vehicle for Arri cameras) but there's very little feeling for the specific moment in English life, at the tail end of "Swinging London" and the beginning of a rough 1970s, even though the film's complicated plot grapples with the country's power structure (political and royal) and London's seamier side. The characters are rarely able to transcend quick-drawn caricature, whether it's Jason Statham as an archetypal Cockney wide boy or Peter Bowles as a spy mandarin; indeed, it's mostly in the film's side story, concerning the real-life revolutionary/criminal (perspective is all) Michael X that you get a sense of the real political stakes.

Late Marriage

2001, Israel/France, directed by Dover Kashashvili


I'd only seen the Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz in one previous film, The Band's Visit, but there's no mistaking her voice: her first scene opens with her character, Judith, offscreen, talking to her daughter from down the hall, but she controls the screen even before she emerges. That voice is a crucial part of Judith's arsenal, and it's significant that a later scene renders her literally speechless when her home is invaded by the relatives of her lover Zaza, who want to separate the pair so that Zaza can embark on a respectable marriage.

That communal assault is typical of the film, with extended families demanding conformity to tradition: though the characters are able to contemplate the idea of a life outside the community and its rules, they would really rather avoid such an outcome. There's a barely concealed violence in many of these interactions that contrasts sharply with the tenderness and sincerity of the relationship between Zaza and Judith, whose easy, often humorous interactions are exemplified by an extended sex scene that's remarkable both for its frankness and its warmth.

The film is shot like a series of fixed tableaux, often beautifully composed, lending the film a limpid appearance that contrasts with the often stormy events narrated onscreen. The camera almost never moves, and Kashashvili often holds the shot for an extended period as the actors move around the frame, crowding the edges for the familial discussions.

Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin

Jean Poiret gets ready for a day of detecting in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

This piece is a contribution to Ten Days' Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon, hosted by Flickhead.

Although Claude Chabrol ended up making four films featuring the character of Inspector Lavardin, he had a hard time getting the first project off the ground. Coming out of a fallow cinematic period –he’d kept busy with various TV projects - Chabrol was unable to find a TV co-producer, and wasn’t even able to benefit from the “avance sur recettes” mechanism that’s employed by so many French filmmakers. The script eventually ended up on the desk of Marin Karmitz, who was just flowering into a producer of considerable power, and Karmitz proposed a budget of 6 million francs (about $700,000 at the time), about half the average cost of a French film in the mid-1980s.

Dominique Lavanant in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

Chabrol, never one to turn down the opportunity to work, said yes, and Karmitz ultimately signed him up as a salaried employee, going on to produce most of the director’s films during the subsequent two decades. That kind of off-screen fidelity is reproduced in many of Chabrol’s casting choices in the Lavardin films. Poulet au vinaigre and L'Escargot noir both feature Stéphane Audran, who has appeared in more than twenty Chabrol films – and was, not incidentally, married to him for sixteen years - as well as Michel Bouquet, a stalwart of Chabrol’s work in the late 1960s/early 1970s, while Inspecteur Lavardin reunites Dominique Lavanant and Jean-Claude Brialy, who appeared together in two key early Chabrol films, Le Beau serge (the director’s debut) and Les Godelureaux.

By contrast, Lavardin himself is played by the comic actor and playwright Jean Poiret, who had never worked for Chabrol before; few of Poiret’s films are familiar to English-speaking audiences given that French comedies don’t tend to travel well. Chabrol and Poiret both appeared in a 1964 film (Les durs à cuire, directed by Jacques Pinoteau), and I believe they shared the screen in a climactic scene, but that was the extent of their prior collaboration. Poiret, like Chabrol, was coming out of cinematic mothballs in 1985. After making roughly three films a year from 1956 to 1970 he more or less disappeared from the screen and spent much of the 1970s on stage in La Cage aux folles, which he also wrote. He credited a role in Truffaut’s Le Dernier métro with giving him “the desire to make movies again,” and he remained active in films until his death in 1992 (his one film as director, the minor but rather enjoyable Le Zèbre, which features his wife, Caroline Cellier, was released three months after his death).

Lavardin turns on the charm in L'Escargot noir (1988)

It’s hard to avoid comparison between Hitchcock and Chabrol, and the casting of Poiret seems very much of a piece with Hitchcock’s use of an actor like Cary Grant - that is, a player known for lighter roles who reveals a darker side. Chabrol uses Poiret’s Janus-like ability throughout the four Lavardin films. It’s consistently unsettling to see the often jocular inspector suddenly turn on a suspect, unleashing verbal and occasionally physical violence, and the character himself is aware of the alarming impact of the transformation, carefully cultivating an unruffled demeanour the better to demolish it when necessary.

Jean Poiret and Michel Bouquet in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

Still, despite Poiret’s lengthy experience as a performer, it’s not clear that Chabrol knew quite what he had on his hands when making the first film. Poiret doesn’t appear until 40 minutes have elapsed, and then proceeds to walk away with the movie. Chabrol doesn’t mess about on the second occasion, even though the script for that outing wasn’t originally conceived with Lavardin in mind, and Poiret appears as soon as the opening credits begin to roll. While Lavardin flew solo in the first film, in the sequel Chabrol pairs him with a Watson character, a local cop who helps to orient him. That pattern is repeated in the two telefilm outings, and in Inspecteur Lavardin, the inspector even refers to his sidekick as Watson.

Lavardin and his local Watson in Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)

Although made for a cinema audience, the structure of Poulet au vinaigre reminds me of a good British television mystery, and the late arrival of the detective is very much part of the pattern. Chabrol using the first section of the film to set up a complex web of local relationships in P.D. James or Ruth Rendell style (hardly surprising, then, that Chabrol turned to Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone as the source material for his 1995 La Cérémonie). Cinematically, the most obvious forebear is Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the resemblance to the acidly-drawn village of Le Corbeau, a place riven by poison-pen letters, wasn’t already obvious one of the key characters in Poulet au vinaigre is an employee of the postal service who, along with his mother (a very unglamorous Audran), steams open the correspondence of the local bigwigs. The film is not without references to Chabrol’s own earlier work, too: the film’s first victim is a butcher, in whose shop window appears the sign “Closed Because of Murder”!

The plot of that first film is the most twisted and the most satisfying of the quartet; Chabrol and Dominique Roulet wrote the script from Roulet’s novel, and it’s a tight interweaving of murder and small-town loyalties and betrayals, allowing Chabrol ample room to peel away the onion layers of relationships and class distinctions. It’s also the one film that transcends the Lavardin character rather than being dependent on him for much of its interest.

Jean-Claude Brialy in Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)

After the first film's success, the Lavardin character was injected into a pre-existing, and apparently rather poor, script after Chabrol’s plan to make a film about Camille Claudel fell through. Isabelle Adjani had contacted Claudel’s family and snapped up the reproduction rights to her artwork, but Chabrol had a measure of revenge, alarming Adjani's producers by initially retaining the title of his Claudel project for the second Lavardin film so that they thought he was pressing ahead. As Chabrol himself admits, the plot on the second occasion is “a banal whodunit, it’s plot 12b,” probably because there was a bit of a rush to get the project moving to capitalize on the first film's success.

Indeed, the main point of Inspecteur Lavardin is not to solve the mystery but rather to have Lavardin attempt to bring a measure of moral justice to the lives of old friends (credibility goes out the window, since he stays in the home of some obvious suspects, one of whom is an old flame). It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to apply Chabrol’s plot judgment to the two telefilms, L’Escargot noir and Maux croisés, although the first of the pair does at least have an appealingly twisted motivation, and Chabrol assembles a nice gallery of players from Chinon’s bourgeoisie.

There’s nothing rote about Chabrol’s visual approach, however. Even in films that many rate as fairly lightweight, he is careful to create a coherent visual style. On the DVD extras for his 1988 film Une Affaire de femmes, he speaks about the issue of finding an appropriate style during the first few days of shooting a new film (Une Affaire de femmes was released the same month that L’Escargot noir was broadcast, which provides an interesting illustration both of Chabrol’s work ethic and of his diverse interests), and on the Lavardin films he also sets himself playful technical challenges. Thus in Poulet au vinaigre he decided that “there would only be a single shot/reverse shot,” and in Inspecteur Lavardin that “there wouldn’t be a single shot at exact eye level” – an apt choice for a film so obsessed with looking and seeing that it features a character (played by a very fey Jean-Claude Brialy) who paints human eyes mounted on stands! The shot choices also serve as a constant prelude to the film’s stunning climactic shot, which shows a death from the perspective of an overhead camera that has been placed in a bedroom.

L'Escargot noir (1989)

Indeed, cameras – artificial eyes - and high-angle shots abound in the four films. The first three minutes of Poulet au vinaigre are shot through the lens of a camera, which takes pictures of the guests at a party in a provincial town (introducing to many of the key players in the process), while Maux croisés centers around a TV quiz show, giving ample opportunity for Chabrol to play with shots of television screens; Lavardin watches one key sequence on a television in a hotel room while the reality plays out down below. Similarly, L’Escargot noir has several important scenes that appear to be filmed from close to ceiling-level - a meeting between two potential suspects, a shot of Lavardin interviewing a chef – or from high above the scene, such as the shots from Lavardin’s hotel room down to a square where one of the suspects owns a pharmacy.

Maux croisés (1989)

Beyond these shots, I wasn’t able to discern a consistent technical challenge in the telefilms, except to note that Chabrol makes his camera exceptionally mobile, constantly tracking down streets and moving from one character or object to another. The dolly crew, crane operator and steadicam operator all earned their keep on the films. Even where the mobile camera is especially notable – following a woman down a street, or or panning to show us Lavardin's destination – there’s nothing gratuitous about such shots, which are almost always designed to add additional information through camera movement rather than through a cut. It’s a technique that Chabrol frequently favours in other films, even where the subject is much more sober – as in Une Affaire de femmes, for instance.

That said, the telefilms are a significant fall-off from their cinematic counterparts, and the final outing in particular commits some familiar bottom-of-the-barrel sins: bringing back a character from a previous film (André, the barman played by Albert Dray in Poulet au vinaigre) in absurdly coincidental fashion, and sending Lavardin to an exotic location, the Italian spa town of Montecatini, for no apparent reason other than the needs of co-production with Italian television. Lavardin’s outlandish behaviour towards suspects hardly marks him as the kind of cop who would have been entrusted with a sensitive cross-border mission (he’s transferred between the first two films, for dunking a suspect in a basin of water). Still, as Chabrol points out in an interview, Lavardin might be outrageous but he’s never stupid. He’s aware that almost everyone he speaks to has something to hide, and as a consequence as long as he doesn’t go too far over the line no-one is likely to complain. In the third film, he sits his various suspects down and when they aren’t as forthcoming as Lavardin would like he says “I feel like I’m going to make a blunder,” adeptly making reference to the widespread image of the French police at the time, while having no intention of actually doing something foolish. Claude Zidi’s films Inspecteur la Bavure (1980) and Les Ripoux (1984) capture, and perpetuate, that negative image, albeit in largely comic terms. Throughout the four films, put-upon suspects threaten Lavardin with lawyers or sputter sentiments like “You’re crazy, you’ll go to prison,” though both they and Lavardin know that nothing serious is likely to happen.

Don't trust those innocent faces - Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

As the cycle moves along, the greatest pleasures come from the ways in which Chabrol references earlier incidents and re-works them. For instance, Lavardin is properly introduced to us over his breakfast at a bar in Forges-les-Eaux (a small town in Normandy), and breakfasts form a key part of his routine. There’s an amusing scene where Mario David (the Watson character in Maux croisés) brings croissants for breakfast and proceeds to dunk his pastry in Lavardin’s coffee, a compliment that Lavardin returns when he breakfasts with his Italian Watson in the final film. More spectacular repasts are at the centre of the investigations in Inspecteur Lavardin and L’Escargot noir, which has numerous references to the culinary possibilities of a good snail, while most of the policework in Maux croisés appears to take place at a hotel dinner table.

Lavardin and his Italian Watson hard at work in Maux croisés (1989)

Poulet au vinaigre (1985, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet)
Inspecteur Lavardin (1986, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet)
L'Escargot noir (1988, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol; for television)
Maux croisés (1989, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet; for television)

--

Chabrol's old friends at Les Cahiers du cinéma gave the two Lavardin cinema films fine coverage: the first film was on the cover of the April 1985 issue, while the second was the lead article in March 1986. The following articles were particularly helpful in writing this piece:

"Éloge de la fantaisie. Entretien avec Jean Poiret (Interview by Olivier Assayas and Marc Chevrie), Les Cahiers du cinéma, April 1985, pp. 38-43.

"Attention les yeux! Entretien avec Claude Chabrol" (Interview by Marc Chevrie and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, March 1986, pp. 9-14.

“Claude Chabrol de A a Z” (Interview by Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, Spécial Chabrol, October 1997, pp. 6-31.

“Masques et bergamasques: Entretien avec Marin Karmitz” (Interview by Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, Spécial Chabrol, October 1997, pp. 72-77.

There Will Be Blood

2007, US, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

These days, one of the great pleasures of coming to a movie long after the theatrical hubbub has died down is being able to pick through the various online dissections in search of gems; I particularly enjoyed David Bordwell's blog entry on Paul Thomas Anderson's shot choices and compositions, which underlines both Anderson's technical skill and the trust he places in his actors.

The scene that Bordwell focuses on, a fairly early sequence that provides the impetus for the rest of the film, is a beautiful combination of careful positioning and movement, with the actors giving rhythm to both dialogue and gesture; although this film features a new set of actors for Anderson, it's not hard to see why he was able to assemble something of a repertory company for his previous films given the level of collaboration in front of and behind the camera.

For a film that subsequently comes to life with such richly textured dialogue, the opening fifteen minutes are wordless apart from the occasional grunt as Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) picks his way through a small western mine: it gives the film an appropriately elemental feel, so that the viewer cannot forget the sweat and danger associated with mineral wealth, but it also reinforces the extraordinary lengths to which Plainview is willing to go in service of his ambitions.

Later, Plainview's skewed moral universe is made absolutely clear with a shot that recalls Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, features glowing in the darkness of Vietnam; Plainview has rescued his son but then turned back to what truly fuels his passions, as he watches an oil well burn into the night. Daniel Day-Lewis's acting style, which certainly stretches the boundaries on occasion, seems entirely appropriate to a story about forces of nature (in more than one sense), and it's fascinating to contrast his approach with that of Paul Dano, who plays both Eli and Paul Sunday: Dano is icily controlled most of the time, with Eli's occasional eruptions all the more unsettling as a consequence.

Une Affaire de femmes

1988, France, directed by Claude Chabrol

A relatively rare period outing for Chabrol - though coincidentally his first three films with Isabelle Huppert were all set in the past - Une Affaire de femmes confronts issues that were nonetheless very much alive in 1980s France. The country was still coming to terms with the Occupation period (as seen in a film as different as Papy fait de la résistance, which dissected attitudes to the Occupation in comic mode), while abortion, which is at the centre of Une Affaire de femmes, had been legalized only in 1975, less than a generation earlier.

The first hour of the film focuses on re-creating the Occupation as a lived experience. Broader political developments only intrude intermittently (the disappearance of a Jewish friend, a radio address by Pétain) as we get a sense of the realities of privation that dominated daily life. An early scene - according to Chabrol's voice-over analysis of the sequence, it was filmed on the first day of shooting - shows Huppert and her children digging for potatoes, an apparently fun outing for the children that is understood in starkly different terms by the adults. Food, as so often in Chabrol, provides a means of entering the world of the film: those potatoes form the centerpiece of a cramped, taciturn family meal, whereas later, when the family's fortunes take a turn for the better, there's a more expansive repast shot from a less confined perspective.

The food in these scenes stands in for the film's real binding force: almost every relationship, even between apparent friends, is conceived in economic terms. Huppert's character, Marie, is quick to see the financial possibilities in her circumscribed town but she's incapable of understanding anyone who does something without monetary motivation - her husband makes cut-out pictures for his own entertainment, an idea that mystifies her.

Chabrol implies that almost all of the female characters have the same pragmatic attitude to money, and are unshocked by what seem outrageous commercial proposals. Marie isn't just motivated by survival, though: she still nurtures a dream of a singing career, while her ambitions blind to her own family's non-monetary needs. That's precisely what makes her an interesting character: she's no one-dimensional martyr, so when the film turns about and re-casts as rather more of an innocent abroad - a pathetic request for a postcard of the Eiffel Tower to send to her children - the final scenes are somewhat undermined, although they also try to portray the way in which Marie is a pawn of the hypocritical occupied state (Huppert is almost able to carry the change off; she's adept at finding the extraordinary complexities in Marie's character). The film's final dedication, to the children of the condemned, also seems problematic, given Marie's own attitudes: her son is starved of affection long before his mother is taken away by the authorities for her activities as a clandestine abortionist, spending his days peeping in keyholes in the hopes of understanding what his mother is doing (in shots that recall not just Chabrol's earlier films but also the child's perspective in another wartime film, Rossellini's Rome, Open City).

A Room with a View

1985, UK, directed by James Ivory

Although much of the film is set in Italy, A Room with a View is very much about visions of England. When one character comments that the countryside near Florence reminds her of Shropshire it's an amusing line but also catches a certain essential truth in the film's view of England as a green and pleasant land, where mundane matters such as personal finance are barely on the horizon. While Forster's book and the film satirize Cecil Vyse for his conceited objections to professional careers, even those characters who allegedly hold down jobs are never shown at work, enjoying lives of great leisure. The film constantly emphasizes the idea of pastoral idyll, most notably in a scene where several of the male characters frolic in a woodland pond - classical tropes abound - with the peasantry, where it appears at all, cast at best as sun-dappled background.

Although it's at times very amusing, especially in the second half - paradoxically the film is far more alive in restrained Edwardian England than among the hot-blooded Latins - the film founders on its own inability to see that it's a participant in what it claims to satirize. It also, of course, launched another wave of English heritage filmmaking, with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant returning several times to Forster (their adaptation of Howard's End is a more rounded vision of England, although it's clumsy in dealing with working class characters).

Dean Spanley

2008, UK/New Zealand, directed by Toa Fraser

I haven't seen Toa Fraser's first film, No. 2, a contemporary saga of a Fijian community in Auckland that sounds like it breathes some of the same air as Sione's Wedding, but this is quite a change of pace - a (literal) shaggy dog tale set in Edwardian England, with an excellent cast featuring Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Peter O'Toole (in full old curmudgeon mode) and Bryan Brown, an actor who's only intermittently found really juicy roles but who's been consistently generous in lending his profile to small-scale Australian productions. 

There's nothing particularly New Zealand about the film, despite Fraser and Neill's work, although there's a strong sense of Britain's role as a colonial power, whether through Brown's character, a typical Aussie larrikin who seems to have a finger in every pie, or the frequent references to the Boer War (distant, half-explained war deaths hang over several characters). 

Most of the film's pleasures come from watching a fine set of actors interact, with Neill particularly good; he's not always taken that seriously as an actor, but here he punctures his more serious turns - particularly in Jane Campion's The Piano - with subtle humour. Fraser's direction has its own fun with Campion's film, lifting her - occasionally derided - overhead shots of tea and cakes for comic effect. Tea, though, isn't this film's beverage of choice: afterwards, you may wish to run out to investigate the pleasures of tokaj. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1977/1980, US, directed by Steven Spielberg

Spielberg has been such a ubiquitous Hollywood presence for my entire movie-going life that it was something of a surprise to be reminded that I haven't seen his entire back catalogue; this was the most celebrated of the few omissions. I'm a big fan of his first few films, where Spielberg already shows tremendous filmmaking skill (notwithstanding the technical horror stories from the set of Jaws) but also has a sense of proportion that ensures his films retain a human scale.

Close Encounters was the first indication that his movies were likely to morph into something less tight and visceral, with the special effects in the "Special Edition," the version I watched, ultimately proving less thrilling than the earlier, earthbound segments (just as Jaws succeeds by not showing the shark, it's the unseen and inexplicable that's most compelling here). 

There's a brilliant sequence early on, for instance, where air traffic controllers crowd the shot - more and more heads joining the fray, staring intently at a radar display - as a pilot reports a strange phenomenon. Despite never leaving the cramped control room it's one of the film's strongest moments, making wonderful use of the frame and of radio-traffic sound effects (Orson Welles might have been proud). Another odd event, later, is filmed from within the cab of a pick-up truck and it's a sequence as eerie as anything involving motherships and gangly aliens.

Even though the film's later sequences are a touch overblown, there's still great pleasure to be mined from the panoply of film references, whether it's the old-fashioned slapstick of Richard Dreyfuss struggling with a rubbish collector, the nod to the concluding segments of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, or the more insular reference to the music from Jaws - as well as the various movies that play in the background at key moments. From my perspective, there was also the intrigue of wondering just why young Barry, the little boy so fascinated by with the lights in the sky, wanders around in a Boston University t-shirt; my employer doesn't routinely turn up in pop culture phenomena.

Dial M For Murder

1954, US, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Where Rear Window, which Hitchcock made immediately afterwards, looked outwards into the courtyard to observe others going about their lives, Dial M For Murder looks inward, confined almost entirely to a single apartment set, with the police in this case the outsiders trying to understand what has gone on. Although the film betrays its stage origins at times in both dialogue and set design, there's still a remarkable sense of visual space, such that we know the location of every room in the tiny apartment, and indeed often the locations of specific objects - critical to both the central act of violence and, later, to the police's unveiling of the crime.

Hitchcock's obsession with icy blondes is front and centre here, with Grace Kelly the object of abuse throughout the film - while others see violence as a game (shades of Rope) she's devastated both by the act and its aftermath - but his visual signatures are also present, for instance in a shot where one is character seen over the shoulder of another, practically a carbon copy of a shot in Secret Agent. While there's an enjoyable sense of poetic justice in the finale, the film's high point is reached early on, in a wonderful long scene between Ray Milland and Anthony Dawson, with Milland both charming and utterly reprehensible.

2012 update: David Bordwell has a terrific analysis of the film, suggesting that Hitchcock employed creative and unusual solutions to the various problems presented by stage adaptation -- something of a counter-argument to those, including Hitchcock, who dismiss the film as a minor work. 

War Arrow

1953, US, directed by George Sherman

A routine 1950s Western, War Arrow is more interesting for what it reveals about the Hollywood system - and its attitudes to race - than for its thin intrinsic merits. Although the film was marketed as a Western, it could just as easily have been sold as a melodrama of frontier life, with scenes of high romantic drama, broken marriages, disloyal husbands, pretty "natives", handsome officers, and men doing what's right. As a consequence, it's never clear that director George Sherman has a solid handle on the material, and his filmmaking skills - with odd cut-off shots and clumsy edits - are roughly on a par with his narrative strengths.

For the modern viewer, the film's casual racism, seen in the ridiculous speech patterns assigned to the Indian characters - though the script is so poor than even this is pretty inconsistent - and the "redface" acting is highly problematic. Henry Brandon and Dennis Weaver have particularly egregious roles as a chief and a young brave; the production team seems to have decided that a bit of brown paint and a bad wig is all that's needed to transform the actors. They play opposite Jeff Chandler, who played Indian - and various other "native" - characters in a number of films, but who's the great white hope here. Early on, Chandler's character seems as though he might actually be capable of seeing the Indians as peers, presenting a pretty accurate account of the historical treatment of the Seminole tribe, and enlisting the Seminoles as allies, but as the film advances it reveals its hand, and there's not much pretty about it.

Note: This film is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. War Arrow played at the Corona, Royal and Regal theatres in Lagos in September 1956 (Lagos had roughly a dozen theatres at the time). I haven't been able to trace whether War Arrow was released in East or Southern Africa, but numerous films featuring similar themes - white/"native" warfare, "native" insubordination, guerrilla-style attacks, scenes placing white characters in peril - were banned in settler colonies such as Kenya, particularly at the height of the Mau Mau insurgency in the mid-1950s. Among the many titles banned in Kenya around that time was Budd Boetticher's Seminole, which would have recounted some of the same historical issues. Such films were generally passed without incident in West African countries, which had much smaller colonial populations: in the same month that War Arrow played in Lagos, four movies that had been banned in Kenya appeared on the Nigerian city's screens.

There's an excellent account of the film, with much of the Hollywood context, on the French website Dvdclassik.com.

Let the Right One In

2008, Sweden, directed by Tomas Alfredson (original title: Låt den rätte komma in)

A remarkably wintry bit of work, Tomas Alfredson's film re-imagines the mythology of vampirism and anchors within a recognisable reality, finding a deep streak of tragedy within the more familiar horror tropes. The film works against the prevailing tendency to glamorise vampires - Twilight, Moonlight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood - with the act of feeding depicted in brutal, messy, morally compromised terms, and these predators depicted as outsiders driven by their own desperate compulsions. What's most discomfiting about this is the idea that the vampire as a stand-in for the pedophile or even the killer - a threatening presence who is nonetheless strikingly similar to the rest of us, even if animated by very different drives.


Alfredson frames the vampire encounters within a coming-of-age tale, with a quiet boy turning to his odd young neighbour as he tries to escape from a routine regulated by constant bullying. There's no hint of romanticization, however: the young boy's vulnerability is his Achilles' heel in all of his encounters, and the solution to his bullying problems will lead him into more treacherous territory. The film has a circularity from which the deeper sense of tragedy emerges: boys become men, and men inevitably make choices and compromises they could never have conceived of as boys.


Alfredson is in absolute control of his material, slowly revealing information while building up his complex characters, and contrasting scenes of quiet winter sunlight with moments of startling violence: there are indelible sequences where a vampire enters a room uninvited - a component of the traditional mythology - and, later, in a scene of unexpected comeuppance in a swimming pool. His film is anchored by two remarkable performances from the child leads - part of a long tradition of strong youth acting in Swedish film - without which the narrative would have far less conviction.

The Golden Compass

2007, US, directed by Chris Weitz

It can't be easy, the business of adapting a much-loved book series and dealing with the fan fallout. But it's a particularly big challenge in this case, since the film jettisons much of what makes the books most interesting - the ideas and even the philosophical questions - in favour of the more screen-friendly plot elements. That wasn't as much of an issue in adapting the most obvious recent comparison, the Harry Potter books, because they're so plot-filled anyway (so much so that the books became very unwieldy as the series continued); the issue was more one of trying to decide which subplots to cull.

There is, of course, a decent helping plenty of plot in Philip Pullman's work, too, which means that ideas such as the relationship between humans and their daemons - a fascinating set of questions about the consciousness and the conscience on the page - are given pretty short shrift here, and indeed aren't always even given satisfying visual form, because the film needs to end with the plot ready to be taken up again where the second book begins. The early sections of the film, in a re-imagined Oxford, are the most successful, mostly for the way in which they posit an alternative yet recognisable reality; as the action transfers to the north country, the CGI effects come to dominate the narrative, and there's no time any longer to linger on the human side of things.

A Night at the Museum

2006, US, directed by Shawn Levy

Another movie chosen to while away a long plane ride, and a disappointment even on the level of lightweight entertainment. The plot is a rehash of the divorced-Dad-must-reconnect-with-son genre (not a genre filled with masterpieces), although here it's blended with a CGI-heavy fantasy plot. The film's greatest problem is that it seems extraordinarily lifeless: there's little sense that the effects work and the human story exist in harmony, even though the film gets much mileage out of Ben Stiller's interactions with diminutive characters (supposedly museum miniatures come to life), at least not until the end. There are brighter spots early on, especially from Dick van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, but even they quickly run out of material (Rooney seems to have been given the same line, or a rough variation thereon, half-a-dozen times). Amazingly, though, the box office was big and as I biked to work today, buses were emblazoned with ads for the sequel.

The Class

2008, France, directed by Laurent Cantet (Original title: Entre les murs)

Andy Horbal, who I'm glad to see has taken up the blogging baton again, asks a simple but entirely apposite question about Entre les murs: what to do with this film? While superficially it seems to be concerned with the situation of the education system in inner-city Paris - though it gives the viewer very little sense of the world beyond the walls of the title, and indeed there are few clues that the film takes place in the capital rather than its oft-maligned banlieues - it's difficult to determine what it's trying to say.

After all, on at least one level the system is demonstrably not broken: salaries are paid, most children attend school, problems are moved from one institution to another to at least attempt to give students a fresh start, and the school functions as a means of passing on French republican values through constant debate and contestation. Even as the students are challenging the system's relevance to their lives, and pointing out that such ethnic and linguistic diversity was never imagined by those who founded the modern education system, they're doing so within well-tested boundaries. The teachers themselves function as a mirror image of this debate, with their school operating as a testing ground for their own ideas of citizenship: while their lives are, day in and day out, exhausting and frustrating, there's still a clear framework in place within which the film never really calls into question.

And yet, as Andy points out, there's also a terrible sense that these students, even as they're being inculcated into a certain way of seeing the world - une certaine idée de la France - are acquiring almost nothing in the way of concrete knowledge, for the system insists that they diligently master the imperfect subjunctive but never seems to test them in any meaningful way, while any really new ideas are absorbed on their own time, as in the scene where a student reveals she's read Plato's Republic. That scene, though, tips the film's hand: it's as obvious as anything in the Hollywood inner-city high genre, and while this film has the virtue of giving the students themselves a voice, it manages to do so in ways that are occasionally eerily reminiscent of a much more obviously conventional film, Freedom Writers, which also makes prominent use of The Diary of Anne Frank as a means to draw the students out.

(Michael Sicinski's dissection of the film makes useful reading, particularly in terms of setting the film within its documentary context, as well as in exploring the acutely illogical nature of one key plot development; it's worth seeing the film first, though).

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2009, US, directed by Gavin Hood
Wolverine isn't great art, but as a big summer movie it's pretty good fun, at least up until the obligatory over-the-top conclusion in which even the limited logic established earlier in the film is thrown out the window. Despite their very different styles, Hugh Jackman reminds me of Bruce Willis: no matter what the material, both actors give 100% onscreen, and I can't help thinking that audiences notice and respond. I rather enjoyed Jackman's hosting of the 2009 Oscars: as silly as the opening song-and-dance number may have been for many viewers, the host gave it his all, which came across even on a small TV screen. The same is true here, with the downside that the film tends to miss Jackman's energy when he's offscreen (although Danny Huston is pretty good in a villainous role). The early going tries to restore some of the smaller scale of the first two X-Men installments, and scenes of Logan/Wolverine's attempts to create a normal life are quite effective, recalling similar efforts -- in a rather different context -- in Gavin Hood's earlier Tsotsi. Inevitably, though, the film subsequently proceeds toward the kind of one-on-one face-off that seems obligatory in the superhero genre, while also leaving plenty of sequel-friendly loose ends.

Gran Torino

US, 2008, directed by Clint Eastwood

It's not always subtle - the central character, Walt Kowalski, literally growls in displeasure from time to time, with Eastwood very consciously channelling characters past - but there's a bracing directness to Gran Torino, which manages to craft a deft portrait of a changing midwestern community without ever losing sight of its central narrative goals. Occasionally, Eastwood is forced to shoehorn awkward speeches into the film to fill in the backstory - two early scenes, one involving Kowalski's sons, the other a persistent parish priest, are especially obvious - but for the most part the dialogue - and there's plenty of it - emerges quite naturally from the developing interactions between Kowalski and his neighbours, members of the Vietnamese Hmong community. 

Although Eastwood may overdo the relationship between Kowalski's tortured past and his prickly yet benevolent present - revealing him as a bigoted salt of the earth character - he is able to use Walt to explore themes of immigration, integration, and working class culture that more usually fall to American independent cinema (if they crop up at all). Eastwood and his writer, Nick Schenk, also evoke the disintegrating Detroit suburbs with real care, and even humour, neither condescending to the residents nor indulging in false uplift. 

Doubt

2008, US, directed by John Patrick Shanley
Although my own Catholic school experiences were in the 1980s in Ireland, there's no mistaking the sometimes bone-chilling discipline that writer-director John Patrick Shanley captures here, the idea that wrapped within the iron rod the nuns and priests have the best interests of the child at heart. That many of the teachers actually believed in all sincerity this didn't necessarily make the school atmosphere any more reassuring, and Shanley, among other things, adeptly explores the ways in which such attitudes resulted in an environment where paranoia and fear affected those at the head of the classroom as much as those behind the desks. Indeed, here the young students themselves are more or less a peripheral presence, for the film's concerns play about between adults.

Although he's generally very assured as a director, carefully revealing facts only when he wishes to show his hand, you occasionally wonder whether Shanley has full confidence in his material and his very fine complement of actors, particularly when he feels the need to underline key moments with Dutch angles, a rather jarring choice in what's otherwise a fairly ascetic visual approach. It's interesting that the Dutch angles in Slumdog Millionaire, which seem far more appropriate to that film's intent and energy, were the subject of far more negative reaction, whereas here they took me out of the otherwise compelling world of the film.

(As with any mainstream release, there's no shortage of online reviews of Doubt, but I thought Glenn Kenny's take on the film especially interesting.)

Persuasion

1995, UK, directed by Roger Michell
Released just before the mini-series version of Pride and Prejudice tore across screens, Roger Michell's adaptation of Jane Austen's final novel is altogether less light-hearted in tone, finding something quite dark in the often confined lives of its female characters in particular. It's been long enough since I've read the books to recall whether that's a characteristic lifted directly from Austen's work, but Michell's choices of music and lighting indicate that he's after something more than a vibrant romp (the essential tone of the Pride and Prejudice series is captured in the opening music).

Without entirely embracing a slavish period authenticity, Michell reminds us, subtly but insistently, of the physical reality of Austen's world: the mud and rain, the dimly-lit drawing rooms, the terror induced by what we would now see as minor ailments, and the sense of often debilitating familial regulation. He's able to switch between the queasy handheld camera that gives a sense of the jarring carriage rides that must have been a daily reality, and limpid shots that convey the almost endless parlour days of a life of leisured wealth. That constant concern for the real world makes his characters' dilemmas all the more concrete: we can see the limits within which they operate, and the careful delineations of class and wealth which are an obsession for some and an impediment for others. And, along the way, we're treated to several wonderful performances, particularly Amanda Root and an up-and-coming Ciaran Hinds as a very Austenian hero.

Mercury Rising

1998, US, directed by Harold Becker

Bruce Willis always gives the requisite 110%, no matter how silly the set-up, and it's pretty silly here, as an autistic boy solves an apparently innocuous puzzle that compromises a top-secret US code (it says something about the movie that neither the audience nor the chief code guy - Alec Baldwin in one-note baddie mode - can figure out the absurdity that led to the release of the information in the first place). No matter: Bruce is on the case, ready to save the country, at least for the blue-collar beer-drinking classes (the wine drinkers are put firmly in their place). He'll take a bullet if necessary to protect the unfortunate child, who spends most of the film screaming in terror given that he's constantly being chased, shot at, and generally abused, frightening for any child never mind one with a disorder like autism. Ironically, given the neurological subject matter, this practically defines mindless.

Penelope

2006, UK/US, directed by Mark Palansky

Although the filmmakers might like to think Penelope is more social satire than fairytale, it succeeds pretty well in the latter vein: there’s real warmth to the performances from Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, especially in the early scenes where the characters haven’t laid eyes on each other due to Penelope’s apparent physical affliction. The film’s fantasy version of London populated with deliberately strange mid-Atlantic accents is also a compelling re-imagining of the location; Palansky recasts the city a little like Jeunet and Caro's appropriated a vaguely real Paris in their (more biting) Delicatessen, while he surrounds his leads with a great cast of character types (though I wish Richard E. Grant had ended up with a little more screen time).

Grave of the Fireflies

1988, Japan, directed by Isao Takahata


A war film that focuses almost exclusively on the the civilian experience of war, Isao Takahata's film follows two orphaned children in 1945 Japan, with an older boy (Seita) desperately trying to care for his young sister (Setsuko) in a situation where adults are either absent or are unable to see beyond their own straitened circumstances to take the children in. What gives the film much of its power is Seita's attempts, despite his own terrible experiences, to create a protective cocoon in which his sister can still have some semblance of a normal routine and even hints of a childhood notwithstanding the fires and deaths that have destroyed the city.

There's great power in Takahata's resolutely unsentimental evocation of a country slipping deeper into privation, where food and money are desperately scarce, and the normal care systems - both governmental and familial - have been strained to breaking point and beyond. As the film notes, wartime ultimately shreds the social fabric, with individual family members looking only to their own instances, and generosity the rarest commodity of all.

While civilian suffering in the war was undoubtedly terrible, and is given deeply affecting expression here, I do wonder if the choice of child protagonists allows the film to skirt some of the issues of adult responsibility that have proved so difficult to navigate in postwar Japan. It's instructive to contrast the film with Kazuo Hara's extraordinary, taboo-breaking documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, released just a year before, which confronts the wartime roles of the military and political systems that ultimately created the conditions in which civilians suffered terrible fates.

The Good Shepherd

2006, US, directed by Robert De Niro

De Niro's account of the early years of the inception and early years of the CIA is compelling enough, but you get the feeling it's all very over-determined, as though the central conflict has an inevitable outcome designed to show Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) the error of his ways. Wilson's a spectacularly humourless man - don't these super-spies ever crack a joke? - who's barely capable of expressing affection to his family, and the film ultimately runs further with than conceit than with Wilson's actual motivations and beliefs as he becomes integrated into the country's espionage bureaucracy. The film has considerable value in outlining the ways in which wartime created the conditions for the post-war apparatus of paranoia (a self-fulfilling paranoia at times) but it's less successful in revealing much about a man whose character has been sketched in broad strokes early on.