Author Archives: aides memoires

Central Station (1998)

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Director Walter Salles with Fernanda Montenegro and Vinícius de Oliveira

A retired schoolteacher ekes out her pension by writing letters for illiterate people at Rio’s main station. She’s cynical and outwardly hard-boiled; she doesn’t always post the letters as promised, sitting in judgement on feckless husbands and fathers. To me, this trashing the hopes of communication between people was as bad as (unwittingly?) selling Josué to possible organ-harvesters! (She does atone for both sins.) Reluctantly she ends up accompanying a motherless boy across Brazil to find (if they can) his father. I saw this when it came out and I am ashamed to say that the only scene i really remembered was the one with the lipstick and the vanishing truck driver.

It’s a slow road movie with redemption/rebirth as one of its journeys. The opening scenes reminded me of The Lunchbox, but probably more from the press of population than the way it was filmed (brilliant at following an individual through a crowd). I had forgotten the latent menace in the society it shows: a petty thief at the station is chased and killed. I don’t know if the religious references are “sincere” or just “cultural”: Isadora and Josué (both actors perfect) are looking for Jesus, his father, a carpenter with two other sons, Moisés and Isaías. There are images of the Madonna and Child in the film – but the publicity poster is of the child holding the woman. (So should I see the lipstick as blood/wine?) Dora talks of how forgetting is inevitable, but it’s clear that she can’t forget her own childhood memories. The ending went awry: Dora’s leaving abruptly is unkind, and the audience seeing her writing a letter on the bus (to an illiterate nine-year-old), doesn’t change that.

The Choral

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Director Nicholas Hytner with Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allam

(Inadvertently I went to a captioned performance: note to self not to do that again until the time comes when it’s actually necessary.)

It was OK. The choral society of a Yorkshire mill town in 1916 puts on an amateur performance of The Dream of Gerontius. They are in the middle of war: many men have already been killed or wounded, and more will be sent to the front after their eighteenth birthdays to risk the same fate. Poignancy is always there. Art, community, endeavour are ways of transcending the brute reality. Fiennes and Allam are very good. The film is typically Alan Bennett in its Yorkshireness, whether humour or bluntness, and there was certainly one scene that he’s used before. In the end, however, I found it very hit and miss and too baggy: there were too many short scenes covering class, morality, grief, repression, sexuality, larking about, art or anti-German feeling that the film doesn’t have a chance to gel. And the performance of the Dream is a a very modern interpretation and, I thought, ineffectively shot.

It was partly filmed in Saltaire; I recognised it immediately.

Wayne Thiebaud

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Each era produces its own still life

Sometimes I am not sure what will grab me and what will elude me. I quite like being surprised by myself. And – for some reason – this small exhibition of a particular section of Thiebaud’s work grabbed me. The introductory panel with Thiebaud’s own quotation set me up: I couldn’t deny what he said, and it was enough to open my mind to his work. Without it I could just as easily have come away thinking that, like Lichtenstein, he had found his schtick and stuck to it. The exhibition reminded me of a book I had to read (“plough through”) for an OU course: Gombrich on the beholder’s share when looking at a work of art. It made sense in front of Thiebaud.

As a graphic artist, he knew how to make an impression. Things I noted:

  • The muddiness of his early Meat Counter painting. Rather nasty colours and textures – unless his aim was to convert you to vegetarianism.
  • Abundance/scarcity – the empty trays on the delicatessen counter. It reminded me of the shock of seeing reduced food availability during Covid. That balance in the modern world of having everything under the sun available to buy . . . but empty shelves are never far away.
  • His still lifes are of everyday objects – nothing exotic or hot-housed here. They are cheap and mass-produced, painted so thickly that you can feel your teeth ache with the sweetness.
  • My steal was the Boston Cremes. They seemed to be float like moored yachts or even like ice shards on Friedrich’s Das Eismeer. Choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
  • Cakes made me think of the cake/doughnut counter at Leeds station. I have always regarded it with a detached and puritanical eye – all that sugar! – but now I shall look at it anew. Walking back, I passed another such counter and had to acknowledge how attractive it was in a garish fashion. (Now that I have aged into an appreciation of The Savoury, I can be judgemental about and ignore the attractions of The Sweet – hypocritcally obliterating from my memory the delicious sugar cubes I used to steal from the larder.)
  • I took a photograph of Cakes above the heads off people sitting on the bench, when really I should have included them. They would have complemented the palette perfectly – him in pale blue jeans and her in a pastel pink top.
  • Thiebaud referred to Cezanne and Chardin – and I could see that his perspective echoed Cezanne and his simplicity Chardin.
  • The impasto: it worked perfectly on the food, but he also layered the paint thickly on the smooth surfaces of the counters and trays. He wasn’t trying to be that representational.
  • Picture captions pointed out that, despite the seeming repetition of, for example, his slices of pie, each one was subtly different. And later I went for a coffee and noticed the cakes under their glass cases: they were indeed all slightly different, and had I had a cake I would have been silently willing the server to choose this one rather than that one.
  • It was all utterly trivial – cakes and toffee apples, for goodness sake! – but somehow utterly wonderful.

Joseph Wright and Cecil Beaton

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After two exhibitions in one afternoon, I thought that what Joseph Wright of Derby (the “of Derby” to distinguish him at that time from another painter of the same name) and Cecil Beaton had in common was creating their own distinctive worlds. One serious and one frivolous. The Wright exhibition was small, containing only a few large canvasses (but what canvasses!), some mezzotints (Wright had an eye for wider consumption), a couple of related exhibits (e.g. an air pump and an orrery) and a rather wonderful self-portrait in pastel. I had thought of him as painter of the new “scientific” age – casting new discoveries in a mould usually reserved for the heroic or biblical – but his range was broader than that. There were little tics: hidden light sources, glowing red tones. He certainly casts J Atkinson Grimshaw into the shade.

And then Cecil Beaton. The Wright exhibition was compact, and the Beaton one would have benefited from the same treatment. At times it felt like one perfect epicene profile and slicked-down hairstyle after another: the appeal of glamour (which is great) had dwindled to a yawn by the final rooms. His photographs, though – like Wright’s painting – do conjure up their own world, a mix of Brideshead Revisited and Hollywood floating in an atmosphere of superficiality and what would now come across as snobbery. There was the hiatus of WWII in all this gaiety; it killed Rex Whistler, Beaton’s friend, and sent Beaton around the UK and the world for the Ministry of Information. The Royal Family, Vogue, theatrical design . . . ah, good, the exit.

But it did send me up to room 24 afterwards to look at Augustus John’s portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, described by Beaton as presenting her with magenta hair and fangs. And it does!

Return to the Harris

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The Harris in Preston has recently re-opened after being closed for some years for renovation. It’s a building with more than one function – art gallery, museum, library, café – and the divisions between them have been blurred in its new layout. Hence there are paintings and reference books amongst desks and chairs in a grand room that rather made me wish I had some school homework to do. Its exhibits are more varied than before, making an effort to reflect Preston from Victorian times to the present day. I definitely want to return and wander at will again.

Susanna

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I may transfer my loyalty from the Grand in Leeds to the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. My first visit, and I was so pleased to have a clear view of the orchestra (including theorbo) from the dress circle.

This was a collaboration between Opera North and the Phoenix Dance Theatre: contemporary dance meets Handel’s oratorio. Sometimes it worked – dancers expressing the latent sensuality of the libretto. On the whole, though, it didn’t gel for me – and I’m willing to admit the deficiency is probably in me rather than the production. It crowded the stage, particularly with the chorus present. BSL was also included – partly in occasional gestures of the chorus, but most obviously through the presence on stage of a BSL interpreter, who made me think of someone who’d wandered on from the wings and decided to stay. I reminded myself – once again – that if I can swallow traditional opera with all its absurdities, I can’t baulk at innovation.

The singing and acting were wonderful. The moment the chorus began their lament for their exile in Babylon, I could feel a lump in my throat. Susanna and Joacim (a counter-tenor) were brilliant, as was the production.