Author Archives: aides memoires

Dead of Winter

Posted on by
1

Director Brian Kirk with Emma Thompson

With the weather and my aches, I was getting cabin fever so an evening at the cinema appealed. This film fitted the bill: I was engrossed while watching it (although cavilling at the over-sentimental flashbacks) and happily picked it to pieces on the way home. Emma Thompson is great as a kind, grieving widow who unleashes her inner Rambo when she discovers a dreadful crime. The winter landscape is perfect for the action: a shoot-out between the Wicked Witch and the Fairy Godmother to keep Snow White. It’s pretty ludicrous – but I wasn’t bothered by that.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Posted on by
Reply

I feel as if I should be writing an essay on the themes of this novel, its recurring images, its modernism and streams of consciousness that lead to a great sea of life – and then hand it in to be marked. But no – I shall just note what struck me on my first reading.

I’ve never read Ulysses (and have no inclination to), but I assume there are similarities. Is it telling that there is no great legendary female voyager to represent Mrs Dalloway? Her geographical range is narrow – Central London and somewhere in the country – but her temporal range is from girlhood to her current age. There were echoes of The Wasteland too – shell-shocked Septimus and I had not thought death had undone so many, the bells that keep the hours.

Women/girls and flowers/the natural world. We first meet Mrs Dalloway as she sets off to buy some flowers (cut, already picked) for that night’s party; her daughter is now of an age where men see her as a flower to be plucked:

She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking . . .

I found myself very taken by the attempts to encompass everything of a person’s thoughts: the constant flowing between youth and middle age in one’s head while clocks strike the hours:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it?

So many characters whose lives briefly touch. Septimus and his suffering Italian wife. The repellent and conflicted – but also suffering – Miss Kilman. Their lives appear dreadful against the worldly comforts of the Dalloways and their friends. Reticence: Mr Dalloway intends to tell his wife that he loves her, but he passes up the opportunity to yet, involuntarily, he tells his daughter how lovely she is. Age brings with it complications that we are only dimly aware of.

Perhaps Sally’s final words are the ones to be heeded: “What does the brain matter . . . compared with the heart?”

Just brilliant.

The Green Ray (1986)

Posted on by
1

Director Éric Rohmer with Marie Rivière

A film that was by turns boring, intriguing, excruciating and very French. “Excruciating” because it reminded you of how awful being young can be – uncertainty, boredom, dissatisfaction, the feeling that things should be progressing along a certain path but aren’t. Delphine’s summer holiday plans are disrupted at the final moment and she has to find somewhere else to go instead. Her engagement has ended and her friends nag her to find someone else. She tries Cherbourg, the Alps and Biarritz and is disconsolate in all those places. Finally there is what seems to be a fairy-tale ending – engineered by Delphine’s moment of decision combined with her “personal superstition”.

It was a film of observation: there was no analysis or judgment. Delphine is often in tears and her well-meaning friends describe her as depressed, but it’s presented as part of life. The film was semi-improvised – sometimes jarringly so, when characters seemed to be responding to an interviewer rather than just talking. Delphine had three or four major speeches when she tried to explain herself – her vegetarianism, her sense of not fitting in, and her refusal to accept one-night stands in place of romance. These – along with the pick-up scene – made the film feel quite different, its diffuse feeling suddenly coming into focus.

A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Posted on by
Reply

Director Anton Corbijn with Philip Seymour Hoffman

An intricate, classily-shot spy film set in Hamburg from a John le Carré novel, reeking of cynicism and cigarettes. It kept me engaged while I watched it and I only picked holes in it afterwards.

Hoffman is a dishevelled, disenchanted spy in charge of a small counter-terrorist unit. He plays the role well, even if the German accent does sound unaccountably Irish at times. A slow-moving, tightly woven plot with some threadbare patches; a few ends – like motives – are left hanging. Why is Gunther so keen to add yet another mole to his network of informers? What’s the purpose of an endless chain of double agents? Perhaps the Americans are right in taking the brutal step of removing the questionable philanthropist rather than allowing more funds to trickle through to Al Qaeda. And le Carré wishful thinking blended well with Hollywood norms: all the women were beautiful and soignée and nearly all the men were nothing to write home about.

Maassluis to Europoort

Posted on by
Reply

The usual route through Brielle back to Europoort. After years of alternating between “German” and “French” pronunciations I have finally discovered how to pronounce it as the Dutch do. This time I visited St Catherine’s Church: I was drawn there by wondering if it was unfinished or half-demolished (the former). I was rewarded for my curiosity by discovering that from the church tower the future Mary II waved off her husband, the future William III, as he set off to overthrow James II. (Sadly, time did not allow me to retrace her steps.)

Doesburg to Arnhem

Posted on by
Reply

We crossed the Ijssel, headed into the Veluwezoom National Park – and promptly got separated. We have a protocol which has worked well enough in the past – go back to the last point we saw each other and use our phones. Problems this time: one phone (no, not mine) was dead . . . and, actually, what happens if you have two different memories of where you last saw each other? We were waiting for each other in different places. In the end I flagged down passing cyclists and sent them forth to look out for a lost tourer. After almost an hour we were reunited thanks to Roberto, a racing cyclist who had turned round and halved his pace to return the missing sheep to the fold. Swallowing annoyance, I reflected on the helpfulness I had encountered.. I had stopped several people, obliged them to speak to me in a foreign language and burdened them with a plea for assistance.

Needless to say, the phone was recharged as soon as we reached Arnhem.

It was a lovely ride through undulating woods on serpentine cyclepaths. In some places Highland cattle roamed freely and rather hogged the paths. Our route into Arnhem was largely downhill through pleasant residential streets of traditional-style 20th-century buildings. Shortly before the station we came to a block of rather interesting buildings which I walked back to look at afterwards. I learned afterwards that they were all by local architect, Willem Diehl.