Category Archives: Films

Nouvelle Vague

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Director Richard Linklater with Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin

I did my homework: I rewatched À Bout De Souffle the previous night. I was too old when I first saw it to be bewitched by its youthfulness and spontaneity and too used to the techniques/approach that it pioneered; this time I was more aware of the circumstances of its creation and more sympathetic to the sense that Godard was trying to capture. Perhaps, too, I am now old enough to appreciate the actors’ youthfulness – particularly Belmondo’s athletic grace and the close-ups of Seberg’s angelic face. This time, too, I wondered about an anti-American angle: the Bogart vibe and the betrayal by an American woman of a good old purse-rifling, car-thieving, police-killing French gangster.

Anyway, Nouvelle Vague is a film about the making of À Bout De Souffle, and it was wholly successful in making me interested in it again. It’s an amusing, engaging, clever homage with brilliant performances/impersonations. It was strange to see Belmondo portrayed as an easy-going young man, since the character he plays in the film is so impatient and hectoring, subconsciously aware that his days are numbered. Marbeck was great as the epigram-heavy, and devious Godard. Mercifully, Linklater’s film avoided the jump cuts and stilted wordiness of Godard’s film; it was the epitome of a stylish, tasteful well-made film that was the opposite of Godard.

Hamnet

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Director Chloé Zhao with Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal

I have a prejudice towards films about real people: it seems to me a trespass and condescension to assume you can portray the inner life of another person. It’s a bit ridiculous of me, and I frequently put it aside (quick check to see how many biographical films I have watched over the past couple of years). And – be reasonable – it’s not like everyone has the option to make autobiographical films like The Long Day Closes. Besides – Hamnet is a film with William Shakespeare, who surely sent Richard III spinning in his grave(s), and so little is known of his life – not to mention his wife’s – that there is fertile ground for speculation.

I enjoyed Zhao’s last film, and there were continuities with this one: strong female lead, nature, joy, kindness, hardship, dirt, earth. Agnes barely moves horizontally in this film (just once to London); her plane is vertical, from planting in the ground with her bare hands to soaring with her hawk. It’s a powerful film: I was a bit resistant to the obvious emotional wave of the acting and musical score at its height but it was undeniable. The attraction between Agnes and Will is immediate and practically wordless; of the two, she has the greater power of the spoken word with rhymes and chants learned from her mother and her own self-expression. The “great man” is often peripheral to the story, for this is seen through women’s eyes: Agnes and her mother-in-law are the protagonists here. (Lots of incidental ironies: if this had been made in Shakespeare’s time, they would have been played by men.) The modern dialogue and sensibility (which jarred slightly) are offset by the dirt and hardship of sixteenth-century life. Birth and death were definitely not anaesthetised or antiseptic.

I am ambivalent about it. My critical voice was on speakerphone while I watched it, telling me that it was too obvious in its emotional weight – but, on reflection, the themes of a woman’s life, family life, nature (the basics of any life, after all) and the transmutation of love and grief into a shared experience through art have stayed with me.

Seven Samurai (1954)

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Director Akira Kurosawa

An engrossing film – despite its lasting three and a half hours and my knowing the story from The Magnificent Seven. B&W with some scene transitions that made me think (incongruously) of the 1960s Batman series. I don’t know how much the director had westerns in mind as he filmed it, but inevitably westerns were constantly in my mind as I watched it. The social types, the codes of honour, the paucity of female roles, the dress code. Quite fascinating.

Strong opposites: the peasants frightened, sly and eternal, a collective; the samurai brave, mobile and ephemeral, for they would die before their time. The bandits – ? Landless peasants, rogue samurai or just generic “baddies”? There were speeches about the importance of collective over individual defensive action, and I wondered if the film (expensive, long, prestigious) was aimed at bolstering Japan’s image after its surrender.

It made me rethink Hollywood genres and tropes too. Not just westerns but all those Robin Hood type of films and the Roman/early Christian films I saw on television as a child, which inducted me unwittingly into the “grammar” of the genres so that I know that a black cowboy shirt indicates a baddy without ever having learned the fact. I couldn’t parse the significance of sumo-style wrapping vs long culottes for samurai in the same way, but I’m not sure it mattered. There were only three guns – all in bandits’ hands at the outset – and I wondered if these foreign imports were viewed as somehow dishonourable. There was definitely an elegiac quality in the depiction of the samurai – as if their day was coming to an end.

Yes, I’m glad that I have watched this particular classic.

It Was Just An Accident

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Director Jafar Panahi

Set in Iran and filmed without official permission. A family man accidentally runs over a dog (“just an accident”) and damages his car. While it is being repaired, he is seen by a car mechanic, who believes he recognises him as the man who tortured him in prison some years before. He kidnaps the interrogator and intends to kill him, but doubts creep in: is he mistaken in his identification? He never saw the man, for he was always blindfolded. He knows only the voice, the smell and the sound made by the prosthetic leg – experiences he can never forget. Over the course of a day and a night he drives around with other past victims of the interrogator as they try to decide what to do with him.

It’s a tense, varied film – sometimes almost comic, sometimes almost disquisitional, frequently chilling. It implies that there is no end in sight to the violence: the trauma and suffering of the regime’s victims against the sense of righteousness of the regime’s officials. There is kindness and goodness, but also fanaticism, a desire for revenge and a generalised corruption (e.g. security guards with their own card readers for backhanders). It was quite brilliant – and the ending caught me off-guard.

Volver (2006)

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Director Pedro Almodóvar with Penélope Cruz

I’m never going to like Almodóvar’s blend of melodrama and X-rated Benny Hill, but I left my prejudices at home and made the most of this film. It’s a practically all-female cast, but men’s deeds cast long shadows over them. (I did think “not this again” at the obviousness of the plot – and the next morning there was something more about the Jeffrey Epstein files in the newspaper. So, yes, this again.) It’s silly about serious things with a generous spirit and focus on women’s struggles, and I remind myself that Almodóvar grew up under the repression and conformity of Franco’s Spain. Cruz is wonderful – a bit like Sophia Loren, with glamour shining through even as she mops floors. Visually it’s colourful and inventive, with plenty of cleavage and bottoms as usual.

Hidden City (1987)

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Director Stephen Poliakoff with Charles Dance and Cassie Stuart

A dud of a film – stilted, with over-expositionary dialogue and some wooden acting; basically just not good enough to keep you in its orbit. Typical Poliakoff – a fascination with the recent past that pulls you in and a disregard for credibility or coherence that pushes you away. This one was a psychogeographic conspiracy theory with gaping holes and sidetracks that led nowhere. The scene where the secret service heavies stopped for their tea break was straight out of Astérix chez les Bretons. (Or perhaps the writer might have been hoping for more of a Blow Up vibe.)

And yet . . . While it didn’t succeed as a good film in its own right, there was something about it that set me thinking. I liked the use of locations – particularly the Kingsway tram depot that I remember (the site of which I shall walk past tomorrow) – and the sense of other lives at other times in this selfsame spot. It reminded me of my little trip into the London underground. There was some humour – just not in the attempt at mismatched couple comedy, which misfired thanks to some poor dialogue and worse acting. There was a side interest in a 1980s take on video culture and declining attention span. (So ironic that Richard E Grant announced that he hadn’t watched a film all the way through for some years when I was thinking about the off button.)

Comparisons to other films: Radio On for its interest in screens and really looking at things. I also thought of The Edge of Darkness from the 1980s and its take on buried secrets (literally and metaphorically), government conspiracy and cover-up. That also grew increasingly unbelievable as a literal plot, but such was its quality that you were carried along with it. No such luck with Hidden City.

The Nights of Cabiria (1957)

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Director Federico Fellini with Giulietta Masina

This is more or less the plot of Sweet Charity, only less sugar-coated. Cabiria is a streetwalker in Rome whose hopefulness breaks the bounds of her circumstances. The film opens with her lover stealing her handbag . . . and ends with her new lover, who has promised her the happy-ever-after marriage she longs for, doing the same. But this time her handbag contains her life-savings. The final scene is her walking disconsolately, caught up in a group of high-spirited youngsters. Even while a tear trickles down her cheek, she begins to smile again.

Themes were familiar from other Fellini films. It embraces people living in caves and the film star in his swanky apartment – mixing La Strada with La Dolce Vita. The ending itself is out of 8½, as the central character is caught up in a kind of dance. Masina makes the role her own: her expressive dance and body are Chaplinesque.