Category Archives: Films

The Good Boss (2021)

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Director Fernando Léon de Aranoa with Javier Bardem

A black comedy that would have been something-and-nothing without the central presence of Bardem. He plays the smug, hypocritical, paternalistic boss of a manufacturer of scales (a metaphor that the film balances on) who has to contend with some potential PR disasters while the company is in the running for a prestigious award. His smarmy charm turns nasty as things escalate. There’s a kind of comeuppance; the fact that it’s engineered by a young woman is satisfying, but, as usual, it’s the Poor Bloody Infantry who suffer.

Dark River (2017)

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Director Clio Barnard with Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley

A bleak and gruelling film. The ever-flowing blackness of wicked deeds. Woman returns to family farm after abusive father’s death and comes into conflict with her brother over ownership. They are both damaged and inarticulate; the scene where he gets drunk and violent is interwoven with her expertly skinning and gutting a rabbit. Like Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, the grimness is leavened all too briefly by encounters with the natural world and moments of connection. It was well done: the photography was good (although my reaction to sheep-cropped hillsides may not be as swooning as a nature-deprived townie’s), the actors excellent, and the film got under the skin of a narrow farming life and its particular knowledge and skills. The contrived ending irritated me somewhat: she emerges cleansed by the storm while he spends the rest of his life “atoning”.

The Great White Silence (1924)

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Ponting filming the metal-clad hull of the Terra Nova cleaving its way through the pack ice

I’ve returned to Antarctica. This is Ponting’s first film of the Terra Nova expedition. A silent with a discreet modern score (thankfully not by the Pet Shop Boys); Abide With Me over the final photographs of Wilson, Scott and the rest certainly had me sniffling. It was brilliant, giving rise to so many thoughts that swung between today’s way of thinking and that pre-WWI Empire-venerating, masculine, Christian mindset that had its own virtues of stoicism and comradeship. It’s mostly about the journey from New Zealand to Antarctica and the wildlife they encountered. The images (penguins, seals, whales) are fairly standard stuff today, but Ponting was truly ground-breaking and courageous. The intertitles were very anthropomorphic, and I would have liked more about the men – but the film was a record of a doomed scientific exhibition, not a photo album.

I have now found an online copy of Priestley’s “Antarctic Adventure” about the gruelling experiences of the Northern Party. I’m hoping the “Boys Own” vibe of the title is belied by the account itself, but I’m not expecting anything as moving as Wilson’s own diaries or Cherry-Garrrard’s generous and insightful account.

Local Hero (1983)

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Director Bill Forsyth with Peter Riegert and Denis Lawson

I didn’t quite get the admiration for Bill Forsyth’s films in the 1980s: their charm eluded me. I’m still not sure that I would want to rewatch Gregory’s Girl, but after 40 years I can say that Local Hero is a really enjoyable film. What I saw then as tiresome whimsy interlaced with money-centred real life is now a small, subtle pleasure. It’s beautifully filmed – idyllic Scotland without the drizzle – and this time I noticed the parallels. Mac and Urquhart are brothers under the skin: both successful wheeler-dealers, albeit one in Houston (international scope for benign/malign influence) and one a Scottish village (influence limited by personal ties). Since Riegert and Lawson were similar in size, build and colouring, this worked perfectly. Little jokes – Mac’s forefathers were from Hungary, the unknown toddler in the pushchair, the Russian fishing captain checking his financial portfolio. Surreal touches of the outside world – the motorcycling dervish and the punk rocker. The minor female roles (stereotypical objects of desire) were enhanced by noticing that one is Marina and the other Stella – echoing the range of the film from underwater oil deposits to Happer’s obsession with astronomy. Nothing was laboured: the amusement was understated and fleeting.

It doesn’t stand up to rigorous analysis – was that supposed to be an environmental message at the end? just what did the villagers intend to do if they made it to Knox’s beach shack? – but I’ll take a bit of filmy gossamer over a tub-thumping lecture any day.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

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Director Carol Reed with Ralph Richardson, Bobby Henrey, Michèle Morgan

What a brilliant film. Richardson was outstanding as Baines the butler. Kindly, amusing and flawed. The little boy was natural and very watchable without being stomach-churningly cute. He was in almost every scene, so the audience always had a simultaneous sense of the adult and the child’s view of what was happening. The photography – angles, framing (Philippe half-wrapped in his blanket or through the banisters) – was a delight. It even had an uncertain outcome – would the gun be used? – which maintained suspense.

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.