Category Archives: Films

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.

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.