Category Archives: Films

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.

One Battle After Another

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Director Paul Thomas Anderson with Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn

Or “One Damn’ Thing After Another” as I thought of it as I was bombarded with quickfire scenes and dialogue, leaving no time for reflection. I’m far too old for something so chaotic, crude and shouty! (But the car chase was absolutely brilliant.) The only times it slowed down, as far as I recall, was to spotlight the malevolence of the powerful white supremacist cell, and a slightly jarring (given the circumstances) genuflection to motherhood at the end. Had I not read years ago the Pynchon novel on which it is loosely based, I would have been floundering a bit.

It’s about a father searching for his daughter against a background of underground agents: revolutionary anti-capitalists, resistance groups on the side of the oppressed, and chilling white supremacists in positions of power that they don’t intend to give up. Once past the cartoonish aspects (e.g. Sean Penn channelling every Sellars character from Dr Strangelove), there is a punchy – if incoherent – resistance to the current Trumpian agenda and actions.

It’s left me with a desire to see The Battle of Algiers again and vague comparisons with a couple of old programmes about state power I’ve recently watched on BBC iPlayer. One is Edge of Darkness – father and daughter again – and the other is David Hare’s play, Absence of War. Unsurprising, both are far more to my taste – but what, more objectively, I note is the way in which atmosphere is built and complex ideas are presented through dialogue and explanation (some of it admittedly clunky) rather than hurling images, vibes and one-liners in the direction of the audience.

The Long Day Closes (1992)

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Director Terence Davies

I have certainly watched a variety of films over the last fortnight. This was definitely my favourite. It swept me up, whereas The Green Ray and Radio On engaged only my curiosity and my brain. I don’t know how autobiographical it is: scenes of a boy’s life in 1950’s Liverpool, his loving family, the magic of the cinema, the brutality of his new school and the guilt-inducing teachings of the Roman Catholic faith – particularly for a boy attracted to his own sex. Memories are heightened: the rain always lashes down, women’s lipsticks are as red as can be, everyone has a good singing voice, his mother is the epitome of lovingness, the wonderful dream-like tableau of his family at Christmas straight out of Hollywood. The nit nurse is witch-like (rather as Miss Gulch turned into the Wicked Witch of the West) and the teachers are Dickens’s caricatures. Via the film, the ex-child shows how the long day – his carefree happiness? – closed with his new school, growing up, his former playmates running off to the cinema without calling for him; refusing to run after them, he retreats to the coal cellar, the shadow of the area railings and loneliness.

Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.

The soundtrack is every bit as significant as Radio On. The opening credits are like a lush Hollywood biopic, written in copperplate so elegant that it’s almost unreadable. The music is, I think (I could check), that which The Ladykillers appear to play as they plan their crime, and the opening scene is very much like that street . . . and, yes, here is Alec Guinness’s voice enquiring about a room. You read the screen images as carefully as any religious painting. Thresholds, front doors, narrow staircases are as significant as St Lucy’s eyes on a plate. When he’s standing in the lashing rain outside the cinema asking an adult to take him in – shades of Gene Kelly about to start singing in the rain?

Strange how the sentimental scenes in Dead of Winter left me cold but in this film I basked in their warmth. Perhaps because they left space for/contrasted with other emotions – and perhaps because I suddenly recalled that my father used to sing when I was a child. Even now I can hear him singing “The voice in the old village choir” (“accompanied” by me as the bells’ dongs) – now there’s a whole meta-chain of nostalgia!

Radio On (1979)

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Director Christopher Petit with David Beames

I thought about “radio off” partway through, but I persevered. It’s got to be a cult film for a reason, I reasoned. An English road movie – all the way from London to Bristol! – with a great soundtrack.

An odd, disaffected film that made me think of J G Ballard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Was there a plot? It was partly financed by the German film industry, and it shared that bleakness and gloom that put me off German films forty years ago. 1979 rushed back to me, but this time I experienced it from the eyrie of age. What happened to all that postwar optimism and rebuilding? How did it turn into this alienating, emotionally stunted world, shot in inky B&W, stripped bare – not of luxuries (for simplicity would be preferable), but of essentials? Where is friendliness, love, interaction, nature, warmth, beauty? It was all concrete and tarmac rather than softness, hostility rather than kindliness, hard core pornography rather than love, screens rather than real life. Potential emotional cores – his brother’s suicide, the German woman looking for her little daughter – were perfunctory. (The little girl now spoke a different language to her mother: intimacy was always fragile.) The acting was minimal, devoid of feeling unless it was anger or irritation. What was the point of it all? What was the director trying to convey? Anything at all? Was it just self-referentially “cinematic”?

I’m still not sure about that, but it definitely had the feel of its time. The camera lingered on things that I had gazed at myself: peeling paint, pylons, petrol pumps. I had forgotten how big women’s hair was in the late 70s and how voluminous their clothes until the two German women appeared. The feel of driving a car – something I did only at that period of my life – or just travelling in a car came back to me with all those shots through the windscreen. The underlying violence of the period – Northern Ireland always in the news, terrorism on the Continent. A film of impressions.