Category Archives: Films

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.

Dead of Winter

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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.

The Green Ray (1986)

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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)

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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.

Theorem (1968)

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Director Pier Paolo Pasolini with Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano

An enigmatic, detached film that skewered the uptight, acquisitive bourgeoisie in a very 1960s/70s fashion. I’m not sure how to think of its attitude to the church though: was the maid’s transformation a satire or an allegory?

A stranger arrives at a Milanese industrialist’s house, seduces each member of the household and leaves. His arrival and departure are heralded by an arm-waving postman. Gabriel or a comic turn? (That’s what I mean about the church.) Each person is transformed by contact with the stranger. The daughter falls into a coma; the maid works miracles; the son perhaps finds his creative energy (depends on your POV I suppose); the wife takes to picking up young men, which could be seen as sexually liberating or despairing, again depending on your POV; and the husband throws off all his trammels – factory and clothes – and ends the film screaming, naked and alone, on Mount Etna. Shades of Stromboli and, somehow, Samuel Beckett.

What also struck me about it was its queer sensibility, which was so different from traditional films, and its reticence. Apparently Pasolini worked with Fellini – but Theorem couldn’t be further removed from the joyful, vital pile-up of something like 81⁄2!