Category Archives: Films

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!

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

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Director Sergei Eisenstein

The first time I’d seen this film, but some scenes – the maggots, the Odessa Steps, the significance of spectacles – are so well-known that I was already familiar with them. It’s an absolute tour de force – visually innovative and powerful. I was swept along with its message and ignored the little voice that noticed the manipulation of emotions. One might say the same of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. It’s set me thinking about the theory of film montage and how it creates atmosphere and feeling.

The film though was almost ruined for me by the over-insistent, distracting score – composed specially by The Pet Shop Boys, who obviously don’t do piano or have volume control . . . or even understand how to use silence.

Fallen Leaves

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Director Aki Kaurismäki

I’d meant to see this at the cinema but didn’t, so I was glad when I found it on the BBC. It’s an oddity: a “romance” between two lonely, hard-up people in Helsinki. The style is deadpan – there’s a big gulf between emotions and the characters’ affectless delivery of their lines. (It was described as a romantic comedy; we-ell, OK . . . but “Notting Hill” it ain’t.) It’s potentially very bleak: each time the radio is switched on the news is about more people killed in Ukraine. Their jobs are hard, monotonous and badly paid. He’s an incipient alcoholic.

There’s a lot going on behind the “action” and dialogue though. Colours: splashes of reds, yellows and blues. Music and songs function as a kind of Greek chorus and even drive the “plot”. Two glimpses of nature (in contrast to workplaces, bars and public transport) when optimism seems justified. Films are significant: the couple’s first date is going to The Dead Don’t Die. At the end of it two filmgoers come out – one comparing it to Bande à Part and the other to something by Robert Bresson (affectless acting again). She gives him her phone number; they are standing in front of film posters for a Godzilla-type film, something with Bardot, and – crucially – “Brief Encounter”. And, yes, he loses the phone number as soon as she walks away. I would need to check, but I think the camera is generally static. Lots of shots on public transport – including one rather heart-breaking one where Ansa is in the foreground, lonely and isolated, and behind her, slightly blurred, we see a young woman who resembles her rest her head on her partner’s shoulder. When the couple are finally reunited, he asks the name of her new dog; she tells him it is Chaplin . . . and they walk off into the sunset.

So realistic but not naturalistic – and rather lovely.

I realised later that Finns have reason to be very concerned about what Putin is doing in Ukraine.

Babette’s Feast (1987)

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Director Gabriel Axel with Stéphane Audran, Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer

Somewhere remote on the Danish coast in the 19th century. A slight touch of a fairy tale about it: there’s a narrator, and if she doesn’t actually start the film with “Once upon a time . . .”, she certainly comes close. Mysterious visitors turn up on their doorstep, there is an almost magical feast, and heaven with its angels is the world beyond.

Two elderly pious sisters, named after Luther and Melanchthon, spend their days in devotion and good works. They are part of a dwindling congregation founded by their late father – all members now elderly and occasionally fractious. In their youth, one sister had been loved by a visiting soldier but he had been called away, and the other had taken singing lessons with a famous French baritone. There was a beautiful scene of them singing the seduction duet from Don Giovanni lovingly but chastely – her final lesson, by her choice. Years pass, they grow old: a Frenchwoman, Babette, fleeing the Franco-Prussian war seeks refuge with them, and she becomes their cook and housekeeper. More years pass, they grow older; Babette wins the lottery and insists on preparing a real French dinner for the congregation – plus, as last-minute additions, the soldier (now a famous general) and his aunt; they are now twelve at table. The sisters quail before the rich food and wine that arrives in their kitchen, fearing that the dinner will be sinfully indulgent and akin to a witches’ sabbath. They urge the congregation to eat and drink but not to mention the luxury of what is put before them.

And they don’t. Only the worldly general is conscious of the magnificence of the food and of Babette’s skill. Yet all of them are touched by the spirit of the feast, which feeds them physically and spiritually. The quarrelsome congregation – their faces now rosy-tinged – retrieve their love for each other, and the general’s old frustrated love is turned into spiritual contentment. Babette’s sublime feast is food for the soul.

What struck me about the film was its attitude towards religious faith. I’m so used to my secular little world and seeing religion only through a cultural lens: “real” religion is the source of wars; in real life and in fiction it is often allied to hypocrisy (Jimmy Swaggart, Uriah Heep); it sits uneasily with feminism or liberal social attitudes; it focuses on heaven rather than real life; it is a thwarting and limiting force in the expansive modern world where almost anything is possible. It brings to mind the baleful Christianity of St John Rivers or the Bishop in Fanny and Alexander. Even a thoroughly “good” character like Dorothea Brooke is led into unhappy confinement by her faith and her wish to follow its precepts. I’m exaggerating, of course – traditional religious faith may get outward respect but doesn’t normally get a good press. It is too restrictive for modern unreligious minds. But in Babette’s Feast the sisters’ faith is shown uncondescendingly; they feel no regret at (what I would see as) their choice of narrow, monotonous lives and missed love affairs; they really are content and as good as they appear. Art is presented as a quasi-spiritual experience – Babette’s feast or the baritone’s music – but it is one of the sisters who has the final word about heaven and angels. I suppose in that respect I too found the film of Babette’s Feast transformative (as well as enjoyable – did I mention that?): it made me reconsider how to think about the presentation of religion.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

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Director Stanley Kubrick with Ryan O’Neal

I remember when this came out; the media were full of it – as they had been with The Great Gatsby the previous year. There was little chance of my seeing either film at the time; I wasn’t fussed about Gatsby, but Barry Lyndon sounded fascinating. So long in the making (and so long in the watching!), the technical difficulty of shooting “by candlelight”, so many extravagant scenes and so many extras, and so many publicity stills that made it look unlike any other film. (Some stills came back to me as I watched the film.) Given that my experience of films then was basically what was shown on television, that was hardly surprising. (Although it did give me a good grounding in westerns, the Hollywood classics and war films.)

So, finally, after 50 years I got to see it on a big screen. It is slow, detached, painterly, amoral, brutal, farcical and tragic all at once. Full of familiar faces on screen for short cameos. I shall not forget in a hurry Leonard Rossiter dancing a jig in thigh-high black boots. The scene where Lady Lyndon encounters Barry for the first time is just wonderful: the lighting, the colour, and such restrained expression in the faces of Murray Melvin and Marisa Berenson. Norma Desmond would have given top marks for their eye work. Acting is done by looks and action/stillness as much as words; Ryan O’Neal is a constant presence, but more often seen than heard. It’s as if figures in half-remembered paintings by Hogarth or Rembrandt come to life to hold the stage for a while and then step back into their frames to the accompaniment of Handel or Mozart.

Had I seen it 50 years ago I think I would have found it overlong and its tone incomprehensible. It was definitely worth waiting for.

As an aside: I have been pondering on male dominance in the external world until very recently, and here is yet another example after Key Largo and The Return. (Gross generalisation alert, obvs.) So much fighting (both in the Seven Years War and informally) and yet more shoot-outs – here the duels that bookend Barry’s career from farce to tragedy. So many images and actions that were once the norm – here the bare-knuckle fight with the regimental heavy. All these might now come under the heading of “toxic masculinity”, but perhaps another way of looking at them is as a signifier of underlying violence in the world.

I see why I so often read female novelists.

Key Largo (1948)

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Director John Huston with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G Robinson

Not wise-cracking characters along the lines of “The Big Sleep” as I was expecting: Bogart was polite and self-effacing, and Bacall was a domesticated widow with a bit of a temper. Only Robinson played true to form: the embodiment of every unhinged bad guy from Nero onwards. The film was adapted from a play – which was obvious from its uneasy juxtaposition of a hostage-scenario-in-a-hurricane with wordy disillusionment at the way the post-war world had turned out. Despite all the death and destruction, pre-war gangsters like Rocco were still around, still thriving, and looking to pull the strings of politicians. Just like Odysseus though, the hero rediscovered his sense of honour and wiped out the baddies single-handedly in yet another shoot-out.

And it worked, despite the well-worn path to the final credits. I was intrigued enough by the characters and the action to be hooked; the pace was tense, and the sense of disenchantment gave it a greater depth than a standard film noir.