Written and directed by and starring Alice Lowe
I rather enjoyed Sightseers and I was prepared for black humour, comic-book gore and bad taste – but not for this. Despite some flashes of imagination and comedy, it was bitty and crude. It sounded OK – and what is the difference between a timeless infatuation à la Dante and Beatrice and stalking? – but the execution was hit and miss. It’s quite a while since I’ve come to the end of a film and felt that I’d wasted an evening.
Director Carl Hunter with Bill Nighy and Sam Riley
A pleasant, off-beat film starring Bill Nighy as Bill Nighy (which he does very well) with a Merseyside accent. It begins with him amongst the statues on Crosby beach, almost indistinguishable from them. He is an ageing man who has spent years looking for his missing son – and rather taking his remaining son for granted. He’s also a Scrabble fiend – so, good with words but – we gather – not with communication.
It’s filmed in a slightly quirky, retro style which invites rewatching and implies he is stuck in the past. (It also invites comparisons with Wes Anderson.) There are lots of good scenes and it was entertaining.
Director Lynne Ramsay with Samantha Morton
I remember thinking when this came out that it probably wasn’t my kind of film. Well, I’ve now watched it and thought about it – and haven’t changed my initial opinion, but I can see that it used its own way to tell the story.
It begins and ends with flickering lights – so I guess that indicates you can expect only partial illumination. It’s bookended too by Morvern’s boyfriend. The film opens with his dead body on the threshold between kitchen and living room: he has killed himself and left Christmas presents for her. The film ends with Morvern dancing to “Dedicated to the one I love” from the mixtape he made for her. In between she grieves, disposes of his body, claims his novel as her own and discovers Spain as an alternative to a life working in a supermarket somewhere cold and grey in Scotland. In the penultimate scene her friend rejects a return to Spain on the grounds that life’s the same everywhere; perhaps it is or perhaps Morvern can find a change. It seems to be a film about love and grieving – but it’s also about youth and discovering alternatives to the small world you start your life in. Lots of drink and drugs and partying to balance against days spent working in a supermarket. Visually it was interesting and at times madly exuberant. I felt very old watching it, but it made me reflect on the ignorance and thoughtlessness and joyful discovery that youth often means.
So much to make me raise a sceptical eyebrow at the unevenness of the tale and the opacity of the character. Why no Scottish accent for Morvern? Why not report the death and arrange the funeral as his note asked? Can you really cut up a body with utensils from the cutlery drawer? Dig a grave with a trowel? Do publishers normally write out cheques for £100,000 to new authors? Did Morvern have any greater insight into her actions and reactions than the audience did? In a way, it was brutally pragmatic: the bottom line was that Morvern’s life was transformed by her boyfriend’s money.
Director Ingmar Bergman
Amusing and entertaining enough with an undercurrent of cynicism and heartbreak. It didn’t engage.
Director Robert Bresson with Martin LaSalle
The polar opposite of The Brutalist: spare, short, black and white, non-professional actors, affectless dialogue, no images just for the sake of beauty or imagination, characters always dominant in the frame as far as I recall. (Well, except for the close-ups of the pickpocketing scenes, which were like dance interludes.)
No introduction, no backstory to the characters. Raskolnikov by Camus is my take. The written autobiography of a young man who decides to become a pickpocket. He’s not very good at first but meets (gets picked up by?) a professional who shows him how to do it properly. (There will be locks on all my pockets from now on!) He refuses to see his dying mother until the very end, he ignores the possibility of a job offered by his steadier friend, and he taunts a police officer with his theories that criminal masterminds are justified in their actions since they are superior to the rest of society. Doesn’t believe in God, almost gets caught and flees, returns to Paris two years later having spent everything on gambling and women, finally gets caught and sent to prison. Sudden change of heart when he accepts the love of the girl who befriended his mother. Fade out on repentance. Sin and atonement, with the road to redemption – as so often – relying on long-suffering females.
Much has apparently been written about Bresson’s disdain for “acting”, but his alternative of stilted delivery of lines left me unmoved. The pickpocket’s voiceover telling the audience how the thrill of stealing from under people’s noses made him feel truly alive was belied by his expressionless face and sullen demeanour throughout. No doubt contrary to Bresson’s intentions, I looked behind the story to the incidentals: the grimy garret, the tap on the landing, Parisian crowds, a slice of life at a particular time and place.
Once again, all the critics thought it wonderful.
Director Brady Corbet with Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones
“Overblown” is, for me, the only description. The final words of the film – “it’s the destination, not the journey” – were so bombastic that, like one last blow of its own trumpet, they widened the existing fractures and the whole edifice came tumbling down. (Unless it was some meta-joke, welcoming the viewer – at last! – to the end credits.)
It started off well: Hungarian-Jewish architect is released from a concentration camp and sponsored by his cousin to move to a new life in Philadelphia. Fairly menial work for a long time until he is taken on by a rich, obnoxious-beneath-the-veneer man who has a grandiose scheme of his own. Eventually – after several years apart – the architect’s wife and niece are able to join him from behind the Iron Curtain. Things like that really made you feel the duration of post-war suffering for people already damaged by the war. The images were wonderful and striking, the acting was great, and I was hooked until the interval.
After that, too much was piled on. As a film about the building of the New Jerusalem (whether metaphorical or the founding of the state of Israel) and the Jewish experience in a new country that still despised you as the old one had – yes. Overweening ambition à la Citizen Kane – not so much. An architect driven by beauty, proportion and space – well, OK, but it’s a bit of a tortured genius cliché. The seductiveness of the vast wealth of the post-war US was tangible and woozily shot, but that look of beauty stretched to everything. The doss house, shovelling coal, life in a wheelchair – all beautifully framed and shot. (The 1980 epilogue really looked a documentary film from the 1980s. Technically brilliant.) That started to grate. How many more shots of the sunlit cross on the altar did we need? The years in a concentration camp were almost irrelevant until the end, when it was revealed – far too late – that the size of camp cells had been the inspiration for designs. If you’re going to focus on boxy and enclosed spaces for over three hours, give the audience a clue a bit earlier on. And – excuse me – born in 1911, studied at Dessau and a celebrated architect before the war? That’s stretching it a bit.
But all the reviewers think it’s wonderful.
Director Akira Kurosawa with Takashi Shimura
This was the original of Living, which I found very moving, so nothing in the plot was new to me. Instead I noticed the differences: Shimura’s range of facial expressions, which were more like those of a silent-era actor. The young woman was still full of joie de vivre, but here she was coarser. The camera work during his night on the tiles was dizzying and full of reflections.
Old Shoe Box 