Category Archives: Films

Evil Does Not Exist

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Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi

. . . but bad things happen nonetheless. It started off so slowly and (I confess) dully: tree canopies, then more tree canopies. But not beautifully shot, as the tree canopies in Perfect Days. A man -Takumi – chopping wood in the snow, expertly splitting the logs with a single blow of the axe. Men collecting water from a spring and taking the cans to their cars, stopping briefly to collect some wild wasabi. A public meeting about the construction of a glamping site and discussion about the siting of a septic tank. Banal talk in the car about jobs and dating apps. And yet . . .

It became mesmerising and thought-provoking. A small community in a forest where spring water is their drinking water and the forest provides their fuel. It’s not primitive: their cars are four-wheel drives. The public meeting was crucial to the unfolding of the film, with Takumi pointing out the importance of balancing the environment with human activity. The glamping site, as proposed, would pollute the drinking water and the inevitable campfires would pose a danger to the forest. I thought afterwards that the way scenes were framed embodied this balance; at first I had thought them dreadfully mundane, but actually there was a balance – for example, between the trees, the snow, the house and the 4WD. The same with the long, banal shots through the back of the car window: the tarmac road receding, but balanced on either side by the forest and at the top by the snow-covered mountains. Characters were often seen moving behind thick trunks or obscured by high banking – a small blob in the wider environment. The short interlude in Tokyo was completely the opposite: the occasional verticals of intermittent tree trunks were replaced by the domineering verticals of nothing but office blocks.

Nobody actually wanted to “be evil”. The Tokyo company representatives didn’t want to upset the delicate balance of the forest and human activity. Takahashi didn’t intend to startle the deer that (presumably) attacked Takumi’s daughter. Takumi didn’t mean to forget to collect his daughter nor to hurt Takahasi. The deer didn’t want to attack. And the glamping site was a means of accessing time-limited subsidies rather than ruining a community’s drinking water, so it just “had to” go ahead for the sake of the company and employee’s salaries. (Hmph.)

Shades of Italian neo-realism; I read afterwards that the actors were not professionals. That would account for the expert log-splitting.

Hard Truths

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Director Mike Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin

A film about misery. Pansy is middle-aged: tired, hostile, hectoring, afraid of the outside world and the germs it harbours. She is miserable and makes the lives of others a misery. You assume there is something undiagnosed – depression, mental illness – but there’s no way Pansy will seek help. Her plumber husband is taciturn: perhaps he has never been a nice man (there are hints), but now he is just morose and sad. Their adult son is obese and spends much of his day in his room with his model planes and childish books about them when he doesn’t go for aimless walks with headphones on. He is also sad. Perhaps with some neuro-divergence (there is no labelling in the film). They are all stuck and none of them knows how to unstick themselves.

It should be gruelling – and it often is – but Pansy’s articulate skewering as she berates everyone around her somehow leavens the depression – for the audience at least. And her sister, Chantelle, is her welcome opposite: upbeat, cheerful, comforting and lively, happy with her two daughters and her hairdressing salon. She is the only one who can get through to Pansy, but it doesn’t make anything better. There is something about their dead mother – their differing experiences of her – but no story arc, no redemption, no defining action that makes a difference: as in real life, the misery goes on.

And it’s brilliant. The acting is really special: Jean-Baptiste makes Pansy totally believable. All the main characters are Afro-Caribbean Londoners. There is nothing explicit about ethnicity – except perhaps that Chantelle lives in a colourful, crowded flat with a balcony crammed with plants and works within a black bubble, and Pansy lives in a quiet interwar suburb which is photographed in the opening shots as if bleached into whitewash. In such ways and through its story, the film suggested how environment, experience and heredity shape a person and her behaviour.

The Travelling Players (1975)

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Director Theo Angelopoulos

Having just seen one film from the Mediterranean made at the tail-end of a repressive regime and looking back on recent history, I thought I’d try another.

Both films were slow, but The Travelling Players beat The Spirit of the Beehive hands down in that respect. I realised how beautiful and human the latter was as I sat through the chilly scenes of a Greece filmed in grey and beige and inhabited by what seemed like marionettes. (That day’s paper had a feature on holidays in Greece with clichéd azure skies and golden beaches; Angelopoulos drained such scenes of all colour.) The camera was sometimes very, very still and sometimes pensively surveyed its surroundings, looking at everything in turn.

It was a film steeped in Greekness. The troupe’s play was “Golfo the Shepherdess”, a bucolic tragedy performed in traditional dress. The manager was betrayed by his wife’s lover; both the wife and her lover were later killed by her son, Orestes, with the assistance of his sister, Electra. Greece itself was betrayed by the Allies after the first and second world wars (and, implicitly, during the rule by the junta). Fortunately I knew enough Greek history to make some sense of the film, and on three occasions characters broke the fourth wall to give a brief account of, say, the Smyrna catastrophe. The viewpoint was very left wing; the British didn’t come out well from any of these little history lessons, and there was a minor revolt as American music drowned out the Greek accordion at a Greek-American wedding feast.

The style was detached: characters were generally seen in long shot, framed in or dwarfed by their surroundings. The film’s prologue was the accordionist’s prologue from the play. Sometimes the camera lingered on a street while the years moved forwards or backwards: thus 1952 became 1939 without a scene change. Often I had the impression of a stage set – particularly for the civil war scenes of street fighting, where opposing groups of fighters advanced and retreated across the “stage” like gangs of rod puppets or shadow puppets (Karaghiozis?). There were repetitions on a theme: Golfo’s fear of the shadow of a man had echoes in several scenes of shadowy figures seen to one side. I found no humour or lightness, but there was a surreal quality at times – the snowy hen hunt, for example – which might have passed for humour. The film’s beginning was its ending: the reformed troupe arrives once again in Aegio after 13 years.

Everyone agrees that the film is a masterpiece, so I shan’t demur. I found it austere and unyielding, like the gaze of the military busts you find in Greek town and village squares – but interesting withal. I created my own pleasure in lapping up what had once been such familiar sights to me: whitewashed stone buildings, double wooden doors, terracotta roofs and akroteria, periptera, ankle-twisting pavements, painted signs, railway station architecture . . . oh, everything.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

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Director Victor Erice

A very slow, painterly film that grew on me. I kept having the feeling that I had seen certain scenes before – perhaps I watched it decades ago on BBC2? – but, if so, it was in the days when such films left me baffled rather than intrigued.

The title was a bit of a stumbling block. I am accultured to think of the beehive as something positive: co-operation and industry for the common good, just like the stone beehive carved above the old Co-op store front that I passed on my way home. It’s an image reinforced by modern use of the bee – the symbol of the regeneration of Manchester, or pollinators essential for life. And yet in the film the beehive seems to have a more malign connotation. The unthinking, unreflecting hive-mind that keeps on doing the same thing endlessly, ruled over by a queen and her army. Or a dictator and his army; thus I realised I had to rethink my interpretation of what a beehive may represent. An interview with the director was enlightening.

It’s set in 1940 in an isolated village on the central plain. A family: large house, parents who barely communicate, two little girls whom we first see watching “Frankenstein” in the village hall. Ana is enthralled by it, and, in a world between reality and imagination fuelled by her sister’s ideas, she seeks out her own spirit friend.

There’s little dialogue, and, as far as I recall, the camerawork is static and lingering. Scenes are more like tableaux vivants. There’s a sense of oppression and menace – the little girls lingering by the train tracks for example – which is only lightened by Ana’s imagination and the occasional kindness of adults. But Ana’s imagination – growing out of the heavy silences and fuelled by a celluloid monster – is somewhat macabre.

Perhaps the scene where the father lifts bee frames out of the hive to examine them has its parallel in the negatives that a film maker holds up to the light. It’s the kind of film that has an afterlife in your own imagination.

The Swimmer (1968)

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Director Frank Perry with Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster decides to return home some few miles by swimming from pool to pool in Connecticut. It’s adapted from a John Cheever short story, which, on the page, could be read as a man’s breakdown or hallucination. (Other readings are no doubt available.) On the screen, though, the physical world is always before your eyes and it’s hard not to take it more literally. Not literally literally: it seemed to me to be an allegory – the flow of a man’s life from immense promise to the break-up of everything he was confident of. It takes place over the course of a day, from bright morning to twilight downpour. Much of the veneer of his perfect life he has peeled away himself: a neglectful friend, a poor employee, an unfaithful husband, cocksure, pushy and with an excruciating line in flirtation. Or perhaps it’s Man’s fall, from the Garden of Eden to the rusting gates and barred door of banishment.

I thought it a surprising film for its time. In other not-quite-mainstream Hollywood films of that period like The Graduate, Butch Cassidy or Easy Rider: the actors were all so young. The Swimmer, in contrast, has a middle-aged Lancaster (ageing fast as the day wanes) as its protagonist who has, by the end, few redeeming qualities. I also thought of it as a film from a male-dominated age, so that its skewering of a American man’s shortcomings/portrait of a man’s unravelling might have been more of a shock to a contemporary audience than today’s – when male, American, white and successful no longer equals manifest virtue.

EO

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Director Jerzy Skolimovski

A donkey road movie. Or an allegory, or a political statement on our treatment of animals, or an observation of human beings from the sidelines. Odd, affecting and occasionally surreal. EO, the donkey, is liberated by animal activists from his home circus and, in a series of almost unrelated scenes, moves from Poland to southern Europe, perhaps in search of his earlier life. He encounters as much brutality as kindness from the human world – a world where animals and landscapes are under attack from our activities. Even the gentler humans are contradictory and somewhat self-destructive. Only the children retain innocence.

With Chesterton’s Donkey running through my head, Catholic themes of suffering came to my mind – even at the end when EO moves with the stream of cattle towards what must be an abattoir, from brilliant noon sunlight into darkness.

The Small Back Room (1949)

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Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with David Farrar and Kathleen Byron

A kind of film noir with Expressionist overtones. The “small back room” was the laboratory and offices of free-range explosive experts during WWII. There was a lot to like about the film, but I was put off by what I saw as melodramatic stereotypes. Farrar played a scientist straight out of a long line of rude, over-bearing heroes stretching from Mr Rochester all the way to Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boon. His prosthetic foot was reason enough for his ill-humour and desire to drown his pain in whisky, but it was done with all the subtlety of a marker pen. Byron was no better, her character written as a long-suffering woman descended from one of the droopier Dickens’s females. Their scenes could have done with a lighter or less clichéd touch.

Some scenes, on the other hand, were great: the bomb defusion was gripping, lots of incidentals intrigued or amused, and the drinking nightmare was brilliantly weird. Home scenes were constantly foregrounded by Byron’s enlarged photo on one side and the bottle of whisky on the other.