Category Archives: Films

Pickpocket (1959)

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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.

The Brutalist

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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.

Ikiru (1952)

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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.

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.