Category Archives: Films

Paris, Texas (1984)

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Director Wim Wenders with Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski

When this came out someone told me that it was the best film they’d ever seen so I confess I was expecting something more. It had that all-encompassing and all-forgiving humanity that I associate with Wenders’ films, but perhaps it hasn’t aged well. For me the plot didn’t live up to the cinematography – or maybe I couldn’t overlook the fact that the behaviour Travis tries to atone for has its own section in the Crime Act nowadays under “coercive control”.

It’s filmed in a way that invites you to consider and analyse it: unusual views, long shots, the foreignness of the US despite its on-screen familiarity. I was transfixed by the view of aeroplanes flying below Walt and Anne’s house in Los Angeles. (Thoughts of the house in “Double Indemnity” – was that on the same hill?) The restlessness of the shots of roads, runways, paths. Driving, flying, walking. Always moving on in search of something. Landscapes natural and urban. The opening of a man walking through the desert was straight out of a western, but his last drops of water (a western cliche if ever there was one) came from a plastic bottle rather than a battered canteen. Lots of touches of red: baseball cap, shirts, the car that Jane drives.

Mirroring: two brothers, two wives, one child. One mother loses and one gains, and not even Solomon could solve that. The beginning and the end of a man on the move. The reflections in the one-way peep-show glass as Travis and Jane talk to each other without ever seeing each other clearly or touching. The title: the place of Travis’s beginning, the place where he had hoped to settle his family, and the increasing unkind joke of his father about his mother – more mirroring of deteriorating marriages.

So, yes, it kept my attention, but, on this occasion, its parts were greater than its whole.

Das Boot (1981)

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Director Wolfgang Petersen with Jürgen Prochnow and Herbert Grönemeyer

A U-boot mission during WWII, mostly set in the submarine itself. Gripping, tense and claustrophobic, it sort of does what it says on the tin. I found no hidden depths as I did, for example, in Deep End – apart, of course, from the eternal puzzle of the madness of war. All that discipline, ingenuity, courage and brutality in the pursuit of death. Why?

Deep End (1970)

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Director Jerzy Skolimowski with Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown

There were times in this film when I wondered if I were watching soft porn. I don’t think so (but how would I know?). More a kind of Carry On film stripped bare. A primary coloured black comedy. It was strange and fascinating with moments of comedy straight out of Jacques Tati (bobbing up and down at the hamburger stall) and moments of absolute awfulness. I was hooked from the start: the salacious lingering over the bicycle down tubes and then Mike’s joyous cycle ride in the grey London dawn to his first job (aged 15) as a swimming baths attendant. With a Cat Stevens soundtrack. I could overlook the bad dubbing just for that.

So many impressions. (I wondered if Skolimowski was still snared in the long tail of WWII horror.) An adolescent encounters a gruesome, twisted adult world of sexuality. The grotesque close-ups of middle-aged faces. I remembered how wonderful youthfulness is – the agility and the slimness beside lumbering, lumpen age. The colours were beautiful – Jane Asher’s long hair and long yellow coat. The vibrant (if peeling) paint of the swimming pool contrasted with the grey streets outside. It was like a separate world of the id. Creepy games masters are stereotypical, but Diana Dors – OMG! Asher was poised somewhere between youth and adult – disillusioned and occasionally vicious. And even innocence could act in a deadly way.

I saw afterwards that it was partly filmed in the Müller‘sches Volksbad in Munich. That brought back memories.

Journey to Italy (1954)

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Director Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders

It took me a while – even as long as the next day – to appreciate this film. The characters are not sympathetic – the private faces behind charming social façades – and the scenes and dialogue are somehow jarring and ill at ease. But I guess that’s the point.

A couple, obliged to spend time together on their own in a foreign land, discover that they have grown apart and maybe don’t even like each other any more. They are disoriented – in their surroundings and in their marriage. Lots of stereotypes: uptight northern Europeans encounter the land of voluble Mediterraneans. The beautiful, sunny south, full of fecundity and the inevitability of death. She is touched by a sense of history and past lives and regrets not having had a child; he is cynical and arrogant, attempting to have a fling but being rejected/rejecting the chance. The climax is a visit to Pompeii to watch the unearthing of a couple who died in each other’s arms 2,000 years before (very “Arundel Tomb”); as they return to Naples, discussing divorce, they are held up in a religious procession where their own personal miracle takes place.

And then the film grew on me. The way the landscapes and the ancient sites are used to affect and reflect the characters’ emotions. Why should they be portrayed as sympathetic when we see them at their most private and conflicted, immersed in tedium and unhappiness? The dialogue seems stilted – but real interlocution is not scripted. It made me think of Antonioni – even to the way the female character (usually Monica Vitti) is suspended between the timeless natural world and the superficial social whirl.

Stromboli (Land of God) (1950)

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Director Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman and Mario Vitale

When I first used to visit the Mani in the southern Peloponnese – before it was underwent cosmetic surgery – I read Peter Greenhalgh’s book and went in search of the churches and mosaics and the entrance to Hades(!). I loved doing that, but even then I felt that living amongst those hostile towers and prickly pears in a traditional way would have been unbearable – perhaps even for those born there. You’d have to be Patrick Leigh Fermor to make it work. The Italian island of Stromboli looked very similar, but with the added horror of no roads to carry you away.

And so to the film: my engagement with it wavered, but it was always interesting. Italian neo-realism again: non-professional actors (which showed), real locations and real lives, quasi-documentary elements, characters formed by particular circumstances. The initial circumstance was an Italian camp for displaced persons, which the Bergman character – a Lithuanian (which gave a real sense of how the war had shaken up the whole of the continent as if it were no more than a snow globe) – was desperately trying to leave. Her first choice was via a visa to Argentina, for which she was rejected; her second was via marriage to Antonio, a very young soldier from Stromboli whom she barely knew.

Reader, she married him. And regretted it as soon as she saw Stromboli: poor, rocky, barren and in the shadow of an active volcano. The island women disapproved of her (trousers!) and she found it primitive; anyone who had the chance emigrated. She tries to adapt, she fails, she tries to escape by walking across the island, passing the volcano, to the small port on the other side. En route she loses everything, calls on God to help her, and the film leaves her on the volcano ready to face . . . what? The sudden introduction of a mystical element felt odd, but in other ways it was powerful film-making. The scene of the volcano erupting, when everyone runs to the sea to spend the night in boats to wait for it to settle down again. The scene of the mattanza – a tuna massacre, which lends credence to the theory that early human beings were largely responsible for the disappearance of mega fauna on the continents they colonised.

I compared it to The Edge of the World, which was less agonised (less Roman Catholic?) and more elegiac, as I recall.

The Lunchbox (2013)

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Directed by Ritesh Batra with Nimrat Kaur and Irrfan Khan

Apparently Mumbai has what seems to me like an incredibly complex system to deliver lunchboxes from home to workers by dabbawalas – something I knew nothing about before seeing this film and am still marvelling at.

The starting point is an uncharacteristic error in delivery, so that a lunchbox cooked by an unhappy young wife for her husband is delivered by accident to a morose widower on the brink of retirement from an accounts department. They begin a correspondence by notes in the lunchbox trays, opening their hearts to each other and re-evaluating their own lives as they do so. She realises that her husband is having an affair and that their marriage is beyond her attempts to revive it; he realises how withdrawn he has become. Perhaps there could be a romance between them (some reviewers took it to be one), but that is only one strand of the film. It’s about more than that. Mumbai is so crowded that first-class commuter travel means standing armpit to armpit, but even here loneliness and oppression creeps in. All scenes seemed hemmed in – in her flat, his office, local transport – with no broader vistas. Family offered a different form of loneliness – her mother’s and her neighbour’s diligence in caring for their sick, unresponsive husbands, her own husband’s indifference. His replacement – perhaps supposed to be there for light relief, but I don’t know enough to tell – was a chirpy younger man without family (a social black mark against him) who would do anything to advance in life: willing to work anywhere, ready to lie, but withal endearing.

It was unsparing about age and illness: his horror of discovering that his bathroom smelled like his grandfather’s, her mother’s outburst of despair at the awfulness of nursing her husband. Really, it’s a melancholy tale, with the camerawork suggesting characters are trapped or only half-seen – but there is something about the possibility of choosing another life that transcends the bleakness. I was quite transfixed by it.

Fear Eat The Soul (1974)

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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem

I couldn’t quite swallow the premise of the film – a disinterested love affair between a cleaning woman and a Moroccan immigrant some decades her junior. I know it was influenced by Douglas Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows”, but Brigitte Mira was no Jane Wyman. However I put that aside . . . and thus was impressed by the film and its depiction of the narrow-mindedness in the face of generous emotion.

It’s beautifully shot – tableaux vivants out of Edward Hopper – with clever use of vivid and muted colours. There was also a visually poetic quality in the scenes, with staircases, doorways and metal grilles symbolising characters’ trajectories. Its approach to the social aspect of the love affair and marriage – the racism and disapproval of family and neighbours – took me back to German A level, when we studied “Biedermann und die Brandstifter” and “Der Besuch der alten Dame”. Something about the quasi-didactic nature of the scenes, with characters voicing very negative social norms in the face of so transgressive a relationship – and also when the same characters later accepted the marriage for their own self-interested reasons. That spotlight on social interactions and microscope on morality reminded me of Dürrenmatt.

It was also a film about loneliness and homesickness and the toll of constantly keeping them at bay. The marriage tottered a bit on the disparities of culture and age, but the ending suggested a more optimistic future.

What was also interesting was to consider when it was made. A couple of years after the Munich Olympics massacre (the film was set in Munich) and three decades after WWII. All the middle-aged characters would have been young adults during the war, and the cleaning woman referred to her membership of the Nazi party as something that everyone did. And the actors themselves? What did they do during the war?