Category Archives: Films

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?

Wajda’s War Trilogy

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I’d only meant to watch Kanal, but the BFI app had all three of Wajda’s war films so we watched them all. They do not follow on from each other, except to chronicle key moments in wartime Poland: in fact I was a little disconcerted at first to see an actor whose character had died in A Generation playing another part in Kanal. There were blanks in my knowledge that I think I’ve managed to fill a bit – and really, how could it not occur to me that of course there would have been anti-communist resistance to Soviet dominance of Poland once it was liberated from the Nazis? I know all about the Greek civil war, so why not Poland? (Except that the Soviets were already in situ and brutally triumphant, so the outcome was never in doubt.)

More ignorance about the layers of national history and ideology that I just had to guess at. These films were made in the mid/late 1950s so post-date the posthumous reassessment of Stalin and straddle the Polish thaw. They were financed – and hence sanctioned – by the state and were expected to have a pro-socialist message. Like British WWII films, they presented a contemporary view of recent historical events – answering, perhaps, a need for remembrance or catharsis or – for Poland – an alternative to the dominant ideology. Grim, tragic and practically devoid of levity and the semaphored sentimentality you find in British films.

Wajda was born in 1926 and joined the Polish Home Army as a teenager, and his actors would have had similar wartime experiences. That adds a chilling aura to these films. They know what they are talking about, and I just had to listen.

A Generation (1955)

A shanty town on the outskirts of Warsaw mid-war and a young man who swaps petty crime for an apprenticeship in a furniture workshop. He is inspired by a communist co-worker and joins the resistance movement, assisting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The final shot is of him and his handful of comrades – a little, doomed battalion – heading off for further resistance.

Shades of Italian neo-realism in its “natural” shots. According to Wikipedia, the machine guns shot live ammunition as there was at that time no way of shooting blanks – ! I gradually became more and more involved in it and was quite bereft at the end.

More ignorance on my part: I had no idea there was a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as well as the Warsaw Uprising.

Kanal (1957)

The fag end of the Warsaw Uprising. The only possibility is defeat, and the only unknown is when. A group of resistance fighters are ordered to retreat via the city sewers and come to an end in various ways. It’s claustrophobic and gripping – and also raises questions of sacrifice and heroism. It reminds you of the scale of the suffering – both military and civilian.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

A more elaborately shot, symbolic film which initially took some working out. It’s a turning point in Poland’s history: 8 May 1945 and the Nazis have surrendered to the Soviets. There is a celebratory banquet in a town’s big hotel. A Polish administrator who has spent the war in the USSR comes to the town to take up a new post under Soviet direction. There are some anti-communist Home Army soldiers and organisers fighting against Soviet rule. Two of them – one, Maciek, looking like James Dean and one William Hartnell in Brighton Rock – are ordered to shoot the administrator but kill the wrong men.

It’s a conflicted film. There are two opposed sides and there are parallel scenes as they remember those they fought beside, but – in 1958 – the anti-communist resistance just had to be the bad guys. In his doomed persona though Maciek knits the two together. He has a tender interlude with a barmaid, and their conversation brings home how the war crushed their young lives. Maciek has a few fellow soldiers left to him (although many have died) but his eyesight is damaged by his time in the dark sewers; she has lost everyone in her life and is totally uprooted.

Towards the end, as Maciek flees for his life, the anti-communist gentry, drunk after the banquet, perform a shaky dance while the band discordantly plays a polonaise. I suppose for the authorities that ridicule might have cancelled out the sympathy that the audience must have felt for the disillusioned – but criminal – Maciek.

La Règle du Jeu (1939)

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Director Jean Renoir

One of those films that I was always on the outside of – an interested but detached viewer, wondering if my reading of the film was the one that the writer and director intended.

Well, perhaps. I thought it a comic opera plot filmed in prose: “The Marriage of Figaro” meets Brian Rix. Upstairs-downstairs, a country house weekend, an extended hunting scene (WWI with a nod to fears of WWII perhaps?), a milieu where affaires and kissing the housemaid on the stairs are de rigueur – all filmed at breakneck speed. Afterwards I read about the technical innovations: lenses with a deep depth of field for the corridor scenes, extended takes. (Poor innovators: after a few decades, audiences no longer see how groundbreaking they were.) I wasn’t convinced that the film successfully skewered the “rules of the game” cynicism of the upper classes – if that was indeed its aim. What was it about the Marquis collecting clockwork toys – was that a symbol? As I said, it left me unmoved – except for mild amusement at the woodenness of the actress who played Christine.

Persona (1966)

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Director Ingmar Bergman with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman

Hmmm. At the point where the camera shifts from Elisabet to Alma so that the audience has to listen to the latter’s purported account of the birth of Elisabet’s son for a second time, I lost all interest and patience. There are so many – possible – themes: identity, truth, secrets, sex, atrocities, love and rejection, a hint of vampirism (?) . . . that I could get no handle on it and was bored. Give me one or two themes in a film, but don’t overwhelm me with them otherwise I will look away and turn to words as a more appropriate form of expression. It looks wonderful – how could it not, with two beautiful, stylish women who resemble each other and are filmed so cleverly? The occasional breaking-up of the physical film comes over like the expression of a scream – and reminds you that it’s only a film. But, oh, it was so obscure and self-referential that I wanted to scream myself before the end.

Up there with Last Year in Marienbad as a film that was a chore to sit through to the end.

The Piano (1992)

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Director Jane Campion with Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill

A sensual, shocking film filled with intriguing painterly images from the start: pink sunshine coming through fingers. The sensuousness of a hole in a stocking (“A sweet disorder in the dress. . .”). Who cares if it’s feasible to spend a night on a windswept beach in the shelter of a crinoline cage – it was true within the framing of this film. The most mind-blowing and heart-breaking image was of Ada’s crinoline sinking into the mud as she collapsed after her husband’s revenge. Shades even of the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. Perhaps not the allusion the director intended, although, on reflection, there is something traditionally witch-like about Ada’s blacks and unyielding expression.

It’s about an electively mute woman, her daughter and her piano, through which she communicates and speaks to he who has ears to hear. So much is unspoken in the film: why did she stop speaking at the age her daughter is now? The little girl is a tremendous talker – but so much of what she says are made-up stories. Perhaps muteness is a way to be true and utter no lies. Love and desire in this film certainly grow without the need for words – and there are dreadful consequences in putting feelings into words that can be read by the wrong eyes.

It’s one of those films that make you think about the inequitable agency/choice (as far as it was possible for anyone) for women of previous eras. Ada’s prickly will is her armour, as her music is her amour. She allows her will to be drowned but her music in future will always have a metallic ring. Perhaps that counts as a happy ending.