Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2016)
I confess I downloaded this assuming it was something entirely different and indeed Korean, but I was assuming it was a variant on The Scottish Play with a focus on Lady M. It was an odd experience, revising my sense of the film’s setting, from eleventh century to Elizabethan to mid-nineteenth century. I was, to be honest, tempted to give up, but I am glad I persevered.
Continue reading →Gypo (Jan Dunn, 2005)
Dunn’s debut low budget feature is Dogme 37, the first UK Dogme film, and is the three intersecting stories of Helen (Pauline McLynn), Paul (Paul McGann) and Tasha (Chloe Sirene). Helen is in a loveless marriage to carpet layer Paul, with a couple of kids, and befriends Czech refugee who is on the run from a bad relationshio with her mother Irina (Rula Lenska).
Continue reading →Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2017)
I went into this knowing almost nothing about it. I’m not sure I came out knowing any more, but it was watch this or Nymphomania Volumes I and II.
Continue reading →The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, 2013)
This romantic-comedy is an unexpected bitter-sweet gem. Neglected by her husband, Rajeev Sehgal (Nakul Vaid), Ila Sehgal (Nimrat Kaur) tries to woo him back with new recipes with the aid of her unseen aunt (Bharati Achrekar). Unfortunately, the lunchbox goes to retiring insurance claims clerk and widower Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), who loves the food and falls in love with her via a series of notes, as does Ila.
It is a long-distance relationship — for much of the film neither lead character is in the same room, nor does the aunt appear on screen. The alienation of contemporary Mumbai is evident — all those lonely people etc. — and we are prepared for some dark tones, even as we can’t seriously contemplate the happy ending you would expect. But the film is more gripping than a series of shots of people reading notes might suggest.
Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017)
On a scale of 1 to to Von Trier, this is about a seven.
The Laurent family run a formerly construction firm near Calais and in the second sequence, a long shot from a security camera, we see a collapse of earth next to a huge set of foundations, complete with a Portaloo falling into the abyss. We are already on the edge, having seen smart phone footage of Eve Laurent’s mother in a bathroom and apparently taking sedatives, and of Eve (Fantine Harduin) doping and possibly killing her pet hamster.
Eve goes to stay with her father Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his new wife Anaïs (Laura Verlinden), elderly grandfather Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and aunt Anne (Isabelle Huppert). The Laurent family is in crisis — Georges wants to die, Thomas is having an affair, Anne is considering marriage to Lawrence Bradshaw (the as-always splendid Toby Jones) and Laurent family firm manager Pierre (Franz Rogowski) is out of his deoth and drinking too heavily.
Haneke expects us to fill in a lot of the gaps — he likes filming from a distance, softening the suicide attempts and violence, sometimes letting us imagine it. There are skips in time where we have to infer events. And Thomas’s sexting is almost illegible, given the tiny surtitles, although that might be as well.
There are other lacunae — the class positioning of the Laurent’s servants, Rachid (Hassam Ghancy) and Jamila (Nabiha Akkari) is fairly obvious, but the role of the illegal migrants in the Jungle camp at Calais seems underdeveloped. There’s something here about white, upper middle class privilege, but it ends up more to Anne’s favour and Thomas’s detriment than might be helpful. Are these the same people that Georges has talked to in a long shot, a moment tinged with potential violence as that’s the filmic language of Happy End.
The title is of course ironic, or at least ambiguous, as those of us who have seen Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998) or even La Bonheur (Happiness, 1965) can attest. But perhaps that’s all too obvious.
La Belle Saison (Summertime, Catherine Corsini, 2015)
I spent a day grumbling about the sense that this was two films which didn’t quite dovetail together — but then I read an abstract about Nancy Astor and thought about her niece Joyce Grenfell and things slid into place.
Continue reading →Un amour de jeunesse (Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)
(Spoilers in final paragraph)
So here the first love is between Camille (Lola Créton), 15, and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), 19, and this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. He’s an artist, apparently, or a builder, possibly, but he’s going to drop out of university and go to South America for nine months. She’s going to sulk, because she doesn’t want him to go, and doesn’t seem to want to go either. Or he won’t let her.So, whilst he’s off channelling his inner Angel Clare, she goes through a series of objectifying jobs and trains to be an architect, taking up with a Norwegian architect. Lorenz (Magne Håvard-Brekke). Then Sullivan comes back.
Continue reading →Krótki film o miłości (A Short Film About Love, Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988)
Young language scholar and postal worker Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) hides from Miss Poland in a room of his godmother’s (Stefania Iwinska) flat, obsessively using the telescope on his desk to spy on the older Magda (Grażyna Szapolowska) who lives in the opposite block. He steals her mail, sends her fake notifications about money orders arriving, silent calls her and even becomes her milkman.
Continue reading →The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997)
My memory is that this got rather sniffy reviews when it came out, and I am both sorry and glad it took so long for me to get round to it.
Continue reading →Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959)
At some point I ploughed through a load of British New Wave and Hammer Horror Films, noting the way in which the behind-the-camera team overlapped — DP here, director there, director here, screenwriter there. I suspect if you tried to do a Venn diagram of kitchen sink, horror and comedy between 1950 and 1975, there’d be huge overlaps. I know I saw A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), but I don’t think I caught this adaptation of John Osbourne’s play that recast Kenneth Haigh (Jimmy), Alan Bates (Cliff), Mary Ure (Alison) and Helena Hughes (Helena Charles) with Richard Burton, Gary Raymond, Mary Ure and Claire Bloom.
And there in the credits you see Nigel Kneale’s name.
Of course, he didn’t just do science fiction, but it was presumably just after or overlapping Quatermass and t’Pit (1958-59), although the fillm version was decade away. He was go on to adapt Osbourne’s The Entertainer (1960). I’m not sure, haven’t not seen the play (unless I caught a BBC version twenty years ago) what Kneale has done, beyond presumably adding scenes in the market, the station and the pub, and the bit with the crashlanded alien, but I wonder if the threatened market stallholder S. P. Kapoor is his addition (at least one of the Quatermass scripts wanted to draw comparisons with contemporary race relations).
So Jimmy Porter runs a sweet stall with flat mate Cliff and dominates his girlfriend Alison, who invites her friend, aspiring actress Helena to stay. Jimmy is angry and young and a man, presumably underachieving — depending how you read his allusions to Wordsworth, but market stallholders can read poetry, of course — and still mourning his father who died when he was ten. One escape is in playing jazz at local clubs. It’s not clear whether he fought in the war or has done national service.
But he is not a happy bunny and is heavily controlling of Alison, who is pregnant, but she doesn’t want to be controlled, or so it seems. The relationships are going to shuffle.
It’s hard, seventy years on, to reconstruct the impact this play had at the Royal Court, and the way it swept aside the well-made plays of Terence Rattigan and Nöel Coward, whose plays have gone through at least one renaissance now. I’m not able to recognise George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw of the Royal Court, Old Vic and Young Vic circles. I didn’t even recognise Donald Pleasence in a fairly early role. But you can’t help feel that Porter needs a good kick in the face and he really wants to get over himself. Thanks to the early death of his father, who had fought in the Spanish civil war, we know he had a problematic childhood, but these rebels without causes have not aged well. It’s not as if he is especially punished for his actions — but I wonder if we read the abuser/abusee relationship rather differently than we might have done at the end of the 1950s.
Meanwhile, there is a pull of Free Cinema and a documentary feel to the exterior shots, even as Brief Encounter might tug back for the waiting room.
Subject to Change 