Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)
Exhibition (Joanna Hogg, 2013)
The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021)
It’s pretty rare for low budget independent movies to have sequels – Hogg’s The Souvenir is a rare exception.
Meanwhile, not being aware that it was getting an imminent release, I went back to earlier films.
Continue reading →This is Tomorrow (Paul Kelly, 2007)
Finisterre (Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, 2002)
What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (Paul Kelly, 2005)
Kelly + Victor (Kieran Evans, 2012)
So, Paul Kelly has made at least three documentaries with Saint Etienne, a musical beat combo whose work I confess I’m not familiar with, although I’ve listened to some since. And I suspect that means I’m missing something with Finisterre.
Of course, This is Tomorrow is mistitled, because it surely refers to the iconic exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956, featuring artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Richard Hamilton, and many more. Instead, it takes us back to the Festival of Britain in 1951, of which the Royal Festival Hall is one survivor. Designed by Leslie Martin, Peter Moro and Robert Matthew, compromises in building meant the acoustics were not as rich as they might have been. There was an attempt to improve this in 1964, followed by a major restoration and improvement between 2005 and 2007. The documentary shows the festival and then moves into an account of the work. I confess I was interested more in the former than the latter and it’s such a shame the Skylon was destroyed.
Having realised this was a loose trilogy, I then watched Finisterre, which includes extracts from The Shipping Forecast and music from the album by Saint Etienne. It’s a version of the City Symphony genre although, despite some really interesting shots and juxtapositions, doesn’t compare with Manhatta (Paul Strand, 1921) or Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, 1927). It’s a day in the life of the city, from 6.00am to 6.00am at Victoria Station, apparently also biographical of the band. I missed all this, but did like the snark about Camden.
Like This is Tomorrow, Mervyn was commissioned to be performed and screened in the Barbican, and is a depiction of the Lower Lea Valley, at around the time of the announcement of the 2012 Olympics. This coincided with the 7/7 bombing, which is brought in via snippets of news broadcasts. The trajectory depends on the wanderings of a paper boy, Mervyn Day (Noah Kelly, presumably the director’s son) on his rather extended paper route. David Essex and Linda Robson contribute as his grandfather and mother. Presumably his name is taken from a Leyton Orient footballer. It’s diverting enough, I learned a fair bit, and maybe needed to be watched alongside reading Iain Sinclair’s Sorry Meniscus (1999), about trying to walk to the Millennium Dome.
Kelly and Saint Etienne have since collaborated on How We Used to Live (2014), which I haven’t seen.
Evans, co-director of Finisterre, has also made a fiction film, Kelly + Victor, (apparently) loosely based on a novel of the same name by Niall Griffiths. Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and Victor (Julian Morris) meet at a club and go back to her place where they have violent sex in which she bites and chokes him. Kelly is a shopworker, who occasionally helps out her dominatrix friend, whilst Victor is a romantic who works on Liverpool dock and whose idea of a date is wandering around the Walker Gallery or Sefton Park.
I’m in.
Of course, this can’t end well, so it needs a bit of caution.
Sequin in a Blue Room (Samuel Van Grinsven, 2019)
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (John Maybury, 1998)
Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020)
Postcards from London (Steve McLean, 2018)
Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau (Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo, Theo and Hugo, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2016)
I think three of these films were distributed by Peccadillo Pictures, a distributor of gay-themed films of varying quality. These were at the better end of the scale, beginning with Sequin, the story of sixteen-year-old Sequin’s (Conor Leach) conflicting search for anonymous sex with older men and for the attractive man he met at the orgy at the private and mysterious The Blue Room. Unfortunately, one of his hook-ups is with B (Ed Wightman), who wants more than a one-night stand. The narrative mutates into something closer to thriller, but feels a bit disjointed. Unlike Théo & Hugo, there doesn’t seem to be any concern about HIV.
Continue reading →Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021)
Wright first came to prominence for me with the sitcom Spaced, working with Simon Pegg (and the fantastic Jessica Hynes/Stevenson), but I confess I’ve been a little less than methodical with his films. I largely enjoyed Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Baby Driver, although had issues with the blokeiness of both. I blinked when The Sparks Brothers was released and still can’t decide if he made it all up.
Continue reading →Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, Death of England: Face to Face (directed by Clint Dyer, National Theatre film, 2021)
One of the unexpected delights of lockdown culture was a screening of Death of England: Delroy, in which Delroy (Michael Balogun) recounts his arrest on the way to see the birth of his daughter and his subsequent electronic tagging. It was funny and gripping and anger-inducing and intelligent, and based on a play closed after press night. It was also a sequel to Death of England, in which Delroy’s friend Michael (Rafe Spall) discusses his relationship with his father, Alan, itself based upon a ten minute short.
Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)
It may be, of course, that I read Rebecca years and years ago — I know I started it and I studied the opening paragraph, the dream of the Manderley mansion from years later, but I’m not sure I got much further. And when I bought two Du Maurier boxsets, I don’t think Rebecca was part of them. It took me a while to track down a copy — although naturally I found several since, as a battered paperback 1992 reprint got more battered as it got carried around.
The conceit should be familiar: lady’s companion Rebecca meets aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo and the two have a whirlwind romance, before returning to the ancestral pad in … where we take to be Cornwall but it isn’t named in the book. The new bride finds life at Manderley difficult and the ghost of the dead Rebecca hangs over her, especially through the behaviour of housekeeper Mrs Danvers. A ball would be useful, perhaps, but Mrs Danvers persuades her to wear the same costume as Rebecca had and then it seems as if a wedge has been driven between the loving couple. Then a body is discovered in a sunken boat… Continue reading →
Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, a German Children’s Story, Michael Haneke, 2009)
Topkapi (Julius Dassin, 1964)
Red Joan (Trevor Nunn, 2018)
The White Ribbon has the same slightly frustrating and unnerving feel as Happy End, this time set in Germany (or possibly Austria) in the year leading up to World War One. An unnamed teacher (played by Christian Friedel) narrates (Ernst Jacobi) his memory of a time in a small village, where the pastor (Burghart Klaußner) fills the children with fears of sin and damnation, forcing the guilty parties (including his own children) to wear white ribbons as a symbol of wrongdoing. This seems to invite wrongdoing — an attempt to kill the doctor, vandalism, masturbation, violent revenge — and presumably is building a narrative that will lead to the Second World War. The right people aren’t necessarily punished.
Meanwhile, Topkapi is a much lighter confection — for which Peter Ustinov won his second Academy Award. Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) and Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell) hatch a plan to steal a treasure from a museum in Istanbul. Simpson (Ustinov) is meant to be a patsy, but gets recruited into the scheme. There’s some odd fourth wall breaking, especially at the beginning, and Mercouri, presumbaly not acting in her own language, can’t quite carry the film. Schell, meanwhile, is handsome in a way I’d never noticed before, knowing him better for The Black Hole (1979). But Ustinov steals every scene he is in and the whole thing is almost a dry run for The Italian Job, with a less clever ending. I really ought to read Eric Ambler one of these days.
I watched Topkapi knowing nothing about it — it popped up on BBC iPlayer. This led me to Red Joan, which takes the real story of the exposure of an old woman, Melita Norwood, as a Soviet spy. Here she is Joan Smith (Judi Dench), initially defended by her son Nick Stanley (Ben Miles, who I keep confusing with Ben Miller), arrested for sixty years earlier leaking of atomic secrets and occasionally has to look like she has indigestion so we can flashback to 1949 and Sophie Cookson being Young Joan. The politics is frankly botched and the sexism of the the 1940s is a little underplayed. Dench is always worth watching — and Iris did a more interesting double casting and flashback (although Kate Winslet was still less interesting).
Ruby Blue (Jan Dunn, 2008)
Jan Dunn returned to the Isle of Thanet for her second feature, again on a low budget, but this time illuminated by Bob Hoskins’s last big screen appearance. We appear to be — and forgive me if this is a cliché of my reading of British film — in Ken Loach territory, as Kes seems to be in the mix. I will be circumspect, but there are hints of spoilers.
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 →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 →
Subject to Change 