Showing posts with label Kristin Scott Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kristin Scott Thomas. Show all posts

Thursday 2 August 2012

KST / Bradshaw

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This was meant to be a draft, for me to use to comment on what the great Messrs Bradshaw and French have 'made of' this film, but it seems to have gone live - whatever they have to say...


Philip French:

In Your Hands (aka Contre toi) is a subtle psychological thriller, the second full-length feature by the French writer-director Lola Doillon, but the first to be shown here. A claustrophobic virtual two-hander, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas as confident, childless divorcee Anna Cooper, a surgeon working in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a prison hospital, and Pio Marmaï as Yann, a wild young man.In Your HandsProduction year: 2012Country: FranceCert (UK): 15Runtime: 81 minsDirectors: Lola DoillonCast: Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, Kristin Scott Thomas, Pio MarmaiMore on this filmAt the beginning Anna appears distraught but carefully controlled, running from a shabby suburban house to her smart Parisian apartment. The movie doesn't leave us long to wonder about her conduct. She goes to the police to report her abduction, and in a tensely developed flashback we learn that she has been held in a cellar by Yann, the vengeful husband of a patient who died during a Caesarean operation carried out by Anna. In this first part there's an emotional ebb and flow, the threat of violence and some physical conflict, as the two discuss the case and its emotional ramifications.In the second part, a delayed instance of the Stockholm syndrome, some mixture of guilt and sympathy seems to draw Anna to seek out Yann. A passionate affair ensues that is in its way as dangerous as the period of incarceration, possibly more so. The end is abrupt and not entirely satisfactory, but it's a convincingly performed and constantly intriguing film


Kristin Scott Thomas gives us another movie in a distinctive genre that she has made her own: modern day, no makeup, speaking French, transgressive sex. It's an intense and claustrophobic two-hander, well acted – especially by her – but frankly a bit of a shaggy-dog story with a faintly unsatisfactory ending. Scott Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a single professional woman living on her own in Paris and a bit of a workaholic. The name signals that, though a fluent and idiomatic French speaker, she is British but otherwise there is no back story. At the beginning of a rare holiday, Anna comes into traumatic contact with an intense figure: Yann, played by Pio Marmaï, and their encounter becomes a terrifying ordeal. The film begins intriguingly and promises much, with an interesting flashback structure which initially conceals as much as it reveals. But in its third act, the movie runs out of ideas and has no more to tell us. Set alongside Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long (2008) and Catherine Corsini's Leaving (2009), In Your Hands showcases of one of this country's most remarkable screen performers, a vividly intelligent presence – but it does not quite work. PB


Wednesday 1 August 2012

An ambivalence for Kristin - first thoughts

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2 August

* Contains spoilers - if you can still catch this film, you probably would not wish to know too much *


We see characteristics of Dr Anna Cooper (though her name and profession do not emerge until we hear her listening to her answering-machine), at the outset of this film, that will haunt its progress and eventual ending, did we but know it: I planned to go back to see whether that foreknowledge matters, and, having done so, can say that it does not.

To my taste, Kristin Scott Thomas inhabited the difficult role of Anna to perfection, for she drives and dictates so much of the pace, although, given that she has been kidnapped, one might assume that she is not in control. In this respect, the title in English, In Your Hands, cleverly exploits an ambiguity of the original, Contre Toi, whereas it has to be said that the subtitles are a somewhat ham-fisted affair.

For example, after Anna has been given the response of I sure do when asked whether she likes tea, the utterance Avec plaisir, when she is offered some, is rendered a little more convincingly along the lines of I'd love some. My ability to keep up with spoken French is not brilliant, but I can usually get the gist of dialogue, guided by what I see. Not here, where such a freedom - clearly for the benefit of speakers of US English - had been taken with the tone and style.

It can sometimes be a slow matter of engaging with a film when one is relating to such a familiar face as that of KST, and almost admiring the acting, rather than - if this denotes the separate thing that I intend - following the performance.

For me, an important moment to settle me in was to see her responding to the messages on her answering-machine, following an absence, but also to see how I would relate to her as a doctor, when she arrives and dresses for work at the hospital. (In this film, her name is the closest that we get to an explanation for anyone detecting that she is not French, which I am sure that the noisy pair of couples behind and to the side of me would have made grist to their mill of whispering / talking through the film, since they also laughed at several inappropriate moments.)


Anyone who did not see a poster or other advertising for this film beforehand will not know that they had to envisage, as they were watching what unfolded, how a certain scene would be reached. In fact, I almost came to wonder whether the image had just been - which it is not - a teaser to set the audience off on the wrong scent. Not that this is a thriller, but it is about psychology, about what makes people tick, have the upper hand, in the relations with each other.

And not in a calculating way largely, because there is a lot of instinct at work, and - if we are not busy laughing in a way that suggests we should have left the film to those who wanted to watch it - it will be open to interpretation quite what is happening. No dogma here about even what happens, let alone the rights and wrongs, and in the intelligent domain of films such as Haneke's Hidden (2005) and Code Unknown (2000) (of both of which I was reminded early on), if not equally of The Woman in the Fifth (2011).


More to come...



Tuesday 31 July 2012

The usual deal in the trailer for The Hunter

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31 July

If you did believe the trailer, you would expect a fast-paced experience from watching the feature. However, it will not materialize, because the trailer is not remotely representative: almost all the action has been squeezed together in a few minutes, and put with the sort of pounding music that makes me feel very unpleasantly anxious.

Imagine, instead, more and more of the glimpses that you have of Martin David (Willem Dafoe) exploring and setting his traps, cut occasionally with the rightly praised photography of the scenery, and you have a better measure of the ratio of what we call ‘action’ to his everyday hunting activities, because this is really not, unless you excite easily, one that will have you on the edge of your seat.

And I wonder how many of these trailers there are: is this the let's-extract-the-last-iota-of-momentum version? Has it mystifyingly attracted attention away from anyone who might have seen In Your Hands (2012), though a film in French with subtitles is a tricky proposition?


Thursday 26 July 2012

128 page-views to-day!

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26 July

If the so-called Stats told me more, I'd be able to understand what has been looked at - the old piece about Bel Ami (2011?) is a bit of a surprise, at 8 page-views, but they don't (what I'm shown) add up to 128 :


64 x 2

32 x 2 x 2

16 x 2 x 2 x 2

8 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

4 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2


And Hello, China!, with to-day's reported audience of 12...



Monday 21 May 2012

Kristin shows her comedic flair [in Salmon Fishing in The Yemen (2011)]

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22 May

* Many a spoiler in this belated review of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) *

I do not know the novel from which this was taken, and can insufficiently conceive that seeing how it differs from the film would merit the time to find out (quite apart from anything else that I would derive from the experience). In any case, my shameless interest was to see Kristin Scott Thomas, and anything else was going to be a bonus.

The typical end-of-film disclaimer always talks of denying resemblances to people living or dead, but we all surely recall the folly of being found out recording having contrived to bury a bad news story, and the fact that Kristin, as the PM's Press Secretary, was called Maxwell might not have been without another irony.

In the screening that I have just been at, KST got some very good laughs, in character, for how she sought to impose (what is usual to call) control* on the situations that she faced, including a rebellious middle son - and, even by then, we weren't quite acclimatized to hearing this actress casually saying 'fucking' as one element of throwing her weight about, which made it naughtily delicious.

As to whether finding a positive story about The Middle East to offset the bad press about the British forces' campaign in Afghanistan made any sense on which to hang this story, not least in terms of the different timescale of day-to-day business of press releases and conferences, I rather doubt anyone in the audience would have been persuaded. However, that was unnecessary, when we were just required to embrace Mrs Maxwell's breezy indifference to reality or other obstacles, few greater than the implausibility embodied in the title itself: she just wanted kudos for the PM and his office, and latched onto any figure mentioned, such as the number of anglers, that suggested that there were votes hanging on what she did.

If we might compare the farcicality, for a moment, to the monumental one of a film such as Doctor in the House (1954) and others in the series (or maybe even Carry on Doctor (1967)), the pompous consultant (James Robertson Justice (or Kenneth Williams as Tickle)), assured of his own importance, is almost in the nature of the role a sketchily drawn character, and provides enough bluster to rub off on and against those more in the lead. Here, though, Kristin was absent for a long stretch at a time, and her character did not, in this regard, appear to have been integrated enough into the film to sustain her: yes, one can argue that, although it is at her behest that any of this is being allowed to proceed, that does not call for her to be on screen, but I rather feel that the film itself lost sight of what it was trying to be, or tried to be too many things, with too many foci, at various points.


It could be a romantic comedy, set against the infighting and machination of politics, but it does not really sit easily as one, and, to judge from a comment that I heard to the effect that 'they have turned it into a slushy romance', nor did it with someone whose reading of the book had led to different expectations. It is more in the nature of the awkward and rather unlikely romance, which brings me onto the pretty-womanization of Ewan McGregor as Dr Jones. No, he is not an LA hooker, but, in an unlikely way, he has to break through his exterior and appeal to his equivalent of Richard Gere (except that Gere thinks Roberts stunning more or less straightaway, and we are the ones who don't understand his fascination).

In a play on stage, one would trust more, because of having to, in one's script and those delivering it, whereas here, when I first saw him, Ewan had been so dolled down, but only in order that he might shine and look gloriously winsome to be the love interest, that I doubted not only what his lifestyle might be doing to him, but also whether I had actually been wrong in inferring that the voice with Scottish accent that we had heard reading a dismissive e-mail must belong to him. It then made it look quite ridiculous, as a depiction of his throwing himself into the project and, with it, in love with his co-star, that he suddenly became boyishly young.

Oh, yes, falling in love can give one a glow and do other wonders, but this was too extreme, as if we suddenly started expecting him to behave like Trainspotting (1996)'s Renton all over again. That and the accent, which might have been - I am no expert - a mannered version of his native one, but which gave the impression of someone so proud of his Scottishness that he made doubly sure that he sounded from there (whereas many a prominent Scot gives not a hint of it in the voice), even at the risk of seeming to be, if not a self-parody, then a target for mockery.

Which might, in some people's mind, link with what Emily Blunt says to him when she thinks that he has called around on her at home to bully her into going back to work, despite her new boyfriend being missing in action. If McGregor's lack of affect (evidenced as Renton), studied choice of language, and self-confessed inability to tell jokes justified her, in this incautious moment, calling him someone with Asperger's, then so be it, but those things, in themselves, do not add up to anything, and I should be disappointed to know if they were meant to.

Disappointed as I would be with As Good as it Gets (1997), if I thought that those watching it - or House or Frasier - believed that they can see both all the problems that are faced, and also, in the love of a good woman, the obvious and redeeming solution. (Not that Dr Jones' wife isn't a belittling cow, more concerned about his final salary scheme than the job that he has to do to get it, but still**.) But more disappointed with what is put in the mouth of Dr Jones as a reply, since there are many who have the hurts to show to disprove the notion that someone with that syndrome would not be wounded by her outburst - or does scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy know something that I don't?


All in all, I enjoyed the patchy political intrigue (as a chance for KST to show the breadth of her talents), the pottily likeable sheikh (Amr Waked) who - surprise, surprise - has more to teach Dr Jones than he imagines and, of course, has to owe Dr Jones his life (in the face of a singularly inept attempt at assassination by someone commissioned in Yemen to kill him, who fetches up in Scotland with no real evidence of a plan). That apart, it is just the will she, won't she with Emily Blunt, and people doing the decent thing as good Britons.




End-notes

* For some, contol freak is a sort of shorthand, but the word 'control', to me, belongs in the day of training dogs the Barbara Woodhouse way. (The phrase is, itself, more likely to have originated with a freak who thinks that it is fit employment to seek to control how we perceive and think about his or her clients, which, when the PM and his government is the client, is where KST in this film comes in.) And the word has no positive companion, such as - to make one up - control champion, just this dismal word in the phrase He's so controlling: engage tongue, switch off mind!
** At Civic amenities - a far cry from the locus amoenus?, I have pondered Dr Jones, at this moment, further.

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Trout-fishing in Essex

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3 May

Sorry, I keep getting that one confused with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), for a screening of which on Thursday afternoon I have a ticket: worryingly, if only for the publicity employed by the film's distibutors, searching for it on Google® by typing in just Yemen brings up no immediate results.


We shall see, and at least it's not

* Fishing for Cod Russian in the Quietly Flowing Don

* Dolphin Fishing in the English Channel

* Tuna Hunting in my Kitchen Cupboard

* or even Catching Red Snappers in the Bedroom


Saturday 17 March 2012

Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (3)

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17 March

* Contains some spoilers *

The most ludicrous claim* that I have read about this film (from the Arts Picturehouse's programme booklet, which I didn't look at before my viewing):

[Robert] Pattinson plays the seductive scoundrel with unbounded pomp and a voraciousness that oozes star quality, outshining a top-notch supporting cast that includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas.


Nothing to do with being unclear which of the phrases is 'oozing', although I saw no ooze, but the belief that, albeit Pattinson is on screen almost all of the time, that means that he outshines anyone is seriously misguided - just physically, and in poise, tone and demeanour, Uma Thurman, for example, is radiant as Madeleine, and she is the part, whereas Pattinson never quite seems to know what his part is, let alone plausibly play it.

But then, nor do the directors or the writers of the screenplay, which is part of the problem...


As to things elsewhere, I see that Philip French has one of his rather terse 'reviews' in The Guradian*, of which this long sentence (which looks longer in columns, and is as chaotic as mine) constitutes almost one-third (without talking about the film in hand at all!):

In 1947 the former English professor, drama critic and leading MGM producer Albert Lewin wrote and directed a fascinating version of Maupassant's 1885 novel Bel Ami about the upward progress of the charming, untalented journalist Duroy (nicknamed "Bel Ami") in a corrupt late-19th-century Paris where the press are in cahoots with the politicians.


Yet, whenever anyone talks about this novel by Maupassant (and, often enough, reviews or synopses of films that adapt something for the first time often enough skate over the origins entirely), why do I get that impression that no one has actually read the thing...?


End-notes

* Less absurd, but no less bad, is this account (from a free paper's cinema section):

Based on the classic Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name [the poster for the film handily points out 'this fact', though I have no conception whether it is a classic, or why it's not having been called Mr Bean's Revenge matters]. A charming but manipulative Parisien [which, in the film, he isn't since, as he points out to Madeleine (Thurman), they didn't go to where he was brought up when they got married] makes his way up the rungs of the social ladder by bedding the most beautiful and influential women in the city [Ricci, as Clotilde, is beautiful, but not influential; the husbands of the other two are both important, one (Charles) in the newspaper that the other owns, but the women and they are just - and only - the people whom he meets when he is invited to dinner by Charles]. Uncertain and awkward in the beginning [does that change?], he learns quickly [ditto] as he conquers - and breaks - hearts [but only having been lavishly and unequivocally tipped off how to conquer those hearts - and why].

** SOme such!


Thursday 15 March 2012

Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)

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16 March

A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...


1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?

They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:

It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)

Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.

How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!


2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!

Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.

We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.

He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...


NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'


3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud

World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:

They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:

* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)

* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him

* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)


You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.

How? asks Georges.

Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...


End-notes

* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...

** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.


Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (1)

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15 March

* Contains a splashing of spoilers *

I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.

As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.

As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.

So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)

Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).

There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.

Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).

This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.

Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)

I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)


So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.

Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)

Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.

Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).

There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.

Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.

Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.


PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).

All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)


For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...


End-notes

* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.

** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.

*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).

**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)

***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.

****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.

******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!


Monday 27 February 2012

Kristin allures again

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 February

* Contains spoilers *

A friend in the cinema had already warned me of what his friend and he had found not only a surprising, but an inexplicable, ending to The Woman in the Fifth (2011), so I was on the alert.

That said, in the dark and not tempted to look at my watch (or the phone), I nonetheless knew that it was an eighty-four-minuter, but had no sense of how far in I was. Waiting for this surprise actually helped me concentrate wonderfully, and it did not, when it came, seem out of place.



What did keep me waiting was when Kristin Scott Thomas, who was presumably the woman of the title, was going to appear, and I had forgotten about the invitation that Ethan Hawke (as Tom) had been given to a literary evening:

Which, it must be said, seemed as dire as one might imagine, with even the effrontery of being asked for a contribution of twenty euros on arrival. If I didn't know that KST would be much better company than all of these old bores, I still wouldn't have blamed Ethan for, having caught sight of her, wanting to follow her (up to the roof, with the base of Le Tour Eiffel seemingly in touching distance) and leave them behind.

As to the way that everything was told (although, quite in the right way, nothing did get told), what arose from an initial feeling that things were uneasy was one of mysteriousness, especially in relation to KST (playing Margit Kadar, half-French, half-Romanian). The seductiveness that she had shown so tellingly well in her role in Leaving* (2009) was not to the fore as such, although she did greet Tom in a very intimate way when he came to her flat for the first time, but was simmeringly, almost glitteringly, present.

And it was fine that she could see an attractive quality in Tom, because his glasses (I am probably not one to speak) didn't suit him, and his face was much better without them when, in the same scene, she removed them (we possibly hadn't seen him properly like that before, because, talking to his daughter through some railings, we just catch him when he swaps glasses with her).



Tom had an inward quality to him that made it seem as if he had not even noticed that another woman (French-speaking Ania from Poland, played by Joanna Kulig) was taking an interest in him, until she arrives at his door very obviously dressed up and (likewise) takes him up to the roof. One almost thought, in the same way, that his curiosity would not get the better of him when on duty in his mysterious night-job (although his employer must surely have thought that, sooner or later, he would have that impulse), and that he would never go to the 5th arrondissement (the Fifth of the title, or, in the French, La Femme du Vème).

I wanted to see this film again, but I may not have the chance - not at my usual cinema, as it turned out that I had made it to the last screening - and I have ordered the book by Douglas Kennedy on which Pawel Pawlikowski based the screenplay that he has directed.

All in all, this was a film that credited me as a filmgoer to follow connections, to be confused, to work it out, and to construct a reality. I was deeply reminded of Kafka, largely the sort of internal logic of The Castle and (to a lesser extent) The Trial, but that's always fine with me.

Tom, I think, is also creating a reality, and his drifting (e.g. his apparent lack, after the initial concern, of action when he finds that his luggage has been taken from him when he is woken at the bus terminus at Quai de l'Ourcq, and then his inertia when, despite having no real money, he is given a room (no. 7) at Le Bon Coin) is part of that. If I get the chance, I will watch it all over again...


End-notes

* I hadn't thought, when I saw it on DVD, that its title translated Partir, but I think that it does so effectively enough.


Saturday 3 December 2011

An appreciation of Sarah's Key - and not for what it isn't

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 November

There are times when I curse myself for having used the time when Kristin Scott Thomas signed my programme for me after her informed performance of Pinter's magnificent play Betrayal that I bothered her with how uniformly useless the UK papers' reviews had been - she didn't need to know (as (a) the run in the cinemas trounced their shallow views and (b) even if it hadn't, the DVD market was sure to pick up on it), and I could have said something other than thanking her for this film that they were too inadequate to appreciate.

So forget what they wrote, and their comparisons (which shouldn't have been made, even given the proximity in time) with this other film The Roundup, with which it clearly shares so little.

This is not the Kristin Scott Thomas French film that this time disappoints, it is better than Leaving (although I think that that film is very fine) and at least as good as I've Loved You so Long. Yes, one can always quibble about the plot, but Sarah's Key pulls no punches in doing justice to the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, from which it sprang.

And here some of these so-called UK film writers / critics got lost, by ascribing to the film what it is in the book (although, of course, it could have been changed), and by not understanding how Julia Jarmond is engaged in what happened to young Sarah Staryznksi, not least because she has a life within her that her husband views as a nuisance, and in her wanting to follow her story, wherever it goes.

The film ends with a truth: that what is shared as a story, goes on, and Julia's character, played with an enormous amount of integrity and with great respect to the times through which Sarah lived, wants to bring that truth, both husband Bertrand's family and to the family with which she feels such a human bond in the person of Sarah herself. Yes, she sometimes thinks that she has hurt and has done wrong, but she has actually healed, and has helped others to view their lives differently.

So forget all this rubbish about what happens 'in the third act' - films are not plays, and do not fall into acts, whether three or five. This is a vibrant and living piece of cinema, which transcends all this nonsense about acts.


I will watch this film on DVD, but I am glad that I had the chance to see it on the big screen, where it could touch audiences - I could here the silence of engagement in the screens in which I saw it. It is also a tremendous novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.