Showing posts with label Le Week-End. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Le Week-End. Show all posts

Thursday 24 April 2014

So great that you're quitting ? : A review of Les beaux jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


24 April

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

So great that you’re quitting

Bright Days Ahead (an uneven translation of Les Beaux Jours*) (2013) is in French, but, however well made, it has more of the sensibility of Hope Springs (2012) than of the best of French cinema : when the producer of Hope came to Cambridge Film Festival, he said that Meryl Streep had suggested making the footage at the end, and, although it had not been planned, it was then found possible to do it. The ending of this film strongly reminds one of it, though with very little feeling that matters have been resolved.

The reason being that Hope shares with this film the topic of healing the damage caused by one’s partner’s behaviour – though here the damage seemed to have been skin deep**, whereas in Tommy Lee Jones’ (Arnold’s) case (and contrary to the optimism in the title’s fictitious place name) it brooded over Meryl Streep (Kay) for almost the entire film. Hope is not a great film, and one can be cynical about the motives behind making it, but it still moves Days Ahead out of the brightness, and into the shade.

Another point of contact is a coastal location. Places in New England became the title resort in Hope, and, at least when we are outside and in it (when we are inside, it could be anywhere), the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is a vivid backdrop to Days Ahead, right from the title sequence, which is made to appear written onto the black of a bascule bridge. Straightaway, it is apparent that getting around is dependent on avoiding the times when tides make it favourable for vessels to navigate the channels and the bridge swings up. In no way apparent, for all the amenity of the location, is why Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and Philippe (Patrick Chesnais) are there at all.

In any case, despite Le Week-End (2013)’s reliance on the deus ex machina of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) to get Hanif Kureishi’s lumbering plot to go anywhere, once it has established the characters of Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) (but with no real prospect of development***), it shows far more about relationships and those near retirement than Days Ahead even thinks to do. For it goes straight for showing an affair, but often half-heartedly, so that one can care too little whether it survives, and too much how toxic its effects might be.

The real moment when there is everything is the illicit possibility of penetrative sex in Caroline’s car, and where, however close we seem to get, the windows are ever interposed between them and us – when that idea is shied away from, we suddenly step back and see where we had got lost from in awareness, the car in plain view and with people about their business.

Ageing the lead actress Ardant backwards is a well-worn trick, and even passionate moments seen in the store-room (to bolster up the notion of romantic rejuvenation) simply do not make for sustaining the conviction of amour fou such as KST’s in Leaving (2009) (or even of her bit-part as Virginie Rousset in Bel Ami (2012), where she, too, glows and visibly unfolds from knowing the favours of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson)) : here, the feeling on both sides is too tepid, even to the extent of stating to one’s lover that the preference is for sleep rather than continuing the time together, and Julien (Laurent Lafitte), too, is just beautified over time to suggest his strengthening appeal.

Throw in ‘getting to know’ the members of the Les Beaux Jours club in a way that is managed hardly better than in Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his superior stage-play as Quartet (2012). In Days Ahead, there are stock follies such as a wine-tasting where someone takes snorters or people unused to potting are let loose on a wheel and produce a deformed piece of clay, and the cheery message that we are invited to share that sniffy Caroline comes to value her new friends might give some a sense of warmth. Yet it is essentially a diversion from the fact that nothing is really going on, except at the level of cliché, and, whilst that may be fine for Fanny Chesnel’s novel, it is too thin for a film that seeks our approval.

Ultimately, the plot throws us back on Philippe and who he really is in relation to Caroline, but sadly the action has concentrated so much on her both that we do not know, and also that we cannot credit what, in the circumstances, would cause him to accommodate her needs. Hope, whatever we may think of its insights, does at least focus on that question, rather than trying to tack it on at the end.


That said, New Empress Magazine's reviewer found more going on here, and more of merit, but making none of these references


End-notes

* Surely not meant to resonate with the title that Beckettt gave to his play Happy Days when he translated it into French… ?

** And, to be susceptible to rapid repair thanks to a few jokes at the expense of a hotel run by a budget brand, and – at the cost of incredulity as to how Philippe got there, and what happened to Caroline’s car – to hitching a lift as the young Dylan or Kerouac might have done.

*** What does happen at the end smacks less of ‘going Godard’ than of the fantasy Paris of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 17 October 2013

A new scale of interest ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 October

When saying to Chris last night that I couldn't give Le Week-End a 6, but I couldn't give it an 8, a thought-process began that went beyond a 15-point scale (where one could, at least, have a genuine mid-point) :

I unleash, as Paul Bowles might do, the 102-point scale, inspired by whisky's Jim Murray and his Whisky Bible...


For said Week-End, it would be thus (each rated out of 17, 17 x 3 = 51, x 2 = 102)

76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


The rating is based on a studio version, or the director's cut...


Thoughts, comments, insults welcome - with this result, almost a percentage, the film wasn't a 6, but less close to a 7 than it would otherwise have had to be




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Descent into raggedness - director's cut

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


16 October

* Contains spoilery spoilers of a spoiler nature *

* Before getting here, you may have read the version put out by the studio, which is more of a review that can be read before seeing the film / if deciding whether to *


Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...



Meg has issues with sex, seeks to ration it, or to rationalize it - maybe she cannot relate to Nick's desire for cunnilingus : has it ever happened, or does she tease as shown ?

When he touches her - or tries to - there is an exchange of hurts, and we see him pleading to penetrate her, but she wants to sleep

We hear, in an angry moment (after he has accused her of dressing up for the laptop guy, and she has looked affronted, brought out maybe prepared adjectives of the buy being sweaty and so on - a defence ? has she really not dressed up, etc., and it is all just Nick's projection ?) of an infidelity with a student 15 years ago


Initiating, sustaining, enjoying sex / sexual action has become an enormous problem for these two. Nick is attracted by Meg's impulsiveness (having said, just before the quotation, that he likes her when she is like this), and flatters her, when she says that a man was chatting her up, by saying that she is hot, before being reminded that she is cold :

The chasteness of Diana, the allure for Actaeon of seeing her naked, the terrible price. It is not attraction / seduction / temptation with Nick and Meg, but humbling oneself for sex - may I, do I have permission, for what can be offered a glimpse of, then imperiously taken away (Nick's comment of lack of acquaintance with her vagina in the last 5 / 10 years) in self-denying sexual starvation

Maybe the fling 15 years ago is why Nick's latest job was at a former polytechnic in Birmingham (a fall from grace), although we are then talking only 1998 (with scarcely the highest pretended levels of scrutiny and integrity), and there has been a well-trodden path of randy supervisors and directors of studies, and willing undergraduates, that takes in The History Man, Tom Sharpe's books, and probably, between the lines, those of C. P. Snow, not to mention Michael Frayn's Donkeys' Years


This is all interesting. But there is a greater neurosis - on the threshold of the party at Morgan's, Meg is the one wanting to go into it / saying that she wants to go into it. It, though, is not a party party, and she immediately seems like a fish out of water, even saying something quite inept to Morgan's pregnant wife in the long time that we must imagine that Nick allows himself to push off with Morgan (and Morgan does not even think to effect any more than superficial introductions), before finding and meeting his son

Previously, Nick had almost to be dragged into the cemetery, but then, when we see him before Beckettt's memorial, he is / says that he is enjoying it, and wants to find Sartre

When he cannot sleep with Meg, Nick creates a shrine to the things that he loves - through Brodbent, we hear love being talked of, and know that Nick experiences it, although he mistakes helping his / their ? son, by having him at home, with what Meg might want

The flinching, the pain, at hearing about what happened to Morgan's ex-wife is quite unfeigned

Thirty years married doesn't seem long enough, and Nick we can imagine in communes and protests, but not Meg, unless the morbidity of their sex-life is the result of such drives and impulses as the craven way in which we him ask to penetrate her, and they have destroyed each other's simple pleasure in each other as a sexual companion

Introducing Morgan, and Nick's humiliating speech at the dinner, are turned into ways for the film to change direction, and we have to believe in the grace of Meg to hear and approve of Nick making massive admissions about himself and her

I can follow this film to the threshold of this device, but no further, and I see the - admittedly joyous - dancing at the end as acknowledging that it really has nothing to shed on what went before

No, not resolutions for resolutions' sake, but do we suddenly have to divest ourselves of the first half of the film in a way that - although joyous - feels pretty fake ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Descent into raggedness - the studio version

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


16 October

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

* Unlike the director's cut, it may be possible to read this version and still see the film without knowing too much already *




Thankfully, Lindsay Duncan only wears the hat at the end - and one soon forgets the title...


Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...

The end references a film clip from Godard, conveniently - unless it is a DVD, not t.v. - on the screen earlier on, but it have been nicer for the film just to have mimicked it, without explanation...

I am unsure about that (or the message that it sends, which will be visited in the director's cut of this posting). I also wonder about Haneif Kuresihi writing the screenplay, and will also need to look into that.

As to the raggedness, when trying to characterize it to someone after the screening who had not seen it, we agreed that the over-elaboration of different styles and types of shot highly resembled someone who is doing a first PowerPoint presentation, and, just because he or she can, having this slide coming in from the left, the next one dissolving - it does not add to the cinematic discourse, but disperses our attention when the crisp focus does not have a function, the arty shot with foregrounded objects wildly out of focus another, and becames variation for the sheer reason of being able to do it, rather than advancing the interpretative message.

The music leaves something to be desired, too. Famously, in the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), Miles Davis and his quintet improvised it in December 1957 : rather cheaply, the composer's sub-Milesian tones were just brought in, from time to time, to convey the beauté triste (if that is the right word order) of Paris, lovers, life. Otherwise, it sounded more like shopping music, vaguely colouring the mood with a sort of sepia, or hitching a ride on Dylan (or the Godard film).



Those are the very bad things. The plus, an immense one, is the performances of Duncan (Meg Burroughs) and Jim Broadbent (as her husband Nick), although one did feel that one had been there a bit before with a quietly spoken Duncan not knowing her own mind or why she hides behind her husband and such reputation as he has. That apart, when she says that she'd like to stop teaching, learn Italian, play the piano, and dance the tango, we utterly believe in her desire to transform her live.

We believe in this couple, the dangerousness of being them, and how they surprise, hurt and electrify each other. We believe in Nick, despite an injured knee, on all fours, and wanting to scent Meg's vagina. We believe in him trailing after her, forlornly calling out Meg, Meg, wait, no, when she flounces out on him.
With Jeff Goldblum in the equation, who seems totally unknowing but not necessarily insincere, the implausibility creeps in - as is said at a dinner party, his character, Morgan, is always loud. What we have to say is how he would he possibly have recognized Nick, in a passionate embrace (cheered on by younger French people), from the back of his head, and how, in this world of Facebook and Google, he would not possibly, if he wanted, have known what Nick was doing and made contact. Morgan's entry, not least as described, seemed forced, as if rescuing the plot from not knowing what it intended.

Goldblum's role just about works, though, nice though it was to see him, he was unremarkable. With the film ending as it does, he ends up as more of a magical figure - and, after what Nick says at dinner, it is hard to imagine that Morgan would be calling down the stairs saying when do you leave, do you have to go, send me a text-message, if you do not want to talk.

All in all, the Morgan involvement is unhurried, but lax in the overall sense of cramming in the enjoyment, and clearly only there to provide a deviation from Nick and Meg just together. I am not sure that it spoils the film, but one imagines that Kureishi could have made progress with the couple (in the film's terms) in some way less striking as a contrivance.

Despite the gratuitous ragged cinematography, the film deserves a watch, if only to mull over these questions afterwards.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)