Do you think I'm pretty ?

This is a review of Under the Skin (2013)

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This is a review of Under the Skin (2013)

Rather unlikely though it may seem in retrospect, Tilda Swinton appeared as four characters in a film where a central tenet is that one or more of three genetically engineered ‘sisters’ needs to engage in sexual activity to collect semen to keep them all alive. Teknolust (2002) really is not much better than described, because it leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination, and does one much care whether Ruby, Olive and Marine perish (let alone whether semen denatures if, as here, heated in a vessel) ?

In Under the Skin (2013), the danger, if anything, is of obscuring the novelistic source-material in a film that is visually very sharp and concerns quiet contemplation, allowing the eye to acclimatize to what is in the shot : a wide view, with, one realizes, Scarlett Johansson (Laura ?*) walking along the road in the middle ground; an assembly of images, faces, gestures in Glasgow that becomes a golden kaleidoscope; looking into the darkness, and seeing that a figure is coming out from it; the fog and what comes in and out of view in it. At one point, the raging of the sea, and people's impotence in the face of it.


At times, #UndertheSkin is unnervingly stylized, like ritual, at others observational of nature, and human nature, in an unassuming way.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 19, 2014

In an opening sequence, complete with acute musical accompaniment composed by Mica Levi, we are given a sense of the genesis of Laura's character, centring on the iris, but, even then, we cannot be quite sure what we see - nothing to do with the quality, for that uncertainty is quite intentional. The film does not really have a narrative, but a structure, and it deliberately leaves the meaning of quite a bit of what we see unclear. In particular, Laura seems to collaborate with more than one bike-rider, who, as she does in her van**, roam the territory (they almost always seem to be seen at night, as is Laura for much of the film), but what the connection is and what purpose it serves no one could ever say.

It is a fine line to tread between telling too much story (Piercing Brightness (2013)) and ending up crass, and not telling enough (and, inevitably, losing some of the audience), and, although Skin is close to the latter, as the film develops, we are running through the possibilities in our minds, and it gives us quite a mental workout (even if, as said, some of those matters are ultimately going to be a matter of our deciding what was going on, and why : perhaps this is some kind of hive, with Laura as the queen, and the men as drones ?).

#UnderTheSkin #Win Hypervisual predatory identification @StudioCanalUK @picturehouses
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 16, 2014

Just when Skin seems to be in danger of having become repetitive, with variations on a theme, it is careful to deviate from what we have seen before - at first, still at its pace and nothing dramatic, although, in such terms and on all sorts of levels, the ending is a shock, not just because we have started to care about Laura when she resembles a black widow spider less. Moving to being less in control, we forget even that the famous face is that of an actress, and think of Johansson as a woman, no longer predating.

All in all, as Edgar Allan Poe would not, nothing to stretch the boundaries too far, an interesting journey, and some devastatingly impressive images.


Postscript

A somewhat spoilery review from Mark Kermode (in The Observer) is quite interesting


End-notes

* Apparently (according to IMDb, she (her name is never heard) is called Laura (which may have been taken from the book, as may the fact that she is English, as Johansson perfectly sounds).

** The same IMDb entry asserts that hidden cameras captured the men who get into the van, who were not actors, and director Jonathan Glazer only told them afterwards about the film. Equally, it describes the film as An alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland whereas being asked for directions or walking to the local shop is hardly hitching...


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

What sort of man is Theodore ?

This is a follow-up review of Her (2013)

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20 February

This is a follow-up review of Her (2013)

The film is called Her (#UCFF's initial response here) and she (Samantha, the voice of Scarlett Johannson) permeates it, but the person anchoring the film and about whom it arguably is must be Theodore : if this is ‘A Spike Jonze love story’, it is love from his perspective (when it feels good, and when he sits on the steps of the underpass, not understanding what is happening), and invites us to wonder what makes him tick.

He does not sleep heavily or sometimes well, but does not mind being woken – which Samantha manages with just a brief signal via his data-handset – and seems generally of a good-natured disposition. In fact, he seems a bit too amenable to have a stable and certain sense of self, for he is wedded to the idea (no longer the lived reality) of ‘being married’, which he says that he likes, and so has long delayed finalizing the divorce. (His lawyer, who appears not familiar – or maybe just not sympathetic – with how people often enough put off the final step, is irritated with him.)

Acquiescence in what does not bother him means that, although clearly troubled by the suggestion that he should stifle his unseen sex-partner with the cat (even if it is only a virtual reality), he goes along with it, and also with many of Samantha’s suggestions / interventions. Just as for his job, Theodore adopts a persona, that of a stud, for remote-sex assignations, and maybe, in effect, he also does for contentedly being on the beach, fully clothed and smiling, ‘with’ Samantha. He even seems to adorn his breast-pocket with large safety-pins (good to see that they still exist in this world !) so that the handset is at the right height for Samantha to see.

The paradigm for Theodore is where he asks a voice-controlled system to select a song of specified type (melancholy ?), in that he rejects what he first has chosen for him, but then settles for the second one. It is in the video-game that he plays at Amy’s (Amy Adams’), where he has to be the best mum, that he lets his fantasy free, bumping his way to the head of the queue, by driving riotously up the verge, as if this behaviour in the game-world is sufficient to express himself.

In his game at home, he appears stumped by a verbally abusive character, but gets a prompt from Samantha that it is a test and swears back. (A brief shot later shows him not playing the game, but communing with the character.) At work, the effusive compliments of Paul (Chris Pratt), who also talks about Theodore’s feminine side, seem to feel awkward to him and he does not seem to find it easy to accept them, but, having met Tatiana, Samantha and he go on a double-date with Paul and her.

He is at ease with Samantha, and he does value her, but one feels that he is better understood and more able to express himself with Amy – probably still just as friends, but, newly divorced, maybe he does not need more than that and to discover himself…


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

It’s not serious…

This is an initial review of Spike Jonze's Her (2013)

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18 February

This is an initial review of Spike Jonze's Her (2013)

"Too many of us have become slaves to the devices that were supposed to free us" https://t.co/VIDBLeqtzo

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 15, 2017

Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore (a latter-day forger of emotions, in letters that are also fake) also becomes drawn in :https://t.co/n1EsOBLQn5

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2017

Loneliness, loss, fear, and guilt are a sample of what is going on in the life of Theodore Twombly (named after the artist Cy Twombly¹ ?), and, to an extent, the film meditates on those emotions, but also, at the same time, engages thoughtfully with AI (artificial intelligence) and what some call The Singularity, which they say will come soon and where there will no longer be a divide between human intelligence and AI : more acutely than with Air Doll (2009), where our focus and our sympathies are solidly with Doona Bae as Nozomi, this treatment of the Pygmalion-type story is more even handed.

Moreover, the scenario interestingly juxtaposes a technical world, where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) plays a game that projects into the space of his room and, almost as now, everyone walking along is talking to someone else who is not there, with his job. He works for Beautiful Handwritten Letters.com as a ghost writer for those who want another person to receive a real letter in his or her script (rather than an e-mail) – and we learn more as the film progresses (including that some books are still printed, too).

A familiar enough notion from at least as far back as Shakespeare (let alone various versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, Flaubert (?), or Woody Allen), but here the writing appears, Harry Potter like, directly onto the page from dictation, and, moreover, in script as if the intended writer had written it. One should probably not take for granted what it is that satisfies Theodore in it : he clearly does value what he does, and does not appear to yearn to be any other sort of writer. (He is known to Paul (Chris Pratt) on reception as Letter Writer No. 612, from whom he receives immodest praise, which initially appears to hint at homoeroticism, rather than an unbiased appreciation of his art.)

What we have already contrasted is the notion of what is real and what is a lovingly created fake (for that is how Theodore comes to talk about his work), this in a world where he can be lying in bed awake, select – based on choosing from a sample of messages – a similarly sleepless woman to talk to and, within a minute, be chatting up and having phone sex with a stranger (as it turns out, a rather strange stranger)². On another level, his flat seems to bear continuing witness to the separation that his wife and he have gone through, because there are pine dining chairs facing inwards, as if missing an absent table, and there are books in disarray on the shelves, suggesting that his wife’s and his books had once been integrated, and, without them, there is no cohesion.

In crude terms, the digital world, which puts him in touch with a fellow insomniac, seems more sorted out than the analogue one of life in the flat after Catherine. His occupation, in a bachelor sort of way, is with video-games (where the player has to explore the virtual territory, but not employing a multi-player mode) and looking at the nightscape. (It is Los Angeles, which was beautifully rendered at night in Drive (2011), but melded in some way with Shanghai (which is credited as a location, along with having its own unit).) With Theodore’s job, digital and analogue are more integrated, because the former allows the production of a physical object, even though, as an artefact, it is an illusion.

Enter Samantha, who is no illusion, and who comes into Theodore’s life when he is sold a new ‘operating system’ as a result of a large video display by OS. (Arguably, she / it is an application (some would say ‘app’), not an operating system ?) Neither knows what to expect of the other, and that exploration is the nub of the film – Theodore only seems to know that he does not want something when he has it, as with the date that Samantha encourages him to go on (and which we see at the time, and, afterwards, from his perspective), whereas she does things and presents him with various faits accomplis of increasing audacity (even the acquisition of a body by adoption).

The film evokes all parts of Theodore’s married life with Catherine (Rooney Mara), from which some of his guilt and all of his sense of loss stem, in montages of carefully thought-out snippets. He has the naivety – though also, unlike him, the insight – of the title-character in Lars and the Real Girl (2007) in thinking that Catherine will be pleased for him to hear about Samantha – this tells us how deeply involved he is, that he is telling all the world. For their analogue / digital dating feels daring, as the first gay or lesbian kiss in some long-running serial might have done, and Theodore embraces Paul’s suggestion, on meeting his girlfriend Tatiana (Laura Kai Chen), of a double-date.

Having Scarlett Johannson as the unseen Samantha avoids her physical angularity, which would not complement Phoenix’s own, and allows her voice to float wonderfully and be highly attractive and reflexive. The joy of the film is that Theodore’s and her conversations feel like a real interchange, so one wonders whether it was done with her on set, to take her cues, rather than put in separately. In a sense, she feels more real than Theodore does, because, no matter that we never she her, she jokes, feels, uses inflexions and speaks wise words, to name but a few, and seems to embody life.

The resonant topic of a creature of any sort growing in capacity and in knowledge³ is even made more potent by not having a simulacrum, such as an avatar – instead, we have just the voice, which, by nuance, intonation and what it says, has to convey the sense of discovery and of a remote, yet somehow intimate, other. What the film aims at representing is a variety of experiences of otherness, and, in its course as in its ending, achieves far greater subtlety than films such as, for example, Piercing Brightness or The World’s End (even if they may also aim at other effects).

The main thing that flaws this film, other than it very slightly outstays its welcome through the number and length of episodes towards its end, is Phoenix’s sometimes imprecise diction (as in The Master (2012)), at which times he appears to be speaking without opening his mouth properly, and subtitles would help, if the words are significant.

A very minor defect in a fine performance, though Johannson’s is impressive and probably betters it. (Oh, and, for the fastidious (as Theodore has to be with his writing), the case of the title – unless in answer to the question ‘What do you want ?’…)


More here : The Agent Apsley meditates further on the nature of Theodore...



Epilogue :

Could a human ever enter into a meaningful relationship with an artificial consciousness? Ian McEwan’s latest novel takes on the ethics of A.I. and human intimacy. https://t.co/jnmgiT2ERu

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 16, 2019

When, of course, all that we really need do is re-watch Spike Jonze's marvellous film Her (2013)... :https://t.co/gB94gAkkhP pic.twitter.com/JidqxK7wZB

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 16, 2019

End-notes

¹ IMDb does its usual trick of not knowing what his surname is, throwing one back one one’s own resources…

² Nothing new there, except the interfaces offers direct and immediate connection (when we hear Theodore’s user-name).

³ It is familiar, say, from Agent Smith in the trilogy beginning with The Matrix (1999) (which, in turn, has its roots in Akira (1988) and, amongst other things, what becomes of Tetsuo).


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

What can we learn from Tracy Chevalier... ?

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17 October

Well, I would listen to Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, endlessly about musicianship, instruments and performance, because I know him, I trust him, and he is knowledgeable.

This filmed account of an exhibition (now past ?), co-written by Phil Grabsky (and another) under the title Vermeer and Music, probably thought it unavoidable to have Ms Chevalier in it.

Does it make as much sense for Jacobi to be a talking head on Bacon's paintings as for Chevalier to be one on Vermeer's ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2013

I do not know why. Yes, she wrote a best-selling novel about Vermeer's life, and it gave rise to a film of the same name (a vehicle for young Scarlett). The title of both renamed a painting that, albeit by tradition, already had a name. (Vermeer seems to have named none himself : nothing, other than an inventory of his house, was mentioned, whereas what I want to know is why - when he was also dealing in art - he did not have a catalogue of his own works, to whom sold, for how much, when. etc.)

The film, perhaps gratuitously, has a narrator (a woman) as well as an art historian (a man) as its host : in the discussion of the second painting that Chevalier was given space to talk about (probably four minutes of the film, twice, and so competing with the time allowed to the exhibition's curator), she called an instrument lying on its side, which the host had described a viola da gamba, a bass viol. They are not interchangeable terms.

I really do not know which speaker was right, but neither even noticed. This is meant to be a film about music, Egarr has already told us that a gamba is like a guitar on its side (it has frets), and, somewhere, the narration has said that the bass viol got taken over by the cello (via the baroque cello, I think), so there is no scope, and no credibility, in calling the depicted recumbent instrument both gamba and viol: it is just inexcusable that this level of inaccuracy is present at this fundamental level.


Am I interested in what narrative there might be in a painting (the two paintings from The National Gallery, which were flanking the guitar player from Kenwood House) ? Does that fit in with facts about Vermeer's family, wife, mother-in-law, household, children ? Do I need to give such space to this to the exclusion of further comments from curators from all over the world ?

At the exhibition itself, the AAM had been playing live – nothing gave that sense in seeing them filmed, for a short while, at the Handel House Museum, which could have had the camera moving from the players to the artwork and back, and which could have been both cinematic and evocative.

There was nothing about genuine Delftwork, no comment on the tiles that form a floor-level frieze in the two paintings that Chevalier was talking about. No mention, also, of Brian Sewell’s theory that the women in the Vermeers, because of how they are dressed, are prostitutes. Nothing, further, about how any artist who did not have brass chandeliers or any musical instrument might see examples to paint.

Nothing about the provenance of any of the works, or (except a hint, in one curator being interviewed, to the effect that Vermeer created a genre) whether he is believed to have originated them in the hope that they would sell (could any artist afford to do that ?), rather than being commissioned.


And what I wanted to know (or nearly did not get told) :

* That Vermeer  did not abandon the family business (which his deceased father had turned his hand to), because he was still dealing in art, and finding it hard to make ends meet, near the end of his life

* That the inventory tells us that the studio was in the four-storey home - but not why (unless painters worked from home) Vermeer did not incur the obvious expense, to have more space and quiet, of an external studio

* Whether it was unusual for artists' works to be untitled

* Why we only have 36 of the known 50 works of Vermeer (addressing the above - was there no catalogue ?) ?

* Do we really know nothing about whether the two to three paintings per year that Vermeer produced (compared, say, with how many by a typical artist) commanded a suitable price ?

* As to commissions, if Vermeer was dealing as well as painting, what the customary practice was - this model (a family member) with these elements and this feel and size and detail ?

* Could the woman standing at the keyboard (and her fellow, seated at one) be looking out, not at us (as we allegedly wanted the woman with the baroque guitar, in the centre, to do), but at the person who had commissioned the work


Too many such questions indicate too few hard facts, too little solid statement of professional opinion by experts...


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No scope for error

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27 July


* Contains spoilers *


Which film combines elements of all these others ? :

* Love and Death (1975)

* Match Point (2005)

* Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

* Broadway Danny Rose (1984)


Films from four decades that have influenced Scoop (2006), from the ending of the first to the patter and character of Danny Rose in the last. It’s a conceit that could easily have come from Woody Allen’s short prose (or the works of Henry James ?) that a respected journalist, hearing of a juicy story when he has died, fights his way back from death to make sure that it is followed up and told : equally, though Hamlet senior has more of an interest in what he tells to Hamlet junior than Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) does in what he says to Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), there is obviously a long history of crimes being told of from beyond the grave.

Combining that impulse with Allen’s boyhood interest in magic – as portrayed in films such as Radio Days (1987) and Stardust Memories (1980) – through a meeting in a magic cabinet, and one is close to the world of Alice (1990). The intrigue, the tension, come from the middle two films, though, and this almost seems like a re-make of Match Point, with more aristocratic families, plotted killing, and a woman who has become a nuisance with her demands set against a pattern of murder.

Not such a great pair as Allen and Diane Keaton (some of those scenes from Sleeper and Manhattan Murder have me smiling as I think of them and the pair’s bunglingly lucky work), Johansson and he do well enough as sleuths, with Allen not trying very hard to keep himself out of it. He has written himself into the film as Splendini (alias Sidney Waterman), an illusionist, washing his clothes in a launderette whilst he stays who knows where to be in London to do his show – a hilarious come-down for a man passed off, for investigative purposes, at swanky parties as a successful businessman in property or oil.

The bamboozling that we know from Danny and Larry Lipton (or, for that matter, C. W. Briggs in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)) is to the fore, and, just as Midnight in Paris (2011) has us take as read that Gil somehow goes back in the past, so Allen casually has us entertain the possibility that Death, with his scythe, may not give all due attention to his charges and that Strombel gets away from him. (The set-up also provides us with a neat closing joke.)

Looked at in Allen's career, from a man with an obviously fake ginger beard taking over a Latin American country to Leonard Zelig, The Human Chameleon, to an actor descending from the silver screen, an element of the fantastical has long been part of his film-making. Here, it adds a jaunty edge of Death being cheated that lightens a story-line that could be that of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with the secret in the basement in Notorious - even if that was not a deliberate outright steal, the sense of homage is there, the eternal feel of a woman snooping whilst she hopes that a man sleeps, but what if he catches her, what of the danger that she is in ?

Here, that sense of danger passes itself to Sid when Sondra has been persuaded all too easily of Peter Lyman's (Hugh Jackman's)innocence (not how I imagined it spelt (Leimann), but what's in a name ?) - echoes of Manhattan Murder, where Diane Keaton (as Carol Lipton) will not let go of teasing away at the contradictions in Paul House (Jerry Adler) and frustrating her husband's (Allen's) desire to let things lie.

And all of this pulls pretty much in the right direction, with romance, intrigue, a murderer on the loose, and Johannson at risk. We even have a slight echo, right at the end, of the indestructible Alex Forrest, dripping water as she proves her continued existence. Waterman gives us a light ending, just as with Love and Death, and there are just a few niggles. One, choosing to drive to where Johannson is with Jackman, is explicable by a district of police and of authority, otherwise they could simply have been summoned and arrived more promptly.

Another is less clear : if one knew that a sensitive room with coded entry had already been entered, would one not have changed the combination, and, in removing one incriminating set of papers, have left another item in its place ? Finally, would one really be on solid ground in thinking that people would appear unrelated when they had posed as father and daughter as guests at several parties ?

Those minor quibbles can themselves be addressed by thinking of the character and self-belief of Lyman, who really had no reason to think that Waterman would talk his way into Lyman's home in his absence and could easily have persuaded himself that - however the woman whom he thought of as Jade had gained access - she had wholly fallen for him and that she posed no threat.

After all, he acts as he does at the end because he has believed a lie about rescuing her from drowning, whereas he thinks that he is exploiting a weakness, and he has dared to seek to blame his act of self-liberation on someone else. That is very much as Chris Wilton does in Match Point by staging a burglary, and, despite cocking up the plan, getting away with it (albeit in a sub-Raskolnikovian sort of way, haunted by ghosts) - departing from that model, Allen has him caught out, and his arrogant belief in his evil ways out of being discovered proving misconceived.

The better thought-out script, the mixture of themes, of light and darkness, makes this a better film than that earlier one, for all its box-office success. Allen in the film gives some great moments, although one can already see how the style of almost improvisatory delivery that is to the fore in To Rome with Love (2012) has become heightened to the stage where, for example, he seems to take forever, after the last murder, to claim to be a newspaperman man on the search for information : I wonder whether Allen, perhaps not just wanting to deliver one-liners, is too much conveying the sense not just of a man looking for the right words (as a contrast to Sidney with the assurance and vocabulary of schmoozing the volunteers and audience in his act), but of one with whom we might find ourselves getting frustrated, wishing that he would spit it out.


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The Vermeer girl

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27 January (updated 10 February)

When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here

The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.

Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.

Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.

However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings

So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)

Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.

We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.

On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…



Post-script

Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :

1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco

2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund

3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)

4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...



End-notes

* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.


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