Criterion Sunday 624: Quadrophenia (1979)

This is a classic of British cinema, based on a ‘rock opera’ by The Who — which I’m guessing is just a fancy way of saying it was a concept double album — telling a story of Mods and Rockers in 1960s London (and, memorably, Brighton). This film adaptation though, to be clear, is not an opera, not even a musical, though music looms large in the protagonists’ lives. The source is also perhaps a hint to something of a studied disconnect to it: despite coming over as a gritty urban realist drama, there are constant hints towards the affectedness of it all. These characters could burst into song at any moment (one of the main actors is even Sting), and sometimes they do repeat refrains from their favourite tracks, but mostly it relies on a very clean, precise aesthetic and the heightened emotions conveyed well by all the actors, but especially Phil Daniels in the lead role of Jimmy.

In a generally unlikeable group of bored and angry kids, Jimmy is the most unlikeable — and yet compulsively watchable — of the lot, and the by the denouement the story has moved away from its gritty roots into something surreal, almost folkloric (like a lot of great 1970s British cinema), with a sequence of songs on the soundtrack finally eclipsing the spoken word, and a grandly staged finale that feels like an end and at the same time, leaves things open for Jimmy. However grim it seems to become for him as a character, the film has the careful poise of a musical (or maybe a Dennis Potter TV drama) in just slightly standing back. Perhaps I’d have fully embraced it if they had broken into song, but it’s still a fine evocation of an era and an introduction to a lot of 80s acting talent.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Franc Roddam; Writers Dave Humphries, Roddam, Martin Stellman and Pete Townshend (based on the album by The Who); Cinematographer Brian Tufano; Starring Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash, Philip Davis, Sting, Ray Winstone; Length 120 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 16 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 623: Lonesome (1928)

This is technically not a silent film, but it’s also not not a silent film. In fact for much of its running time, it’s an exemplary advertisement for the freedom and artistic possibilities that the medium had reached in the year after the similar Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was released, because when the brief segments with synchronised sound come they literally stop the film in its tracks. What is a city symphony for New York City, with loose impressionistic photography, heady use of lap dissolves and location shooting, suddenly becomes for about a minute each time a static and ugly dialogue scene with an unmoving camera and no real sense of place. Luckily, those scenes pass quickly, largely self-contained, leaving Lonesome to be a sweepingly romantic film about two people who find each other by chance, visit Coney Island, then are separated just as (un)fortuitously (by the cops no less, going above and beyond their duty of care), and that’s pretty much the plot of the thing. However, it’s a fairly swooning film that for all its slender plot still manages to carry you along.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Pál Fejős [as “Paul Fejos”]; Writers Edward T. Lowe Jr., Tom Reed and Mann Page; Cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton; Starring Barbara Kent, Glenn Tryon; Length 69 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 10 March 2023.

Criterion Sunday 622: Weekend (2011)

It creeps up on you this one. Set in Nottingham, and following a young man called Russell (Tom Cullen) who seems a bit shy, it starts out with loud party scenes, little moments glimpsed at a party then a bar that Russell heads off towards, such that I spent part of the film just wondering if the sound mix was right (these are all loud environments, drowning out the words to a certain extent). But this is a film about people who can’t quite make out what the other wants, or are trying to protect themselves in ways that put emotional distance in their relationship, even as their every other fibre seems to be screaming for something closer and more intense. The actors do a great job in conveying this push and pull while director Andrew Haigh finds these moments that seem to encapsulate the drama, until at length the two just talk to one another. There are no big redemptive moments or melodramatic changes of heart, but you sense there’s feeling between the two that won’t go away immediately, and an openness that gives them both a little bit of extra strength in a world where you register small moments quite piercingly. For example, just one that comes to mind, there’s a scene of Russell standing on a tram on his way to meet Glen (Chris New), and he’s near some younger kids making fun of gay people, and we observe him just subtly taking off his flatcap and altering his body language to try and make himself blend into the background more; the film is filled with little moments like that, suggestive of their situation for observant viewers to pick up. It’s a film of small wonders, made on a small budget but with plenty to recommend it.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Andrew Haigh; Cinematographer Ula Pontikos; Starring Tom Cullen, Chris New; Length 97 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Tuesday 7 March 2023.

Criterion Sunday 621: Rosetta (1999)

The opening of this film is iconic, and to a certain extent it’s what put the Dardenne brothers — already in their middle age and having had years of documentary and film experience behind them — on the map. Our title character just barges forward relentlessly, getting into a fight with her employer (who has just let her go at the end of a probation period), and in the first few minutes we don’t even see her face, just the arch of her shoulders, her propulsive forward movement, the determination that the back of her head implies, the anger at not having a job anymore. This defines the film and while it does slow down at moments, for meals, brief tender passages between people, for the most part it’s this forward momentum that carries it. Obviously it’s a style that the brothers were working on in their earlier film La Promesse but it comes to fruition here, in a film that delves into the lives of those living outside of established social safety nets, a hard-scrabble existence of living paycheque to paycheque, needing work to survive and doing anything they can to get it, a generation Rosetta exemplifies and had such a strong effect there was even a belief it led to a law protecting the minimum wage in Belgium (it didn’t, but it certainly must have galvanised opinion). It still holds up all these decades later, and the Dardenne brothers still have strong careers on the back of its impact, but it’s hard to get over the way this central character is introduced, the force with which that swing door is pushed as this film begins.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at the Paramount, Wellington, Friday 28 July 2000 (and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Friday 3 March 2023).

Criterion Sunday 620: La Promesse (1996)

By all accounts, certainly by that of the filmmakers themselves, this is where it all began for the Dardenne Brothers. They’d made documentaries, even a couple of features, beforehand and had built up a bit of a career since the 1970s, but here is where they applied those techniques to fiction in a way that would become their trademark — a restless camera constantly following their protagonists, eschewing careful blocking and marks in favour of this documentary-like verisimilitude, using unknown actors (often non-professionals) and of course following often overlooked working class lives. So here we are introduced to Roger, played by the actor who would probably most closely be linked to the Dardennes, Olivier Gourmet, as an apparently nice boss, and his son Igor (Jérémie Renier, who would return in L’Enfant), though it soon becomes clear Roger is a dodgy operator, exploiting immigrants, using them for construction work, and then when one dies by accident, covering it up despite his widow (Assita Ouedraogo) and baby living in one of his properties. So this leads to the promise of the title, between the dying man Hamidou and Igor, an ethical dilemma of the nature that would also come to define the Dardennes’ filmmaking. It’s all beautifully shot and composed, with a breathless headlong rush into danger, as Igor defies his father and starts to make his own choices in life.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a short piece with more recent interviews with both Gourmet and Renier reflecting on making the film, being there at the start of the Dardenne brothers’ journey into successful filmmaking.
• There’s also a much longer interview with the brothers by an American film critic at their office, which really gets into the detail of their career and work on the film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo; Length 94 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 619: Le Havre (2011)

Even working in France, with French actors (and he has done so before), the very specific style and timing of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki is extremely clear here from the very first frames. The way every shot is lit, carefully placed splashy lighting with a high contrast almost noirish feel, but via comic books, the saturated blocks of colour in the set design, and the pacing and deadpan humour. It all comes together beautifully for what is ultimately a fairytale. We all know this isn’t how this story plays out but there’s also an inbuilt sense that people don’t want to see that, though in telling his story — of immigrants from Gabon trying to make their way to the UK, but discovered in a shipping container in the Normandy port town of Le Havre — he is also very much telling it from a European perspective, an idealised one of people just looking out for the best for their fellow humans (even the jaded police inspector). The Africans feel like set dressing to what is otherwise a perfectly pitched comedy — a comedy, partly because so abstracted from reality — of European tolerance to immigrants. So that — whether the film or reality — slightly sours what is otherwise a very lovely, laconic evocation of community.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Aki Kaurismäki; Cinematographer Timo Salminen; Starring André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 27 February 2023 (and sometime on DVD at home, London, in the early-2010s).

Criterion Sunday 618: Gray’s Anatomy (1996)

This is a filmed version of one of Spalding Gray’s famous stage monologues, which tend to involve him sitting behind a desk with his notes in an otherwise unadorned black box space. Of course director Steven Soderbergh has done his best to make this format more visual, with his full bag of tricks, but the origins and format of the show are still fairly clear. This, then, is a film that’s primarily about words, which makes sense because its subject matter is the loss of vision. It incorporates little spliced-in interviews with random people on the subject of eye health, and as a fair warning to those who aren’t expecting it, those stories can get pretty gruesome (the release also includes footage from Gray’s actual eye surgery, and it’s fair to say I won’t be watching that). This film, however, is certainly likeable, for it rests largely on Gray’s ability to tell a story, which by this point he is a master of doing, and as Gray is likeable so is the film.

NB: The Criterion Collection lists the date as 1997, although the film premiered at 1996’s Toronto International Film Festival so that’s the year I give here.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Steven Soderbergh; Writers Spalding Gray and Renée Shafransky; Cinematographer Elliot Davis; Starring Spalding Gray; Length 79 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Saturday 18 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 617: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Spalding Gray was an American literary raconteur primarily known for his monologues, with which he toured like any stand-up comedian, and which too were committed to film (the Criterion Collection has followed up this film with Gray’s Anatomy in its list of releases). This in certain respects is like those — it’s a film narrated entirely by Gray in clips from his monologues, interviews and other on-stage events — but instead it tries to tell the story of his life from beyond the grave (he committed suicide in 2004). It’s a way of a telling a life story without resorting to familiar stand-bys like the talking head interview or archival footage (written texts on screen, photos and the like), and makes this final testament to the man more like one of his own works, and that makes sense given the involvement of his widow and son (who does the music). It all zips by rather nicely, and gives you a sense of him as a public figure and hints towards himself as a private individual too, about some of the life issues he was going through (which always would be grist to his monologuing, but became more fractured as a source after his debilitating injury sustained on holiday in Ireland). It’s a work that’s evidently made with love, and that shows.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a nice little piece with interviews with producer (and Gray’s widow) Kathie Russo, as well as the film’s editor Susan Littenberg (for once not a pseudonym for the director and an actual person) and director Steven Soderbergh explaining the genesis of the idea and how the film came together. Nice to hear from them all about the project, and about the choices made in telling it. Turns out, for a man who chronicled his life and experiences for his art, there was plenty to choose from.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Steven Soderbergh; Starring Spalding Gray; Length 89 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Thursday 16 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 613: Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951)

One of Bergman’s earlier films, he’s finding his way to some of his most enduring themes here, via the story of a traumatic past haunting the present for a ballerina, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson). But it’s not just trauma: there are truly happy moments that seem to mock her from the past, as she labours in misery with a rather priggish and accusatory boyfriend (Alf Kjellin). Of course, her first love Hendrik (Birger Malmsten) had his faults too, but the past scenes, teenage years by a lake, lit brightly, with an effervescence to them, feel like a different film (despite the actors being the same). They pick wild strawberries, they go for a swim, there’s a joy that’s clearly lacking in the present day scenes. But light and darkness are intermingled, and the memories of the past can bring respite to us, though as ever in Bergman the solaces of religion are of variable quality.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Ingmar Bergman; Writers Bergman and Herbert Grevenius (based on a story by Bergman); Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer; Starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Tuesday 17 January 2023.

Criterion Sunday 611: Being John Malkovich (1999)

I can’t really be considered part of the cult following of Charlie Kaufman. The tone of his work just doesn’t resonate with me so much, and there’s a lot here too, in what must surely be considered his foundational work, that leaves me a little cold (though it clearly works for a lot of people). That said, like plenty of classic comedies (albeit with an ironic 90s tone), this film throws so much at the screen that plenty of it does hit, and some of it really is quite affectingly off the wall. Specifically, the way that the film utilises Cameron Diaz is very much against type, and Catherine Keener too has never been more striking (usually those two actresses would be playing these roles the other way round, you feel), but together they create an emotional bond via the mediation of the titular figure that almost erases John Cusack’s puppeteer from the film entirely. By the final third, things have been put in motion that pull the film off in all kinds of weird directions, and the constant accrual of detail makes for a rather rich and perplexing series of thematic explosions that have a cinematic pyrotechnic value at the very least, though some even achieve emotional resonance. It remains a film I still admire more than fully love, but that’s on me; it’s a singular American achievement both coming out of the 1990s and drawing a line under it for a new decade.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Spike Jonze; Writer Charlie Kaufman; Cinematographer Lance Acord; Starring John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Orson Bean; Length 113 minutes.

Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 27 May 2000 (and on VHS at home, Wellington, May 2001, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Sunday 29 January 2023).