Criterion Sunday 495: “The Golden Age of Television”

Back in the 1950s, a lot of filmmakers and actors made their breaks in filmed plays, initially an hour in length but later longer, both in the United States and in the UK too. Dramas were staged regularly, after a few weeks’ rehearsal, and shown live on television, mainly because pre-taping didn’t exist. However, it does seem as if they were filmed for posterity and while they may not be perfectly preserved, at least they do exist, unlike a lot of early television, which has been wiped forever. The Criterion’s set seems to follow the selections made for a repeat in 1981, and the introductions made at that time for each of the films are presented in this collection as well.

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The first film in the collection, 1953’s Marty, is also the one which went on to greatest acclaim later, remade two years later as a feature which swept most of the major Academy Awards for that year (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay). Looking back at the original TV production at almost 70 years’ distance, it feels as if this is a cute twist on the idea that women are constantly pestered for marriage, but flipping it on its head: here it is the lumpen titular character (Rod Steiger), nearing the age of 40, who is constantly pestered as to when he’s getting married. He has a large Catholic family, and all of them seem to have been paired off, but the problem is: he’s perceived as ugly. Perhaps that’s just the fishbowl lenses of these clunky old TV cameras (they add more than 10 pounds), but at least he’s not a “dog”, as seems to be the insult for unattractive women (the ones we see don’t seem to have weight issues like Marty). It’s hard to find oneself in these old dramas, of course; Marty, for all his unluckiness in love, is also a little bit too persistent and comes across at times as rather an unlikeable character, prone to mumbling then shouting, liable to press for a kiss a little too eagerly. Still, we’re encouraged to be on his side, and I suppose there is an empathy developed for his character. The primitive technology is used nicely by the director for some dramatic camera movements, but mostly this sticks to the play-on-screen format with a tight structure (the complaints of Marty are matched nicely with the moaning of the mothers about their sons abandoning them, though the expected roles for women remain very much of the period) and a small number of settings for the action.

It’s easy to forget that these 1950s TV plays were filmed live. Sometimes that can be obvious for various reasons, but in a film like Patterns (1955) it’s almost hard to tell, so fluid and elegant is the camerawork. It’s obvious the cameras were clunky and the picture is weirdly distorted, but there’s a freewheeling sense to this boardroom drama, as various egos are torn and frayed and words are exchanged back and forth. It gives a particularly visceral sense of the American office which eschews interpersonal drama for a battle of the wills between the company head and his vice-presidents. That said, there’s a lovely speech from our lead character’s wife that sets out the moral compass of the film by being realistic and hard-nosed rather than preachy and virtuous, a tone that you sometimes forget the 1950s was capable of, but is present in the darkness that underlies plenty of that decade’s cinematic output.

More than the first two productions, No Time for Sergeants (1955) seems particularly stagey. The other films managed to find ways to adapt their teleplays into something visual, even on the primitive recording equipment available, but this sticks with non-naturalistic effects like stage lighting and very simple sets. In a way that makes sense because it’s a comedy, but it harks towards a future of TV sitcoms rather than prestige films, and its star Andy Griffith went on to dominate that medium after all. It’s likeable enough, a wartime-set comedy about a slightly foolish Southern man who signs up and bumbles his way through various scenarios, seemingly good natured in his eagerness to please but managing to get his sergeant into hot water along the way — Griffith plays this straight rather than knowing, but he’s certainly less of an idiot than he seems from his accent, and this production exploits that tension nicely.

A Wind from the South (1955) is set in Ireland, which leads to a lot of fairly painful (but certainly could be worse) stabs at an accent. Julie Harris does a good job in the central role, a repressed woman whose brother is the controlling force in her life, who’s been brought up in the traditional ways but starts to feel something for a man who comes through town. There’s some nice work here but it still feels a bit unfocused at times, and perhaps I just react a little negatively towards all those on-screen Irish stereotypes.

After having watched a few of these films, I think it’s the simplest ones that work best, because after all there’s not a lot of budget (or technical ability) to do much more than a few small rooms. Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) draws attention to its staging by having our hero, a baseball player whose nickname is “Author” due to his constant writing (which within the play itself doesn’t seem particularly accomplished), introduce us to his story and break the fourth wall throughout by guiding us the audience through the events. It’s a nice touch but it allows us to forget the very basic sets and focus on the interrelationships between “Author” (a young Paul Newman, and already a pretty magnetic screen presence) and his roommate (Albert Salmi), who’s had a terminal cancer diagnosis and whom he is trying to protect within the team. You get a good sense of the workplace management situation (or lack thereof), the behind the scenes bullying and jockeying for position, it’s all very nicely done and — as mentioned already — well-acted from its cast packed with plenty of talents.

Throughout this collection, Rod Serling (as writer) continually proves his worth. After Patterns the previous year dealt with ad men, Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) is a boxing drama, which has always been a sport that translates particularly well to the screen. We don’t even see any of the matches themselves, as the focus remains on the difficult decisions that both Jack Palance’s boxer and Keenan Wynn’s coach need to make to survive, the latter by entering into shady deals with dodgy guys that push him towards bad decisions, and the former who’s belatedly coming to the realisation that he needs to remake himself and find some new life because he’s reached the end of the line in the ring. It’s all passionately acted, not least by Palance and Wynn, though it’s also good to see Keenan’s dad Ed mixing it up with some serious dramatic work as well. There are some big scenes and big emotions, but this is the soul of this kind of small scale TV drama and it works really well.

Serling had some of the snappiest scripts of all the films featured and another of his, The Comedian (1957), is also that: a high-tone melodrama about a comedian at the top of his game (Mickey Rooney) who behind the scenes is a bullying tyrant of a man, who treats his brother (Mel Tormé) like dirt and has frequent run-ins with his head writer (Edmond O’Brien, continuing to channel all those noirs he was in over the previous decade). Somehow, despite these characters being in the world of entertainment, they all still feel like heavies, mainly because they are all deeply flawed people scurrying around like rats trapped in a cage trying to get out. And I think it could really land except that maybe because it’s shot live for television, there’s something just a little hammy about it. Too often it feels like Rooney, O’Brien, all of them have just been asked to be a little bit extra, go a little bit further, and so there are spittle-flecked scenes of shouting, characters screaming in one another’s faces, where perhaps a little bit of subtlety might have been rewarding? I don’t know, but it feels like a very aggressive film, I guess because it’s about such difficult people, and that is, after all, the world they all operate in. Given the live filming, it’s incredible that some of the scenes came off, montage sequences, a freewheeling jaunt through a TV studio bouncing from character to character that could have come straight from an Altman film. There’s a lot here that’s genuinely quite great, but then again director John Frankenheimer was even by this point a seasoned veteran of live television.

Indeed, there’s no doubt Frankenheimer was a slick director at the format. And while by 1958 there was a small amount of pre-taping that was possible apparently, for a largely live production this all cuts together superbly well. The problem I have in the case of Days of Wine and Roses (1958) is the broadness of the acting. It’s about alcoholism and the toll it takes on people, but this is straight up a soap opera level of melodrama, with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie alternately bawling and spluttering drunkenly at each other. It has a certain intensity to it, but it’s all too easy to laugh — something I attribute more to changing expectations of subtle dramatic work over the ages rather than anything inherent to their choices. It’s all very nicely done, but like the characters it’s all a bit messy.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• Each of the seven films has an introduction taken from a 1981 series of broadcasts that presented these films again to television audiences for the first time since their original broadcast. In it, a famous host introduces a series of interviews with cast and crew, who talk about the filming and the time and contextualise the importance of these works for viewers of the early-80s, for whom some of the actors first seen on TV in these shows were now household names.
• There is an additional 15-20 or so minutes of footage of John Frankenheimer being interviewed in 1981 talking about his two productions, and he’s a good interview subject, eloquent about his work and with a pretty good memory given how many films he made.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
The Philco Television Playhouse: Marty (1953)
Director Delbert Mann; Writer Paddy Chayefsky; Cinematographer Al McClellan; Starring Rod Steiger, Nancy Marchand; Length 52 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Tuesday 4 January 2022.

Kraft Television Theatre: Patterns (1955)
Director Fielder Cook; Writer Rod Serling; Starring Richard Kiley, Ed Begley, Everett Sloane, June Dayton; Length 53 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Wednesday 5 January 2022.

United States Steel Hour: No Time for Sergeants (1955)
Director Alex Segal; Writer Ira Levin (based on the novel by Mac Hyman); Starring Andy Griffith, Harry Clark; Length 50 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Thursday 6 January 2022.

United States Steel Hour: A Wind from the South (1955)
Director Daniel Petrie; Writer James Costigan; Starring Julie Harris, Donald Woods; Length 51 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 7 January 2022.

United States Steel Hour: Bang the Drum Slowly (1956)
Director Daniel Petrie; Writer Arnold Schulman (based on the novel by Mark Harris); Starring Paul Newman, Albert Salmi; Length 52 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 8 January 2022.

Playhouse 90: Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956)
Director Ralph Nelson; Writer Rod Serling; Starring Keenan Wynn, Jack Palance, Kim Hunter, Ed Wynn; Length 73 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 9 January 2022.

Playhouse 90: The Comedian (1957)
Director John Frankenheimer; Writer Rod Serling (based on a story by Ernest Lehman); Starring Mickey Rooney, Edmond O’Brien, Kim Hunter, Mel Tormé; Length 74 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 9 January 2022.

Playhouse 90: Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
Director John Frankenheimer; Writer JP Miller; Starring Cliff Robertson, Piper Laurie; Length 80 minutes.
Seen home (DVD), Wellington, Monday 10 January 2022.

Criterion Sunday 410: Under the Volcano (1984)

Alcoholics, it turns out, are rather boring and interminable people when put on film. This one does a good job of capturing the spiral in which Albert Finney’s character Geoffrey is trapped, a consul working in a small town in Mexico just before WW2, whose wife Yvonne has apparently left him and who is not making much effort to hold himself together. He has turned, fairly heavily, to drinking, as one imagines a lot of British colonial figures have done in the past, but that really does seem to be all that defines him, as he stumbles from one bar and one encounter with some local colour to another. Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset) returns one morning after the Day of the Dead festivities, and his younger brother too (Anthony Andrews), and together they hash out their various fallings-out, as things get ever more bleak for Geoffrey. There’s a lot of imagery of death — as you might imagine given the setting and festivities — which feels fairly ominous alongside the titular volcano, and it all amounts to a sort of allegory about the British abroad, which is persuasive in its way, though hardly the most fun to watch. It’s just a cavalcade of self-pity and immiseration enlivened by the setting and the fine acting.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director John Huston; Writer Guy Gallo (based on the novel by Malcolm Lowry); Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa; Starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Andrews; Length 112 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 26 March 2021.

俳優・亀岡拓次 Haiyu Kameoka Takuji (The Actor, 2016)

Every year the Japan Foundation has a touring programme that takes over the ICA for a week or two, and then goes on the road around the country, with a (fairly random) selection of Japanese films, mostly recent but a few classics also. One of them this year was this 2018 family drama based on a series of children’s picture books, which has an appropriately engaging, childlike and colourfully comic sense of its subject.

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There’s a lot of evident talent on show in this film, both behind and in front of the camera. It’s about this empty shell of a man, Takuji Kameoka (Ken Yasuda) — an actor of course (the actor of the title, named in the Japanese original) — who stumbles through his various minor film roles as thieves and heavies, often hungover from the previous night’s drinking. That’s a recurring theme, and the film is filled with recurring themes because partly it’s about a cycle of repetition in a life, and the way that a life spent being other people on film can lead to some strange blurring of the lines, as if he sometimes imagines his own life as an act, and how things might work out differently. Frequently the film moves seamlessly between what’s happening in the plot and the films-within-the-film that our actor Kameoka is in, or imagines, such that you’re never quite sure where the line is drawn. There’s a weird audition with a famous Spanish director that takes place on a soundstage and seems taken from some kind of filmed dream sequence, or the fight scene staged for a monosyllabic old timer which all seems to be going wrong except maybe it isn’t, and that’s somewhat how Tameoka lives his life. It definitely makes me wish the director had been able to make films more frequently than she has.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Satoko Yokohama 横浜聡子 (based on the novel by Akito Inui 戌井昭人); Cinematographer Yoichi Kamakari 鎌苅洋一; Starring Ken Yasuda 安田顕, Kumiko Aso 麻生久美子; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at ICA, London, Wednesday 5 February 2020.

Criterion Sunday 255: Opening Night (1977)

Coming the year after The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, this could be construed as another film about Cassavetes’ relationship to art and artistic practice — and that is certainly a major element in it — but after the very masculine energy of the previous film, this one refocuses the story once again on Gena Rowlands and becomes about her character Myrtle’s (not-entirely-)self-destruction. By that I mean that she, as a celebrated theatre actor, has the adulation and the awards, but she also has a coterie of people around her who are only too happy to enable her in her downward spiral, just so long as they can make some money off her along the way. Her trajectory is triggered by the death of a young fan, whose presence comes back to haunt her throughout, which gets her to contemplating her own mortality and ageing, and perhaps it’s also a little to do with having to perform boring bourgeois plays about families and relationships (which she doesn’t really have in the same way). Maybe that last one is my misreading, but Myrtle’s erratic behaviour (brought on by the way she’s constantly pushed by those around her) leads her to ditch much of the text of the play she’s in, during its small-town off-Broadway run, such that by the Broadway opening night of the title she and Cassavetes are riffing on something completely different (to the irritation of the playwright, the legendary Joan Blondell). This sequence is largely improvised, and it’s unclear to me whether we’re supposed to take it as a swipe at how theatre audiences will laugh at any old nonsense, or about how much the actors react against the original text, or just about a person breaking down and opening themselves up, but in any case it’s a potent story about the price of art.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• Ben Gazzara speaks to Gena Rowlands at her home in the mid-2000s, discussing the film’s themes, the other actors, how it was made, and how annoyed Cassavetes got at being called an auteur. There’s another short piece where DoP/producer Al Ruban speaks about making the film and the way he talks about Cassavetes does sort of fit that description, but then there’s a lot about the way he specifically collaborated on his creations.
• There are two fairly straightforward trailers that lean heavily on footage from the final performance of the play-within-the-film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer John Cassavetes; Cinematographer Al Ruban; Starring Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell, John Cassavetes; Length 144 minutes.

Seen at National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 15 May 2002 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, August 2001, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, London, Friday 12 July 2019).

Criterion Sunday 119: Withnail and I (1987)

I have, as it happens, already written a review of this on this blog so here it is. There’s little I’d want to add to it, aside from reaffirming that it does stand up under the weight of its cult status, not that it’s a film I myself am necessarily drawn back to, unlike…

Criterion Extras: … the fans depicted in the short piece Withnail and Us (1999), who show a fanatical fondness for the film that sometimes seems too much (obsessive quoting of movie lines has never been something I’ve been good at, nor had any inclination to do) but also reminds me of what’s genuinely appealing about the film’s bleak dark vision of England. Alongside the fans, the documentary also corrals a number of the actors to talk about the experience of making the film, and is an enjoyable half-hour for what it is.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Bruce Robinson; Cinematographer Peter Hannan; Starring Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths; Length 107 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Sunday 26 January 2014.

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)

Hollywood films of the early-1930s, before the instigation of the Production Code, quite often have a loose and freewheeling quality that still delights so many decades on. Plenty of that is in evidence here, with the sparky Sylvia Sidney playing heiress Joan, who begins dating alcoholic reporter Jerry (Fredric March) after meeting him at a high society party. Indeed, the title of the film comes from his signature toast. In terms of the pre-Code elements, the frank portrayal of alcoholism and adultery — as Joan and Jerry start to feud and break apart — is forthright and unapologetic, and there’s a lot to enjoy in the spirited performances. It’s a pity, then, that the denouement glosses over the preceding events with a moralistic hue, but for the most part director Dorothy Arzner keeps things moving along nicely, and it even briefly features a young Cary Grant as one of Joan’s paramours.

CREDITS
Director Dorothy Arzner; Writer Edwin Justus Mayer (based on the novel by Cleo Lucas); Cinematographer David Abel; Starring Sylvia Sidney, Fredric March; Length 88 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Sunday 31 January 2016.

郊遊 Jiao You (Stray Dogs, 2013)

Since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September 2013, where it won a prize, it’s taken over a year for Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs even to get a screening in London (despite there having been two London Film Festivals in the intervening time), and just a one-off in an East London multiplex at that. I suppose this might suggest that potential distributors consider the film may be problematic to sell, and certainly it has all the traits that have marked the ‘slow cinema’ coming out of Taiwan since the 1980s (primarily films by Tsai and his compatriot Hou Hsiao-Hsien). Indeed the film even starts with a static shot of several minutes in length, showing two children sleeping while a woman sits beside them. And yet it’s a marvellous film that despite being slowly-paced and deliberately withholding a lot of information about its characters, exerts a fascinated hold over the audience (well, over me certainly) for its long running time. Even seeing the first half hour twice — the characters speak so seldom that it took the cinema that long to realise it was framed incorrectly, resulting in the subtitles being cropped off — didn’t loosen any of that hold, and in fact seeing the same slowly-paced near-silent sequences twice in a row without getting bored or antsy just made me more confident in the film’s artistry.

Trying to sum up what it’s about is a trickier proposition, not just because of the aforementioned lack of expository dialogue, but because of a somewhat perplexing narrative strategy, which seems to mix up different time periods with one another. If the woman (played by three different actors, as it happens) is the childrens’ mother sitting with them at the start, the next shot seems to skip back to a time when they are just living with their father (Lee Kang-Sheng), while intercutting scenes of the mother working at a supermarket while her kids lurk around. The father is working by a busy road holding signs advertising luxury condominiums in all weather; he lives with his kids in a dry corner of a derelict warehouse building, while shopping centre toilets provide a chance for personal hygiene. These characters are, by all standards, poor, and their living arrangements and alienation from society suggest that they are the ‘stray dogs’ of the title. At some point, the mother finds the father and the children, and the family are united. Quite what has got them to this place, or where they go from here, is sort of what the film is about.

I say “dry corner” above because the film — like all of Tsai’s films — is utterly suffused with dampness, whether it’s the severely (and picturesequely) water-damaged home the family occupy near the film’s end, pools of water on the ground, leaks from above, or driving rain outside. More than many of Tsai’s films, it’s about people adrift and unmoored, and along the way it provides a pretty concise portrait of modern society, specifically a sense of alienation — their difficulty in connecting with one another (and, perhaps, with the audience, not least thanks to the strategy of having three different actors play the ‘mother’ role). One of the most striking (and in many ways, disturbing) scenes, which plays into this, has the daughter ‘adopting’ a cabbage as a surrogate mother, which her father (while drunk, as he is rather often) comes home to find in bed. And several sequences, including at the film’s denouement, show the characters intently staring towards a painted landscape horizon.

It’s bleak, and it’s slow, but it’s almost hallucinatory in its intensity, and to my mind the narrative ellipses and obfuscations just make it all the more compelling. Despite not revealing the specifics of this particularly family unit, in many ways it seems to say something about family and connectedness and about the difficulties of forming those connections, and about all the ways they may go awry. Or perhaps I’m misreading it completely, and it all means something else. Whatever, it’s certainly a film to continue thinking about.

CREDITS
Director Tsai Ming-kiang 蔡明亮; Writer Song Peng Fei 鹏飞, Tsai and Tung Chen Yu 董成瑜; Cinematographers Liao Pen-Jung 廖本榕, Xin Lu Qing 吕庆鑫 and Shong Woon-Chong 宋文忠; Starring Lee Kang-sheng 李康生; Length 138 minutes.
Seen at Vue Stratford City, London, Tuesday 2 December 2014.

Withnail and I (1987)

Famously, this mid-80s black comedy occupies a place at a certain select level of ‘cult films’ (certainly in the UK). Many people like to quote it incessantly, but it never made much of an impression on me when I saw it as a teenager, so it was good to reacquaint myself with it recently and realise that in fact — unlike so many garlanded cult films — it does deserve some of its popularity. It’s not cult in the sense of niche interest though, as it’s all fairly engaging; presumably the use of the term is more to do with its relative success at the time of its release. No indeed, there’s no egregious bad acting or flimsy sets, though stylistically the film isn’t particularly standout. What it has is wit and laughs and, in Richard E. Grant, a hugely charismatic anti-hero.

The titular characters are young actors and the setting is London at the arse-end of the 1960s, and not a particularly pleasant bit of London (either then or, perhaps to a lesser extent given the forces of gentrification, now). Nominally this is Camden Town, but to those of us who live nearby and pass through it regularly, it’s clearly not filmed there, but in the leafy Western suburbs, somewhere around Westbourne Green or Notting Hill (which when the film was made in the mid-1980s was pretty run-down too). My point is, these are not rich characters living the kind of idle life they would be if they inhabited one of these parts of London these days. They are living a classic student/actor’s life of hand-to-mouth scrabbling after sustenance, which mostly takes the form of alcohol. As it happens, Withnail has a rich uncle, Monty (Richard Griffiths), to whose country cottage the two repair for a holiday, but that’s about it as far as action goes. They each vaguely search for work, but we only hear about that in passing as ameans of punctuating Withnail’s wallowing.

So this is not a film about what the characters do, so much as how they do it. The film is really good at what it’s like to be between higher education and your first real job, if you’re down on your luck — and that’s probably the key to its cult success. The central character (Paul McGann, playing the unnamed “I” of the title) is the viewer’s proxy, and Richard E. Grant’s Withnail is probably how you might have imagined yourself through the haze of your 20-something heavy-drinking habits — angry and sarcastic and miserable, but witty and funny and relentlessly energetic in pursuit of narcotic relief from life’s pains. (There’s even a drinking game which has grown up around the film — drink when the characters drink — but it’s probably not advisable except to those who are in the same situation and point in life as the characters.)

It’s all put together with journeyman professionalism, but the core of the film’s success is in writer/director Bruce Robinson’s script, and the acting, particularly the single-minded Richard E. Grant and the luvvie lush Richard Griffiths. Paul McGann does fine with what he has to do, but it’s very much a less showy part. If you’re British and in your 20s or older, you’ve probably seen this film, but I think it stands up even after over 25 years as a fine example of a black comedy.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Bruce Robinson; Cinematographer Peter Hannan; Starring Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths; Length 107 minutes.
Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Sunday 26 January 2014.

Nord (North, 1991)

This series, of which this is the second instalment, is inspired by the Movie Lottery blog, whose author is picking DVD titles from a hat in order to decide which films to watch. As ever, you’ll notice my dust-gathering DVD collection includes a lot more European arthouse films. I’ve selected another one from the hat to watch and present my review below.

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There’s a lot of empty space in this debut feature from the director Xavier Beauvois, who is most well-known for the contemplative monastic drama Des hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men, 2010). The contemplation in this early work is altogether less divinely-inspired, unless it’s by the deities of ancient Greece, who seem to preside over this drama of a family falling apart under the strains of the father’s alcoholism. The empty space is the setting of the title, in the grey industrial North of France, around Calais where the director himself grew up. It seems to suffuse every scene, not least because so many unfold in extreme long shot, with the actors as small presences against the terrain.

Nord is essentially a two-hander between father (Bernard Verley) and son, played by the director as a directionless 18-year-old (though Beauvois was about five years older when he made the film). Bulle Ogier is one of the great character actors of French cinema, though she is a curiously distant presence here, seen feeding her disabled daughter or watching TV with the family, her character only really making an impact thanks to one brief yet disturbing scene.

The distance may of course be related to the reticence of the camera to get too close to these characters’ faces, meaning their emotions are mostly conveyed through body language and gesture, though there’s no shortage of this. Quiet stretches of silence — such as the family in their living room, arrayed across the screen and looking past the camera at an unseen television set — are increasingly punctuated by distemperate outburts, as the father is sucked into addiction. He is an implacable presence, grimly focused with a hard unforgiving face. His work at a local chemist’s, from whom we see him surreptitiously pocket some pure alcohol at the film’s start, appears precarious as his absences are increasingly problematic for his manager to cover. Meanwhile, the resulting strain on the family’s home life seems to be affecting the son’s schoolwork, for which he shows scant interest. However, as the film progresses, it more and more seems as if he is the one who is best placed to pull through the other side of the family crisis.

The film progresses with long periods of quietness, the characters adrift, and the slow bubbling up of deeper emotions is carefully controlled in an impressive manner by Beauvois as a young first-time director. The staging of the family scenes at home, for example, perceptibly shifts after the father goes into rehab, with the sombre TV-watching zombies of earlier replaced by a warmly-lit family meal. There’s even a rare close-up when son goes to meet father, and he seems to soften a little. It’s in these little moments that the film is at its best for me, and makes it a worthwhile watch if you can track it down.

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CREDITS
Director/Writer Xavier Beauvois; Cinematographer Fabio Conversi; Starring Xavier Beauvois, Bernard Verley, Bulle Ogier; Length 92 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 5 May 2013.