A Hidden Life (2019)

A discussion that has cropped up once again in political and media circles has been around “antifa”, and every time it happens a lot of people with the same wearied tone have to explain it’s not an organisation, it’s an ethos, a motivating ideal, a praxis and a shared struggle: it is just short for “anti-fascist”. Such struggles can take an explosive, active form, and there are no shortage of World War II movies to illustrate that (though most are Hollywood stories of heroism against the odds), so I’m including this film in my ‘cinema of resistance‘ theme week. Terrence Malick’s most recent film instead deals with the internal contortions, of morality and faith competing with self-preservation, and the way that just these simple acts of resistance can carry their own dangers. The only thing that “antifa”, such as it is, calls us to do is to resist fascism. All that I can hope is that to continue to do so is something which does not lead to the outcome in today’s film, but as some of the world’s largest countries have taken an active turn towards demagoguery and fascism, that is starting to seem rather more perilous.

I haven’t really connected with many of Malick’s films since The Thin Red Line (and certainly not the last few), as he’s progressively loosened his narrative focus in preference for impressionistic movements. However, with A Hidden Life, he seems to have reined this extravagance in a bit (though the stylistic tics are still very much evident), not to mention choosing a setting and theme that seems more fitting to his particular style. Of course, there’s still plenty of voiceover, used more as another layer of sound than to convey any specific information, and he takes the interesting decision to have the film in English except where perhaps the words are less important—background chatter, bureaucratic invective, in which case it’s in German.

It’s an odd film, though, that bathes this story—of Franz (August Diehl), an Austrian peasant in the early-1940s, who grimly resolves (with an at times wavering, but nevertheless increasingly bitterly held, sense of moral clarity) to defy military tribunals and not speak the ‘Hitler oath’—in a certain sort of beatific calm, which makes sense given he was after all beatified not so long ago. There’s little sense of the actual war, and perhaps in 1940-1943 (when the film is set), it hasn’t particularly reached the alpine Austrian setting of St Radegund or even the Berlin prison he’s shipped off to later. There’s one chilling scene where the village’s mayor inveighs against the dangers of immigrants and foreigners, despite clearly having none in his midst, which obviously remains current, but otherwise this is very much focused on Franz and (almost equally) his wife Franziska, grounding their story in the community and (as you might expect from a Malick film) the glory of the natural world. It’s not even quite as overtly spiritual as some of his more recent films have been, though given Franz’s Catholic faith and his later beatification, it is obviously imbued with that throughout.

I liked it, and didn’t even feel the running time once the movie started to hold me. It’s shot with some oddly distorting lenses, and the camera operators must all have been children given how close to the ground the camera seems to be most of the time, but Malick’s impressionist excesses aren’t so much on show or are perhaps less jarring when not juxtaposed against Hollywood or indie music backgrounds.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Terrence Malick; Cinematographer Jörg Widmer; Starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Jürgen Prochnow, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz; Length 174 minutes. Seen at Curzon Mayfair, London, Friday 17 January 2020.

Criterion Sunday 320: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Perhaps this just plays much more strongly to American audiences, but the swelling orchestral music that comes in at key moments makes it pretty clear what a fundamentally honourable man this simple Abraham Lincoln was, even when he was a young man just starting out in the law. This would be nothing more than hagiography (or perhaps a superhero origin story) were it not for Henry Fonda’s performance and John Ford’s guiding hand that somehow keeps it from turning too mawkish, focusing instead on the justice he wrings from a case of two young lads getting into a dust-up with a local ruffian (and Deputy Sheriff). Still, simple values isn’t the same as simplistic, and for all its overwrought melodrama, this is a canny film about a national hero made at a time of global crisis.

CREDITS
Director John Ford; Writer Lamar Trotti; Cinematographers Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller; Starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver, Ward Bond; Length 100 minutes. Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Tuesday 26 May 2020.

Honey Boy (2019)

The Israeli director who made Bombay Beach and LoveTrue—both of which I admired and both of which lurk uncomfortably somewhere between documentary and staged drama—gets an ostensibly fiction feature with this one written by its star Shia LeBeouf, and thus fits into my American films directed by women theme. However, it turns out to occupy a similar territory adjacent to Shia’s own lived experience (though in the time after I saw this film and wrote the review below, questions have been raised about how truthful all of this was, and about some of his own behaviour), and tells a fairly traumatic story in an engaging and visually inventive way.

Shia LaBeouf is one of those actors I’ve always wanted to like—perhaps because some of the media excoriation of him has been so very ad hominem for so long—but finally this is a performance of his I can really get behind. He plays a fictionalised (only lightly, I gather) version of his own father in a screenplay he wrote and it very much puts him in the same territory that Joaquin Phoenix has been going over for years. It gets big and ugly at times, proper emotional turmoil, but it’s all underpinned by a deep vein of tenderness. That’s helped along significantly by Noah Jupe, who plays the younger version of himself, and very much holds his own in what is essentially a two-hander between the two actors (there are also some scenes with an older version of Shia, played by Lucas Hedges, but the dynamic between father and son remains similar). Director Alma Har’el has made a number of fine films in the past decade, which at least ostensibly have been documentaries, although these have always had a strong sense of performance at play—as if finding the characters at the heart of real people—so perhaps this step into fiction (but fiction based on reality) is a natural progression for her. In any case, she makes films with verve, humour and warmth, and that’s always evident.

CREDITS
Director Alma Har’el עלמה הראל; Writer Shia LeBeouf; Cinematographer Natasha Braier; Starring Shia LeBeouf, Noah Jupe, Lucas Hedges, FKA Twigs; Length 94 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Friday 6 December 2019.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Another American film directed by a woman which comes on the heels of the same director’s excellent work on The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me? and plunges her back into another gently middlebrow and lightly period piece about the anxieties of artists. I found it likeable, and it’s well worth checking out.

There’s something almost aggressively middlebrow about this film, indeed about a number of the season’s films, and perhaps I only say that because it fits into a certain kind of Oscar-ready category, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing here. It’s about a television personality (one I was not at all familiar with, as my upbringing did not feature Mr Rogers), and the film at times has a deeply televisual feel in the way it’s constructed—I don’t know that I can explain it, just that something about the way the shots were constructed, the musical cues, the scene transitions (both the editing and the interstitial model toy sets) felt almost uncannily like this film was intended to be a Very Special extended episode of Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood (though as mentioned above, I obviously don’t know the original show except as it’s shown within this film). But rather than the TV personality, the film’s story focuses instead on Matthew Rhys’s journalist, an angry resentful man who’s trying to find an angle on Tom Hank’s Fred Rogers; the film and Hanks’s performance almost seem to play along, and he has these ways of staring intensely that suggest some deep buried secret is going to come out—certainly the legacy of 70s light entertainers on British TV led me to worry where this might lead. But no, in fact, Rogers seems like a genuinely decent guy, who cares deeply about the way that children are spoken to, and I think that all comes across really effectively in the film. It would also make an interesting double-bill with A Hidden Life (which was out in UK cinemas the week beforehand, hence was on my mind), because I think both are films deeply imbued with a very Christian faith, though in rather more subtle ways here, expressed primarily by silence (there’s one particularly striking scene in a diner) and by a sense of ritual.

CREDITS
Director Marielle Heller; Writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (based on the article “Can You Say… Hero?” by Tom Junod); Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes; Starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Chris Cooper; Length 109 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Friday 31 January 2020.

तलवार Talvar (aka Guilty, 2015)

Today we sadly learned of the passing of the great Irrfan Khan, so I’m taking a break from this week’s theme on my blog to watch one of his performances; while this review below is unlikely to be of his best film, it’s still a decent crime investigation thriller in which he capably plays a slightly ambiguous character. Others have seen some of his higher profile films — of those, most in English, I’ve only seen Slumdog Millionaire (as well as smaller parts in Jurassic World and The Darjeeling Limited)—but I have enjoyed him in romcoms like Piku and the recent Qarib Qarib Singlle, and his career stretches back to a small role in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988). He’s an actor that seemed able to play both complex less than heroic characters (as in this film), as easily as likeable easygoing charmers. In any case, he’s usually the moral centre of the films he’s in, all too often playing authority figures we can trust (even if that reputation is played with at times, as with this film).

One of the difficulties Talvar has to get over, in presenting its true-crime torn-from-the-headlines case of a young girl found murdered in her family home near their similarly-slain servant, is that it was never really solved. And so we get, in the now-cliched Rashomon-like way, flashback recreations of multiple different viewpoints on what happened, with all kinds of ridiculous suggestions being put forth (some of them reported gleefully in public) by first the police investigators and then the “CDI” (Central Dept of Investigation) of whom Irrfan Khan’s Ashwin is leading the case. Even more than the criminal investigation, the film is keen to show how messy and disorganised India’s justice system can be, with incompetent cops and bosses who seem (it is implied) more interested in ensuring their old classmates are exculpated of any wrongdoing than in getting a satisfactory conclusion to the case. There’s a hint of Touch of Evil too in the way that Ashwin’s methods can be little better than torture at times—if he’s the hero of the film, he’s an antihero at best—but he’s still more impassioned than most of the guys milling around him, who are mostly looking out for their own careers or their friends. I think it works well, and it’s all very well put together, even if the film itself has a bit of a TV true-crime thriller feel at times; it nevertheless maintains a consistent tone, anchored by Khan’s empathetic performance.

CREDITS
Director Meghna Gulzar मेघना गुलज़ार; Writer Vishal Bhardwaj विशाल भारद्वाज; Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar पंकज कुमार; Starring Irrfan Khan इरफ़ान ख़ान, Konkona Sen Sharma কঙ্কনা সেন শর্মা, Neeraj Kabi नीरज काबी; Length 133 minutes. Seen at home (Netflix streaming), London, Wednesday 29 April 2020.

Ride Like a Girl (2019)

I don’t like to feature films on my site that I think are disappointing, as it seems to me a poor way to use a platform, however few followers one might have (and I don’t have many). However, I’ve committed myself to another Australian-themed week (which so far is by Australian women directors) and I haven’t got many films to draw on, or time to watch new ones, so here’s one I saw on the plane over. It’s directed by Rachel Griffiths, a long-established actor whose work I’ve really appreciated, turning her hand to directing.

I know nothing about horse racing, or the competitive life of the professional jockey—though I am reminded that I’ve read a novel about a young woman riding horses for a living (it’s called House Rules by Heather Lewis, and let me tell you that had a very different tone to this film). This particular story is about Michelle Payne (Teresa Palmer), the first woman jockey to win the Melbourne Cup. Sadly, for all its positive messaging about young women growing up to achieve their dreams, Ride Like a Girl sticks to a programmatic structure and a deeply predictable template that majors on big swelling music to convey emotional journeys. The actors are uniformly excellent, but many of their best qualities are lost in the mix here, and the undoubtedly talented work of the jockey whose life is being told here seems reduced to a series of clichés. Still, it all looks very handsome.

CREDITS
Director Rachel Griffiths; Writers Andrew Knight and Elise McCredie; Cinematographer Martin McGrath; Starring Teresa Palmer, Sam Neill, Stevie Payne; Length 120 minutes. Seen on a flight from London to Auckland, Friday 21 February 2020.

Harriet (2019)

As is traditional at this time of year, distributors are dumping a lot of their awards contenders into cinemas, along with other uncategorisable films as counter-programming perhaps or just because being winter, a lot of people are going to the cinema and taking more chances. As such, there’s no shortage of things I want to watch coming out this week. One is Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, though I’ve done horror films and I’ve done Australian films as themes already, so instead I’m going to focus on films set in the 19th century, starting with Harriet which is the release I was building up to last week with my biopic-themed week of reviews.

This is a curious film, made by the same director whose debut was the magisterial Eve’s Bayou (1997) but in an altogether different register, a by-the-numbers biopic replete with crescendos of music to guide our way through the drama, and beautiful shots of the American countryside (around Virginia, I gather), the rising sun casting its glow over Cynthia Erivo-as-Harriet’s newly-freed face. Indeed, there is a constant suggestion throughout that the Divine presence is shining on Tubman, and she is seen frequently falling into reveries that suggest—like a modern Joan of Arc (who is even referenced at one point)—that God is talking to her, as she is inspired to lead slaves out of the South to freedom, avoiding slave-catchers and bounty-hunters along the way. That, though, may be the most interesting twist to the story (suggesting, after all, the director of the gloriously uncategorisable Black Nativity).

It feels at times like this needed an even larger canvas, a multi-part structure perhaps, to tell its tale, as it rushes through Tubman’s Civil War exploits towards the end in just a couple of scenes. And though I can’t fault Erivo’s performance, she is curiously single-note as a character—and perhaps that’s the trouble with being an icon (or a saint)—while some of the supporting players don’t feel very much more substantial. Still, there are these gorgeous old-fashioned photos of the cast over the end credits that suggest an evident love for the characters and the period. Perhaps the film will have a valuable educational purpose, but at times it feels just a little inert.

CREDITS
Director Kasi Lemmons; Writers Gregory Allen Howard and Lemmons; Cinematographer John Toll; Starring Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, Janelle Monáe, Clarke Peters; Length 125 minutes. Seen at Odeon Holloway, London, Friday 22 November 2019.

The Irishman (2019)

Today sees the UK release of Harriet, but only two weeks ago we got a brand new biopic from Martin Scorsese. For that I did a themed week around very long films, but this week’s biopic theme means I can revisit that film and finally post a review. I liked it. I gather some didn’t or felt it somehow less consequential in Scorsese’s oeuvre, but a lot of people have been gunning for him for some throwaway but no less deeply felt comments about superhero movies. Still, there’s a place for everything in modern cinema, and even if three-and-a-half hour gangster epics are mostly being made for streaming services now, it was still a solid box office draw given the very large packed cinema I saw this one in on a Saturday afternoon.

Look, I mean yes Scorsese has some good films (even some great ones) in all genres, but the stuff he’s always been best at capturing is the world of gangsters—a shady world of men closed away behind dark glasses in subterranean lairs—but those worlds have changed as he’s got older. Now the gangsters are old too: they’re old men who have lost things in life, maybe lost everything, lost their friends, alienated their families and are just these old men, dying off and being forgotten. No matter how powerful you were, how much influence you had, eventually people forget your name, your legacy and everything that made you important when you were in your prime, and that’s eventually what it feels like he’s getting at by the end of this film.

The de-aging technology has been much discussed, but even when these men are presumably playing 20 or 30-year-olds, back in the 1950s, they still look like old men, move in a hulking slow way—I don’t think that’s wrong for the characters, but in practice they always seem old no matter what the time period is. The timelines are all mixed up, though, as events from one era rush into those from another, because this is a story being told from the perspective of that old, forgotten gangster, as snippets of events seem to hit him and pull him along, and for all of its length, the film is never slow or boring, provided you like this slow-burning vibe that Scorsese is going for.

Pacino does his usual big thing, though increasingly looking like Steve Van Zandt as he gets older in the film (and Little Steven is in the film too, in a small part, playing some old school crooner on stage I believe), but the rest of the cast are all about intensity, not least Joe Pesci, who feels like the real standout in this ensemble. It’s a good film, is what I’m saying.

CREDITS
Director Martin Scorsese; Writer Steven Zaillian (based on the non-fiction book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt); Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto; Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Romano, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham; Length 209 minutes. Seen at Curzon Mayfair, London, Saturday 9 November 2019.

Two Japanese Biopics about Artists: Tochuken Kumoemon (1936) and Utamaro and His Five Women (1946)

While there are a huge number of recent biopics I can (and have) reviewed recently during this themed week on the genre, they have also had popularity throughout the history of cinema, and in many other parts of the world. Today I am focusing on two Japanese examples I watched more or less back-to-back this past year, both of which are concerned with artists, and are made by among the better directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse and Mizoguchi.

Tochuken Kumoemon (1936). A portrait of an artist, in this case the popular turn-of-the-century (Meiji era) singer of the title played by Ryunosuke Tsukigata, which feels as a film a little bit underdone. It’s artist-as-egotistical-monster, as he recollects his past life ahead of a big sold-out show in Tokyo. For all that he’s smiling and regaling those around him, he quickly starts to come off as a small man, unwilling to perform except for lots of money (which in itself isn’t unreasonable) but then belittling to those around him, critical of his son’s lack of manliness, and high-handed with his wife (Chikako Hosokawa), whom he abandons for a mistress (Sachiko Chiba) which pushes her to death. There’s little reflection on his part, and it becomes just a series of these character flaws which are brought out through the acting and the script. Not a bad film, and watchably well-made, but Tochuken is ultimately a bit of a creep.

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Utamaro and His Five Women (1946). It’s probably not a stretch to interpret films about artists as being a reflection on the filmmaker’s own craft, and here we have questions of what it means in practice to be an artist—shunning relationships, and with a compulsive need to create all the time—along with ethical considerations that must have pulled on Mizoguchi. After all, Utamaro is drawn in his work to some of the lowest in society, people generally lacking in power (most notably courtesans) and to committing their lives to wood block prints, a radical act and challenging to the authorities it seems (along with Utamaro’s often frankly sexual subject matter), meaning at one point he finds himself in shackles. The whirl of society around Utamaro includes his publisher and a fellow painter, a student of another school of representation who takes offence at Utamaro’s statements, but who is persuaded of the errors of his ways by a duel (taking the form of painting rather than violence) and then joins Utamaro as his disciple. It’s all rendered with great grace and style, as one might expect from such a film master as Mizoguchi.

CREDITS

桃中軒雲右衛門 Tochuken Kumoemon (aka Man of the House, 1936) — Director/Writer Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男 (based on the play by Seika Mayama 真山青果); Cinematographer Hiroshi Suzuki 鈴木博; Starring Ryunosuke Tsukigata 月形龍之介, Chikako Hosokawa 細川ちか子, Sachiko Chiba 千葉早智子; Length 73 minutes. Seen at home (YouTube), London, Thursday 13 June 2019.

歌麿をめぐる五人の女 Utamaro o Meguru Gonin no Onna (Utamaro and His Five Women, 1946) [certificate PG] — Director Kenji Mizoguchi 溝口健二; Writer Yoshikata Yoda 依田義賢 (based on the novel by Kanji Kunieda 邦枝完二); Cinematographer Minoru Miki 三木稔; Starring Minosuke Bando 六代目坂東簑助, Kinuyo Tanaka 田中絹代, Kotaro Bando 坂東好太郎; Length 106 minutes. Seen on a train (DVD on a laptop), Tuesday 11 June 2019.

3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon, 2018)

Biopics are often about famous men (and made by men too), but increasingly women’s stories have been brought to the screen, whether in big budget biopic dramas like Hidden Figures or in little indie chamber pieces like this one, which is about a film star towards the end of her career.

This is on the whole a pretty solid chamber drama (more-or-less) set at an upscale resort hotel in France in c1980, as Romy Schneider (Marie Bäumer) is rather unsuccessfully in detox, while a German journalist and photographer (Charly Hübner) comes to interview her, and her friend Hilde (Birgit Minichmayr) stops by to offer emotional support. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the performances are all very good, even if it does run a little long—there’s a lot of the interview in there, and we get a sense of the fragile state of Schneider’s psyche as she breaks down over the course of the drama. Hilde’s character is the least ostentatious, but Minichmayr has worked with Jessica Hausner and Maren Ade, so she knows how to hold the camera’s attention for even a repressed, very interior person. You can tell it’s set in the early-1980s because everyone smokes constantly, everywhere, in restaurants, bars, hotel rooms… just always lighting up. It’s not always obvious why this was made, but as a portrait of depression, and the bleak insularity of stardom, it feels compelling at times. Also, the (all too brief) Denis Lavant appearance is most welcome.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Emily Atef; Cinematographer Thomas W. Kiennast; Starring Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner; Length 115 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Monday 19 November 2018.