Criterion Sunday 391: if…. (1968)

After recently watching Spice World and 1933’s The Invisible Man, I feel I already have a sense of how small, insular and close-minded an island Britain can be. Perhaps those weren’t the lessons to be learned from those particular films, but an assessment of the British (or English) character is somewhat in the background, and it’s the same here in a portrayal of the kind of education our ruling classes get in the UK. It’s a satire of course, but even when it’s going over-the-top (there’s a priest in a drawer! there’s an entire stash of weaponry!) it’s never particularly untethered from the reality — or at least how I imagine it to be (though the writers of this film were certainly drawing on lived experience). Even the very removed microcosm of school life I endured showed some of the hallmarks of the society depicted here, though obviously never nearly as brutal. It’s also rather awkward watching this in the era of incels and domestic terrorism, as you get the feeling that what Mick (Malcolm McDowell) and his compatriots are doing isn’t so far removed from that paradigm either. Still, given the system they’re rebelling against here, there is still an underlying level of sympathy for Mick, and the satire remains pointed. It’s no wonder it caused such a stir at the time, given the nature of politicised student violence and the incipient revolution in the air back in 1968, but there’s still a revolutionary zeal to it watching even now, alongside that black comedy.

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Lindsay Anderson; Writer David Sherwin; Cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček; Starring Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, David Wood, Robert Swann, Christine Noonan; Length 112 minutes.
Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 22 January 2021 (and on VHS at home at some point in the distant past).

Criterion Sunday 330: Au revoir les enfants (1987)

The title is taken from the final words of the priest, Father Jean, headmaster of the Catholic boarding school to which its protagonists are sent from Paris at the height of World War II, but it could as easily be bidding goodbye to them from where they live with their parents, or indeed to their innocence of course. The film builds up its picture of these wartime kids leaving the city, and shows the mysterious appearance of a few more kids to their classes early on, one of whom, Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), sits next to our main protagonist, Julien (Gaspard Manesse), who can be taken as something of a stand-in for the director, given this story is based on his own experiences. It soon enough becomes clear that these new kids are Jewish, and so the tension builds and remains through otherwise quotidian scenes of playing with the class, or eating food together. Characters who seem to be on their side are revealed to have secret collaborationist tendencies, and even refined upper-class spaces seethe with barely-hidden prejudice. However, it’s all handled in a way that allows us as audience to come to that realisation with Julien, without overburdening the narrative, and the acting is naturalistic. The film is shot by Renato Berta, who worked with Straub/Huillet, and brings a certain starkness to the imagery, avoiding sentimentality. This is a very fine film about a bleak period in history.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• Extras which had been on a supplementary disc as part of the original box set are included on the Blu-ray reissue, most notably the Charlie Chaplin short The Immigrant (1917), which is seen being screened to the kids within the film, with musical accompaniment from Irène Jacob in her first film role. I’m hardly a connoisseur of Chaplin’s films (I’ve only seen a small handful), but you can see a certain virtuosity in the staging of this, in which Chaplin’s familiar “Tramp” character is an immigrant on a ship bound for New York. We’re introduced to him leaning over the side while the ship rolls dramatically, suggesting he’s heaving his guts out, but the first gag reveals no, he’s just catching a fish. This continues with all kinds of physical comedy — there’s a particularly nice scene in the mess hall, where food slides between the immigrants — and a sweet bit where he anonymously helps out a young woman (Edna Purviance) who’s had her money stolen by a gambler whom he’s won it off. The ending with Purviance is rather abrupt, but it caps a film with a number of solid comedy setpieces.
• Another extra is a five-minute visual essay about one of the more troublesome characters, an outcast named Joseph, trying to locate and understand what drives him, and the difficulties that drive him to his final decisive action in the film.

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Louis Malle; Cinematographer Renato Berta; Starring Gaspard Manesse, Raphaël Fejtö, Francine Racette; Length 104 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Sunday 28 June 2020.

Selah and the Spades (2019)

The milieu this film sets itself in — a fairly well-heeled boarding school — is hardly new to cinema, but the telling of this tale is distinctive enough that I think there’s a lot of promise in this director (and of course, the cast, most of whom are fairly new faces, though Jharrel Jerome was seen in Moonlight).

---

Certainly a distinctive debut in the crowded marketplace of high school-set films, though something about the tone feels a little older than that, since it eschews the usual bright poppiness of that milieu for something darker and more reflective. The tone throughout is rather elliptical and with lots of little flashes of details, slightly off-centre close-ups of little tics and expressions, small touches that create an impressionistic sense of this time of life as somehow heightened and laden with feelings that go beyond just what is happening at a plot level. Entire sequences feel rather abstract in some ways, and plot becomes very much a minor part of the film at times, which pushes it into interesting territory that maybe isn’t always fully successful in its realisation but makes it preferable to something boring and safe (which is, to be fair, where most of this genre is pitched). The minor characters too feel a little underdeveloped, with Paloma (Celeste O’Connor) the standout — some of her dialogue felt contrived, but at other times, when she was just quietly observing, she seemed like the most interesting person on-screen. I’ll look forward to the director’s future work.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Tayarisha Poe; Cinematographer Jomo Fray; Starring Lovie Simone, Celeste O’Connor, Jharrel Jerome, Ana Mulvoy-Ten, Gina Torres; Length 97 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Saturday 18 April 2020.

Criterion Sunday 294: The Browning Version (1951)

I’m pretty sure that most people going into this film aren’t exactly expecting anything thrilling. After all, as a film it exudes exactly the atmosphere of the scenario it depicts, black-and-white photography capturing the fusty old corridors of a large overprivileged English public school where Michael Redgrave plays a Classics teacher, Mr Crocker-Harris. He has a quote from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon permanently chalked up on the board behind his desk as he dispassionately surveys his classroom and speaks in a flat monotone to the boys, all but one of whom very much dislike him. It takes its time, too, for the drama to get going, but it works in some of the same ways, as, say, Brief Encounter in tracking these minute little changes of emotional register among a small group of central characters. It’s easy to miss what’s going on, and I suspect it only improves on re-watching, but this impressed me far more once it had finished than I had any expectation upon starting.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a five-minute clip from British TV in the late-1950s with Redgrave being interviewed about acting and how he gets into roles, during which he briefly touches on this film.

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Anthony Asquith; Writer Terence Rattigan (based on his play); Cinematographer Desmond Dickinson; Starring Michael Redgrave, Jean Kent, Nigel Patrick, Brian Smith; Length 90 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), London, Wednesday 12 February 2020.

Criterion Sunday 279: Der junge Törless (Young Törless, 1966)

This was one of those early feature films in the New German Cinema, in which Schlöndorff turned his elegantly monochrome camera inward on German society, through the story of a young man at an Austrian boarding school in the early part of the century. It’s not so much about a boy’s coming of age, as it is about him learning about the depths of his own and his society’s cruelty towards others, about becoming institutionalised, seeking explanations (at one point, through imaginary numbers in mathematics) for the irrational desires of the heart. That said, it all moves fairly slowly and methodically through its story, and though the acting is rather frosty and stilted, I think that’s how it’s supposed to come across. I think I admired it more than I loved it, but it’s a fascinating film all the same.

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Volker Schlöndorff; Writers Schlöndorff and Herbert Asmodi (based on the novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß “The Confusions of Young Törless” by Robert Musil); Cinematographer Franz Rath; Starring Mathieu Carrière, Marian Seidowsky; Length 87 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 7 December 2019.

Criterion Sunday 29: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Unlike the recent run of Criterion films, what’s challenging about this release isn’t anything that’s depicted on screen (there’s no violence or body horror or even bad language): it’s what’s not depicted. It’s an elegant, beautifully-filmed and languorous film, but there’s a gaping void at its heart, which is the lack of explanation for its central mystery — the disappearance of three young women and their teacher at the titular setting. It’s implied (both here and in the Joan Lindsay novel it’s based on) that the events really happened, but in a sense this is a red herring, because the events are pushed into a mythical realm of nostalgia and memory. The director, Peter Weir, and cinematographer Russell Boyd make bold use of a gauzy filter for the camera, imparting a hazy nostalgia to the proceedings. There’s also a bold stylisation to the acting (dreamy and absent gazes abound), while the scene of the girls’ disappearance as their classmate screams after them is a masterclass in channelling the uncanny through the simple expedient of not having them react or look back. More recent films like Innocence (2004) and this past year’s The Falling channel some of the same emotional terrain that Weir set out so long ago (40 years now!), but Picnic at Hanging Rock retains its eerie primacy.

Criterion Extras: David Thomson introduces the film in a short video piece, but the highlights are a contemporary Australian television on-set visit (featuring interviews with the novel’s author Joan Lindsay, and some of the key cast and crew), as well as a more recent return to interview Peter Weir and Anne-Louise Lambert among others. Finally, the dual format set comes bundled with a copy of the source novel, which makes for a fascinating comparison to the final film, and focuses quite a lot more on the aftermath of the events than the film does (I can recommend it, and doesn’t take too long to read).

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Peter Weir; Writer Cliff Green (based on the novel by Joan Lindsay); Cinematographer Russell Boyd; Starring Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert [as “Anne Lambert”]; Length 115 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 22 March 2015.

The Falling (2014)

Films set at girls’ schools form a fairly distinct ‘coming of age’ subgenre by this point, many of them distinguished by their undertow of the uncanny. I’m drawn back to Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004), ten years ago now but still provoking indelibly eerie memories, so the fact that The Falling even comes close to the power exerted by that film is, I’d say, a good thing. It too is shot by a French woman (Agnès Godard, frequent collaborator of Claire Denis) and like that earlier film, the rites of adolescence are intricately bound up with mystery and death. Set in 1969, it centres on two young women, Lydia (Maisie Williams) and the free-spirited Abbie (Florence Pugh), but mainly within the context of their time at school, as they and their classmates share experiences and set themselves against the brusque Miss Mantel (Greta Scacchi) and the airily unconcerned headmistress. What’s interesting is not so much what happens, as in the languorous atmosphere, in which significant events are revealed in an almost off-handed way at times. The camera frequently returns to a sylvan scene of trees looming over a small pond, often empty shots of threatening portent, as if summoning some Pre-Raphaelite vision of drowned maidens, and it certainly adds to the general sense of uneasiness. By the end, things get pretty charged in ways that I’m really hoping function as allegory (in a live Q&A the director was keen to stress that at least some of it wasn’t autobiographical), but as a piece it is stylish, and carried by some excellent acting.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Carol Morley; Cinematographer Agnès Godard; Starring Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake, Florence Pugh, Greta Scacchi; Length 102 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Mayfair, London, Monday 13 October 2014.