Criterion Sunday 643: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

I’ve not seen either of Hitchcock’s films of this title, though the 1956 one with Doris Day and James Stewart is much the more famous. However, this British film from his mid-1930s period is still pretty tight — it has a 75 minute running time! — and has a lot going for it. The central couple (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) have that familiar chipper upper-middle-class moneyed English way about them that a lot of pre-war heroes seemed to have in British cinema, as Brits abroad, holidaying in Switzerland. They’re sorta nobodies, but they have their particular skills: she’s a good shot with a rifle (hmm) and he… well, to be fair, I don’t remember very much about Banks’s Bob Lawrence. He’s fairly unflappable, which is always a good quality, and he has a habit of pushing his nose fairly fearlessly into things, which certainly helps this plot. As it happens, they unwittingly uncover some international intrigue — it’s just what happens to English people on their European holidays — and must piece together the plot and foil a murder that could destabilise the whole world. So the stakes couldn’t be higher, and Peter Lorre is the manifestation of this vaguely Germanic threat (never specifically stated, and Lorre himself had to learn his lines phonetically, having fled the Nazis not long before). He has some of the same baby-cheeked menace he had in M, with a streak through his hair and a prominent knife wound on his forehead used to hint at his dangerous personality. It’s all what we would consider classically Hitchcockian and certainly one of his successes of the pre-Hollywood era.

---

FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Alfred Hitchcock; Writers Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis; Cinematographer Curt Courant; Starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre; Length 75 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 7 May 2023.

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.

---

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 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.

---

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 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.

---

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.

Spencer (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). This isn’t the only film on my list to have been comprehensively talked out already. You don’t need another review of it, you got everything you needed about a year ago. But it wasn’t released in NZ until into 2022, and despite all my many reservations, I really enjoyed it. Not because of any fondness for its subject, but because of the way it was done, the atmosphere it evoked. So here we go, another review.

---

This film is a whole vibe, and either you get with it or you don’t, I somewhat suspect. I did, but I can understand people who go the other way. In terms of its felicity to ‘real life’, well I think that’s a fraught question at least; I’ve seen some people marvel at the accuracy of Kristen Stewart’s performance. I’m not enough of a devoted royal watcher to really know how much she captured Diana, but I don’t really see her specifically in Stewart’s portrayal. But this is as much a story about a woman in a particular situation, imagining how it might go down; it’s a fable and a fantasy, it’s shot in a hazy, gauzy, pastel-hued way yet somehow also manages to channel gothic horror. But Stewart’s Diana is trapped from the start, a doomed woman, even if around her the royal family seem nothing so much as zombies, not least Charles (Jack Farthing) and Her Majesty, who have the deadest of eyes. So she only has her head to delve further into; she gets visions of Anne Boleyn and increasingly dissociative fragments of an alternate reality, which we know is not her own because she’s giddy and happy, moving down endless corridors like Kubrick’s The Shining, cautiously at first perhaps, but with an increasing abandon as the film progresses. Against my best instincts — because I really do not like or want to hear about the British royal family — it manages to be a beautiful film, and an excellent performance as ever by Stewart who goes in fully and bodily to the whole thing. Whether it captures Diana per se, I can’t say, but it captures something fleeting, somehow both archly camp and deeply felt, about an impossible life.

CREDITS
Director Pablo Larraín; Writer Steven Knight; Cinematographer Claire Mathon; Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 6 February 2022.

Benediction (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). Maybe I missed the gathering of the Terence Davies fans last year, but I don’t recall many people listing this on any year-end best-of lists for some reason, and that perplexes me. He’s never exactly been fashionable, but this was a really strong film, an evocation of the past and the movement from youthful impetuousness into a conservative older age, set against the backdrop of WW1 and the ensuing interwar period.

---

Nobody is out here making films like Terence Davies. As it opens, this comes across like a combination of archival museum video that you watch in hushed silence in a media centre before entering a memorial to a horrifying past, along with the kind of TV drama which feels boldly experimental sheerly out of budgetary necessity (such enterprises usually restricting themselves to a handful of sets in old buildings sparsely populated by actors in costumes). And yet, for all that this seems like exactly the kind of thing cinema should not be doing, I really do mean it not in a bad way — for example, Raul Ruiz’s magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon very much had that latter kind of quality, and it doesn’t even feel like cost cutting but about cutting away the pointless aggrandisements of the costume/period genres to get to something essential.

In this film, Jack Lowden is fantastic as Siegfried Sassoon, who has a tender impish charm alongside a bitter seriousness (though it’s really only the latter quality that Peter Capaldi as his older version gets to show, his youthful esprit having been thoroughly dissipated). Not being familiar with Sassoon’s story, I was somewhat surprised he lived past the First World War (I think in my head I had conflated him rather too much with Wilfred Owen), but this film captures something of the turmoil of the early-20th century, while cataloguing popular/gay culture of the period (Ivor Novello, Edith Sitwell, and quite a parade of handsome slightly bland looking chiselled youths that flit through Siegried’s life).

It’s a fascinating way to tell this story, which gives as much time for him to read a poem to himself as it does to rather more melodramatic goings on, but it’s an effective story that neither panders to its period nor to us as modern viewers, and is all the better for that.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Terence Davies; Cinematographer Nicola Daley; Starring Jack Lowden, Simon Russell Beale, Peter Capaldi, Jeremy Irvine, Kate Phillips; Length 137 minutes.
Seen at Light House, Petone, Sunday 24 July 2022.

Catherine Called Birdy (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. I recently covered Lena Dunham’s breakthrough feature film Tiny Furniture in my Criterion Sunday supplement (which led to her getting the Girls TV show), and in some ways she still struggles as an artist with growing up. Hence we get this feature in which she really throws herself into childhood, but with a middle ages twist, and it’s rather sweet really: almost brutal when it needs to be, but never really getting bogged down in the filth, at least not too much.

---

Lena Dunham directed (and wrote and produced) this adaptation of a young adult novel, but she isn’t in it at all, which is something worth pointing out to the sadly numerous anti-fans of hers. And though it may seem quite different from artsy studenty metropolitan lives, perhaps its mediæval setting isn’t so far removed from that spirit of creative jouissance she usually tries to cultivate. It’s certainly not far from the darker and more depressive concerns because for all its lightness of touch, quirky colour and spirited performances, there’s an underlying grimness to life itself which haunts the film. Of course the key is that for the most part the characters don’t dwell on this (perhaps because it’s something they can never escape), but it adds something grounding to what could otherwise come across as altogether too twee. There are memorable turns from all kinds of supporting actors, not least Andrew Scott (unsurprisingly) as Birdy’s father, or Paul Kaye as “Shaggy Beard” (some kind of Yorkshire nouveau riche), as well as from Bella Ramsey in the lead role who gets across her childish energy as she is thrust into an altogether more adult world (or rather, perhaps there is no such distinction; certainly there was no concept of being a teenager, and that’s part of what the film gets across well: you’re a child until you’re not).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Lena Dunham (based on the novel by Karen Cushman); Cinematographer Laurie Rose; Starring Bella Ramsey, Andrew Scott, Billie Piper, Lesley Sharp, Joe Alwyn, Sophie Okonedo; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), Wellington, Thursday 20 October 2022.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here) and this post falls into two themes already identified: (1) unexpected pleasures; (2) Colin Farrell as a fine actor. I would not have imagined the latter 20 years ago when he was starting out as a fairly generic pretty dude in big budget films, and the former is the case for a lot of films on my list this year. Most years, they’re unexpected because they are directors or projects unknown to me. However, this one, just about the last film I went to see in 2022, is by a director I know and have not liked the films of, plus with the general Oirishness of the enterprise (deedly-dee music, whimsical religious irreverance, and cute animal friends), I was primed to dislike it intensely. But I didn’t.

---

This makes for an odd note to end a year of film watching at the cinema, but it’s not a bad film by any means. I’ve often been a bit suspicious of McDonagh’s cinema, and haven’t liked most of the stuff that people have been big fans of, but this hits a very honest note in dealing with some pretty deplorable behaviour in a way that makes it clear what’s gone wrong. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) just wants to be left alone to work on his fiddle music in silence without the tiresome chatter of his buddy Padraic (Colin Farrell), a nice yet dull local cow herder; the film throws us straight into Colm’s decision, but it’s easy to take on trust how this longstanding friendship went by in a haze of stout down the local pub. The film captures their interactions, and those of the local characters, by focusing on the simmering tensions of rural life, and though it does ratchet things up a bit towards the end, it’s a commentary on people getting far too mired in their ideals to notice what it’s doing to them as people. Thus, there’s a sort of bleakness built in there — the confrontation with a person’s life and the worth they derive from it at the end — but the film works hard to ensure that it keeps us just teetering on this side of that particular abyss very ably. There’s a bleakness of course, that goes with the 1920s civil war setting, and the craggy glowering landscape, but it’s a bleakness primarily expressed by the way the characters end up, making this a sort of parable about paying attention to what matters when the world is falling apart (a parable for our times).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Martin McDonagh; Cinematographer Ben Davis; Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan; Length 114 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Saturday 31 December 2022.

The Green Knight (2021)

I listed my favourite films of 2022 here but I’m trying to post fuller reviews of them as well. One that was again a 2021 favourite was one that showed up on streaming probably some time early in 2022 (maybe the year before, I don’t know; streaming seems so vague in terms of release dates), so I only caught up belatedly though in truth I was hoping for some cinema screenings. Fat chance I guess. Maybe one day in a retrospective, or if some enterprising soul does a season of mediaeval-set movies.

---

I think it’s fair to say that this film has divided opinion — although we are now fairly far from its release, and therefore hopefully people are able to come to it without preconceptions now. Presumably, though, that’s partly due to the way it endeavours to film a 14th century chivalric romance. After all, the way that such texts were written doesn’t much fit with the modern conception of psychological motivations and naturalism, and I think trying to find a way to visualise a story told in a different mode has guided many of the choices here. As one example, text frequently shows up on screen, giving the whole an episodic feel, as our hero Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) tries to make sense of, well frankly, his whole life.

There is throughout an undertow of inevitable death which probably fits pretty well with the period, especially for a (wannabe) knight such as him, who must face all kinds of dangers, and in the final reckoning his quest is as much a question of morality, of doing good and being virtuous and finding where that line lies. It’s also very interesting the way that the finality of death is not presented as the end of life; beheaded characters walk away with their heads, a vision of a skeleton gains flesh and vice versa, those who are dead also converse with the living — and presumably that is led by the storytelling tradition.

In all, I think the film effectively preserves the mystery of life and death and puts across a compelling alternative vision of storytelling itself. However, I would one day love the chance to see this on the big screen, as I do not think that our TV was able to cope with the various shades of darkness that are employed throughout the film, and the film seems designed to look better the bigger the screen.

CREDITS
Director/Writer David Lowery (based on the anonymously authored poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo; Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury; Length 130 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), Wellington, Saturday 12 February 2022.

Aftersun (2022)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a non-Criterion Collection review, but as 2022 is done and dusted (well, the year, not my viewing of films from that year, which will undoubtedly stretch out for years to come), it seems like a fitting theme for my first few posts of this year would be to cover some of my favourites from last year. This small British indie film was my favourite, until I eventually catch up with everything else. You can see my full list here though.

---

After a year of watching fairly unchallenging films at the cinema (sadly I missed my city’s annual film festival), it’s nice to see one that properly challenges audiences. Which is, I suppose, one way of saying it’s slow and sad — and thus probably not for everyone — but I think it has depths to it, and I miss a film with depths. Texturally, it reminds me of the early work of, say, Lynne Ramsay and that’s not just because its period setting reminds me a little of Ratcatcher in its lugubrious mood (though where that film went back a few decades to the 70s, this one takes us back to the 90s). Partly too that’s the way that the evocation of the era doesn’t rely on period hairstyles and music, but rather on some far more oblique signifiers of the era like the grain of the camcorder films (though, okay, there’s also the “Macarena”).

However, the more resonant aspect of the film is that sadness that haunts its tale throughout, though is never explicitly reckoned with. There’s the feeling evoked by the dark, heavily strobing club dancefloor sequences that punctuate the narrative, the emptiness of the video framings being watched by someone looking back on this period of life, and the quiet moments in the story of a young dad and his 11-year-old daughter on holiday in Turkey that are punctured by the dad’s attempt to be upbeat and positive. (It should be said up front that the darkness isn’t anything to do with sexual abuse, so don’t go in worried about that. The relationship between these two is clearly loving and strong, in both directions.) But there are strong hints throughout of the elegiac nature of this 90s holiday, and the way it resonates in the present, such that in a sense this is a coming of age film that goes beyond the innocuous flirtations on the beach or the innocent kisses by the poolside with teenage boys, into more delicately shifting psychological territory.

I imagine it will hit a long more strongly for those who are parents, but it feels beautifully cathartic in a way that relies on the audience to make the connections and draw out the emotional threads, and that’s just a nice change of pace.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Charlotte Wells; Cinematographer Gregory Oke; Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio; Length 101 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 11 December 2022.