Monthly Archives: November 2011

BFI LFF 2011: W.E.

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Madonna’s biopic of Wallis Simpson was notorious long before screening at the 2011 LFF, following a disastrous premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The version screened in London was reportedly re-edited; one clip released a couple of months ago is indeed different than the version I saw, in that the original is an incomprehensible and absurd rapid montage that was eventually toned down to be much slower but equally as incoherent. It would be interesting to compare the two versions, but it’s not like the London version was a phoenix rising from the ashes of that first screening. It remains one of the most misguided, inept, and unintentionally entertaining movies of recent times, so much so that my derisive giggles threatened to get me in trouble with the huge and scary guy sitting next to me who, commendably, seemed to be able to take this slice of insania a lot more seriously than I could.

The blame for W.E.‘s many sins can be laid at the feet of Madonna and her Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian, who co-wrote the screenplay / transcribed the dialogue from a book featuring Fabio on the cover. It’s their choice to pull a Julie and Julia, crosscutting between dramatisations of Wallis’ life and the plight of a modern woman, the key difference being that W.E.‘s protagonist Wally Winthrop is fictional. We see notable moments from Wallis’ life, painting her as a victim of circumstance, a woman horribly brutalised by her first husband who then cuckolds her second husband seemingly by accident, before causing the abdication of the King of England despite begging him not to do it as it would ruin their lives.

These overwrought scenes, alarmingly similar to the kind of godawful TV movies made to cash in on royal events like the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton,* are intercut with Wally, a young woman who takes refuge from her empty life by wandering around her former place of employment — Sotheby’s — in the days before an auction of Wallis’ belongings. She is visited by the ghost of Wallis in a Play-It-Again-Sam-stylee, who gives her meaningless advice about self-actualisation that prompts the viewer to wish that Madonna had written a New Age book instead. The bond between the women is strong; Wally is also abused by her vile and uncaring husband, and finds solace in the arms of a kindly security guard, Evgeni, a man whose soulful nature is perfectly summed up by the fact that he keeps a picture of his dead wife in a copy of Rilke’s Letter To A Young Poet on the bookcase near his piano. Seriously.

There’s the germ of an interesting movie there (I mean holy crap, Wally learns from Wallis’ mistakes and goes for a sentimental pauper instead of a chinless toff, and is therefore happier OMG money isn’t everything that’s so deepz), though it would require far more than a bit of an editing trim to make it work at all. Not that Madonna could see her movie objectively any more. It’s hard not to watch W.E. and see it as Madonna’s love letter to herself via Wallis. She’s spoken of how she empathises with Wallis, and the movie oozes with sympathy for the woman, painting her as someone whose joie de vivre and irrepressible nature was such that she was unable to avoid the attentions of powerful men, as well as excusing her notorious interest in the Nazi party by giving her a dismissive line about how she courted Hitler just the once and only because she was just like everyone else, trying to stop him from annexing the entirety of Europe by being really really nice to him. And with one bound Madonna was free! Except not.

This Cele/Bitchy article draws a parallel between Madonna’s inclusion of John Galliano and Leni Reifenstahl’s names in the credits and the decision to airbrush Wallis’ possible Nazi support from the movie, but I think the truth is closer to Madonna just deciding she likes Wallis and felt sorry for her and just couldn’t let her own ego shut up long enough to realise that comparing yourself to someone as dodgy as Wallis just because you like to fame-compare yourself to one of the most notorious and historically significant women of the last century is probably a really really really bad idea, no matter how hard you like to shout that she was just trying to talk Hitler out of being such a dick and hell she wasn’t interested in being Queen anyway. As such, W.E. stands as possibly the most expensive and gaudy example of fanwank ever made; I’m amazed Wallis isn’t revealed to be a Jedi Knight in the final act.

Ah yes, gaudy. Much has been made of the look of the movie; Madonna enlisted A-list names from the fashion and jewelry world to clothe her actors, but it says something about my interest in such matters that I just spent 10 minutes wondering if this sentence’s separation of “fashion” and “jewelry” was redundant because maybe they both belong to the same world. If a movie doesn’t feature costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka or Danilo Donati then I’m not going to notice them. As for jewelry, the only piece I’ve ever been interested in was a Superman logo ring that I wanted to wear on my left ring finger, but my wife Daisyhellcakes rightly vetoed that decision with a quickness. There’s an argument that W.E. is some kind of fairytale saga with bad guys and princesses and lessons learned about true love, but not only is that a bit of a leap, it’s entirely at odds with these glum, anti-magical visuals.

As far as I can see, W.E. is a relentlessly ugly movie, with flat lighting made worse by Madonna’s choice to complicate the visual palette of the movie by adding tons of grainy close-ups of objects and noses and headlines as if the only movie she has ever seen before was Oliver Stone’s JFK. It’s possible that this betrays an ambivalent attitude toward superficial beauty, that Madonna is perfectly aware that the trappings of glamour are nothing compared to the true glory of the world, be it the martyrdom of misunderstood women, or empathetic sisterhood, or some kind of penitent rejection of riches as shown when Wally runs away from her contemptible rich husband to live with honourable peasant Evgeni in his still-pretty-bloody-nice NY “hovel” (which we know is horrible because Madonna has considerately looped in the sound of a dripping tap to hammer it home), but it’s an unconvincing theory, undermined by the participation of those legendary designers. I’ll believe it when I see Madonna slobbing about in one of the fragrant and awesome Tulisa Contostavlos’ pre-glamournisation tracksuits.

The ugly photography helps obscure the actors that struggle to make something of Madonna and Keshishian’s sixth-form dialogue. James D’Arcy and Richard Coyle fare particularly badly, with D’Arcy’s Edward given little to do other than pine for his hyper-confident American lust object while being a little bit decadent; the overall effect is of a creepy aristo with some weak inbred genes losing his decorum in the presence of That American Chutzpah. Coyle is even worse, but then he’s given an impossible acting task to fulfill. His character — the dastardly, abusive husband of poor martyr Wally — is an RKO serial villain with a very nice head of hair and a glass of Scotch glued to his right hand, who brazenly cheats on his saintly wife for no apparent reason other than that Madonna needed Wally to suffer just like her namesake, before finding the love of a good man.

Madonna’s weak facility with actors spreads to her extras; scenes like the auction sequences are littered with scenery-chewing attention-seeking overactors seemingly egged on by the director to be as unsubtle as possible. “Look at them”, she seems to be saying. “They’re awful aren’t they, the rich. They just want to take a piece of me… I mean Wallis, as a souvenir. They don’t understand me… er, Wallis the way I… erm, Wally does.” They clown and yawp and boil away in their seats like hyenas, which Madonna makes sure to emphasise by intercutting the auction footage with shots of Wallis’s friends, off their mash on Benzedrine, rolling around on the floor to the tune of The Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant, as Wallis dances in front of them with an African woman from high society (like they used to do in the 30s, I bet) who suddenly materialises behind her. Do you see? Do you see what fame is? Poor Madonna, that prisoner of infamy. Only a truly noble martyr like Wallis could possibly understand what it is to be a massively successful and influential woman, but instead she has to deal with us gawping at her and bidding on her clothes and taking Benzedrine… er… hold on… ::Level 8 Warning — Metaphor Collapse Imminent — Prepare Hydrangea Distraction Protocol Omega::

Does any of this work? Abbie Cornish is better than she should be, though mostly her role requires her to be quiet and stoic and defiant. She’s been busy this past year or so, what with appearing in Bright Star and misfiring “Gurl Powah” debacle Sucker Punch which, oddly enough, shares a few similarities with W.E., though not because W.E. features dragons or ninjas or cosplay, sadly. Cornish is becoming one of the more interesting actresses working today, but Jane Campion’s movie aside, she’s not getting the projects she deserves. She’s often paired up here with Oscar Isaac as Evgeni, who gives yet another terrific performance to rank alongside his work in Nicholas Winding Refn’s retro thriller Drive. He gets the only “funny” lines in the film, but he’s so likeable that I actually laughed with them just out of gratitude that the movie actually recognised a human emotion other than “Melodramatic Mugging”.

Andrea Riseborough’s Wallis is problematic. There are details to her performance that show effort and understanding, an attempt to translate Madonna and Keshishian’s appalling muddle of histrionics, cliche and lumpy exposition into something resembling the behaviour of a human being, but these moments are obscured by a terribly misguided accent that makes her sound like Jennifer Jason Leigh’s impersonation of Katherine Hepburn in The Hudsucker Proxy. Add to that the awful things Madonna makes her do, such as her final moment with Edward, which will go down in history as one of the wrongest things ever committed to film. Many weeks later I’m still not sure if it’s meant to be a joke or not, or whether Matt Groening and the Futurama team should sue over the misuse of this character design.

But I love this movie. Love it. It paralysed me with delighted mirth for almost all of its considerable length, and made me want to drag busloads of people to see it. Please dear Lord give me a chance to book out the Prince Charles and set up a screening just like with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (another movie where the director’s ego leaps in front of the camera and inadvisably shakes it all about). I dream of a large posse of W.E. fanatics throwing jewelry and Masai spears at the screen and quoting along with Madonna and Keshishian’s Mills-and-Boonian dialogue. We can mock the melodramatic blocking (all hurled martini glasses and weeping / leaping at beds), the bizarre inclusion of Mohamed Al Fayed as a character in order to draw a parallel between the Royal Family’s treatment of Wallis and Diana Spencer (I mean FFS), Wallis’ magical cocktail shaker which she shakes with such vigour that it brings all the boys (and girls) to her yard, the incredible scene where a horrified Edward visits Wales and is greeted by a village full of monosyllabic commoners muttering words of adoring deference from beneath a veil of worthy soot. It’s a bad movie masterpiece, ranking right up there with Showgirls. It will be celebrated and adored for years to come, for all the wrong reasons, but then that’s more than Wallis Simpson got, so Madonna can chalk this up as a success, I suppose.

* An earlier version of this post claimed that Prince William actually married to BBC Breakfast’s one competent host, Kate Silverton. My error — one which gives away my antipathy toward matters of the monarchy — was spotted by Shades of Caruso contributor Masticator, who added, “TV event of the year”. Indeed. ::retires from blogging::

BFI LFF 2011: Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai / Martha Marcy May Marlene

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Last year’s London Film Festival featured the first UK screenings of Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a movie so exciting that 24 people were carried out during the final hour due to exhaustion of the adrenal gland. It was the acme of action cool; nothing released since has featured anything as thrilling as the sight of Kōji Yakusho unfurling a scroll before bringing on the mother of all beatdowns against a small army. With that in mind, this year’s inclusion of Miike’s follow-up Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was a must-see, even with a number of reviews expressing bemusement at its slow pace.

These same concerns were levelled at 13 Assassins, which had a beautifully paced first hour that meticulously set up the stakes. Miike’s judgement was a welcome change from his traditional unpredictability, but some seemed to pine for the madness of his earlier movies. In that case they’ll dislike Hara-Kiri even more. It begins at the same pace as 13 Assassins before taking a disastrous turn, overstating its case at such length that I offered up a prayer to Nyarlathotep to rend the projector asunder with his tentacles.

Talking about the problems with Hara-Kiri is difficult without spoiling some of its surprises — for those who haven’t seen Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 original, of course — but the conceit of the movie is that a lone samurai, Hanshirô Tsugumo (a haunting performance from Ebizō Ichikawa), arrives at the House of Li to demand the right to commit seppuku in that place of great honour in order to restore his name, after being made… well, I don’t know the correct word for it. Redundant will have to do, I guess. Kageyu, the head of the house (played by the amazing Yakusho, here cast as the opposite of the noble Shinzaemon from 13 Assassins) accuses the samurai/ronin of attempting a “suicide bluff” in order to persuade the house to take him on or pay him off to prevent the ritual disembowelment, and tells the tale of another samurai, Motome, who approached Kageyu the year before. The young samurai was shamed into killing himself as an example to others hoping to make money out of their “compassion”.

Miike then presents the movie’s first flashback, which is the closest he comes to providing a grisly setpiece to match his other work. He shows this death without much gore — another example of Miike’s newly restrained style — but even without that it’s nigh-unwatchable. The young samurai is made to humiliate himself and commit a grisly, protracted suicide with a blunt object. The scene feels like it will never end. The audience visibly squirmed in its seat throughout the long scene, taking solace in the burst of violence that ends it. It’s a bravura sequence that lingers in the memory long after the movie finishes.

That’s quite an achievement considering the length of the second flashback, which is excruciating for an entirely different reason. Even if it wasn’t already way too long, the second flashback shows the lead-up to Hanshirô’s arrival at the House, which involves poverty, humiliation, death, rain, snow, death, poverty, and just endless, endless misery. It’s a trial to sit through, especially if, like me, you are absolutely mortally terrified of being destitute or unemployed or broke. We are shown Hanshirô’s battle to survive his downsizing from the Samurai Department of Feudal Japan (or whatever it’s called) as he struggles to make money selling umbrellas. At one point a character manages to scrape up enough money to buy three eggs, and then promptly drops one and eats it off the floor. Grim.

I’ll be honest, I have a really tough time watching anything like this at the moment. Terror over the state of the economy, and the possibility of being made redundant again, have made me an absolute basket case (see also my terrified whining in my Take Shelter review), and Hara-Kiri‘s enormous wallow in broad melodramatics was a miserable experience. To other viewers it might not seem so long, but in my eyes it completely unbalanced the movie, which thankfully rallied in the final ten minutes as Hanshirôo’s motives become clear. Nevertheless, even taking into account the objectivity-distorting nature of my phobia, the structure of the movie causes its own problems.

As far as I can see, the only good thing to come from the flashback structure is that there are a couple of surprises in the plot that generate enough narrative energy to carry the movie through its considerable longueurs. If it was told linearly instead, we would have a very very long and tedious melodramatic first act that lasts over half of the movie, followed by a heavily loaded second act that introduces the antagonist too late and then shows two acts of violence in a row with barely any room to breathe between them.

No viewer would be able to make it through that overblown miserabilist opening hour to get to the juicy stuff later; it’s just too ridiculous to follow, and contains little surprises. Instead of dealing with the problems of that act, the writers and Miike have jumbled the plot to hide its problems, but no amount of shuffling of index cards can save it. This decision looks even worse when you consider that Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In has a similar structure — with a couple of very long flashbacks coming in the second half of the movie — but uses that narrative trick to far better effect.

The first half of the movie is perplexing, as Almodovar hides the motives of Doctor Robert Ledgard and throws in clues about the identity of his mysterious lodger/captive Vera Cruz. Almodovar is brave enough to make a completely obtuse hour of cinema before pulling out a series of jawdropping twists and revelations in the main flashback (though this viewer felt the denouement was disappointingly flat; a shame as for the most part it’s a terrific movie). Whereas Miike places his surprises and shock moments in the first half, Almodovar puts them closer to the end. It’s arguable that Almodovar is playing the same trick to hide narrative weakness, but the difference is that his shuffling makes The Skin I Live In work, for the most part. Hara-Kiri contains a fatal flaw — that endless boring scene — that could never be fixed. It’s a great shame.

Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene has a more conventional flashback structure, alternating between two time-frames to dramatise a young woman’s indoctrination and escape from a small cult. Elizabeth Olsen makes one of the most memorable debuts in recent memory as Martha, who flees a patriarchal cult to stay with her sister and brother-in-law (Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy), neither of whom seem happy to see her. Durkin crosscuts between her disastrous attempts to fit in with her well-off, liberal relatives and her past with the cult, where she goes by the name Marcy May, so given her by its leader Patrick (a memorably vile John Hawkes).

The great sadness of the movie is that no matter where she goes, Martha / Marcy May is treated poorly. She’s relatively safe with her family, but she has lost the social skills necessary to fit in, and won’t explain what has happened to her, leading to a total breakdown in her relationship with them. At the compound she was accepted, but was the victim of a drug-assisted rape; a “tradition” in the cult. Her inability to strike out on her own creates a sense of awful claustrophobia, and as the movie progresses, and we see more evidence of her behaviour at the compound, her motives become more ambiguous. Will she accept the freedom of the outside world, or will the cult win out?

That oppression of Martha’s spirit by her past — which begins to surface again by the end of the movie — resembles the same crushing hopelessness as experienced by Hanshiro and his family in Hara-Kiri. There are barriers in your life that conspire to keep you down, and as someone who grew up in financially restricted circumstances, the weight of Hanshiro and Martha’s baggage felt familiar. Caitlin Moran recently wrote a column about poverty that I think ranks as her best and most important work. Poverty is something you feel will always be there, affecting every decision you make, altering the way you see the world and respond to it. No matter where you go or what you do to better your life, you dread a return to that state.

Hanshiro is powerless to prevent his sacking, and Martha’s ignorance prevents her from seeing beyond her narrow horizons. Though Hara-Kiri does a reasonable job of dramatising this situation, Durkin’s movie perfectly captures that sense of hopelessness, from the brilliant, baffled performance by Olsen to the gloomy photography of Jody Lee Lipes.* Durkin does a superb job of depicting the strained relationship between Martha and her sister, but his premiere achievement is building such a bleak atmosphere, photographing nature as a source of both comfort and menace. The shadows that loom over Martha occur with greater frequency as the movie progresses. It’s a dark blanket that swallows the cult up, most memorably in a skinny-dipping scene in a pool, and a grim scene featuring a gun and a cat, which signals an escalation in the cult’s malevolence.

And yet it’s arguable that Martha is not the passive protagonist it seems, considering the “identity” of “Marlene”. Beware: from this point on there are plot spoilers and possible interpretation spoilers too. Martha spends much of the movie doing very little other than being picked on, abused or exploited by those around her, and it’s arguable that Durkin has done little other than create a Dickensian orphan-type to be pitied by the audience. Her major act of agency seems to be running away from the cult in the opening scene of the movie, and then deflecting attempts to bring her back by fellow cultist Watts (Brady Corbet, whose trademark creepy / sympathetic stare is used as well here as in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia). After he leaves her alone Martha calls her sister, who picks her up and takes her back to her lakeside holiday home, which is as opulent as the cult’s base is delapidated.

Later we find out that the cultists regularly raid the homes of their family members, and burglarise nearby houses. They’re also willing to kill anyone unfortunate enough to be home; these revelations are timed beautifully by Durkin to maximise our unease, as Martha begins to suspect that her sister’s home is being monitored by the cult. The key moment for Martha comes late in the movie when, after the tension between her and her family reaches an uncomfortable peak, she calls the cult and speaks to “Marlene”. It’s not until a later flashback that we find out that “Marlene” is a kind of codename used when answering the phone. We see Martha / Marcy May do this, asking three questions in accordance with a rule written on the wall next to her.

So did Martha escape from the cult at the start, and have second thoughts near the end of the movie, thus dooming her family? Or was she always meant to contact them, giving a code to say “all clear”, but then had second thoughts after that (her paranoia in the final few scenes of the movie show she is violently opposed to the notion of returning to the cult)? Though I’m curious to know what Durkin intended here, I almost don’t want to know; the ambiguous ending of Take Shelter has been partially ruined for me after finding out that the writer / director Jeff Nichols intended no such ambiguity and was making a very specific point. I think both movies benefit from remaining unclear. Spoilers end!

But even if Martha is a victim, there’s nothing wrong with that interpretation. Sometimes you can’t change your fate, and the choices you’ve made can end up dooming you and those around you. It’s a bleak message, but then Martha Marcy May Marlene is the best kind of horror movie; the one where there is no hope of escape. The final shot of the movie will haunt you long after the credits finish, especially if you’re the kind of person who has been running from the past all your life, but you feel that the life you once lived is in your DNA, your soul, and the only thing you can hope to do is delay the inevitable.

* Embarrassingly, during the post-movie Q&A I asked Durkin whether he had used different cameras for different scenes, as some shots looked like photographs from the 70s, but he said no, and seemed a bit perplexed at my boring technical question. Ah well, John Hawkes was a gent about it. I love him.

BFI LFF 2011: Take Shelter / The Artist

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Times are tough. The economy looks like a dessicated version of its former self, waiting for rehydration that won’t ever come if our right-wing overlords have anything to do with it. The planet’s surface is hayzum-jayzum; all the water seems to be going to the wrong places. We’re just waiting on collapse. The experience of modern life often seems to be nothing more than bracing for impact, futilely attempting to protect ourselves from oblivion by padding ourselves with information about how bad it’s going to get, how secretly everything is going to be okay; info, misinfo, disinfo, facts that don’t do what you want them to. It’s all fuel for fear, and it’s exhausting.

It’s tempting to think that the pressure of modernity is affecting just you alone, that the constant stressful suppression of the fight-or-flight instinct is something you’re going through on your own, but a shift in the cultural landscape can prove this isn’t a pit of despair for one. Horrible though it might be to think that the collective unconscious is broadcasting waves of doubt and fear, there’s also a kind of solace to be taken from it. You’re not alone in being scared all the time, of dreading the future instead of running toward it with open arms. We’re all in this together, after all.

Dear reader, I ask that you bear with me as I discuss Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, because any objective appraisal is impossible. The 2011 London Film Festival featured a number of movies that featured scenes of poverty (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai), hopelessness (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Dendera), and existence-shattering threats from within (Shame) and without (The Monk, We Need To Talk About Kevin), while existential threats from the environment loomed large in other movies seen recently (Melancholia, Contagion), but nothing in recent times has shaken me as much as Take Shelter. I’m not using that phrase lightly; as the credits rolled I found myself having the equivalent of a subdued but nonetheless terrifying panic attack. Nichols reached into my brain and squeezed until I broke.

Take Shelter depicts the gradual meltdown of Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), who begins to experience vivid nightmares hinting at a forthcoming ecological disaster. Visions of terrifying cloud formations and a thick, oily rain that transforms people into something akin to rage zombies haunt him, lingering so long that the sense of foreboding he experiences begins to affect his ability to function. As friends and family begin to appear in his visions as menacing versions of their true selves, Curtis becomes isolated from others, and embarks on a mission to build a storm shelter in his backyard with which he will protect his wife (Jessica Chastain) and daughter. It is this mission that begins to jeopardise his job and social standing, bringing about a disaster in his life less dramatic than the end of the world, but one just as dangerous.

Shannon does blistering, career-best work as a man struggling to cope with the horror of impending doom brought on by circumstances he cannot control. Nichols wisely makes Curtis an active participant, giving him an antagonist to rail against in the form of his genetic family’s history of mental illness. His mother has spent much of her life in sanitariums, and as soon as he begins experiencing the visions he tries to come to terms with them as manifestations of some internal breakdown. He seeks help, reads up on the subject, and refuses to think of his visions as anything other than evidence that the thing he has most feared has finally arrived.

Curtis’ situation gradually worsens as the movie progresses, and Nichols has paced this descent into mania and terror perfectly. There’s nothing flashy about Take Shelter; even the subtle effects work by Hydraulx is cleverly inserted into the movie in an unassuming way. Curtis’ visions are filmed with restraint, but they’re no less efficient for all that. By framing both reality and vision identically, the viewer is wrongfooted constantly. Are the visions bleeding into his reality? Are they coming true? The tension this decision generates is considerable, aided by the slow disintegration of Curtis’ relationships, and the increasingly dire effect it has on his body; one scene involving a seizure is particularly disquieting.

This movie is soaked in dread. As the controversial final scenes come around, the film’s grip on my psyche became oppressive and terrifying. Curtis’ breakdown, and his tragic awareness of the hopelessness of his situation, is so brilliantly realised by Shannon that the movie becomes hard to watch, made even more painful by the stunning empathic work by Jessica Chastain, here required to be more than the saintlike mother of Malick’s Tree of Life or the cliched, almost omnipresent shrewish obstacle-wives of so many lesser movies. The pain that this family suffers — emotionally, physically and psychically — is rendered with a careful eye by Nichols, though never dispassionately.

This is a powerful movie, an emotionally devastating experience given greater significance by its perceptive channeling of wider societal concerns. As the credits rolled I realised I was breathing way too hard, shaking and even crying. As I say, this is a purely subjective reaction and I don’t expect anyone else to react in the same way, but Nichols’ superb control over the unravelling narrative, and his subtle but disturbing use of nightmare imagery reminded me of the most upsetting works of David Lynch. That’s not to say he does anything to ape or even reference the great surrealist’s art, but he has an affinity for disturbing atmospherics, depicted here with clinical rigour, that brought about the same existential terror I felt during Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or Mulholland Drive.

Spoilers between these bold sentences: read at your peril! I also reacted strongly to Curtis’ desire to take responsibility for his problems. He’s not content to let this terror just sweep him away; he rails against it as hard as he can, seeking out help and questioning the nature of his affliction for as long as he can, but it’s not enough. He succumbs when confronted by his former friend Dewart (Shea Whigham, giving one of his customary brilliant performances), loudly proclaiming that a storm is coming. It’s an electrifying moment; the careful build-up of tension is suddenly gone and Curtis gives in with something that looks almost like relief, taking on the role of apocalyptic preacher with gusto. It only lasts a moment, though, and he then realises how much he has lost by revealing his madness/clairvoyance, and how far he has strayed into the landscape of the insane.

But has he? The final scene of the movie seems ambiguous, though Nichols has said in an interview that it isn’t meant to be. Nevertheless, his intention with the final moment matched up to my interpretation, which is that Shannon’s fight to fix his own problem is lost, but he gains something more profound. His visions have led him to reject the love and support of his wife, but at the end, no matter whether the finale is a dream or reality, his wife is still there for him, and he accepts her completely. He’s no longer alone, and in that there is hope. That’s all that matters.

This is the inspirational message I’ve taken from it. Curtis can do nothing to deflect what’s coming, be it madness or apocalypse. He tries and fails, because there are always outside threats we can do nothing about. Agonising over the economy or the environment or the imminent destruction of compassionate policy thanks to the demented obstructionism and selfishness of the right-wing forces that seek to punish the unfortunate; none of this accomplishes anything. Curtis is fighting a losing battle, and for those of us who feel similarly terrified of what’s on the horizon, it’s hard to watch someone go through the same thing.

And yet we’re not alone. Take Shelter spoke to me more than almost any other film released in the past few years, because it presented me with the nightmare I’ve been having for a long time, and just as Curtis has Samantha by his side, I have my wife, and my friends, and Jeff Nichols and everyone who sees and responds to this magnificent movie. It’s small consolation, but it’s enough. Spoilers end!

Take Shelter might be the best movie I saw at the festival; it’s certainly the one that elicited the strongest negative reaction from me (not necessarily a bad thing). However, my lack of objectivity makes me wonder if this is the right choice. It felt as if it had been made for me (please forgive my arrogance), and I can’t predict what others think. The Artist, on the other hand, is easy. This is a movie that can make a sourpuss fall in love. It’s impossible to convey, with words, the power of Michel Hazanivicius’ delightful love letter to the silent era, because he has managed to capture sheer happiness with his camera, and the experience of seeing it in a roomful of people is one of the purest joys a filmgoer can experience.

The gala presentation of The Artist was attended by stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, producer Thomas Langmann, and Mr. Harvey Weinstein himself. He, of course, did most of the talking, giving a long speech that seemed to consist of an epic anecdote about how brave he is for deciding to distribute the movie. I’m not sure this qualifies as brave; yes it’s a silent black and white movie set in the Twenties and Thirties, but choosing to pick this film up is an absolute no-brainer. I’m sure there were many UK distributors in the audience that night, and by the time the final credits rolled, they would all have been clamouring to pick it up.

Hazanavicius’ homage to the silent movie era pays tribute to the format, but also to the aesthetic of the time, mixing broad humour and melodramatics in perfect harmony. The plot, drawn from A Star Is Born and Singin’ In The Rain, involves preening superstar George Valentin (the delightful Dujardin, channeling Gene Kelly) at the moment that silent movies become a thing of the past. We see him just as his star is about to wane, though he remains as oblivious to the imminent success of the talkies as he does to the disintegration of his marriage to Doris (Penelope Ann Miller).

It’s at this moment that he meets Peppy Miller (Bejo, also a delight), who luckily capitalises on their chance encounter to become a star in her own right. She is young and eager enough to embrace the new filmmaking technology, and her star ascends as George’s fades, but her love for him remains a constant. Only his bitterness and stubbornness keeps them apart, just as it isolates him from others and brings about a dark period of self-pity. The parallels with Take Shelter, and Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai — which also features a lengthy melodramatic sequence in which poverty threatens to destroy our protagonist — are notable. There have been complaints that the section of The Artist showing George’s fall is too long; they obviously haven’t seen the seemingly endless misery-porn segment of Hara-Kiri, which destroys any audience sympathy and patience.

But whereas those two movies depict a grim vision of a fate that is impossible to escape, The Artist is uplifting, showing how a stubborn, proud man can be transformed by love, and how there is always something hopeful just around the corner. I won’t give away too much about the glorious finale, other than to say it lifted my spirits and made me want to dance out of the cinema. I know I wasn’t alone in this; the audience applauded throughout. It’s the ultimate crowdpleaser, a true celebration of the magic of the communal experience of cinema.

More than that, it reaffirms a belief I hold, but often forget thanks to my naturally pessimistic nature. George sows the seeds of his resurrection by being open to new experiences, even though that openness is a consequence of his flirtiness and not anything more noble. He helps Peppy, giving her the beauty spot that makes her famous (in her first starring role in Beauty Spot, which was the working title of this movie). George might not learn to be open to new experiences early on, but it is this behaviour, initially displayed accidentally and eventually intentionally, that saves him. It matches up with this recent, brilliant Derren Brown experiment which shows that we make our own “luck” just by altering our mental state. It’s a kind of low-level magical thinking, to embrace the world and its opportunities; truly preferable to my default negativity.

It also shows how an idea can flourish over time, how artists influence other artists and create a self-generating flow of culture that they can dip back into whenever necessary. It’s George’s idea for the beauty spot that pushes Peppy into the limelight; he selflessly donates something to her, and eventually reaps the rewards for his generosity. Art begets art; culture grows from what came before, and if you’re smart enough to adapt to it, then you can keep contributing. George’s only failing is short-sightedness. Once he opens his eyes, and accesses another part of his personality, he comes back stronger than ever. The greatest artists of our time have benefited from this flexibility; The Artist is a beautiful depiction of this truth.

I cannot recommend The Artist highly enough. It’s possible to dismiss it as fluff, as some already have, or to say that there’s very little to it that hasn’t been done before, but it’s commendable even if only for Hazanavicius’ clever use of the format; one title card toward the end of the film is one of the best jokes of recent times, and brought the house down. And please, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t respond to pretty much the greatest performance by a dog in years — God bless Uggie, who plays George’s onscreen partner The Dog — then you’re taking things way too seriously.

More importantly, it’s worth noting that sometimes a homage is more than just empty posturing; it can also be a statement of intent. The Artist might be a beautiful, pitch-perfect homage, but Hazanavicius is obviously aware that cinema is in the throes of a similar transformation to that which occurred in the 30s, and has made a timely movie that wears its period clothing lightly. As Anne Billson said to me this morning, “It’s pastiche, but transformed by a modern sensibility.” We see an industry in tumult, and know that the same thing is happening now. The Artist celebrates cinema of both eras, and acts as a connective tissue between both timeframes.

As talkies changed cinema then, 3D and IMAX and digital projection is changing cinema now. A cynic might say that The Artist is just cinema looking at itself in the mirror, but it’s not gazing with narcissistic and empty adoration. It’s chanting an affirmation, sending out a rallying cry to filmmakers and audiences to prepare for a new era. Embrace the new technology, re-engage with the idea of a collective audience, use the new tools to tell new stories, or tell the old ones better. The best is yet to come.

BFI LFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

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Objective assessment of A Dangerous Method — the first movie by David Cronenberg since Eastern Promises — was rendered impossible in the minutes before it started. Regular readers will recall that I am notoriously bad at dealing with these brushes with the great and the good. For all the complaints I make about the anti-glamour of the London Film Festival — held as it is in the most crowded and commercial part of London — as soon as a famous or semi-famous creator appears prior to a screening, I’m usually rendered insensible with joy.

Now take that absurd emotional response and multiply it by a billion, because David Cronenberg is, in my humble opinion, the most important, consistent, and intellectually ambitious director working in the world today. Perhaps of all time. His self-deprecating and funny speech before the second LFF screening almost completely passed me by as my brain fizzed and my eyes misted up. There are just no words to describe how important the man’s work has been to me since my formative years, how much his ideas and his intellectual curiosity have shaped my worldview. To be in his presence was overwhelming (fuzzy photographic proof can be found here; he is with LFF head Sandra Hebron).

The news from previous festival screenings was that Cronenberg had frozen a potentially interesting subject in amber. The dread word “tasteful” appeared more than once. Surely it had to be false. This most transgressive of filmmakers wasn’t making Oscar bait; it just couldn’t be possible. Nevertheless, the disappointed reviews rolled in, talking about the man’s glory days as if they were long past. For those of us who love his work, this was a dark time. And yet, contrary to those reports, Cronenberg throws caution to the wind with one of his boldest openings ever, and to do that he had to reinvent Keira Knightley.

Cronenberg’s facility with actors is nothing short of miraculous. Though he tends to work with already brilliant performers, the work he draws from them is often the best of their career. James Woods, Jeff Goldblum, Viggo Mortensen, Ralph Fiennes, and Christopher Walken have all shone for his camera, with special praise due to Jeremy Irons, whose dual role in the masterpiece Dead Ringers might be the finest performance(s) of the last 30 years. Here he is reunited with Viggo following the departure of Christoph Waltz, and gets to work with the imminently famous / notorious Michael Fassbender. How many actors have had a year as packed with diverse and brilliant performances as Fassbender has over the past 12 months?

Knightley was the wild card. Often derided by critics and cinemagoers, she has yet to make an impression as an actress rather than as a film star, though her work in Joe Wright’s Atonement was solid, and she held her own with a mostly underwritten role in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (with an uptick of responsibility in the third installment). Cronenberg places her front and centre in the very first scene of the movie, and she does not hold back. Gurning, growling, rocking back and forth, barely able to communicate due to the extreme nature of her tics, Knightley’s startling introduction is a gauntlet thrown in our face. Just as Cronenberg once challenged the commitment of his audience with exploding heads or compound fractures, now he’s affronting our sense of reserve by presenting a fearless, unrestrained demonstration of acting pyrotechnics.

This explosion of acting tics has proven to be the most divisive element in the critical response to A Dangerous Method. Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein — patient, collaborator and lover of Carl Jung — as a broken woman partially healed by the pioneering technique known as The Talking Cure. This first appearance depicts her as barely functional, and it’s from here that we gauge the success of Jung’s treatment as he nurses her towards something akin to “normality”. Anything less from Knightley would make the early achievements of psychoanalysis seem less impressive; as Cronenberg says here, the birth of psychoanalysis transformed the human condition completely, and Knightley’s depiction of Spielrein as an almost alien being is intentional and wholly correct.

Her performance calms down soon after this startling opening as she is slowly healed by Jung, but the eye is drawn to Knightley in every scene as she fights against this unpredictable force within. It’s a perfect visual metaphor for the tumult in all of us, hidden behind our civil face, here brilliantly personified by Fassbender and Mortensen as buttoned-down, constrained Jung and Freud. Cronenberg’s masterful decision to restrict his camera and his actors is perfectly judged. The movie is bound so tightly that it almost squeaks as it tries to move; vertical lines dominate almost every scene, faces appear in the middle of the frame, dialogue is delivered in clipped, almost emotionless tones.

Into this precise world comes Knightley, barging in over and over again to unsettle the delicate world. Those vertical lines tip over onto the diagonal, Fassbender’s eyes begin to flicker with doubt and fear, and with that comes a sexual impulse that he finds impossible to resist. It isn’t long before Jung falls under her spell, taking on the role of dominant in a D/s relationship inspired by her admission that abuse by her father excited her sexually. Cronenberg’s camera finds them in flagrante delicto as if coming across them in secret, our POV catching furtive glimpses of them from around corners and through doorways as they hide from public view. In these moments Spielrein seems utterly transported, while Jung’s involvement seems more hesitant.

Some bright spark on Twitter noted that Spielrein serves the same purpose here as Marilyn Chambers did in Rabid, infecting two men with the unpredictable virus of doubt. She also resembles Genevieve Bujold’s Claire Niveau in Dead Ringers, unsettling the equilibrium of the Mantles’ filial framework, or even the Videodrome signal that rewrites Max Renn into an amalgam of man, woman and machine. Spielrein’s intrusion into Jung’s mental space transforms him too. She contributes to the idea of the Anima and Animus within us all, and to the concept of the Death Drive postulated by Freud, who becomes aware of her theories later in the movie. They are men of the mind, and their minds are mutated by this invading agent, for better or worse.

The conflict between the public and the private, most dramatically shown through Jung’s secret unethical behaviour, is amusingly drawn. With the exception of forthright Knightley, the cast play guarded roles that obscure their baser impulses, all of which subtly leak out for the benefit of Cronenberg’s camera. He brilliantly dramatises the competitiveness between the ambitious Jung and the defensive Freud; the deterioration of their father-son/mentor-pupil relationship, triggered by generational envy and ethnic frisson, is funny and painful. By the end of their friendship, Freud pointedly draws more and more attention to Jung’s Aryan heritage and the way this taints his relationship with both himself and Spielrein, who are both Jewish (see this brilliant, perceptive review by Amy Taubin for more on ethnic identity, Cronenberg’s mastery of composition, and Knightley’s bold performance; many thanks to @DarkEyeSocket for introducing me to that wonderful critique).

My understanding of Freudian and Jungian theory is negligible, I must admit. Most of what I know about Jung’s work concerns his interest in parapsychology. Cronenberg and Christopher Hampton (the screenwriter, adapting his own play The Talking Cure) have dramatised the infamous moment when Jung gleefully reveals his theory of Synchronicity to Freud. The elder scientist’s cynicism is unchanged by the peculiar instance of Jung correctly predicting that a loud cracking sound will be heard in the room during their conversation. It’s a funny scene in a surprisingly amusing movie, though within this moment is the sad realisation that Jung, suddenly made confident by Freud’s companionship and his burgeoning adulterous relationship with Spielrein, has just experienced the rejection of a father figure.

Cronenberg knows more about these scientists than I ever will. Unpicking his coded references to their work is beyond me, but fortunately post-movie discussions with psychology expert Daisyhellcakes have illuminated some of the clever subtextual details littering A Dangerous Method. For instance,Vincent Cassel races into the movie at the halfway mark as Otto Gross, a libidinous, uncontrollable psychologist who helps to disrupt Jung’s psyche. He also creates a dynamic between the three male protagonists that reflects the Ego (Jung), the Superego (Freud) and the Id (Gross), a dynamic that soon dissolves, symbolically echoing the way Jung and Freud’s theories moved in different directions from the same starting point.

It could also be argued that Sabina’s development throughout the movie follows the four levels of Anima development, that we see her through Jung’s eyes, flowering as a person just as the Anima progresses from “base” desire to a position of wisdom and strength. Perhaps the version of Spielrein shown here is an ironic externalisation of Jung’s anima, just as Freud and Gross can be seen as aspects of Jung’s psyche (this also echoes Cronenberg’s earlier work, as The Brood represent an externalisation of Nola Carveth’s rage). The Anima that is Spielrein flourishes while Jung, trapped in the four stages of Animus development, is left broken and depressed, tragically incapable of benefiting from her development due to the bonds of societal expectation and duty. In this way the movie is, on a macro level, a tragic joke about a physician unable to heal himself.

Those who love Cronenberg have always expected this level of symbolic trickery. He’s unafraid to treat serious subjects with playfulness, and A Dangerous Method can be seen as either a straight biopic or a puzzle to be tinkered with. To paraphrase Bob Dylan upon meeting Alicia Keys, there’s nothing about this movie that I don’t like. Cronenberg’s mastery of the material is total. In a way he has been making this movie his whole life, and this might come to be seen as a Rosetta Stone to interpret his other works. Immaculately performed, beautifully shot and sensitively scored by his longtime collaborators Peter Suschitzky and Howard Shore respectively, it’s a funny, sad, sexually frank love story, a film with many levels of interpretation, and an important work of intellectual ambition. If you’re interested in cinema, in human nature, in the history of the modern age, this is essential viewing.

BFI LFF 2011: Two Weeks Enduring Central London’s Many Charms

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It says something about a man’s life that attending a film festival just a few dozen miles from his front door is so far and away the highlight of the year that once one has finished, he starts looking forward to the next one. Just like the miserable dads you see in bad comedies who make their loved ones’ lives hell prior to the big family holiday in the middle of the year, I spent the time between the 2010 London Film Festival and the 2011 London Film Festival talking about how much I was looking forward to the London Film Festival, or talking about the previous London Film Festival.

Colleagues at work began taking sick leave just to avoid me talking about shaking John Sayles’ hand last year. My cats have heard me complaining about the BFI’s website so often that they now understand about 50 words of human English. The tattoo I got of departing festival director Sandra Hebron might have been a step too far, but what else was I going to do with the large amount of unoccupied real estate on the top of my head? It was getting out of hand, so much so that on the day that tickets went on sale and the BFI servers promptly crashed yet again, I melodramatically declared that my year was definitively ruined. I’m fortunate that Daisyhellcakes is a strong and generous enough person that she didn’t divorce me on the spot.

But it all turned out reasonably okay. We got a shitload of tickets; so many that we ended up with too many, which is a bit of a problem as there is a no refund policy on LFF tickets. Apologies to anyone who queued outside the West End Vue one afternoon in a futile effort to get tickets for Roman Polanski’s Carnage; there were two tickets you could have had but sadly the baffling no refund rule meant you missed out. Word of warning to anyone who goes to the festival next year and buys too many tickets, which is all too likely considering how badly the website crashed this year; if you get too many tickets, start hawking them on Twitter well ahead of the screening. No one else will help you.

I can imagine queuing outside the West End Vue was a particularly miserable experience. Last year I whined about the renovation work being done on the building next to that cinema, which made exiting the building doubly difficult and miserable, but that was nothing compared to this year. Thanks to the forthcoming Olympics, London is pouring literally quadzillions of pounds into sprucing itself up for all of the guests we’ll get next year, which is tough shit for anyone trying to visit this year. Leicester Square is currently being torn apart by machines to such a drastic extent that post-Decepticon-invasion Chicago in Transformers: Dark of the Moon looks easier to navigate.

It’s not just the embarrassment one feels when thinking of great filmmakers and artists (and Jude Law with his excellent hat) coming to London to help celebrate the completion of their work and being presented with a plaza that’s almost entirely filled with mesh fences and corrugated iron, though that does make a lover of London wince; it’s as if the city turned up to a premiere dressed in sweatpants and a faded Scooby-Doo t-shirt. It’s mostly because getting around the area was nigh-impossible for two weeks. Just moving from the West End Vue to the West End Odeon, or Piccadilly Circus, was pretty much like this (actual iPhone footage that I took).

So that was a bit crap (the experience, not Jude Law’s beard). The festival, on the other hand, was terrific; we both saw a number of superb movies, some not-so-great ones, and an outright bad movie classic that will end up being embraced by anyone who has ever watched Showgirls or Dreamcatcher or Glitter and screeched with astonished laughter. Over the next week or so I’ll do my usual LFF thing, comparing some of the movies in order to figure out why some worked and others didn’t, most obviously with the rather similar Shame and Rampart, though I’ll also be tackling some of the more significant movies on their own. I’ll also make a shameful admission about the realisation that I am a know-nothing when it comes to Eastern culture, try to come to terms with the terrible child of the austerity era (the new Cinema of Misery), and reveal my ignorance of psychoanalysis when I discuss David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which will happen tomorrow.