I have seen some interesting films in the last week or two
that have been rather dissimilar from each other in form and style.
I will take them one by one:
Aimer, Boire et
Chanter (/the Life Of Riley): This was the last film made by the late
Alain Resnais, who made his name with such classics as Last Year In Marienbad, and Hiroshima,
Mon Amour. This one could hardly have been further from the style of those
great films (only half of which I understood at the time). This was based on a
play by Alan Ayckbourne, the playful British playwright, who came to prominence
in the 1970s after I had moved back from Britain to Canada, and whose works I
have never before seen. Resnais, using a cast of expert French actors, found a
remarkable way of filming a stage play: since the play is set in Yorkshire, he
filmed many shots of the Yorkshire countryside, which metamorphosed into large
drawings of the cityscapes in which the play took place, eventually
metamorphosing again into a setting for whatever the next scene might be,
always with a backdrop of long canvas-like drapes. So there is a slight air of unreality about
the action taking place, which, to be quite honest, was unreal enough to
warrant such a setting. It is all about
a character called George, who is falsely rumoured to have been diagnosed with
cancer, setting off his four or five mates into paroxysms of grief (and some
gallic shrugs of indifference). They discuss George’s characteristics, among
which is his fondness for women, and what emerges as the play goes on is that
George has threatened to take a holiday in Tenerife, and appears to have
promised each of the wives of his four friends that he will take her with him.
His wife, who is present from time to time, protests that he is taking her, and
eventually, faced with the dilemma that each of them has been promised the
trip, the wives reconcile with their husbands, and George goes off with the
young daughter of one of them. George,
who has been living the life of Riley, as the English expression (and title of
the play) has it, finally expires, and all we ever see of him is his coffin.
Tellement drole, as the French might say.
Boyhood:
This film, hailed as a masterpiece, was made over more than two decades by the
American director Richard Linklater. It
runs for 166 minutes, rather too long, even for a supposed masterpiece, I would
say. But it is a remarkable affair. Linklater began to shoot around a
six-year-old child Ellar Coltrane, and returned to film aspects of his life
every year until he was 21. When I went to the film I thought it was a
documentary, and I wondered how he managed to film scenes of family life which, frankly, did not bring much credit to
the characters at its centre. For example, the boy’s mother had three husbands,
at least one of whom developed into a domestic tyrant, who didn’t seem to mind
his tyrannical ways being filmed, which seemed most unlikely. Not only did it
seem unlikely, but it was unlikely,
and, in fact, never happened, because all the characters surrounding the boy
were played by actors. The film, thus, was a documentary only in its portrayal
of the boy, but was otherwise a feature. As such, it did present what seemed a
rivetingly authentic view of middle class (or perhaps just a touch below middle-class)
American life. The father of the boy, who was estranged from his wife from an
early stage in Ellar’s life, was expertly played by Ethan Hawke: he portrayed a
man who was raffish, verging on ne’er-do-well, in the early stages, but who
somehow, through various shifting relationships, managed to emerge at the end
as a more solid and dependable character who was at least capable of talking
and mingling with his ex-wife from so long before. I kept thinking of Barack
Obama’s statement that he believes in American exceptionalism with all his
heart, and what I was thinking was that this film might serve as a corrective
to that absurd and Amero-centred view of life. The people in his film seemed
more representative of that class of Americans we read about from time to time,
people who are hanging on by their fingernails, mired in debts that they
believe are unpayable, and whose passage through life is more truncated and
confused than a normal middle-class family might expect.
Zulu: I
have not heard much of South African film in recent years, although their plays
have reached a world-wide audience, and their novelists are among the best
writing in English. Zulu
is a gritty, realistic film made by Jerome Salle last
year, and starring two excellent American actors, Forest Whitaker, as the
embodiment of a politically-conscious black policeman, who, along with his
scruffy, disrespectful sidekick, played by Orlando Bloom, is trying to uncover
the murder of a mutilated corpse that has been discovered in Capetown’s botanical
gardens. She turns out to be the daughter of a formerly well-known Rugby
player, and what occurs and is shown in excruciating detail in this movie is
the almost insensate violence that hangs over South Africa these days as a
cloud. The movie is good in that it
portrays a South Africa struggling to emerge from its former insane policies of
apartheid, showing black-white acceptance (up to a certain level) that seem
realistic. But the level of violence shown, of casual violence, is exceptional,
even for an action movie. For example, when the policemen go to the beach to
talk to people who might know something, they are suddenly put upon by a
gun-wielding gang of thugs, who, having discovered in one of the policemen a
certain fear, zeroes in on him, and almost casually hacks off his hands with
their machete. The fact that this violence affects everyone is emphasized when
the lead policemen discovers that his mother is threatened in a effort to get
at him, and that she has, in fact, been
killed in one of those inconsequential episodes of violence. He is so enraged
by the death of his innocent mother that, knowing who to blame, he stalks the
gang, and as soon as he comes upon them, brutally shoots them down, one by one.
When his sidekick, in search of him, finds him in the desert, he is lying
propped, dead, against a tree, the life apparently having out of him in the course of his path of
destruction. This is a scary movie, and it reminds me of a statement made in
the 1960s by the brilliant correspondent Stanley Uys, who reported on his
country for The Observer newspaper in
England for many years. He wrote that apartheid was having such a deforming
effect on South African life that if it went on much longer any government that
followed it would probably find the country ungovernable. In certain aspects,
this seems to be true.
Babel: I
came upon this movie, made to great acclaim in 2006 by the Mexican director,
Alejandro Gonzalaz Inarritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, on Netflix. I had
seen it before, but at that time did not appreciate fully how remarkable it is.
Using a gun as a connecting point the movie follows the stories of three groups
of people in Japan, Morocco, Mexico and the United States. The gun was owned by
a wealthy Mexican who, during a hunt in
Africa, gave it to a Moroccan guide, who sold it to a man, who handed it over
to his two pre-teenaged sons, who, testing the boast that it could shoot three
kilometres, fired form the hills at a passing tourist bus, and happened to hit
an American woman, played by Cate Blanchett, with one of the bullets, putting
her life in danger. Her husband played by Brad Pitt, was a peremptory rich
American who had left his two small children in the care of their Mexican maid,
Maria. When Maria had reported to him that she had to attend her son’s wedding,
Pitt had peremptorily told her to cancel the wedding, she had to stay, especially
if she could not get anyone else to look after the children. Perhaps unwisely,
she decided to take the children with her into Mexico, rather than cancel the
wedding (which was, in any way, impossible). And when, the wedding over, she travelled
back into the United .states with her drunken nephew, they got involved in
border problems that ended with her being set adrift in the desert with the
children, who were saved just in the ick of time, but which incident led to her
being deported, because she had been living illegally in the United states for
sixteen years. Meantime, in the home of the rich Japanese, his deaf-mute
teenage daughter, contemptuous of her father, goes out into the city with her
deaf-mute friends, and flaunts her youthful sexuality to bad effect, while,
back in Morocco, a hunt is on for the killers, thought by the American ambassador,
to be terrorists who had carried out the shooting on the Ameircan tourist
bus. It all has been shot with such
verisimilitude, the sequences all being shot with an impressive attention to
local colour and custom and possibilities, and impossibilities, come to that,
that I found it, overall, a most impressive movie, and one whose characters,
rooted in life as they were, it was impossible to lose interest in. Try to pick
this one up, if you can.
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