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The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Shallow Blue Sea
I don't doubt that Terence Davis is a brilliant writer and director and of all people has a real feel for the era of the Deep Blue Sea - post war austerity, two shilling gas meters, bedsits and so on (see in particular the wonderful "The Long Day Closes", or "Distant Voices, Still Lives".) But this film is a shocker. This is a play adaptation, an intense tragedy about the need for physical love and the awfulness when it is virtually the only thing lovers have. Davis has pointlessly introduced pub sing-songs, big budget recreations of post-blitz London, and worse, strange new scenes and stilted, pointless dialogue, for no reason that I can possibly see, because the play is a masterpiece and needs no extra scenes or dialogue. It is a different kind of tragedy to see a talented writer/director acting as wrecking ball. Don't let this film put you off this amazing play. If you want to see a good adaptation, the BBC one of the 90s with Penelope Wilton, Colin Firth and Ian Holm is quite wonderful and is on YouTube.
Toast (2010)
Dull characters: the 1960s are the real star
If you like Dusty Springfield or would simply like to be transported perfectly, exquisitely back to the mid 60s and early 70s, you will enjoy "Toast", a cinema adaption of food writer Nigel Slater's autobiographical memoir of his 1960s and 70s Wolverhampton childhood. The clothes, houses, cars, even sweets of the mid 1960s and early 1970s are beautifully reproduced. The Art Director must have haunted auction houses, had 1960s "Simplicity" patterns made up again, found the perfect beige Rover saloon, and the joiners built a perfect 1960s kitchen. Dusty Springfield sings at key points and of course we also see her album "Where am I going" and its turn on a Dansette. Part of your ticket price is in effect a Museum admission, so perfect is your experience.
So skillful is the recreation of the 60s that even the opening credits are by means of long forgotten 60s products on the corner shop shelves with the names of the cast, Writer and Director cleverly stencilled onto them. However if you wish to see characters that skillfully made in Slater, his parents or his stepmother, you might not be so happy. Where, as you look round the 60s kitchen and dining room everything is interesting, unusual, redolent, if you try to understand much about the characters beyond the dislike between son and father or stepmother, you'll find almost nothing.
The characters are not completely free of depth, even if their attempts to communicate always fade. The gorgeous, raucous stepmother the cleaner, Mrs Potter, played superbly by Helena Bonham-Carter tries briefly to find common ground with the child Slater, before reverting to threats. Her character might be some sort of cook-up itself, chain-smoking expressively, always in a 60s curtains one-piece, communicating with her new husband by cooking alone. I wonder if there's some gay dislike of women in this character. More likely it is simply the determined method of the film to have a 3D 1960s, some slapstick, and 2D characters for us to do the best we can with.
Curiously a single character does talk articulately and explain the world around him: Slater's pal at school, who spews out the kind of adult wit and knowledge that American screenwriters like for their grotesque child stars: is the writer simply showing that they really can do dialogue, though they've been forced otherwise to write silent simpletons?
Perhaps many father/son relationships of that era were that distant and silent, mine pretty much was. There was less feeling that fathers need find time or try to talk much to their children if they didn't want to - they were bringing home the bacon and that was enough: we're a million miles from that world now. I wonder if Slater's autobiography would fill us in a lot on this relationship; it's hard for cinema to portray a silent, stuttering relationship like this, and a lot is required of the viewer in experience and imagination. Even I, a contemporary with I think a similarly distant father, felt dumbfounded. Maybe I miss the point; the film avoids the human profundities in order to take us on a delightful ride through the 1960s and early 70s, as light and simple as a Slater soufflé, with some slapstick to keep us amused.
Diva (1981)
Le Look!
Remember when thrillers involved the search for some incriminating tape? This 1980s French cop film has not one but two tapes, some good gangster cars, mopeds (because this is 1980s France,) but above all, style. In fact, mainly style, and where it doesn't get in the way of style, a cracking "tapes" thriller.
A nerdy postman on a moped makes a bootleg recording of an opera star. For some reason (to be stylish I'd think) he lives in some sort of combination of a warehouse and breakers yard, all slow goods lifts, car wrecks, and of course a 1980s nerd's full suite of hi-fi and recording equipment. The postman follows a beautiful and captivating shoplifter, a childish Asian girl with a line in art student baby doll wear and talking in captivating (to nerds) haiku, riddles and arty commentaries on life. The dialogue is a delightful, preposterous studenty game, a childish Farewell My Lovely. The girl is the muse, the moll or just the adornment of Richard Bohringer's wealthy, Delphic artist, most of whose art is his own posture, such as wearing a mask and snorkel to make the tea.
After TV drove down cinema admissions through the 60s, and all parents and grandparents were watching Morecambe and Wise, apart from an occasional excursion to a James Bond or Mary Poppins, cinema became mainly for the teenager and young adult. After 30 minutes of jeans, hair gel and booze ads, there were various kooky and attractive but rather adolescent films to watch, flattering the moderately bright youth that they saw right through the adult world, understood it better, or at any rate its music and style. Repo Man, Videodrome and so on. The French, always loving style and specialising already in artiness, briefly produced this new cool for self-focussed youth in films known as "Le Look". Beineix formed his own production company so that, kookiness aside, he could make films as carefully and beautifully photographed as Diva. Between entertaining murders and arty, soliloquies, Diva has an exquisite sequence with a Citroen, the famous one, resprayed white, approaching a perfectly symmetrical lighthouse and outbuildings. Who knows how Richard Bohringer's inscrutable (and very cool) artist also rents or owns this place, but he does. The clouds are like castles, the sun enormous, the Citroen matches the sky and the lighthouse. The journey thither is a symphony of perfect film school angles, much of it seen only in the wing mirror case's reflection. All the while the girl talks in her haikus and riddles. Some cool and stylish developments ensue to keep the tapes from the crooks that covet them, and our confused, pigeon-chested nerd survives still. The Citroen then leaves, but at a perpendicular, and at distance, just like in the Conformist. Quelle style! Quelle "Look"! Beineix had one other such stylish hit in the 80s, Betty Blue, and a couple of odd misses around then, but subsequently a very patchy career. Perhaps such adolescent kookiness, however brilliant, has to grow up, and if not disappear.
The killers are a superb duo, as good as any Bond baddies, one of whom, an ugly little suede-head in dark glasses, permanently connected to a Walkman (this is the 80s,) who never says anything except "I don't like this", "I don't like that", generally something connected with the latest hit they're carrying out - what part of compelling stories is either accidentally or deliberately preposterous behaviour of an individual, particularly at this studenty extreme? For example, the distraught postman, sleeping in his motorcycle helmet at his friends' (safe) house: why? The artist with his mask and snorkel for the kitchen: why?
The moped (this is the film with the iconic image of a full face motorcycle helmet on a torso of a mannequin) nerd seems to have followed the girl only for a frisson. He's really smitten with the American singer. There is an absurd but delightful encounter with her brought about by his theft of her dress from her dressing room. This could really only be the 1980s. Stalking women and stealing their dresses isn't clever, fashionable, funny or kooky now. In any case the beautiful opera singer couldn't have been interested in a nerd. Nowadays too that might be thought creepy, however in that stylish run-off from the unhinged '70s, it was very cool, although really only for youth. In that way, much of the film is more like a very good pop video or even perfume ad. Incomprehensible, but beautiful, the absurd couple in album cover poses, lovely music accompanies their unlikely intimacy (the main piece, which the boy recorded, being La Wallie, sung by the actress Wilhelmina Fernandez herself.) The camera zooms and pans, strange bird song interrupts the lovely nocturnes, passing cars silent for no reason: it's an intelligent adolescent's dream of adult life, combined with an art student's film project, mixed into a decent cop flick. The camera is rarely stationary, panning and tracking endlessly, mostly tracking, but staying on its kooky subjects.
Two sets of baddies pursue the nerd for the different tapes. One set coolly nasty, the other coolly arty, in mirror specs, usually motionless. The film is a moving painting, the chase scenes excellent, amongst which a car chases the postman's moped into the Paris metro, until the moped runs out of petrol. The senior cop has the biggest car - probably the biggest American coupé ever to burble out of Detroit (an eight litre Cadillac Fleetwood.) The idea of such a car fitting on anything but Paris' bigger boulevards is hilarious.
I'd forgotten what a stylish, amusing, attractive film this was. Usually nowadays when watching anything more than about fifteen years old, in this Identity Politics and #MeToo era, one finds oneself saying "This could never be made now". That doesn't stop us from putting ourself in the position, allowing for the time when the film was made (or at least, most of us - there is a busy "Outrage Culture" scene that likes to abhor this sort of thing.) Yet, what about this film would really be unacceptable? Amidst all the kookiness and cool, the women are as complex, cool and interesting as the men. The film has prostitutes, ok that's sensitive, but like the rest of the characters they're cool, intelligent and arty. If this film is not a classic it must be because, in spite of its cinematic brilliance and its high-grade hokum plot, it's too adolescent. Perhaps only adult films, in the sense of being grown-up, can become classics?
This film is either going to enrage or entrance you - try to remember if you were seduced by this sort of thing thirty or forty years ago, if you're as old as me, and if so you will be again; in other words: yes it is a classic!
They Were Sisters (1945)
Decent post-war British weepy melodrama.
"They Were Sisters", a lush, Black and White studio film, has the cream of post-war British acting talent (Phyllis Calvert, James Mason, Anne Crawford.) You will need to get over the hurdle of tolerating that late 1940s bright, British way of talking, only nowadays to be heard in reduced form from the Queen. Also, accept and get used to the slightly wooden "Peter and Jane" style child actors - then you'll see a great weepy melodrama.
James Mason is deliciously malevolent and controlling of his drippy, sweet, doormat of a wife, the fragile Dulcie Gray. This sister's marriage troubles are timeless - what we would nowadays see as coercive control, or "gaslighting". Her sister Vera, played by that specialist of a high-maintenance woman, Anne Crawford, has a marriage more particular to the upper middle-class of the middle years of the century: a spoilt trophy wife, like a character from Noel Coward who's strayed into a melodrama, but still highly entertaining for it. The perfect, third sister Lucy has the perfect marriage, except she cannot have children, and so dotes on her sisters' neglected children. We're not great ones for family dramas like this nowadays, being rather individualistic and focussed on our ability to choose whether we marry and whether children quite fit our modern, choice-filled lives, so it is a refreshing pleasure to see this sisters' family drama, let's say from a "family" era.
Interestingly the wicked James Mason character's seventeen year old daughter is well played by Pamela Kellino, his future wife and already thirty in this picture - one of those actresses like Alicia Silverstone who seem able to play teenagers into their thirties. James Mason seems to have shown up as his smooth self in so many anonymous films that I'm inclined to avoid him; that's a bit absurd, because he's in so many good ones, in particular this one: see what he's made of here.
Give this great film a chance: if you can accept the accents and jauntiness and stop noticing them, it's a great melodrama, and the softer amongst you might finish up blubbing - maybe not quite "Wonderful Life" territory, but could be tear jerking.
Frenzy (1972)
Briliant!....Nasty!
Alfred Hitchcock was the son of a London grocer, and returned from Hollywood in 1972 to make "Frenzy", an enjoyable but slightly emetic psycho-thriller set in Covent Garden market.
Many detective stories include loving detail of their location - Agatha Christies and suchlike, or the easy Sunday evening Inspector Montalbano on BBC, which is only partly a detective story but mainly a love letter to old Italy. This film is set in Covent Garden flower, fruit and veg. market a year or two before it closed, and it does feel like a nostalgic love letter to old London, the camera endlessly tracking over Victorian Covent Garden, and into flats, pubs and offices of the neighbourhood. The motion of the film is perfect, feeling like a promenade performance, following the characters around Covent Garden, into and out of those offices, pubs and flats. One tracking shot is particularly famous, from an upstairs bedroom with something dreadful going on behind its closed door, backwards down the stairs and out into the busy Covent Garden street. Unlike Montalbano or those prim whodunnits, this film is a fantastic "wrong man" thriller, like Hitchcock's films of the 30s, 40s and 50s - the Thirty Nine Steps, Saboteur, North by Northwest and so on. Unlike those films, it's post-Psycho, with shocking, queasy violence and, a first for Hitchcock, nudity.
Until Psycho, films were mostly visually euphemistic about violence - stabbings would be slightly off camera, with the stabbed perhaps looking slightly troubled and then quickly expiring, shootings might not seem to cause bullet wounds, fist fights had a kind of choreography. Hitchcock's Psycho, with its terrifying shower stabbing scene, must have been one of or perhaps the main, shattering change to these conventions of propriety. In the years after Psycho, there seemed to be a boom in graphic shootings, stabbings, machine-gunnings and so on - things like Bonnie and Clyde on the slow-motion receiving end of several belts of ammunition. We're used to it now and we seem to have evolved a curious language of violence, where we compare how "dark" we find our latest film or box set, according to whatever lurid ballet of rapid-fire shootings, knife-throwings, skull-crushings and so on that we witness. Still I wonder if Hitchcock got a little carried away with the demons Psycho set free in him in this film. I could hardly believe I'd watched, unable to look away, and I think I "enjoyed", the extraordinary sequence where the frenzied neck-tie murderer strangles his latest victim, the camera close up on her frantic eyes as they leap desperately from side to side, and then slowly become still.
Furthermore, although we continue with our mega-violence and tell ourselves that that's progress, in fact it's mostly as conventional now in it's new, blood-soaked but comic-book, preposterous manner as the euphemistic stuff of the 1950s and before was in its sanitised, un-graphic form. Even though there is all this splatter, we know exactly where we are with it, that it's a horrid dance, but in fact in some ways we are returning to some of the strong moral codes that held until the 1960s, one of which is a horror of rape. In other words, I don't think this film could have been made at any other time than the temporary societal nervous breakdown of the 1970s. This film has rape jokes, a rape, and stranglings within that classic Hitchcock "man wrongly accused" thriller. You will probably be uneasy, and shocked, and yet, given that that is then and not now - it is in fact very entertaining. The pace, the movement, the complexity of the perfect entrapment of the wrong man, the creepiness of Barry Foster's psychopath (apparently Michael Caine refused this role,) the economy of the plot, and the wittiness alongside the gruesome that we see in the best Hitchcocks.