I first saw The Sacrifice when I was at university in York, presumably upon its release in 1986 or 87. I used to go to the film club in the large comfortable auditorium, frequently in N's company. The auditorium was built on what was claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Europe, though that now seems doubtful, and word had it that it was sinking, as the direct result of a Boomtown Rats concert the year before I arrived. I vaguely realised that the film I was watching was supposed to be the work of a seminal director, but my memories of that viewing remain vague, and dominated by the spectacular closing scene.
One's reaction to a work of art is always conditioned by the conditions under which one sees it. These conditions might include one's state of mind, the person in whose company one sees or experiences the work, one's age, or countless other factors. It seems pertinent to allude to this earlier watching as the film itself is so self-consciously addressing the issue of ageing. It is the last film Tarkovsky made; it is dedicated to his son; the final scene is of Alexander's young son addressing a question to his father who is being removed in the manner of a modern day Lear. One cannot help but feel that, perhaps like Lear, which it so consciously echoes, this is a film best seen from a reflective perspective, located not so far from the threshold of death; even if that death were merely the starting point for the next round of eternal recurrence (or 'return' in the script's translation) as the mysterious postman, Otto, suggests.
Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are all name-checked in the opening twenty minutes. The parameters are laid down. But the influence of two other northern artists seems stronger. It's impossible not to feel the shadow of Bergman looming over Alexander's struggles. Alexander is played by Erland Josephon, a long term collaborator of Bergman's. His depiction of an isolated soul, seeking not merely to create but actually to become a work of art, references the filmmaker, as does his character's name, an echo of Bergman's childish incarnation in Fanny and Alexander. The other key influence seems to be Chekhov. In some ways The Sacrifice feels like a dystopian reading of Chekhov (through Beckett). Although two of the characters arrive in a nifty BMW, the women wear dresses that look more like something out of turn of the century Russia than an Abba influenced Sweden.
All these influences are brought to bear and, as one of the key moments of the film shows, they all count. The reason the characters are gathered is to celebrate Alexander's birthday. Otto, the postman who seems more like the boatman at the Styx, brings Alexander a large 16th century map of Europe as a present - a present which is a sacrifice, as all presents, he says, should be. They talk about how Europe has altered, and what those early inhabitants might have made of it. All this precedes the film's central tenet: the occurrence of the fabled nuclear strike. Unless Alexander is prepared to sacrifice himself to redeem time and the world, nuclear winter is upon us. In the lead-up to the moment when the world ends, the film explores what it is that will be lost, and what it might be that has brought us to that point.
At the time the film was made, Europe was still the front line of a potential nuclear war. Now, twenty years later, the terms of the chess match have changed. The fear of a third world war, which clearly haunted Tarkovsky, has receded, to be replaced by other millennial fears. The slow, sepia shots of crowds rushing through a devastated street, which punctuate the movie, seem just as pertinent in this era of ever-more-dramatic Hollywood apocalypse movies; or McCarthy's The Road. Alexander's sacrifice may have staved off one damnation, but it hasn't kept the others at bay.
In a film so steeped in Western culture, (this review hasn't mentioned the influence of Leonardo, Pierro della Francesca or Russian icon painters), the latter stages suggest that Tarkovsky perceived another direction for the world to turn. Alexander listens to Japanese music, and wears an oriental cloak, decorated with the Yin and Yang, as he summons up the courage to take the step of destroying his home in order to save the world. His son tends to the tree he has 'created' in a Japanese manner. He carries water to nurture it. This echoes an idea Alexander expresses at the film's opening, as he 'plants' the tree, that if we were to find one ritual to perform every day, at a set time, even were that just to pour a glass from the tap and then throw that water away, it might create a foundation of meaning in our lives.
This notion, redolent of Zen Buddhism, allied to the restoration of faith (those who fail to believe in God are those who have never been desperate enough to need to, Alexander claims as he prays) offer, so the filmmaker seems to suggest, an escape route from the terminal end that centuries of Western culture have created. In burning his home, Alexander destroys his possessions, books, maps and all. There is a way out, but it requires sacrifice.
Tarkovsky's film is no easier to watch twenty years on. It is still a long haul of a movie, demanding the viewer's exhaustive attention. The underlying themes the film explores seem no less pertinent today than they did twenty years ago. The notion of sacrifice, personal, societal and cultural, in the quest for nothing more than survival, seems even more relevant. The conditions under which the film is watched have altered less than time might have lead one to expect.
The lake still may or may not be the largest artificial lake in Europe, (this remains debatable), but the auditorium would still appear to be sinking.
Saturday, 22 December 2007
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
silent light (dir. reygadas)
In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, after a night on the Tren del Muerte, there were Mennonites wandering the streets, looking like something out of an Edward Hopper painting, with their dungarees and wispy beards. They seemed exotic within the context of their exotic locale, and oblivious to this exoticism, as they presumably were.
Silent Light deals with a husband in a Mennonite community who's conducting an affair, and grappling with the consequences of this. It's a film set in Mexico, even though almost all of the dialogue is in the curious German spoken by the community. There's a remarkable moment when Johan, the adulterous husband (a dead ringer for the art critic Robert Hughes), hears a song being played in Spanish on the radio, and starts singing along. At another point his wife brings tacos to the workers in the field. When his wife collapses at the road side a couple of Mexican truckers stop to help. But by and large the film is set in a world of its own, beneath the great rolling sky and the starry night.
This sense of an isolated world within the world must have appealed to Reygadas. The film opens and closes with time lapse sequences of dawn and dusk. It wells up out of the darkness of night, before retreating back there at the close. This gives the film a biblical, elemental quality, which frames the devout Mennonite community Johan belongs to. He has been lead astray, but he is also genuinely in love with Marianne (played with remarkable placidity by Maria Pankratz). He doesn't know if this development in his life has been brought about by God or the devil. Reygadas presents him as a good man in the thrall of greater powers. His father, a preacher, tells him that he would not be in his shoes for anything in the world, and yet he is also envious of him. Later, when the consequences of his actions become clear, Johan's father tells him he cannot hold himself responsible - this has all been ordained.
Underpinning the film's narrative is a latent humanism. None of the characters are unsympathetic, neither the adulterer, his mistress, nor the wife. The film resolutely avoids melodramatic plot developments. (At one point Johan and Marianne sleep together. Johan has left his children with a man in a van. As he approaches the van, looking for them, we fear the worst. But they are fine, laughing in the van, listening to Jacques Brel.) In the end, the plot finds its resolution in an other-worldly twist, which could be seen as evangelical, or magic realism, or both. People are likely to find themselves in situations which are beyond their expectation or rational understanding. And there's not much one can do in that case but trust in God, or fate.
The film's relentlessly slow pace re-affirms this message. Reygadas is never afraid to let the camera linger. He will film an open doorway, with the interior nothing but blackness, and slowly pan in until an image is revealed beyond the darkness. There are things there to be seen, but we need to learn to have the patience to observe them. Our expectations of rapid solutions to vast problems (such as the reason for an affair, or the cause of death, or the existence of God) is presented as naive. Reygadas appears to be encouraging us how to learn how to see oncemore, with new eyes. We stare at a screen and see only darkness. Slowly glimmers of light appear. These give way to the subtle forms of the world, revealed with the rising of the sun. Finally we, the audience, know what we're looking at, and everything is clear.
Cinema, the exercise of training our eyes on a screen lit by silent light, gives us the opportunity to do this. To learn how to look at the world as though it has been made anew.
Silent Light deals with a husband in a Mennonite community who's conducting an affair, and grappling with the consequences of this. It's a film set in Mexico, even though almost all of the dialogue is in the curious German spoken by the community. There's a remarkable moment when Johan, the adulterous husband (a dead ringer for the art critic Robert Hughes), hears a song being played in Spanish on the radio, and starts singing along. At another point his wife brings tacos to the workers in the field. When his wife collapses at the road side a couple of Mexican truckers stop to help. But by and large the film is set in a world of its own, beneath the great rolling sky and the starry night.
This sense of an isolated world within the world must have appealed to Reygadas. The film opens and closes with time lapse sequences of dawn and dusk. It wells up out of the darkness of night, before retreating back there at the close. This gives the film a biblical, elemental quality, which frames the devout Mennonite community Johan belongs to. He has been lead astray, but he is also genuinely in love with Marianne (played with remarkable placidity by Maria Pankratz). He doesn't know if this development in his life has been brought about by God or the devil. Reygadas presents him as a good man in the thrall of greater powers. His father, a preacher, tells him that he would not be in his shoes for anything in the world, and yet he is also envious of him. Later, when the consequences of his actions become clear, Johan's father tells him he cannot hold himself responsible - this has all been ordained.
Underpinning the film's narrative is a latent humanism. None of the characters are unsympathetic, neither the adulterer, his mistress, nor the wife. The film resolutely avoids melodramatic plot developments. (At one point Johan and Marianne sleep together. Johan has left his children with a man in a van. As he approaches the van, looking for them, we fear the worst. But they are fine, laughing in the van, listening to Jacques Brel.) In the end, the plot finds its resolution in an other-worldly twist, which could be seen as evangelical, or magic realism, or both. People are likely to find themselves in situations which are beyond their expectation or rational understanding. And there's not much one can do in that case but trust in God, or fate.
The film's relentlessly slow pace re-affirms this message. Reygadas is never afraid to let the camera linger. He will film an open doorway, with the interior nothing but blackness, and slowly pan in until an image is revealed beyond the darkness. There are things there to be seen, but we need to learn to have the patience to observe them. Our expectations of rapid solutions to vast problems (such as the reason for an affair, or the cause of death, or the existence of God) is presented as naive. Reygadas appears to be encouraging us how to learn how to see oncemore, with new eyes. We stare at a screen and see only darkness. Slowly glimmers of light appear. These give way to the subtle forms of the world, revealed with the rising of the sun. Finally we, the audience, know what we're looking at, and everything is clear.
Cinema, the exercise of training our eyes on a screen lit by silent light, gives us the opportunity to do this. To learn how to look at the world as though it has been made anew.
Thursday, 6 December 2007
the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford (d. andrew dominik)
There's an odd moment well over half way through the film when Robert Ford meets a senior politician. Played by a bald-headed man who's recognisable but hard to pin a name on. It turns out to be James Carville, the former Clinton campaign manager. Someone who knows the workings of power inside out. Former figures from the world of politics playing at acting usually look foolish and make the film they've been placed in look foolish too, but Carville doesn't and neither does Dominik's movie. Somehow, in the breadth and weight of it's study of power, fame and destiny, his presence seems appropriate.
The Assassination... comes in at 16o minutes. It's not a jaunty ride. A lot of the most interesting material takes place in the final 15, after Jesse James' death. In the subsequent fate of his killer, Robert Ford, there's a whole other movie lurking. There might be legitimate questions about the conservatism of the script's reluctance to play around with time frames, using a voiceover which feels like the film's weakest link instead. Ford's destiny is inextricably linked to that of the gunslinger he grew up admiring. This instigates a wonderful circularity to the narrative, which could have been explored in a less teleological fashion.
That's about the only criticism that can be levelled at Dominik's epic. Like many non-native directors filming in North America (most of the film was shot in Canada) - Dominik seems to have fallen in love with a vast attritional landscape. The space that's given to the landscape by the cinematography is redolent of Malick, snowy wastes deputising for rippling corn fields. The voiceover is also, perhaps, a nod in the old master's direction. The other spirit hovering over the slow-burning narrative is that of Leone. The creation of atmosphere requires time; language needs to be allowed its richness; tension mounts the longer the note is held.
At it's heart, as the title implies, this is a film about a relationship between two men. Accordingly the film sinks or swims on the strength of the twin lead performances. Pitt's job is the harder. He has to play not merely a posthumous myth, but a living one. Jesse James, as depicted in the film, was a convoluted idol. Ruthless killer and loving family man. It's not easy to pull off these masculine contradictions, but Pitt manages it. And he conveys something more (with its own echoes of Eastwood in Leone's films) - which is that the gunslinger does not excel through speed or courage, but through a knowledge of his fellow man, an ability to read what his enemy is thinking behind the eyes. Jesse James, in Pitt's portrayal, doesn't look like he's ever read a book; but he knows the workings of a man's mind.
However, the film requires more than just a fine performance from Pitt. Casey Affleck as Ford needs to match him. From the moment he first appears, to be scolded by Sam Shepherd, Affleck captures the wistful blend of dreamer and wannabe that Ford may well have been. The performance builds through the film, with the parentless Affleck conveying in the sullen twitch of an eye everything you need to know about the adolescent's reaction to the thing he's grown up loving. The final 15 minutes, after the deed has been done, gives a glimpse of how he could have mastered the more subtle psychological genesis of the child becoming a man damned by his youthful hubris.
Dominik's film rides its ambitions. In a way it shows that what a filmmaker needs to do is attend to the details. Nick Cave's score is suitably powerful, Roger Deakins' cinematography acquires the epic touch that the tale requires. The dialogue is artful, yet convincing. The words smell of damp nights camped out in the woods; or the slip of the tongue that can prove a death sentence. The performances across the board stand up to the presence of the two leads. Once all these and the thousand and one other details are in place, the narrative of how power attracts and corrupts can unfold. In the manner of a 19th century Russian novel, Dominik allows the intranigence of fate to play itself out in the twinned destinies of the idol and the worshipper who becomes a Judas.
The Assassination... comes in at 16o minutes. It's not a jaunty ride. A lot of the most interesting material takes place in the final 15, after Jesse James' death. In the subsequent fate of his killer, Robert Ford, there's a whole other movie lurking. There might be legitimate questions about the conservatism of the script's reluctance to play around with time frames, using a voiceover which feels like the film's weakest link instead. Ford's destiny is inextricably linked to that of the gunslinger he grew up admiring. This instigates a wonderful circularity to the narrative, which could have been explored in a less teleological fashion.
That's about the only criticism that can be levelled at Dominik's epic. Like many non-native directors filming in North America (most of the film was shot in Canada) - Dominik seems to have fallen in love with a vast attritional landscape. The space that's given to the landscape by the cinematography is redolent of Malick, snowy wastes deputising for rippling corn fields. The voiceover is also, perhaps, a nod in the old master's direction. The other spirit hovering over the slow-burning narrative is that of Leone. The creation of atmosphere requires time; language needs to be allowed its richness; tension mounts the longer the note is held.
At it's heart, as the title implies, this is a film about a relationship between two men. Accordingly the film sinks or swims on the strength of the twin lead performances. Pitt's job is the harder. He has to play not merely a posthumous myth, but a living one. Jesse James, as depicted in the film, was a convoluted idol. Ruthless killer and loving family man. It's not easy to pull off these masculine contradictions, but Pitt manages it. And he conveys something more (with its own echoes of Eastwood in Leone's films) - which is that the gunslinger does not excel through speed or courage, but through a knowledge of his fellow man, an ability to read what his enemy is thinking behind the eyes. Jesse James, in Pitt's portrayal, doesn't look like he's ever read a book; but he knows the workings of a man's mind.
However, the film requires more than just a fine performance from Pitt. Casey Affleck as Ford needs to match him. From the moment he first appears, to be scolded by Sam Shepherd, Affleck captures the wistful blend of dreamer and wannabe that Ford may well have been. The performance builds through the film, with the parentless Affleck conveying in the sullen twitch of an eye everything you need to know about the adolescent's reaction to the thing he's grown up loving. The final 15 minutes, after the deed has been done, gives a glimpse of how he could have mastered the more subtle psychological genesis of the child becoming a man damned by his youthful hubris.
Dominik's film rides its ambitions. In a way it shows that what a filmmaker needs to do is attend to the details. Nick Cave's score is suitably powerful, Roger Deakins' cinematography acquires the epic touch that the tale requires. The dialogue is artful, yet convincing. The words smell of damp nights camped out in the woods; or the slip of the tongue that can prove a death sentence. The performances across the board stand up to the presence of the two leads. Once all these and the thousand and one other details are in place, the narrative of how power attracts and corrupts can unfold. In the manner of a 19th century Russian novel, Dominik allows the intranigence of fate to play itself out in the twinned destinies of the idol and the worshipper who becomes a Judas.
Monday, 3 December 2007
the darjeeling limited (dir Wes Anderson)
The camerawork in Anderson's mordant railway road trip ranges from the frenetic to the measured. Robert Yeoman, the DOP, is not scared to use his zoom, and the camera frequently chases a scene around, veering from one point of interest to the next. On the other hand, the film sets up stately set pieces, such as the sequence where the 'mythical' Darjeeling Express, carrying all the movie's characters, trundles past the camera; or within the opening short, where the camera glides around Jason Schwartzman's suite in the Hotel Chevalier in an uninterrupted take; or finally when the three brothers leave a hut in slow motion during the funeral and make their way to a rickshaw.
These variations in style can be interpreted in two closely connected ways. On the one hand as evidence of a playful willingness to experiment. On the other as 'kid in the sweet shop' syndrome.
Anderson's film is dealing with the notion of adults still trying to grow up. The three brothers at the heart of his film live in the shadow of their late father, whose funeral is alluded to in a flashback. Their quest is to find their mother, which they do. She is living in the tiger-infested foothills of the Himalayas, and tells her children that the people there need her more than they do. The children come to some kind of acceptance of this, and end their trip having gained some kind of collective understanding of each other's peculiarities.
The script includes a moment where Owen Wilson's brother responds to an Indian man's question: What are you doing here? With the line - We came on a spiritual journey but it hasn't quite worked out. Anderson and Co are conscious of the issues that their movie generates: the wealthy westerners frolicking in search of their karma in the impoverished backwoods. It's possible that the juxtaposition with the opening short's opulent Paris hotel room is a kind of nose-thumbing to the whole notion of political correctness. In the quest for the self, all rules, including those of cinematography, are there to be broken. The boys get thrown off the train for breaking the rules, but the journey keeps going and in the end they find themselves catching...another train. There will always be more trains.
It is tempting to say that there's something Fitzgeraldian about Anderson. The creation of idealised, flawed icons of americana, with their jazzy clothes, outrageous manners and idiosyncratic wit. But in the end, The Darjeeling Limited feels more like a Waugh novel without the narrative tautness. The self-indulgent emissaries of the latest great power using the exoticism of an alien background to explore their foibles.
In the film's final sequence, the brothers run to catch another train. In their rush to make it, they fling their baggage away in wonderful slow motion. This literal metaphor suggests that they will proceed on their journey lighter in soul and possessions. The scene is a mirror image to the opening sequence of the film, where Bill Murray's hapless businessman runs for the train and is overtaken by the more athletic Adrien Brody, who leaves him standing. In that opening sequence, which uses the slow motion trick for the first time, I felt exhilarated. It felt as though we were about to be taken on a remarkable, revelatory journey. By the time of the closing sequence, my engagement had dwindled. That baggage should have been ditched weeks ago. The slow-motion running still looks pretty, but like a kid in a sweet shop, I'd had one too many liquorice allsorts and the sweetness was starting to pale.
These variations in style can be interpreted in two closely connected ways. On the one hand as evidence of a playful willingness to experiment. On the other as 'kid in the sweet shop' syndrome.
Anderson's film is dealing with the notion of adults still trying to grow up. The three brothers at the heart of his film live in the shadow of their late father, whose funeral is alluded to in a flashback. Their quest is to find their mother, which they do. She is living in the tiger-infested foothills of the Himalayas, and tells her children that the people there need her more than they do. The children come to some kind of acceptance of this, and end their trip having gained some kind of collective understanding of each other's peculiarities.
The script includes a moment where Owen Wilson's brother responds to an Indian man's question: What are you doing here? With the line - We came on a spiritual journey but it hasn't quite worked out. Anderson and Co are conscious of the issues that their movie generates: the wealthy westerners frolicking in search of their karma in the impoverished backwoods. It's possible that the juxtaposition with the opening short's opulent Paris hotel room is a kind of nose-thumbing to the whole notion of political correctness. In the quest for the self, all rules, including those of cinematography, are there to be broken. The boys get thrown off the train for breaking the rules, but the journey keeps going and in the end they find themselves catching...another train. There will always be more trains.
It is tempting to say that there's something Fitzgeraldian about Anderson. The creation of idealised, flawed icons of americana, with their jazzy clothes, outrageous manners and idiosyncratic wit. But in the end, The Darjeeling Limited feels more like a Waugh novel without the narrative tautness. The self-indulgent emissaries of the latest great power using the exoticism of an alien background to explore their foibles.
In the film's final sequence, the brothers run to catch another train. In their rush to make it, they fling their baggage away in wonderful slow motion. This literal metaphor suggests that they will proceed on their journey lighter in soul and possessions. The scene is a mirror image to the opening sequence of the film, where Bill Murray's hapless businessman runs for the train and is overtaken by the more athletic Adrien Brody, who leaves him standing. In that opening sequence, which uses the slow motion trick for the first time, I felt exhilarated. It felt as though we were about to be taken on a remarkable, revelatory journey. By the time of the closing sequence, my engagement had dwindled. That baggage should have been ditched weeks ago. The slow-motion running still looks pretty, but like a kid in a sweet shop, I'd had one too many liquorice allsorts and the sweetness was starting to pale.
Friday, 30 November 2007
eastern promises (dir. cronenberg)
The film opens with a scene of dramatic violence. A barber tries to convince his son to cut his customer's throat. The son doesn't want to. The barber does it. The director shows the blood emanating from the great tear in the throat. The victim convulses and the audience flinches.
Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.
This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.
Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.
Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.
Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.
Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.
Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.
This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.
Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.
Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.
Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.
Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.
Friday, 16 November 2007
the band's visit (dir Eran Kolirin)
Kolirin knows how to frame an image. The opening shot shows a man trying to fit a yellow balloon into the front seat of a camper van. We don't know why the man is doing this, nor will we ever learn. The man gets in the van, drives off, and is never seen again. What lies behind the van is a group of eight policemen, members of the police band who have arrived in Israel to perform. They stand there, puzzled, immobile in the their faintly comical powder blue uniforms. The camera has never moved.
This eye for a set-up continues throughout The Band's Visit, lending the film a crafted, dispassionate aesthetic. A military band carrying instruments of various sizes through a dusty desert is a visual treat, and the director is not afraid to spoil us, lingering over their haphazard progress. However, there is more to this dispassionate eye than mere pretty pictures. The danger that the film's narrative runs is that it will become too sachirine. Kolirin resists this with his pared back script and the cast's understated performances.
The film tells the story of a military band who get on the wrong bus and end up in the middle of deepest Israel. They are befriended by Dina, a free-spirited and bored cafe owner, with a curious history, never revealed. There are no more buses, so the band is forced to accept the hospitality she and a friend offer. The next day they leave for the concert. That's it. The drama is all in the culture clash, the coming together of old enemies. In Dina's cafe, one of the policeman hangs his blue hat over a picture of an Israeli tank.
Any hint of sentimentality would undercut the film, and leave it open to charges of implausibility. Wisely, Kolirin's script is as carefully composed, and restrained, as his shot composition. There's no Hollywood ending. The characters don't find it easy to get on with the enemy. They have to negotiate for common ground, scrabble around for moments where they can trust and alight upon the field of their common humanity.
Music helps, nowhere more so than in the scene where three bandsmen sing Summertime lugubriously, in the company of an awkward Israeli family. Perhaps oddly, the other thing that assists them is their lack of a common language. They are forced to resort to English, and in their mutual uncertainty with the second language they find common ground.
You can see why The Band's Visit has been so successful on the international festival circuit. The band finally find their way to the site of their performance, and the film concludes with Tawfiq, the weather-beaten bandleader, singing a traditional Arabic tune. Israeli and Egyptian flags flutter in the background. The hope is tangible: culture alone gives a framework for the possibility of understanding. The most intractable of divisions can be overcome.
However, The Band's Visit's restraint, and gentle pacing, alludes to another truth: that these divisions will not heal in a rapidly edited hurry. They healing must be allowed to proceed at its own pace. It must be handled with due care, and great consideration.
This eye for a set-up continues throughout The Band's Visit, lending the film a crafted, dispassionate aesthetic. A military band carrying instruments of various sizes through a dusty desert is a visual treat, and the director is not afraid to spoil us, lingering over their haphazard progress. However, there is more to this dispassionate eye than mere pretty pictures. The danger that the film's narrative runs is that it will become too sachirine. Kolirin resists this with his pared back script and the cast's understated performances.
The film tells the story of a military band who get on the wrong bus and end up in the middle of deepest Israel. They are befriended by Dina, a free-spirited and bored cafe owner, with a curious history, never revealed. There are no more buses, so the band is forced to accept the hospitality she and a friend offer. The next day they leave for the concert. That's it. The drama is all in the culture clash, the coming together of old enemies. In Dina's cafe, one of the policeman hangs his blue hat over a picture of an Israeli tank.
Any hint of sentimentality would undercut the film, and leave it open to charges of implausibility. Wisely, Kolirin's script is as carefully composed, and restrained, as his shot composition. There's no Hollywood ending. The characters don't find it easy to get on with the enemy. They have to negotiate for common ground, scrabble around for moments where they can trust and alight upon the field of their common humanity.
Music helps, nowhere more so than in the scene where three bandsmen sing Summertime lugubriously, in the company of an awkward Israeli family. Perhaps oddly, the other thing that assists them is their lack of a common language. They are forced to resort to English, and in their mutual uncertainty with the second language they find common ground.
You can see why The Band's Visit has been so successful on the international festival circuit. The band finally find their way to the site of their performance, and the film concludes with Tawfiq, the weather-beaten bandleader, singing a traditional Arabic tune. Israeli and Egyptian flags flutter in the background. The hope is tangible: culture alone gives a framework for the possibility of understanding. The most intractable of divisions can be overcome.
However, The Band's Visit's restraint, and gentle pacing, alludes to another truth: that these divisions will not heal in a rapidly edited hurry. They healing must be allowed to proceed at its own pace. It must be handled with due care, and great consideration.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
into the wild (dir. Sean Penn)
A lot happens in the final few minutes of Into The Wild. The hero, Christopher McCandless dies an excrutiating death and communes with his parents. Most of the characters he's met along the way are shown in flashes, having some kind of positive experience. A helicopter shot pulls away from the Magic Bus, last resting place of McCandless, and spins off into the sky. Finally, a still of the real McCandless is shown, looking uncannily like the one we've been watching for the past two hours and twenty minutes, played by Emile Hirsch.
For a slow moving film, it's a busy ending, and in many ways it seems to undercut the pathos of McCandless' sad demise. It's practically screaming at its audience: He Didn't Die in Vain!
Which brings us on to the God question. Rainey, the hippie who befriends the hero early on, asks him playfully if he's not Jesus - and suggests he might like to walk on water. At this point we know he's just a mixed up kid who's got the wandering bug, so the remark's a joke. But it's a joke which seems to take over the film. McCandless wanders like a saint through the city, rejecting the way it corrupts the soul. He displays a strong asexuality, refusing the advances of a beautiful soul mate either because she's only sixteen (an unlikely prohibition for this free spirit) or because he's truly so unworldly that he doesn't do sex. He preaches on the mount, talking to the old timer who's befriended him about how God is in everything. And, the final sequence seems to be suggesting, in the end he comes face to face with God, and his quest, which has now become spiritual, has blessed the lives of all he's touched.
The God undercurrents running through Into The Wild lend Penn's story a portentousness which obscures its charm. (The scene where McCandless climbs a mountain and screams in unison with nature is oddly reminiscent of DeCaprio's King of the World moment). The story is interesting enough without the need for the syrup.
In another way, Into The Wild is Penn doing a Herzog movie. McCandless is stepbrother to Timothy Tredwell. At one point a bear saunters past him, perhaps on its way to devouring Tim, passing up the tramp's skin and bones. At another, McCandless drags a boat, in this case a canoe, up a mountain, a la Fitzcarraldo. Penn appears to be aspiring to the purism of a Herzog epic. The film has the same scale, the same episodic narrative structure as a grand Herzog opus. And yet - it never has the roughness. It looks pretty. Hirsch is no Kinski. He's a puppy of a saint, all gentle love and good vibes. Even in his death throes he looks like he could have been the Ralph Lauren model that his alter-ego, spotted in an LA bar, might be.
These contradictions swim around Penn's enjoyable movie. In spite of the film and its hero's love of solitude, expressed through a rousing soundtrack and some sweeping Alaskan cinematography by Eric Gautier, it's Alexander Supertramp's encounters with the William Carlos William's underbelly of American society that bring the film to life and lend meaning to his experiences, something the narrative suggests he belatedly came to understand. For all its inclinations to be a serious investigation (in the shadow of Tolstoy and Thoreau), of the meaning of man in modern society, the tension between nature and civilisation - in the end Into The Wild works most effectively as a gently comedic character piece, in the vein of Fielding or Cervantes. Penn has an actor's eye for characterisation, from the crazy Danes to the police ranger on the phone who tells the hero he can't paddle his canoe.
The final sequence pays homage to these characters, acknowledging their importance within the hero's life but also within the narrative. The dilemma between the societal impulse and the quest to find the natural man is apparent in both film and character. Is it appropriate to end a film which has been exploring the values of nature and solitude with a gargantuan helicopter shot, redolent of the extremes of societal technology? Whilst one's instinct might be to say - no way - in practice it has a peculiar effectiveness. The film wants to have its cake and eat it, and maybe that works. Like McCandless, it critiques American society for its venal divisions and destructive urge to wealth; but also praises it for its family values and can-do freedoms. Perhaps this is the true contradiction at the heart of McCandless's twin journeys to Alaska and death. In which case Penn has done a fine job in rendering its authenticity: helicopter shots, god complex and all.
For a slow moving film, it's a busy ending, and in many ways it seems to undercut the pathos of McCandless' sad demise. It's practically screaming at its audience: He Didn't Die in Vain!
Which brings us on to the God question. Rainey, the hippie who befriends the hero early on, asks him playfully if he's not Jesus - and suggests he might like to walk on water. At this point we know he's just a mixed up kid who's got the wandering bug, so the remark's a joke. But it's a joke which seems to take over the film. McCandless wanders like a saint through the city, rejecting the way it corrupts the soul. He displays a strong asexuality, refusing the advances of a beautiful soul mate either because she's only sixteen (an unlikely prohibition for this free spirit) or because he's truly so unworldly that he doesn't do sex. He preaches on the mount, talking to the old timer who's befriended him about how God is in everything. And, the final sequence seems to be suggesting, in the end he comes face to face with God, and his quest, which has now become spiritual, has blessed the lives of all he's touched.
The God undercurrents running through Into The Wild lend Penn's story a portentousness which obscures its charm. (The scene where McCandless climbs a mountain and screams in unison with nature is oddly reminiscent of DeCaprio's King of the World moment). The story is interesting enough without the need for the syrup.
In another way, Into The Wild is Penn doing a Herzog movie. McCandless is stepbrother to Timothy Tredwell. At one point a bear saunters past him, perhaps on its way to devouring Tim, passing up the tramp's skin and bones. At another, McCandless drags a boat, in this case a canoe, up a mountain, a la Fitzcarraldo. Penn appears to be aspiring to the purism of a Herzog epic. The film has the same scale, the same episodic narrative structure as a grand Herzog opus. And yet - it never has the roughness. It looks pretty. Hirsch is no Kinski. He's a puppy of a saint, all gentle love and good vibes. Even in his death throes he looks like he could have been the Ralph Lauren model that his alter-ego, spotted in an LA bar, might be.
These contradictions swim around Penn's enjoyable movie. In spite of the film and its hero's love of solitude, expressed through a rousing soundtrack and some sweeping Alaskan cinematography by Eric Gautier, it's Alexander Supertramp's encounters with the William Carlos William's underbelly of American society that bring the film to life and lend meaning to his experiences, something the narrative suggests he belatedly came to understand. For all its inclinations to be a serious investigation (in the shadow of Tolstoy and Thoreau), of the meaning of man in modern society, the tension between nature and civilisation - in the end Into The Wild works most effectively as a gently comedic character piece, in the vein of Fielding or Cervantes. Penn has an actor's eye for characterisation, from the crazy Danes to the police ranger on the phone who tells the hero he can't paddle his canoe.
The final sequence pays homage to these characters, acknowledging their importance within the hero's life but also within the narrative. The dilemma between the societal impulse and the quest to find the natural man is apparent in both film and character. Is it appropriate to end a film which has been exploring the values of nature and solitude with a gargantuan helicopter shot, redolent of the extremes of societal technology? Whilst one's instinct might be to say - no way - in practice it has a peculiar effectiveness. The film wants to have its cake and eat it, and maybe that works. Like McCandless, it critiques American society for its venal divisions and destructive urge to wealth; but also praises it for its family values and can-do freedoms. Perhaps this is the true contradiction at the heart of McCandless's twin journeys to Alaska and death. In which case Penn has done a fine job in rendering its authenticity: helicopter shots, god complex and all.
Friday, 26 October 2007
Cargo 200 (dir Aleksei Balabanov)
How does a film capture a time and a place? All too often, film fails where literature succeeds, in spite of film’s ability to physically recreate the circumstances of the past. However, there’s more to capturing the past than merely painting a picture. The filmmaker needs to capture the rhythms of speech, the frames of mind, and something more – the poetic reality of the period. Because a film is not a slice of life – it is a story, manufactured with artificial constraints, and these constraints have to convince the watcher that they are valid, even if they’re not. Scorsese’s work is a prime example of how this can be achieved and how it can’t be. Gangs of New York exemplifying the latter, Goodfellas, to pick one from a bunch, the former.
All of which is preamble to an outrageous Russian film, which sets out to capture the demented period that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. Its based on a true story of the abduction of the daughter of a Communist official. The film uses clips on TV to identify the period: Gorbachov sitting with one of the last politburos; various song and dance acts. Set-piece scenes depicting a kind of primitive illegal rave add to the sense of a society on the point of breaking out of the Soviet grip.
Within this world, the viewer is introduced to various characters, including a brash young Ukrainian who drives his own car, boyfriend to the daughter of a minor Soviet official; the devoutly Communist professor of Scientific Atheism at Leninsk University; and the owner of an illegal vodka distillery, who lives in his own private fiefdom in the middle of nowhere. The professor’s car breaks down near the distillery and he discusses God with the seemingly psychopathic owner. Later, the student picks up a girl and heads there to drink.
All of which devours an hour or so of screen time, with the pivotal characters yet to appear. Balabanov seems more concerned with describing this bizarre, edgy culture than telling their narrative. Until the moment when the apparent drifter at the distillery shoots a worker and kidnaps the girl the Ukrainian brought with him, driving her to Leninsk and handcuffing her to a brass bed in his near-senile mother’s apartment.
The drifter, it emerges, isn’t a drifter, but the genuinely psychopathic Captain Zhurov, head of Leninsk police. Leninsk police isn’t really a police force, but a mafia paramilitary defence unit. The Communists think they’re in charge, but they’re not. The girl says her boyfriend, a paratrooper due back from Afghanistan, will avenge her, but her boyfriend comes back in a coffin (the Cargo 200 of the title), the policeman takes possession of the coffin and throws the dead paratrooper in bed with the girl.
Before you realise it, this is not a slow-burning, droll look at the end of an era, but a full-on, gothic extravaganza of violence, fear and lunacy. And this, you start to say yourself, as the old lady watches the flickering images on TV, stepsister to Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, might be exactly what that time was like.
Cargo 200 would never have got past the film company censors in this country. It’s constructed like a mess of a movie, with the main protagonist taking too long to emerge, the tone veering like a spinning drunkard, the genre beyond description. But when you walk out of the cinema, punchdrunk after 90 minutes which seem much longer, you can’t help thinking that this might by as good a depiction of that time and place as you’re likely to find. This is why empires crumble: not because they’re in coherent, functioning shape, but because they’re in utter, calamitous chaos.
All of which is preamble to an outrageous Russian film, which sets out to capture the demented period that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. Its based on a true story of the abduction of the daughter of a Communist official. The film uses clips on TV to identify the period: Gorbachov sitting with one of the last politburos; various song and dance acts. Set-piece scenes depicting a kind of primitive illegal rave add to the sense of a society on the point of breaking out of the Soviet grip.
Within this world, the viewer is introduced to various characters, including a brash young Ukrainian who drives his own car, boyfriend to the daughter of a minor Soviet official; the devoutly Communist professor of Scientific Atheism at Leninsk University; and the owner of an illegal vodka distillery, who lives in his own private fiefdom in the middle of nowhere. The professor’s car breaks down near the distillery and he discusses God with the seemingly psychopathic owner. Later, the student picks up a girl and heads there to drink.
All of which devours an hour or so of screen time, with the pivotal characters yet to appear. Balabanov seems more concerned with describing this bizarre, edgy culture than telling their narrative. Until the moment when the apparent drifter at the distillery shoots a worker and kidnaps the girl the Ukrainian brought with him, driving her to Leninsk and handcuffing her to a brass bed in his near-senile mother’s apartment.
The drifter, it emerges, isn’t a drifter, but the genuinely psychopathic Captain Zhurov, head of Leninsk police. Leninsk police isn’t really a police force, but a mafia paramilitary defence unit. The Communists think they’re in charge, but they’re not. The girl says her boyfriend, a paratrooper due back from Afghanistan, will avenge her, but her boyfriend comes back in a coffin (the Cargo 200 of the title), the policeman takes possession of the coffin and throws the dead paratrooper in bed with the girl.
Before you realise it, this is not a slow-burning, droll look at the end of an era, but a full-on, gothic extravaganza of violence, fear and lunacy. And this, you start to say yourself, as the old lady watches the flickering images on TV, stepsister to Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, might be exactly what that time was like.
Cargo 200 would never have got past the film company censors in this country. It’s constructed like a mess of a movie, with the main protagonist taking too long to emerge, the tone veering like a spinning drunkard, the genre beyond description. But when you walk out of the cinema, punchdrunk after 90 minutes which seem much longer, you can’t help thinking that this might by as good a depiction of that time and place as you’re likely to find. This is why empires crumble: not because they’re in coherent, functioning shape, but because they’re in utter, calamitous chaos.
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
tick tock lullaby (dir lisa gornick)
This is a low budget independent UK production tackling the serious issue of children. The narrative is constructed around four different women all of whom are contemplating having a baby. Two are sisters, and the other two are in a gay relationship.
Using this clearly signposted thematic, the director (writer, leading lady and cartoonist) assembles a nuanced film which flits effortlessly between light hearted humour and cold hearted pathos. The characters are recognisable London people, and a sense of location permeates the film, with scenes in Soho streets, on London buses, parks, homes.
The film retains a polish which belies its minimal budget. Gornick's own cartoons counterpoint the action deftly, offering a child-like commentary on the complex actions of the adults. Mat Davidson's persistent score works effectively in maintaining the dramatic flow, adding an ironic voice of its own to the events on screen.
The editing is crisp and effective, and the narrative pleasantly complex. But above all else, Tick Tock Lullaby succeeds in creating a relationship of great intimacy between camera and performer. This allows her to capture performances with the degree of nuance the subtle, improvised script requires. Scenes of potential melodramatic weight are given a gossamer lightness. And through this, and the excellence of the cast she's assembled, the weighty and eternal issues of genetics and the maternal/ paternal instinct are explored with subtlety. As a result, more of the truth of our complexity as sentient adults and sexual beings is revealed than most movies even aspire to show.
The hook of this film is the thoroughly modern notion of a lesbian couple wanting a child. Yet to place Tick Tock Lullaby in a box marked 'Gay and Lesbian cinema' would be wrong. Noting her own antecedents, her own genetic imperatives, Gornick touches on the latent parent inside us all. Tick Tock Lullaby seems unlikely to get a large cinema release, but it has a freshness and a sense of purpose that puts much contemporary cinema to shame.
Using this clearly signposted thematic, the director (writer, leading lady and cartoonist) assembles a nuanced film which flits effortlessly between light hearted humour and cold hearted pathos. The characters are recognisable London people, and a sense of location permeates the film, with scenes in Soho streets, on London buses, parks, homes.
The film retains a polish which belies its minimal budget. Gornick's own cartoons counterpoint the action deftly, offering a child-like commentary on the complex actions of the adults. Mat Davidson's persistent score works effectively in maintaining the dramatic flow, adding an ironic voice of its own to the events on screen.
The editing is crisp and effective, and the narrative pleasantly complex. But above all else, Tick Tock Lullaby succeeds in creating a relationship of great intimacy between camera and performer. This allows her to capture performances with the degree of nuance the subtle, improvised script requires. Scenes of potential melodramatic weight are given a gossamer lightness. And through this, and the excellence of the cast she's assembled, the weighty and eternal issues of genetics and the maternal/ paternal instinct are explored with subtlety. As a result, more of the truth of our complexity as sentient adults and sexual beings is revealed than most movies even aspire to show.
The hook of this film is the thoroughly modern notion of a lesbian couple wanting a child. Yet to place Tick Tock Lullaby in a box marked 'Gay and Lesbian cinema' would be wrong. Noting her own antecedents, her own genetic imperatives, Gornick touches on the latent parent inside us all. Tick Tock Lullaby seems unlikely to get a large cinema release, but it has a freshness and a sense of purpose that puts much contemporary cinema to shame.
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
control (dir. Anton Corbijn)
Control is a great title. It hits all the right buttons. The name of the film, also the name of a Joy Division song, encapsulates all that their music was about. Joy Division’s songs are pressure cookers. Ruled by a relentless rhythm, they contain seething emotion, the lid on the constant point of being blown off.
Control, the film, intimates that it’s aware of this. The beautiful, constrained cinematography buttons down the Mancunian gloom in black and white. The street Curtis lives in with his wife looks like something out of Coronation Street before colour TV. Sam Riley’s performance, as Curtis, is smouldering, restrained, hinting at something going on beneath the amiable blankness. Riley does everything asked of him, and does it with charisma, crucial for the role of an iconic pop star. His problem is that, in the end, not enough is asked of him, neither by script, nor, it would appear, director.
In order to understand why we’re watching a movie about this particular icon, it’s necessary for the script and film to scrape beneath the surface of the music’s sculptural rhythms. To understand the extent of Curtis’ suicidal distress, we need to see something of his power. One scene alone gives a glimpse, when he refuses to go on stage, is replaced for a song by a pale substitute, and then steps in, his performance alone capable of giving meaning to the music and making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. For a brief moment Curtis’s music, his weakness, his presence, and his epilepsy are welded into a fierce dramatic whole.
But that’s as close as we get. In the following scenes it’s back to the grindstone, his Belgian girlfriend cradling his head before his wife calls and he commits another lie. Rather than elucidating the hero’s mental instability, the protracted mess of his private life is turned into melodrama. Will he go with the winsome Belgian or stick with the homely Samantha Morton? By the end it seems even the writer is past caring; a pivotal scene of supposed significance within the affair (‘What’s your favourite colour?’ ‘Man City blue’) is tacked on long after it’s dramatic momentum should have kicked in, and Morton, his wife, on whose book the film is based, becomes a mumsy purveyor of stock lines. Neither character is fleshed out, and the film’s failure to explore their complexity short-changes Curtis’s dilemma and the true nature of his tragedy.
Finally, back to the music. In taking the decision to portray Curtis as an anthem to doomed youth, Control tends to ignore the thing that made him stand out. His music. Control makes little attempt to investigate the creative process of the song writing; how his ideas were melded into those barbed wire songs. Hook’s dry wit and Sumner’s quiet neuroticism are local colour for his love life, like the grey northern skies.
In the end the music on Control’s soundtrack, which is the reason the film has been made in the first place, has a depth of feeling which indicts the film for presuming to offer a rounded portrait of the singer, a portrait it doesn’t begin to pull off as well as the songs do themselves. The film shows the skin of the man, but it never manages to get underneath it.
Control, the film, intimates that it’s aware of this. The beautiful, constrained cinematography buttons down the Mancunian gloom in black and white. The street Curtis lives in with his wife looks like something out of Coronation Street before colour TV. Sam Riley’s performance, as Curtis, is smouldering, restrained, hinting at something going on beneath the amiable blankness. Riley does everything asked of him, and does it with charisma, crucial for the role of an iconic pop star. His problem is that, in the end, not enough is asked of him, neither by script, nor, it would appear, director.
In order to understand why we’re watching a movie about this particular icon, it’s necessary for the script and film to scrape beneath the surface of the music’s sculptural rhythms. To understand the extent of Curtis’ suicidal distress, we need to see something of his power. One scene alone gives a glimpse, when he refuses to go on stage, is replaced for a song by a pale substitute, and then steps in, his performance alone capable of giving meaning to the music and making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. For a brief moment Curtis’s music, his weakness, his presence, and his epilepsy are welded into a fierce dramatic whole.
But that’s as close as we get. In the following scenes it’s back to the grindstone, his Belgian girlfriend cradling his head before his wife calls and he commits another lie. Rather than elucidating the hero’s mental instability, the protracted mess of his private life is turned into melodrama. Will he go with the winsome Belgian or stick with the homely Samantha Morton? By the end it seems even the writer is past caring; a pivotal scene of supposed significance within the affair (‘What’s your favourite colour?’ ‘Man City blue’) is tacked on long after it’s dramatic momentum should have kicked in, and Morton, his wife, on whose book the film is based, becomes a mumsy purveyor of stock lines. Neither character is fleshed out, and the film’s failure to explore their complexity short-changes Curtis’s dilemma and the true nature of his tragedy.
Finally, back to the music. In taking the decision to portray Curtis as an anthem to doomed youth, Control tends to ignore the thing that made him stand out. His music. Control makes little attempt to investigate the creative process of the song writing; how his ideas were melded into those barbed wire songs. Hook’s dry wit and Sumner’s quiet neuroticism are local colour for his love life, like the grey northern skies.
In the end the music on Control’s soundtrack, which is the reason the film has been made in the first place, has a depth of feeling which indicts the film for presuming to offer a rounded portrait of the singer, a portrait it doesn’t begin to pull off as well as the songs do themselves. The film shows the skin of the man, but it never manages to get underneath it.
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