film round-up
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls). As perverse and weird as 40s Hollywood melodramas get. Joan Bennett is a stern, protective American mom with a jetsetting husband whom we never see, a pubescent boy with naturist leanings and a daughter who's seeing some crook three times her age. The latter two quarrel and the man is accidentally killed; dutifully the mom gets up at the crack of dawn to awkwardly lug the corpse into a speedboat, ride out to the middle of the lake and jettison it. We're spared none of the logistical difficulties- it's pure Hitchcock. Enter James Mason, reprising his laughably shit Irish accent from Odd Man Out, which rather spoils a performance full of sadness, longing and subtlety. He professes to be the 'good cop' from a duo of blackmailers and over the next few days, whilst he's gently harassing her to raise several thousand dollars they sort-of fall in love. Nothing comes of it, but still barely plausible. For its silliness the film has a buttoned-up angst at its core, and the director is a real pro whose camera swoops about the place with real grace.
The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles). AAGH the shoite oirish accents are following me, this time it's Orson's turn to make a prick of himself in an otherwise excellent film. He's a drifter, tough guy and part-time sailor, Rita Hayworth is his femme fatale and lured by her -though he knows no good can come of it- Welles agrees to join the crew on her husband's yacht cruise (the husband being a bitter invalid lawyer, his business partner creepier still). Hayworth radiates sex but there's too much poison and rancour in the air for romance to bloom; Welles' sailor is more naive than he seems at first sight. There's a suicide pact, steamy Central American locations, Welles framed for murder, a courtroom drama, and the pace picks up as we rush towards the climax in Chinatown and a genial, dazzling, three-way shootout in a hall of mirrors. Noirish, fatalistic and rather expressionist. Clever and bloody well made.
Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette). I've seen a few of his and they're normally rather heavy going, if playful. Not so this one, which reminded me very much of L'Appartement. Chaotic but light and comic- theatre types swapping partners like it's a ceilidh, with plenty of nods to Midsummer Night's Dream, Smiles of a Summer Night and other staples from the bedhopper's canon. A couple are back in Paris with their Italian theatre group and the woman gets involved with her ex, a blustering academic. There are also two siblings; the brother a sulky young rake who's trying to seduce the academic's ballet teacher wife, the sister an enchanting, lovely girl who meets the actress' Italian bloke in a reference library and helps him to look for the long-lost text of an unperformed Goldoni play. And their batty mum who's always baking cakes.
Very, very French then- but with flippant charm. Didn't recognise any of the actors but there were some great performances in there; complex, nuanced and very watchable. In my favourite scene, the Italian confronts the academic and challenges him to a duel; I am the offended party, I get to choose the weapons, come to the theatre tomorrow. He leads him up to a wooden plank in the rafters, on which are two bottles of vodka. First man to fall off the side loses the duel. Bit of a cop-out ending but it will put a smile on your face.
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz). Pinter script after the John Fowles novel (which I ain't read). It's a grim Thomas Hardy-type tale. Jeremy Irons is a bright Darwinian scientist with a pretty, rich fiancé and a bright future, who (god knows why) gets obsessed with Meryl Streep's eponymous scarlet woman/social outcast and loses everything. Fate, destiny, tragedy and all that. The tale is occasionally interrupted by scenes showing Jeremy Irons, the successful Film Star, energetically screwing his glamorous Hollywood co-star throughout the rehearsal & shooting period, and getting obsessed with her even though there's no question of him abandoning the wife & kids or she her sophistiacted French partner, and getting himself worked up into quite a state. DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE.
It's got quite a lot of meat to it, holding up real life against fictional stories and modern times -British Rail sandwiches and all- against genteel period Victoriana in Lyme Regis. The Victorian story ends like an epic novel, all the loose ends tied up, and the modern story ends with awkwardness and shame, stolen whispers on the patio at a summer night's party, neither declaring their feelings and Jeremy Irons sobbing as a car drives off. But the intellectual exercise creates a lot of distance, makes you regard the characters as childish brats. Makes you suspect that the men are wallowing in self-pity 'cos they can't have twelve wives each like the Taliban do. And you can't shake off the feeling that Pinter has gone over all this ground before, only much better, for Losey with The Go-Between and Accident.
Chéri (Stephen Frears). Another classic novel which I ain't read, Colette this time. Unlike any of the above I did actually see this in the cinema, and whatever deficiencies it had, the cinema is the proper place to see these ravishing sets and costumes; rich courtesans in belle epoque Paris, and for a Fortnums fetishist like me the film is a huge visual feast. At its heart two lovers, who have to give each other up because the woman is 30 years the boy's senior. Michelle Pfeiffer plays it well and is about as beautiful as is possible for a woman in her fifties. The spolit, androgynous boy is Sebastian Lite. Kathy Bates heads the other courtesans, a greek chorus of grotesques who throw Pfeiffer into relief; but you look at them and think that the cobblers of Hackney, never mind the monarchs of Europe, could do better than that.
It's all bitchy battles of who-could-care-less until the boy actually has to give up Pfeiffer and settle down in his arranged marriage, then the realisation of what he's lost hits him. Not so blasé after that, and the narrator vaguely mentions that there's some war coming up which is going to wipe out his whole generation and there's a fantastic 360 degree pan around the inwardly grieving Pfeiffer. But most of the time you're left to drink in the luxury and ruminate on how the soft-porn scenes in mainstream films get more graphic by the year. A surreal side note- it's produced by Everton owner Bill Kenwright.
Awaydays. Low-budget Merseyside misery. Our hero is Carty, a nice boy out of art college who goes to Tranmere games with his dad, and casts longing glances at the local firm of football hooligans. He meets and befriends one Elvis, the only culturally enlightened member of the firm, at a Bunnymen gig. Elvis has outgrown hooliganism and is delighted to have a mate he can go to post-punk discos with and talk to about existentialism and Big In Japan; he hatches plans for the pair to move to Berlin. To his dismay, Carty cares only for being initiated into the firm and getting hospitalised by fans of Cardiff, Crewe et al- and he really won't take no for an answer.
Every Saturday noon they meet in the pub, get on the train, get off the train and fight the home club's hooligans in a subway. We never see whether they actually go to any of the matches. The internal politics of the firm come to the fore and Elvis descends into junkiedom, confessing to Carty that he's gay and in love with him (from a confession box no less), all of which was blindingly obvious after two minutes. The wham-bam sex and violence are a bit Lock Stock, but the violence at least provides a voyeuristic thrill. The closest I've ever got to participating in football violence was in the pub after a Spurs match, when a fellow Spurs fan overheard my two friends and I discussing Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, deduced that we must be homosexuals and requested that we step outside for a fight. So I'd probably piss myself, but I do understand the attraction.
In a lot of these films the violence is heavily stylised -from the balletic movements of Kubrick's droogs to the slow-motion tackles in the slow-motion rain of The Damned Utd- but the fights here just seem very real. Kicks and punches and blood and crunching bones that happen matter-of-factly, in real time. It's the soundtrack that puts a surreal slant on proceedings; early Simple Minds, 'Unknown Pleasures' and vast quantities of early Ultravox. Hearing John Foxx sing over bootboy battles is like hearing Oasis in an Ingmar Bergman film.
The Third Generation (R.W. Fassbinder). A demanding one- Fassbinder gives the Red Army Faction a kicking with all his characteristically clear-sighted pessimism and misanthropy. The opening credits flash on and off in neon green, the cast list interspersed with digressive rants as a woman with her back to us watches TV in an office overlooking a grey Berlin. So far, so Godard.
There is so much noise in the film that it's a real battle to hear what anyone is saying- there's a TV on in every room and for 90% of the film the actors are battling with the drone of a newsreader; as well as an avant-garde electronic score, itself often competing with scraps of Viennese waltz, Edith Piaf, one of the characters singing on a guitar, a baby screaming. Often, at the start of a scene graffiti from public toilets will be placed over the action, neatly typed out in white capitals and attributed to their source as if they were philosophical quotations and not dumb scrawls soliciting gay sex/advocating the gassing of Turks.
It all put me in mind of Godard circa La Chinoise; a cell of revolutionaries who are really kids and have no idea what they're playing at. When one member invokes Schopenhauer, his grandfather tells him "Schopenhauer said a human existence was worth no more than that of a rock. Nonsense; you need another war, then you'll realise that your life is worth more than a rock. And you'll know the thrill of living between two wars, during a war..." They strive for well-drilled discipline and precision, but the resident of their HQ shares the flat with a junkie who walks around naked. They talk of blowing up the Rathaus but they're barely capable of cooking their dinner without tearing one another to shreds. It's more People's Front of Judea than Al-Qaeda. As for their beliefs, you could call them nihilists but they don't seem to have thought about that part at all.
They end up by kidnapping a businessman (Lemmy Caution from Godard's Alphaville) who earlier joked about capitalists sponsoring terrorism so that the state would push through greater authoritarian controls. It's fast-talking and Swiftian and largely incomprehensible, much more so than the other Fassbinders I've seen. But you can't help being impressed.