Category / Film

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Death of a Son (1989)

Do you remember the days before reality TV?  Do you remember the days before make-over shows?  Do you remember the days when British terrestrial TV used to commission one-off plays?

I bet you don’t.  Not really.

Ross Devenish’s Death of a Son is a powerful reminder of why it is that all of those British TV drama strands gradually died off.  It features one well-known actress (Lynn Redgrave) and a script that combines bone-crunching worthiness with grinding sentimentality and a complete lack of intelligence.  It is awful.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Gymnast (2006)

Does a ‘beautiful’ film necessarily have to have amazing cinematography?

Despite really rather pedestrian lensing, Ned Farr’s The Gymnast is beautiful film.  Filled with well-thought out visual motifs and built around a series of stunning pieces of aerial performance art, the film not only calls into question traditional conceptions of beauty but also traditional models of self-actualisation.  Is being honest with yourself and the people around you really all that is needed in order to be happy?  This film about a lesbian coming out of the closet late in life suggests that some outings are more equal than others.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

“To shoot people, sweetheart!”

And with those words… my heart soared with joy.

Richard Wallace’s The Fallen Sparrow is very much an overlooked gem.  One of a series of novels by Dorothy B. Hughes that were adapted for the screen during the hey-day of the film noir, The Fallen Sparrow is a demented psychological thriller in which a tortured veteran of the Spanish Civil War cuts a swathe through New York high society as he attempts to solve the (possible) murder of the man who helped him escape the clutches of the Gestapo.  As the veteran moves from reconnecting with his old friends and into a world of sinister academics and crusading noblemen, the lines between reality and delusion blur and then finally disappear.  Boasting a fantastic script and some rather surprising performances, The Fallen Sparrow deserves its place in cinema history.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

Robinson in Space (1997) – Ghosts of Albion plc

The ending of Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) saw the fictional academic Robinson and his loyal but un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) drowning in a sea of absence.  Having criss-crossed the city of London in a desperate search for its hidden nature, the pair eventually collapse.  Exhausted, deflated and defeated.  London, they announce, is a city without essence.  Devoid of any underlying meaning or fundamental essence, Britain’s capital is a hermeneutic desert.  A space in which no meaning can grow and into which visitors are forced to carry any truths they may need in order to keep themselves alive.

Robinson in Space marks the return of London’s intrepid duo.  This time the pair are hired by an un-named international advertising agency to produce a similar report on the unspecified ‘problem of England’.  However, despite travelling further and further across the country, Robinson’s initial romanticism about England proves to be just as deluded as his romanticism about London.  Indeed, neither an enchanted kingdom full of art and fellowship nor a gothic landscape full of dread and oppression, England reveals itself as a land of facts.  Tedious, maddening, preposterous facts.

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by Jonathan M

London (1994) – Squabbling Hegemonies

It is difficult enough to try and capture the meaning of a book or a film, but how about attempting to distill the essence of a particular time or a particular place?  How about an entire city?  Travel writing is an attempt to do exactly this.  To take the experience of a particular place at a particular time and distill it down into the collection of sounds and symbols that make up the written word.  Thought of in these terms, the task seems onerous. After all… books are creatures of words.  Even films are beings of language once you bear in mind their scripts, their budget meetings and the attempts by directors to tell actors and technicians alike exactly what they want from a particular scene.  To write about the meaning of words is one thing but to write about something bigger than language is another.  Something like the city of London.

Patrick Keiller’s London is a combination of documentary film and extended essay.  Its un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) tells of his cross-London walks and expeditions in the company of a quixotic academic known only as Robinson.  Robinson has a very particular vision of London.  A vision he desperately wants to be true, and if it cannot be true then it must be about to come true.  But as the pair cross and re-cross the city of London along with its suburbs, financial districts, parks and run-down estates, it soon becomes clear that London will not conform to any single vision and that this refusal to conform is the very essence of the Mother of All Cities.

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by Jonathan M

Another Year (2010) – Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

“Work then without disputing,” said Martin; “it is the only way to render life supportable.”

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used now and then to say to Candide:

“There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden.”

 

So ends Voltaire’s immortal novel Candide, ou L’Optimisme (1759).  It is an oddly enigmatic ending that has elicited much commentary and speculation.  By the end of the book, Candide has witnessed and experienced many hardships and horrors.  He has travelled the world and seen the worst of it.  Yet, when called upon to distill his all of his knowledge and insight, the optimist expresses only a desire to tend his garden.  This desire to return to the garden is not an ode to the unexamined life or a hymn to religion’s capacity to return us to Edenic bliss.  It is a belief, simply stated, that the world is what we make of it and that the harshness of existence can only be kept at bay by the construction of a carefully tended space.  A space that is ours.  A space that we control and that we care for.  When Voltaire suggests that first we must tend to our gardens he is telling us that meaning is not something that we discover in the world, but something we build into it.  Happiness requires work.  It requires continual effort.

 

This simple realisation lies at the heart of Mike Leigh’s new film Another Year.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The String (2009)

As someone who watches quite a bit of GLBT cinema – without actually being either G, L, B or T – I am often struck by the way in which gay indie film directors present coming out as a very simple moral question.  Most GLBT films frame coming out as a question of personal honesty and self-actualisation.  According to these films, people are in denial until they are not, at which point they come out and it is up to their friends and families to deal with it and by ‘deal with it’ I mean ‘accept it unconditionally’.  Indeed, GLBT cinema traditionally presents the ethics of coming out as purely a question of acceptance.  If you accept your friend/relative/former partner then you are morally good, if you do not then you are morally bad.  But what of the morality of living a lie?  what of the morality of turning people’s lives up-side down so that you can finally be honest with yourself?  Surely these are not simple questions.

Mehdi ben Attia’s film Le Fil addresses the social repercussions of coming out in a way that most Anglo-American GLBT films refuse to do.  A loving satire of upper-class Tunisian society, The String asks whether hypocrisy really is a worse option than social isolation.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Seven-Ups (1973)

Did you enjoy Steve McQueen in Bullitt?  How about Gene Hackman in The French Connection?  Well… believe it or not the producer of both of those films went on to direct a film of his own.  A film with many of the same advisors and technical assistants.  The result?  A Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie but, unlike Bullitt and The French Connection, The Seven-Ups is nothing else than a Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Sealed Cargo (1951)

Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1980s will remember a time when TV schedules were bulked out with lesser-known black and white films.  Films which, as a kid, you would seldom find yourself watching.  There is a definite rainy-saturday-afternoon feel to Alfred L. Walker’s Sealed Cargo.  A war-time drama dealing with U-boats and the paranoia surrounding Nazi infiltration of the Danish merchant navy, Sealed Cargo features both some sublimely atmospheric moments of tension and some frankly demented action sequences.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007) – Willful Stupidity as Self-Protection

In order to mourn the passing of the Humanist and Historian Tony Judt, the New York Review of Books decided to republish an essay of his about the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz.  In this piece, Judt draws particular attention to Milosz’s invocation of the concept of Ketman.  Ketman, originally an Islamic concept referring to a person’s capacity to pay public lip-service to the worldview of political authority whilst maintaining a private opposition to that world-view, was used by Milosz to explain how it was that Communism continued to hold sway over entire populations despite its myriad hypocrisies and impracticalities.  Judt then goes on to argue that American college students struggle with the concept of Ketman:

Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach.

Judt then points out that market capitalism holds a similar sway over the West as Communism once did over the East.  We all know that capitalism is horribly flawed.  We all know that it makes some people disgustingly rich while denying even the most basic necessities to billions of others.  We know this and yet we simply cannot imagine what it would be like to live without the Market.

In Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

Set during the final years of Romania’s Ceauşescu regime,  Christian Mungiu’s 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni şi 2 Zile is an exploration of what it is like to be held between two equally dehumanising intellectual systems.  Intellectual systems that demand complete ideological loyalty despite both being horrifically flawed.

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