Tag: Jonny Greenwood

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

Phantom Thread

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

American director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film to be set in England ostensibly concerns a ladies’ dress designer to the rich and famous in the 1950s. It moves between London where Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) works and the house in the country where he relaxes. It also moves between the obsessive, creative designer and his efficient, business-minded sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the woman he meets and comes slowly but surely to depend on as his model, muse and partner. Beneath the surface, it’s about relationships, manipulation and control.

There’s also the two siblings’ long dead mother with whom Reynolds – basically a mother’s boy – is obsessed. So much so that, when he falls ill (possibly fatally), he sees her standing by the wall of his bedroom and speaks to her (she doesn’t respond). We know it’s her because of a photograph seen earlier: the apparition gives away no more information than the photograph. “Always carry it with you”, he tells Alma on their first date. He likes sewing things – photographs coins, messages – into clothing. His mother’s picture is sewn into his coat lining.

When I say first date… Well, Reynolds wines and dines Alma, a very ordinary waitress with a slight German accent who’s working at a small village hotel, then takes her back to his house in the country… so that he can try out material on her torso and start designing a dress for her. Later, he gets out his tape measure just in time for Cyril to turn up and write down Alma’s measurements as Reynolds calls them out.

The narrative parades a bewildering array of House of Woodcock clientele, from fans who would give anything to wear one of his dresses (swiftly dismissed from the Woodcock restaurant table by Cyril) to royalty with entourage, from a well-paying but ultimately self-loathing drunk to Alma the muse. Reynolds and Alma remove a commissioned dress from the drunk’s body as she sleeps her stupor off. “Not worthy of the House of Woodcock”, says Alma.

Also on show is the dress design, manufacture and modelling display process, complete with a team of seamstresses who, when Reynolds falls ill and collapses onto a dress, have to work late in order to repair it for delivery abroad the next morning.

By far the most interesting aspect of the film, however, is the interplay between the three main characters. Reynolds can be stubborn, telling Alma she’s making too much noise buttering her toast at breakfast which destroys the rest of his working day. Alma obsessively loves Reynolds and desires to have him and his time on her own terms. As such, she is more than his match. As too is Cyril. A power struggle between the two women is inevitable. Even more interesting, picking mushrooms in the country, Alma decides that the only way to get Reynolds under her control may be to poison him, something with which Reynolds, once he realises what she’s up to, readily complies.

So although this has all the trappings of a film about fashion and clothes design (specifically dresses) and more than satisfies on that level, and while it’s also beautifully paced and photographed and boasts a fantastic period score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, the film plays out less as a 1950s period costume piece and more as a drama about some very dark interpersonal subject matter indeed. It feels less epic than certain of Anderson’s earlier offerings (Boogie Nights/1997, Magnolia/1999, The Master/2012) and closer to his more intimate debut Hard Eight a.k.a. Sydney (1996) and his other Day-Lewis collaboration There Will Be Blood (2012). Hard Eight shows a lowlife US world and Blood a self-made man. However, Thread’s characters are most definitely English (or German immigrant in Alma’s case) and part of the circus surrounding and servicing the privileged classes.

We’d love to see Anderson dealing with something that gets under the skin of ordinary, non-privileged Brits rather than the well-heeled types so often portrayed in US and indeed British dramas. For now, though, the slow-burning Phantom Thread will do very nicely, thank you.

Phantom Thread is out in the UK on Friday, February 2nd. The film has received six Oscar nominations. On Netflix in January 2020.