Tag: money

The Good Person

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Hot shot film producer Sharon (Moran Rosenblatt) flies home from abroad only to discover that her husband won’t let her past the gate entryphone to their home on arrival. Furious, she borrows (or, technically, steals) his parked car so she can go about her business. On arrival at her empty office, her long-standing assistant Alma (Lia Barnett) informs her that the bailiffs have taken everything.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so she takes a meeting with another producer who under normal circumstancea she wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but who is snowed under with projects and wants her to take one of them off his hands. Thus, she becomes the producer of a comeback movie by a notorious womaniser who gave it all up to become an ultra-conservative rabbi, Uzi Silver (Rami Heuberger), a star who hasn’t worked for several years, i. The money is already in place from the Film Fund, so the project should be a piece of cake. It all looks too good to be true. And, as so often in life, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

Her fears abut the rabbi are confirmed when she learns that he won’t allow any women on the set apart from herself, nor will he negotiate with her (female) line producer in the room. And there’s no script – well, adapted from 1 Samuel 18-31 (this refers to the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently chaptered and versed slightly differently from the Christian one), the script is the story of King Saul visiting the Witch at Endor prior to his military defeat and his falling on his own sword. All she has to do is get someone to write a script and he’ll rubber stamp it. He himself is to play King Saul while his wife, the star who played alongside him on the last film before they got out of the movie business, is to play the Witch of Endor. To write the script, Sharon enlists the help of her old friend Shai (Uri Gottleib).

To reveal what happens next would be to spoil the film, except to say that this is one of those films where if anything can possibly go wrong for the central character, then it does. Somewhat curiously, it was billed in the festival blurb as a screwball comedy, however, I personally wouldn’t apply that label to it and fear anyone seeing this with that expectation would be severely disappointed. Thinking about it in retrospect, there IS comedy here, but it’s black comedy of the wry observation variety which may make you smile after the event but won’t make you laugh at the time.

The film is shot in stylish black and white apart from occasional sequences in preview theatres watching parts of the movie (only the odd clip here or there makes it into the film that we, the audience, are watching) which are in colour. This is scarely a new trick (see, for instance, Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, 2021) but it’s a tried and tested one that does the job. Elsewhere, the piece is nicely paced: director Anner and his editor keep it moving along nicely and you’ll agonise alongside Sharon as she undergoes one terrible experience after another.

Set in present day Jerusalem, it presents the movie business as essentially areligious in a wider culture which is clearly steeped in one of the major world religions, i.e. Judaism. The movie business is almost portrayed as a religion with its own set of irrefutable tenets (no-one puts it in these terms, but, for example, thou shalt offer opportunities for employment equally to members of both sexes) which are challenged, for good or ill, by those of conservative Orthodox Judaism (men should not touch or even associate with women, for they are unclean – my paraphrase) with the members of the Film Fund just as shocked as Sharon with Uzi’s “no women other than you on the set” demand to the point where they momentarily consider cancelling the funding.

You could argue, though, that non-association with women is exactly what Sharon’s husband does to her at the start of the piece. You could also argue that the only way she gets her films made is because she has a rich husband who bankrolls her (until, at the start of this, he no longer does) which makes it quite a smart sideswipe at the idea of the film producer who has got there by dint of hard work and talent alone. No-one suggests Sharon isn’t talented (although she’s fallen on producer’s hard times and the Uzi Silver / King Saul project is clearly her selling out, making something in which she doesn’t really believe in order to get some easy money), but equally it seems that without her husband, she is (financially) nothing, itself an ultra-conservative idea.

There would apear to be many more layers to this film on reflection, which might reveal themselves on further viewing; on first watch, however, it comes across simply as a great ride.

The Good Person plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Price Of Everything

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

On one level, Nathaniel Kahn’s latest is a filmmaker’s dream. Kahn, who made the compelling documentary My Architect (2003) about his father Louis Kahn, had an idea for something about art and money and persuaded his backers to let him just go out and start shooting. And he got some great material. The Price Of Everything is mostly vox pops, although that’s augmented with footage of the subjects doing what they do – artists working in their studios, dealers checking proofs of catalogues, buyers showing us artworks in their homes – and the odd bit of historical footage such as of 1973’s infamous Robert Scull sale.

New York taxi driver Scull was both a brilliant publicist of events and an avid collector of modern art by then unknown artists. His sale at New York’s Sotheby Parke-Bernet of some 50 of his paintings saw them sell for up to 50 times the price he’d originally paid. It established the idea that artworks could be traded for considerable profit, enraging the artists who made no money whatsoever from such sales. Although, as Scull points out in archive footage to painter Robert Rauschenberg, the new prices set the bar for future sales of such artists’ works which would benefit them too in the long run.

Celebrated artist Jeff Koons, whose ‘Rabbit’ casts an inflatable silver-coloured rabbit in solid steel, is here revealed as as much a player of the art market as a maker of art. Like a Renaissance artist employing a vast team of over 100 artisans, his studio produces a steady stream of work designed to sell to collectors at the highest prices. The contradiction doesn’t seem to worry him, but it leaves a nasty taste if you think art is something more than commercial product.

At the other end of the scale, abstract painter Larry Poons was praised in the late sixties for his widely collected Op Art dot paintings. But when he abandoned that painting style for something looser, his newer works failed to sell like his favoured ones. The market is shown to elevate its chosen art practitioners such as Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose 2012 painting Drown catapulted her into the ranks of top selling artists when it fetched around five times its estimate at auction in 2016.

Alongside the artists, the film parades a veritable circus of dealers, buyers and others. Sotheby’s Amy Cappellazzo protests that contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter (seen in the film, but not that much) is happy to take money from private buyers, but would rather his works went to galleries where the wider public can see them. This assumes neither collectors nor museums have hidden them away in storage.

Elsewhere, collector Stefan Edlis proudly shows off works in his collection as well as his battered, ‘J’-stamped passport that came with him when he escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager. He clearly believes art is meant to be seen and in 2015 rather than secreting them out of sight somewhere as their collection increased, he and co-collector wife Gael Neeson donated some 42 works to the Art Institute Of Chicago where the public could see and enjoy them.

This (and much more besides) may be fascinating stuff, but the problem is that Kahn doesn’t seem to know what to do with it once he’s shot it. The resultant mishmash of watchable character studies lacks any real central thesis to pull it together. If you can get past the obscene sums of money moving from collectors to dealers, some of the people pictured come across well and others less so.

I had the feeling that the prices paid for the art works had little to do with their intrinsic (non-monetary) value. Kahn seems to recognise that most artists do what they do out of compulsion, not to make money. However, the only contemporary artists seen here are those who have been rewarded handsomely in financial terms at one time or another. The Price Of Everything is ultimately about capitalism and trading much more than the artists, who mostly appear incidental to the selling process and all too often separated from their work once it’s sold.

The Price Of Everything is out in the UK on Friday, November 16th. Watch the film trailer below:

Microhabitat (So-gong-nyeo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Miso (Lee Som), whose name in Korean means both ‘smile’ and ‘micro’, lives in a small, one room, unheated apartment in Seoul. So cold in fact that when she and her boyfriend Hansol (Ahn Jae-hong) start peeling off multiple layers of clothing in the middle of winter that she’s given up by the time she’s down to her slip. It’ll have to wait ’til the Spring.

Having enough money is a constant struggle, but she’s shrewd and always puts aside enough for basic outgoings like food and rent as well as pleasures like smoking and whisky every month. When her landlord tells her the rent is going up, because his landlord is putting his rent up and he needs to pass some of the increase on to his tenants, she realises she’s going to have to cut something. So she gives him notice with a view to saving up for a new deposit and finding somewhere cheaper.

Now, she’s homeless. And homelessness is the perfect vantage point from which to truly see a society for what it is.

As she carries on with her housekeeping job for assorted agency clients, Miso stays with a series of old friends one after the other who all played together in a band back in the day. Among them, keyboard player Hyun-jung (Kim Gook-hee) is married to a man she hates, living in an apartment with him and his parents where she’s doing all the washing, cleaning and cooking, although she’s a terrible cook and the parents ran a Chinese restaurant for thirty years.

Drummer Dae-yong (Lee Sung-wook) is locked into 20 years of paying for an expensive apartment for his wife of eight months who wanted the apartment but has tired of him. Vocalist Roki (Choi Deok-moon) is ecstatic when she shows up at his and his parents’ apartment and makes plans to trap her there and marry her. And guitarist Jung-mi (Kim Jae-hwa) takes umbridge when Miso joins her husband on a balcony for an after dinner smoking break.

Years later, the friends meet for a funeral for which no-one’s been able to track Miso down. “Whatever happened to her?”, they wonder. From the closing moments, it’s clear that while everyone else, in their different ways, sold out, Miso is still out there, on her own and enjoying her smokes and whisky.

There is so much to admire here it’s hard to know where to start. The obvious place is the character of Miso, who quietly rebels against ever increasing price hikes as they destroy her household budget by opting out of the system while still participating in its little luxuries (her cigs and whisky).

Then there are the friends, each one a deft little character sketch illustrating some human foible or other.

This film has a very definite finger on a cultural pulse that extends far wider than Korea. Prices are increasing, incomes remain stagnant. Those at the top are making a lot of money at everyone else’s expense. And causing a great deal of human misery in the process.

For the most part, the film is beautifully shot and edited, even if it seems to lose its focus somewhat for part of its last third. That’s a minor gripe, though. Its central character is so instantly likeable that one hopes we’ll see more of her – and sooner rather than later too.

Microhabitat opened the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) as part of its strand A Slice Of Everyday Life. It’s available on Mubi for 30 days starting on March 22nd (2019). Watch the film trailer below.