Tag: nineteenth century

The Woman King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Outside of the Greek myth of the Amazons, we don’t really think of armies as being made up of women rather than men prior to the last few decades, yet historically this actually occurred in a West African country, the Kingdom of Dahomey (further info: National Geographic; Wikipedia) between the middle of the 17th and the end of the 19th centuries. These warrior women are the subject of this film, which takes place in 1823.

A prologue shows a small unit of the women in action under their General Nansica (an unforgettable Viola Davis) as they attack and slaughter a unit of (male) soldiers from the neighbouring Oyo kingdom who have invaded one of their villages. These women are fearsome indeed and fly in the face of the representational norm female or military.

After this compelling, action-packed opening, the narrative shifts to follow rebellious, young Dahomey girl Nawi (Thusu Mbedo) whose traditionalist father attempts to marry her off to an older man. She takes an immediate dislike to this proposed husband and refuses the match. So her father instead takes her to the king’s palace to become a slave to King Ghezo (John Boyega). At least, that’s what you assume her fate will be, but once inside the gates she and numerous other newcomers have the option to train as soldiers for Nansica who puts her under a trusted lieutenant Izogie (Lashana Lynch, the black female 007 from No Time To Die, Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021).

Following the template of Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), the film observes the training of these women into full-fledged fearsome fighting machines (even if this episode doesn’t quite equal Kubrickian rigour in its execution). There is also much introspection on the part of Nawi whose independence gets her into trouble with Nansica’s chain of command but whose initiative (in the manner of so many characters in individualism-oriented, Hollywood films) ultimately proves an asset.

This is the time of the slave trade, with black nations selling members of their neighbouring countries – those captured in war, for instance – to profiteering white westerners. It would be tempting to try and paint Dahomey as not taking part in this, and indeed much is made both of the warrior women freeing slaves and of a Westernised, black man travelling with the slavers forced to come to terms with the evils of the trade. This may be a case of playing fast and loose with the truth.

This is a story about black people, specifically women. This means that, without relying on the often ridiculous, historical inaccuracies of colour-blind casting, it provides black actresses (most of the cast) with some spectacularly good parts and enables their delivery of some memorable performances. Moreover, the extraordinary women depicted here actually existed in history; the fact that a halfway decent movie has been made about them is a cause for celebration.

The Woman King is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 7th.

Watch the film trailer below. (Please note that the irritating, ill-judged pop soundtrack is not representative of the film):

The Lighthouse

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The 1890s. The constant pounding of 19th century industrial machinery. Stark black and white photography in a 4:3 Academy aspect ratio. On the prow of a steamship as it ploughs through the water stand two men. They head towards an island with a light… a lighthouse. They disembark from a rowing boat.

Inside the building, the older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) instructs his new assistant (Robert Pattinson), who he constantly addresses as “Lad”, in his duties. Despite what’s written in the manual, he won’t allow the assistant to operate the light itself – he’s charged with repair and maintenance work.

They get off to a bad start when the Lad refuses a drink from his new superior, opting for water rather than whisky. Some time later though, he relents to join him in a whisky and asks that they address each other by name. The assistant is Ephraim, the keeper is Tom. Ephraim becomes increasingly unreliable. He has a run in with a gull and lobs a rock at it, an act which upsets Tom who believes that dead sailors’ souls inhabit the birds. Ephraim is sitting in Tom’s hoist halfway up the lighthouse exterior on painting duty when it breaks, causing him to fall some twenty or so feet.

He also has unnerving, increasingly sexual dreams and masturbatory fantasies of a mermaid, brought on perhaps by a combination of the isolation of the place and the small carved mermaid figurine he finds in a slit in his mattress. He finds her lying in recesses under seaweed atop rocks. He imagines tentacles passing and strange, close up shots of orifices in undersea creatures.

The two men’s rough period costumes and lengthy conversations in equally period dialogue over meal times and drink, the cramped lighthouse room and stairwell interiors, the harsh exteriors of rocky outcrop, gulls, mermaids, the contrasty black and white photography, the constant, pounding and pulsing industrial sound, all these elements combine to render the film a unique sensory narrative, visual and aural experience for the viewer.

It helps too that the dramatic element is grounded in two striking lead performances, but the other elements are very much in play. As the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly dreamlike and harder and harder to distinguish fantasy from reality. It’s not always clear if events are unfolding in the real world or somewhere in Ephraim’s subconscious. Like the intermittent shots rising up the spiral staircase lighthouse interior, this us not do much as descent into madness as, disturbingly, an ascent to that state as if it were a higher physical plane.

Although not that long a film, it’s highly demanding, not something to see if you’re quite tired after a hard day’s work. This is not a film that carries the viewer: a certain amount of work is required of the audience. Approach it in that frame of mind, though, and it should prove rewarding.

The Lighthouse is out in the UK on Friday, January 31st. On VoD on Monday, May 25th.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The mid-19th century novel The Personal History Of David Copperfield is considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece. Narrated in the first person by the eponymous David, it tells of one man’s life from birth through a series of adventures and encounters with a motley crew of relatives, friends and associates that seem to span the social breadth of Victorian England.

To cut the novel’s tale down to a manageable movie length, director Ianucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell have dumped certain characters and subplots to focus on others. As with the director’s previous outing The Death Of Stalin (2017), the final film half works yet is beset by strange casting choices – actors playing Russians sporting a variety of English dialects in Stalin, various BAME actors playing roles that aren’t always entirely believable in terms of their ethnicity in Copperfield. That includes the film’s lead Dev Patel, who plays David convincingly as a wide-eyed innocent.

There’s a great deal of racism around in the 21st Century: it’s hard to believe there wasn’t considerably more in the 19th when few were trying to address those issues, yet no-one seems to notice Patel’s obvious ethnic background. When he’s sent to live with the family of his mother’s kindly housekeeper Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), she and her husband have adopted a number of orphans, one of whom, Ham (Anthony Welsh), is black, which could make sense. Later, however, when the mother of David’s privileged, white, secondary school friend James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) is played by the black actress Nikki Amuka-Bird, the ethnic casting is distinctly unbelievable. Pursuing the colour blind casting still further, Ianucci casts Chinese British actor Benedict Wong as Wickfield, the financier ultimately ruined by alcoholism and another terrific black actress, Rosalind Eleazar, as his daughter Agnes.

On one level, colour blind casting sounds great and if you view the whole thing as a satire not based on any specific, historical place and time then it’s not a problem. Sadly, Dickens is very much a man writing about the 19th century and even though all the actors are fine in terms of performance, the BAME casting sometimes doesn’t work. I’m not saying the entire cast should be white – there were certainly some BAME people around – but I’m calling for an attempt at historical accuracy, a practice which should take precedence over the accidental pursuit of a politically correct fantasyland that never was.

Outside of the ethnic controversy, Ianucci proves highly adept at casting Dickens’ characters. Dev Patel carries the film well and other highlights include Hugh Laurie’s Mr Dick, a sweet if mentally ill man who believes Charles I to have deposited his thoughts in his (Mr. Dick’s) head and Ben Wishaw’s suitably ingratiating social climber Uriah Heep. Tilda Swinton doesn’t appear particularly stretched in the role of David’s controlling and donkey-hating aunt Betsey Trotwood.

Dickens wanted to highlight the problem of want in Victorian society and the film represents this aspect of his writing well. The constant hounding of Micawber (Peter Capaldi) for his debts results in one memorable scene where his baby in its pram is suddenly moving down the hall as the bailiffs grab under the front door and pull the hall carpet out underneath it. Equally impressive are the scenes of David working as a child in a bottle factory where the machines are too tall for him to operate properly.

Elsewhere however, as with Stalin, one struggles to remember that Ianucci is the comic genius behind television’s political comedy series The Thick Of It (2005-2012) and its superb feature film spin-off In The Loop (2009, in both of which Peter Capaldi so brilliantly played ruthless and foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker). Maybe he’s better at portraying contemporary rather than period stories. That said, if his Copperfield never quite scales the genuinely funny comedic heights of The Thick Of It, or even reaches the foothills, it at least gets Dickens’ remarkable characters onto the screen and is not without its moments.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is out in the UK on Friday, January 24th. On VoD in June.

Daguerrotype (Le Secret de la Chambre Noire)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In a large house in a rural French town, contemporary photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet) employs 19th century daguerreotype photographic plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. (The “chambre noire” of the title is the French term for both “darkroom” and “camera obscura”.) Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. Stéphane attaches his models to metal rigs designed to hold them in place for the duration, an experience both uncomfortable and sometimes painful for them. He makes a living from fashion shoots set up by his colleague Vincent (Mathieu Amalric).

In between paid gigs, Stéphane obsessively photographs on a larger plate camera life-sized images of his 22-year-old daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau) just as while she was still alive he previously lensed his late wife Denise (Valérie Sibilia). Exposing his daughter for longer and longer periods of time of around 60 minutes, he sometimes has her drink liquid compounds to help her keep still.

Marie is concerned that the mercury-laden chemicals required for her father’s work, spillages and seepages of which can kill vegetation, are stored near the greenhouse in which she’s grown rare plants since she was a child. She wants to study botany and gets accepted on a course in Toulouse. This would mean moving away from home. She’s deeply unhappy about the father-daughter relationship and her father’s new assistant Jean (Tahar Rahim), talking to estate agent Thomas (Malik Zidi), hatches a plan to convince Stéphane of Marie’s death so that he will sell the house at a low price enabling Jean and Marie to make a fast buck by reselling at market value. It’s the sort of plot from which Hitchcock or Chabrol might have made a terrific suspense thriller.

“He’s confused photography and reality for so long he can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead”, Marie confides to Jean. A few minutes in, when neither Jean nor the audience have been introduced to Marie, he spots her as a silent apparition in a blue, nineteenth century dress moving slowly up a staircase to be briefly framed like a pictorial subject in the circular landing above. Have we just seen a ghost?

Occasional creaks, blackouts and apparitions recall classic ghost stories like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963). There’s a scene when Marie emerges from a bedroom that recalls the a similar scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and there are echoes in the father’s moulding his daughter into her departed mother which recall Obsession (Brian DePalma. 1976), itself a reworking of Vertigo. The heavily melancholic/ romantic score by Grégoire Hetzel, while light years away from Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo and Obsession, has a similar effect.

However, those expecting a shocker like Kurosawa’s own Pulse/Kairo (2001) or Creepy (2016) are likely to be disappointed. Admittedly, an unexpected fall down some stairs proves as unnerving as anything in Pulse/Kairo and unsettling corridor lighting cues recall rival J-horror ghost outing Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002). Yet the film largely eschews J-horror shock tactics to deliver a far more meditative, languorous and fluid experience to dreamlike, ethereal effect – as you might expect from a film based around the slow processes of nineteenth century photography.

Despite the French cast, crew, locations and architecture, this feels every inch a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film with numerous echoes of his other, Japanese-shot work. Opening exteriors recall the house that opens Before We Vanish (2017) and in almost every scene, there’s a clean feel to the composition familiar from those other films. Away from his native Japan, Kurosawa has imposed his own unique visual sensibilities on French culture and come up with something at once recognisably French and at the same time strangely alien to that culture.

(A note on spelling: the photographic plate is referred to as a ‘Daguerreotype’ after its inventor Louis Daguerre, while the film’s title drops the second ‘e’, presumably to make the English title’s pronunciation easier for a popular audience.)

Daguerrotype is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection. And don’t forget to check our interview with Kurosawa!