Tag: novel

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

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.

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

Tell It To The Bees

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1952, Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the small Scottish town where she grew up to take over her father’s medical practice as the local doctor. She left in her teenage years under scandalous circumstances which, we’ll learn later, involved falling in love with another girl in an age when such things were frowned upon. When young Charlie Weekes (Gregor Selkirk) turns up at her surgery with a minor injury, recognising he may be going through something of a hard time she takes him back to her house to show him the bee hives she keeps in her garden. She tells him you can share any secret with the bees and they’ll understand.

Charlie’s mum Lydia (Holliday Grainger) isn’t having an easy time of it either. Her husband Robbie (Emun Elliot) became a changed man during the war and their relationship is over. He has to all intents and purposes moved out of the family home. Lydia holds down a factory floor position at the mill where her less than sympathetic sister in law Pam (Kate Dickie) works, but is behind on the rent and eviction is not far off on the horizon. Lydia’s fury at the new doctor taking her son to his house is mitigated when she meets Jean and discovers the latter is a woman, not a man.

Once Lydia and Charlie are evicted, Jean gives them lodging. When Lydia is laid off, Jean gives her a job as housekeeper. On news of her eviction, Lydia – a keen dancer – heads to a local pub, hits the drink and is all over the first man to join her on the dance floor. Charlie spots her through the window and feels betrayed. If you’ve seen the trailer or publicity stills which accurately pitch the film as a lesbian romance you’ve got a pretty good idea where this is going – although the narrative has a few surprises in store towards the end.

Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s adaptation of Fiona Shaw’s novel proves effective for the most part, capturing the feel of a small town where everybody knows everybody else and no secrets stay hidden for long. In passing, it delivers believable portraits of bailiffs working for landlords and the harsh, shop floor working conditions of (mostly female) mill workers. Doctors working within the newly founded NHS find that patients can’t quite get used to the idea that medical treatment is free and consequently are slower in seeking advice or treatment than they might be today (at least, while we still have an NHS free to all at the point of need). Finally, in an unexpectedly harrowing subplot, a backstreet abortion goes wrong threatening to kill off a minor character.

Beyond the young Charlie, the few other male characters are deftly sketched if mostly on the fringes of the narrative. Lydia’s husband Robbie is a brute given to occasional bouts of violence, unable to relate to his wife yet still tragically in love with her. He contrasts sharply with Jean’s kindly solicitor friend Jim (Stephen Robertson) who proposes to her then remains genuinely interested in her well-being even after his advances have been rejected. Elsewhere the boy with whom Charlie plays in the woods talks to him about “a dirty dyke”, the only words on offer to describe Jean’s sexual preferences.

All the performances are top notch (why doesn’t Kate Dickie get more decent roles?). A mention should also go to the decision to shoot with real bees rather than special effects: the bee wrangling and cinematography yield spectacular results.

The one place the film trips up follows a scene in which the outraged Robbie plunges his fist through one of Jean’s hives. If you kept bees and discovered someone had done this, you’d most definitely have a reaction. But, inexplicably, Jean doesn’t ever appear to notice this has happened. (It may not be a script error – it’s possible this material was there and either not shot or cut out after shooting to bring down the running length.) It’s an irritating plot hole that knocks the film down at least a star on our rating. Which is a shame because, that sole misstep aside, the whole thing works as a serviceable, small town, post-war, lesbian, romantic drama. With a young boy’s perspective thrown in alongside those of the two women for good measure.

Tell It To The Bees is out in the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The couple walks along. They’re completely in love. “Are you ready for this?”, asks Fonny (Stephan James). “I’ve never been more ready for anything in my whole life”, replies Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne).

Welcome to a movie that is at once one of the most romantic of the year – out just in time for Valentine’s Day – and a gritty indictment of the way black people are treated in the USA. Which sounds a pretty unlikely mix, but then Barry Jenkins is hardly an average director. His Best Picture Oscar winning Moonlight (2016) proved this for this writer by having one character at three different ages played by three actors and making that potentially disastrous proposition work so brilliantly on the screen.

If Beale Street Could Talk‘s source material is a 1974 novel set in Harlem by US writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) who explored the black experience in some considerable depth and is the subject of highly recommended documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017). The novel is Baldwin‘s response to the incarceration of black people for crimes they have not committed by a system, as he sees it, designed to keep them in their place through systematic abuse and mistreatment. Baldwin has a gift for writing about people, what makes them tick, their good and bad qualities.

The film’s romantic opening soon gives way to something else: Tish visits Fonny, in prison for a crime he did not commit, to tell him she’s going to have his baby. The only way they can communicate is through a glass partition. They’ve been friends since childhood and are now partners as adults. But they’re not married and she’s got to tell her and his parents about the baby. And the family have to find a way to get him out of prison.

The narrative is a clever exercise in parallel editing. One strand shows Tish and Fonny’s life together, growing into love, finding an apartment, his being picked on by a racist cop (Ed Skrein). The other shows Tish’s story following Fonny’s incarceration, her telling both their families about the baby, the ongoing life process of pregnancy, birth and raising a son, fighting for her partner’s release with her mother’s help.

The two leads are terrific. KiKi Layne is a real find, capturing a mixture of innocence and fragility on the one hand and a perseverance and strength on the other. The latter is something Tish gets from her parents, especially her mother Sharon (Regina King) who at one point has to fly to Puerto Rico to persuade gone to earth witness Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) to testify that Fonny wasn’t the man who raped her.

Although he gets less screen time, Stephan James as Fonny is good too whether showing Fonny’s essential optimism in his life in the outside world or his attempt to hold himself together as prison life threatens to make him fall apart, the latter experience only really seen from Tish’s side of the glass partition when she visits him. (There is no attempt to otherwise show Fonny’s prison life beyond such visitation scenes, no way the film might be described as a prison movie).

In addition there are numerous impressive bit parts – the film is surely destined to become a future Who’s Who of Black US acting talent – and other aspects of the production do it proud too. The sequence where first Tish’s family then Fonny’s react to the news of her pregnancy deserves a special mention, there being much to say about the way Tish’s family, despite being oppressed by a system rigged against their race, practise life-affirming values in marked contrast to Fonny’s family where father is driven to rage by feelings of powerlessness while mother and daughters use legalistic Biblical language to lord it over the “sinful” Tish.

Special mentions should go to James Laxton’s cinematography for juxtaposing the lush, vivid palette of a seventies Harlem romance against the harsh, brutal colours of an oppressive prison environment (exactly the qualities that seemed to be absent from the cinematography of that other recent, period New York movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and an achingly beautiful score by Nicholas Britell. That said, this is one of those movies where all the technical people and their departments, those unsung, behind the scenes heroes of movie-making, each more than pull their individual weight to contribute to a whole that adds up to far, far more than the (considerable) sum of its parts.

This remarkable film consolidates Barry Jenkins’ achievement in Moonlight and deserves to be even more widely seen, not only because it so beautifully articulates the black experience in the racist society that is the USA but also because it’s so well put together in terms of all aspects of movie-making craft. The cast, main and bit parts, are to die for and it’s a great introduction to the writings of James Baldwin to boot. See it.

If Beale Street Could Talk is out in the UK on Friday, February 8th. On VoD on Friday, June 21st.