Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?

 

OK, admittedly it’s late at night, but Fiona’s safely abed with a cold, there’s no chance of interruption, SURELY I can finish watching Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD this time. I must be about halfway through it.

In episode three of this exciting serial, Kate Dickie is drawn closer still to the ex-con (Tony Curran) she’s been stalking. In fact, having submitted to a pawing at a party round at his flat, she’s working up to a full-fledged seduction.

The film’s third sex scene is something of a departure for Scottish cinema, since it seems to be both consensual and, to a degree, pleasurable for the participants. Not necessarily for the audience, mind you, but let’s not get carried away with hibernian joie de vivre here. More beautiful photography is deployed (night-time views from a tower block are a gift to digital cinema), though I’m uncertain about the cut-aways to a gently burbling lava lamp during the actual coitus — it seems somehow comical. But the shots themselves are v. pretty.

The semi-pleasurable sex (very explicit, very unromantic, kind of squalid and horrible to watch, but photographically nice at times) fits in with the general vibe — this is post-RATCATCHER Scottish miserabilism. Lynn Ramsay’s sullen wallow of a film departed from the social-realist vibe of the Loach imitators with flights of fancy, like a mouse landing on the moon by balloon — only a moment, but it lifts the thing out of straight realism. The new flavour is more “artistic”,  in the sense that poverty must be rendered aesthetically pleasing, less political, but just as dour. (Lynn Ramsay = Tarkovsky with deep-fried Mars Bars.)

Curran’s chat-up line, in which he speculates frankly as to the flavour of Dickie’s genitals, and his description of her as “that bird with the nice arse” seem to have won her over, and the sex scene goes off without a hitch, nobody gets beaten or covered with custard (thank you, YOUNG ADAM, for that enduring image of Caledonian loveplay) and everybody seems to have as good a time as they’re capable of, within the generic constraints.

Then Dickie walks out on Curran, goes to the bathroom, and does something horrible involving bodily fluids.

And to think, I’d been invited round to one of my student’s flat to watch an evening of films about MINING.

Time for bed. I’ll finish this tomorrow. I’ll admit I’m intrigued as to what she’s up to, though. But I can’t help feel that by holding back Dickie’s whole motivation, Arnold has effectively shut the audience out of the film. I have more sympathy at present with the rather vile Curran character, because I share his puzzlement. It’s hard to share anything with Dickie as she’s such a closed book. But I expect all this to be cleared up, and that may justify everything.

Apart from the lava lamp, which needs no justification.

Thank You For Having Me

 

We don’t usually do commercials here at Shadowplay, but I met a very nice chap from Second Run DVDat the Jancsó screening and I said I’d mention his fine company on the blog here. Second Run have been bringing out extremely rare and extremely good movies, such as Jancsó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE, MY WAY HOME and THE ROUND-UP, which was screening that eve. Since the 1960s print of the film, complete with “X” certificate, was minus the original opening artwork, Second Run’s DVD was actually played for a few minutes at the start to give us the necessary background information denied us by whoever distributed the thing back in the day.

And no, I’m not being paid in free DVDs to say this, but Second Run are a great outfit and you should buy/rent their stuff, not just to support a noble cause but because the films are great and you’ll be the ones who benefit. Frame grabs here from their release of MARKETA LAZAROVA support my case admirably, I feel.

It was an evening of meeting interesting folks. Rolland Man, ace film lecturer, was there. Several students and ex-students of mine said hi, including award-winning documentarist Maja Borg, and current 2nd-year Shu Moon Leung, who snapped a picture of me in manly embrace with the great Janscó, which I’ll post here as soon as I receive it.

As I hopped on the bus, I saw Mr. J. standing outside Filmhouselooking, approvingly I think, at the poster for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON. Wish I’d got a picture of THAT.

He’ll be in his trailer.

 

I wonder if Otto Preminger died, of Altzheimer’s and lung cancer, mouthing the word “Rosebud”? Unlikely, I guess. But ROSEBUD, his second-last film, is the one where his critical rep really bottomed out, and it must have stung. If the ailing Preminger could remember anything from recent years, that failure might be it.

Although I’ve yet to experience ROSEBUD, I must admit I found his follow-up, THE HUMAN FACTOR, released four years later, pretty grim — Otto was reportedly already losing the plot, and it’s easy for me to believe. The volcanic Nicol Williamson seems miscast, and the model (and current Mrs. Bowie) Iman gives a performance of extraordinary awkwardness and painful self-consciousness (she’s rather good in STAR TREK VI, though, smoking a cheroot and battling Bill Shatner). Otto could still move the camera gracefully through the barren locations, though one wishes he wasn’t saddled with such an unconvincing studio Moscow for the film’s despairing conclusion. Graham Greene, who wrote the (rather unsatisfying) book, advised Preminger not to attempt the film, which he felt was too subtle for Otto’s temperament, or something. He also remarked afterwards that the film was plagued by budgetary difficulties.

(Despite all of the above, THF has an odd kind of pathos, mainly because it’s so thin-looking, so uncomfortable with its own shabbiness, like a terribly old person trying to cover their nakedness. You don’t want to look, but sorrow somehow forces you.)

No such issues seem to have beset the glossy multinational hostage drama ROSEBUD. The problem here may be more one of intrinsic naffnessin the plot: Palestinian terrorists hijack a yacht containing five naked young millionaires’ daughters, played by Debra Berger, Brigitte Ariel, Lalla Ward (future wife of Dr Who Tom Baker, and now of God-bashing evolutionary scientist Professor Richard Dawkins), Isabelle Huppert and Kim Cattrall.

Choke!

Peter O’Toole is clearly the man to rescue these damsels, and Lord Attenborough turns up also, as somebody called Edward Sloat, which is enough to make me want to see this film VERY BADLY. Naked millionaires’ daughters + Edward Sloat = Shadowplay Must-See.

Cattrall had a rough time with Otto and his ROSEBUD. “Rosedud , we called it,” she told the Guardian in 2002. “I was 17 [Preminger was 69], I hadn’t seen THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, or LAURA, or any of those films, and I didn’t realise what an innovative, brilliant film-maker Preminger was. All I knew was that he was very, very important, and he seemed to be screaming and yelling all the time. There’s a film called GULAG 17 [actually STALAG 17], which he was in, playing a Nazi commandant - and I felt like we were really living it.” Cattrall provoked some of this screaming by laughing whenever Otto called ”Action!”

“Well, I thought that was really funny. I thought they only ever said that in films made about films. I thought in real films, they said something like, ‘When you’re ready.’”

Preminger retaliated by telling Kim, “You remind me of Marilyn Monroe. Not in looks, of course. In lack of talent.”

I always think any actor confronted with this kind of backchat from a director should reply, “Well, you probably shouldn’t have hired me, then.”

Dear me. Is Otto really trying to sell the film based on its VARIETY OF LOCATIONS? And isn’t he rather an awkward presence as voice-over man? I think I even prefer the guy who, as Ewen MacGregor puts it, “must spend all his time driving from one recording studio to another, swigging whisky and smoking cigars and gargling broken glass.”

But still — gotta see ROSEBUD.

This is a much better Otto trailer — it’s alternately LUDICROUS and SOPORIFIC, but the good bits are amazing, starting with Otto’s hilarious first appearance (intentionally hilarious, yes, but why?) , and perhaps climaxing in his hyping of Barbara “Goo-goo” Bouchet, ”a new face…und a new body.” Plus he sounds more and more like Arnie the longer he talks (and he seems to talk a looong time).

I might have to give IN HARM’S WAY another try sometime… I remember the Pearl Harbour stuff being really impressive, Preminger’s long-take aesthetic married to gigantic pyrotechnic effects– not much chance of a retake there. And the Saul Bass end titles are wonderful, of course, the Preminger credit immediately followed by a ‘tomic ’splosion (I never said SUBTLE). But I didn’t get much out of the film otherwise. I find the older John Wayne a little hard to take, until THE SHOOTIST redeems everything.

I love Jonathan Rosenbaum’s piece on late Preminger in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. J-Ro might be more positive today, but he captures with some sympathy the sheer oddness of late Preminger: “Yet for all their hysterical indigestibility, they are candidly (and sometimes painfully) personal works: what is lost in craftsmanship is gained in lucidity, even if this lucidity is often the expression of an ambivalence that borders on the schizophrenic. … Thus the ambiguity beginning in LAURA ends in pure and simple contradiction: the blind viewer may say ‘comedy’, the deaf viewer may say ‘tragedy’, but the spectator will have to settle, like Preminger, for something else.”

That does go some way to describing the fascination of late Preminger, both the good films and the bad films (not that there’s universal agreement on which is which).

Dead Means Very

 

It’s like being in a bloody war. No, wait, we ARE in a bloody war.

But I meant the way the prominent figures of British films have been keeling over this week. Paul Scofield is the latest one I’m aware of, and I feel like putting on LONDON or ROBINSON IN SPACE to hear his majestic voice again, and because those beautiful Patrick Keillor film-essays are the kind of thing I can drift through in a dreamy cloud of pleasure, bewildered when the film ends and I wake into sluggish reality.

Also today we heard of the decease of Brian Wilde, a fine character actor and comic turn, with a long long track record. Back in in 1957 he played Rand Hobart (no relation to Rose), the crazed devil-worshipping farmer in NIGHT OF THE DEMON for Jacques Tourneur, uttering the classic line “It’s in the trees — it’s coming!” before his memorable self-defenestration (the line is repeated in Kate Bush’s song The Hounds of Love, but revoiced by another actor).

Previous to that, Arthur C Clarke shuffled off, and my blog received about fifty hits from people typing in variations of the query “Arthur C Clarke pederast” due to a casual statement I made in an old Euphoria post. Oops.

The big shock was Anthony Minghella’s too-early death. He wasn’t a filmmaker whose work affected me particularly, but it was tragic to lose him so suddenly and so young. His latest film, THE NO 1. LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY, from a novel by Edinburgh writer Alexander McCall Smith, and photographed by Edinburgh-based ace cameraman Seamus McGarvey (the man with Nicole Kidman’s nose on his mantelpiece, grisly souvenir from THE HOURS) airs on the BBC very shortly.

These are the WRONG PEOPLE. I’m basically opposed to the whole idea of death, though I admit it has its uses: it’s important to know there’s something out there worse than THE COTTAGE, for instance. But if we have to have a bunch of film industry deaths, why can’t it be the people ahead of me in the queue for film funding? Not that I wish them any harm, but if SOMEBODY’S got to go…

(Explanatory note on the title of this post: in Scots vernacular, for some reason, “dead” means the same as “very” — one might say, “That was dead good,” or “He’s dead nice-looking.” Or, presumably, “He’s dead dead.”)