Not much point in me writing a Forgotten if I neglect to tell my editor I’ve done so, is there? Belatedly, then, this week’s Forgotten appears.
An unusually precipitous June has left Edinburgh International Film Festival sopping wet this year — I escape the downpour by plunging into Yves Allegret’s grimly wistful UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE, the wettest film on record. Pull on your galoshes and splash over to the Daily Notebook for this forgotten treasure.
BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD, a fine HBO documentary about the mentally unusual chess champion, is screening at Edinburgh International Film Festival but not as part of the neuroscience in cinema strand, although it easily could be: with all the hints of autism, monomania, sensory hyperacuity and paranoid schizophrenia, Fischer’s brain would make an excellent object for study.
After three screenings (I’m such a lightweight) I was falling asleep at the start of Liz Garbus’s movie, but it woke me up and snapped me into attentiveness by the time it got to the epic championship bout between Fischer and Boris Spasski. Like WHEN WE WERE KINGS, the movie uses expert testimony to elucidate just enough of the strategy involved to allow the matches to transcend a mere score-sheet of victories and losses. The boxing movie had Norman Mailer helpfully outlining Ali’s moves so that someone like me, whose experience of fisticuffs is limited to getting duffed up in the school playground, could appreciate some of the craft behind the pummeling, and similar insights provided by experts and associates of Fischer allow the audience to get a sense of the tactics even if they don’t know Philidor’s opening from a hole in the ground.
Extracts from Pudovkin’s CHESS FEVER, the finest of chess-based movies, amusingly illustrate the long history of chess masters who suffered marble loss, my favourite being the guy who came to believe he was playing against God, via wireless — and winning.
Fischer, who I found weirdly sympathetic in spite of nearly every aspect of his personality, seemed to illustrate the particular dangers of monomania — as long as chess was the only thing in his life, and he was on an upward course in his career playing it, his psychological problems had a productive focus. Once he became World Champion, the terror of losing took chess away from him, and so he became narrowly focussed on other, less healthy subjects, such as his anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Since Fischer was himself Jewish by birth, it doesn’t take much analysis to see this as a manifestation of self-hatred, just as Fischer’s difficult and demanding behaviour at tournaments seemed to everyone but him like a kind of psychological warfare. “I don’t believe in psychology, I just believe in good moves,” he said. And with no belief in psychology, he had absolutely no insight or defense when his mind started deserting him.
ARRIETTY is the latest film from Studio Ghibli, and it’s a good one — I haven’t seen TALES FROM EARTHSEA yet but found HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE and PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA excellent yet not as excellent as I’ve been used to from Miyazaki. Here, Hayao M provides script and producing services, and as with HOWL’S the source is a British children’s classic, The Borrowers. Borrowing the idea but not the exact story, Miyazaki and his director Hiromasi Yonibayashi serve up a typically gentle, beautiful world — cel animation proves to be an ideal medium to evoke the separate-but-overlapping worlds of the jumbo humans and the micro-folks, with terrifically expressive sound design eloquently creating the particular perspectives of the differently-scaled characters.
There’s also tactile, sensory detail to the use of objects which makes you truly feel the weight of a pin wielded like a rapier, and four wads of double-sided sticky tape used as climbing gear (folded around the hands and feet) which have convincing heft and stiffness. Water droplets the size of basketballs are carried to and fro, and Arrietty the classic Miyazaki early teenage heroine can dry off after a soaking just by brushing a few snow-globe-sized water domes from her dress.
True, one dialogue scene does foreground a rather obvious eco-message, and the song is arguably overused (when you get to the end of a Miyazaki movie, always say “This’ll be the song, then.”) but the open ending is a brave touch, and along the way there’s excitement, humour, grace and charm, and the most sustained sequence of crow-bashing since ANTICHRIST.
Shadowplay
