Masquerade

I was predisposed to like CLOUD ATLAS because I directed part of it. Not a large part — not as much as Tom Tykwer or Andy or Lana Wachowski. Just around five seconds of the bottom left hand corner.

Around a year ago, our friend David Brown, who was line producing the Scottish section of the shoot, got in touch with me and asked if the students at Edinburgh College of Art might be persuaded to shoot material for a big split-screen montage showing the media sensation caused when London Irish gangster throws a literary critic off a rooftop for dissing his book. I volunteered my own services and produced a short TV segment debating the merits of murdering critics, and was joined by a number of students, all of us seizing the chance of a decent payday and an exciting CV entry.

It’s possible that the DVD contains the unexpurgated versions of our films, I’ll get back to you on that.

The trailer for the movie was kind of a wow, but did worry me with its VO pontifications. Happily, the movie digests all the philosophizing a lot better than the MATRIX sequels, and struck me as that rare phenomenon, a movie that’s more than the sum of its parts. Following in the path of DW Griffith and INTOLERANCE, Buster Keaton and THE THREE AGES and Bill Forsyth and BEING HUMAN (only the middle movie was a real success), the movie tells six stories in different historical periods, and connects them mainly thematically and with a few little motifs — the gimmick of David Mitchell’s source novel, in which the characters from one story read others, or see movies based on them, isn’t as central here, which means the script has to work to establish why exactly it IS telling so many apparently unrelated yarns. I liked the effect.

We’d heard that the script was around 180 pages and rumours hinted that the rough cut of the first half of the movie came in at three hours, but the finished product, though long, never felt it. Multi-narrative things can drag easily, as it takes longer for each narrative strand to get started, interrupted as it is by others. The team here are buoyed along by the sheer puzzlement of what all these stories have to do with each other. It’s a very different plan from the book’s nested narratives, but a pleasingly perverse one.

It’s also fun trying to figure out the literary and/or cinematic influences behind each story, and which sources inspired Mitchell versus which influenced the filmmakers, something I’m not smart enough to do. But here are some guesses –

South Pacific 1849

No idea where this derives from, but it’s another take on the slave trade, which suddenly seems the topic du jour. It’s quite moving, and improves on DJANGO UNCHAINED with its pseudo-science phrenology monologue from Leo DiCaprio, by giving its slave-owning characters philosophical self-justifications that aren’t just nonsense — they have a particular kind of self-serving pseudo-logic.

Best perf: Jim Sturgess is lovely. I saw THE BROWNING VERSION back in 1994 so I guess I saw him as a kid, but this was my first real exposure. Keith David is also great, but I most enjoyed Tom Hanks grotesque fancy-dress turn.

Cambridge and Edinburgh 1936

The amanuensis set-up made me think of Ken Russell’s TV play Song of Summer, but like all the storylines, this one turns into a thriller. I would have liked to see more of Edinburgh, of course.

Best perfs: Ben Whishaw is very affecting.

San Francisco 1973

Seems to channel bits of SILKWOOD, with its nuclear industry whistle-blower plot. Funny seeing West George Street in Glasgow, situated on a steep hill, standing in for San Francisco. Likewise, a Scottish bridge forms the approach to the power plant, which has been digitally painted in to the shot.

Best perfs: This is Berry’s chance to shine, but I also loved Brody Nicholas Lee, and Hugo Weaving as hitman Bill Smoke, a variant on his MATRIX nasty.

Niall Fulton, who plays The False Natan in NATAN, is standing just offscreen on the right, playing one of the diabolical Hoggins Brothers.

UK 2012

Tykwer’s comic relief episode (to which I contributed my few seconds) ties into the theme of the struggle for liberation, as Jim Broadbent tries to escape from an oppressive old people’s home. I guess it has some antecedents in the English comic novel, but I don’t know what. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST certainly seems relevant though.

Best perfs: It’s Broadbent’s show all the way, but the other oldsters are terrif.

Neo Seoul, Korea, 2144

This one has quite a lot in common with V FOR VENDETTA, which the Wachowskis produced, and it makes sense that this section of the novel would appeal to them. An innocent woman is adopted by a seemingly superhuman terrorist to battle oppression in a future society where some kind of holocaust has been instigated — it’s very similar, but the story world itself is very different, incorporated imagery reminiscent of BLADE RUNNER, ATTACK OF THE CLONES, THX 1138 and even SPEED RACER.

Best perfs: Doona Bae and Xun Zhu are both great, but I also loved James D’Arcy’s coolly “sympathetic” interrogator.

The Big Island of Hawaii 2321

Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker, a post-nuclear adventure where everybody speaks a strange patois of degenerated English, must have been the influence here. By coincidence I just reading Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley, and since that features the culture clash between those who have devolved to barbarism and those who still have technology, that may also have figured in the mix. The filmmakers’ exploded structure pulls this out from the centre of the novel where it’s the only uninterrupted tale, and allows it to bookend the whole film, while weaving in and out. The last shot is a winner.

Best perf: Tom Hanks gets to do his conflicted hero thing here.

Asides from the good performances, the film is also full of strange impersonations, as actors are got up in prosthetics and funny voices to play different ages, genders and races, though interestingly the movie squeamishly eschews the blackface that so enlivened O LUCKY MAN!, the last obvious case of an ensemble cast playing multiple roles. Instead we get a lot of yellowface and some equally unconvincing instances of Korean actors playing white. This is all interesting.

I wasn’t offended in the least. I did wonder slightly at the intended effect, since the makeups are elaborate but not convincing at all, and not all of the actors are suited to chameleonic performances. Hanks makes a nicely repulsive quack, and an amusing Scottish landlord, and he does have a knack for the grotesque. Likewise, Hugo Weaving makes a good manly female nurse, and it’s a role which suits drag. I enjoyed Hugh Grant’s old age turn, even though he looks like a Spitting Image puppet under all that latex. (Incidentally, that humiliating arrest of his has really opened up a useful line in villainous sleaze for Grant: all his characters in CLOUD ATLAS are baddies.)

But mostly the film shows that actors are often better playing characters they are a little bit like — and one reason the film works as well as it does is that the more blatant disguises function mostly as novelty turns in storylines centred around characters played by actors roughly the right age, race and sex for their roles. It does add an amusing guessing-game element to the film, and the end credits have a LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER moment of revelation.

Skungpoomery

Just finished Michael Coveney’s Ken Campbell, The Great Caper, about one of my heroes, the actor, theatre director, sit-down tragedian and genius, “in the pure sense of an influential demonic character.”

I think I first became aware of Ken Campbell via a TV play he wrote and starred in — The Madness Museum, dealing with experimental treatments for insanity in the Victorian era. A kind of blackly comic chamber of horrors. If anyone has a copy, I’d love to see it again.

But I may already have read about him in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, in which Wilson recounts how the Illuminatus! trilogy, which he co-wrote with Robert Shea, was adapted for the stage by Campbell and his Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool as a nine-hour theatrical epic, somehow transferring to the National Theatre in a production featuring John Gielgud as the voice of the super-computer, FUCKUP.

If so, I didn’t connect the two Ken Campbells. And due to some ambiguity in the credits of The Madness Museum, I wasn’t sure if the guy in the show was called Ken Campbell or John Sessions… But I knew which one I was primarily interested in.

Also, there was the Ken Campbell Roadshow, which I’d seen featured in THE SECRET POLICEMAN’S BALL, the film record of John Cleese’s charity concert for Amnesty International. My friends and I knew nearly all the star comedy acts featured, having seen them on TV, but this stuff was new, and alarming. Sylveste McCoy hammered a nail into his head. Campbell acted as goad. And little David Rappaport (later the leader of the TIME BANDITS) was introduced as “Not the smallest man in the world… but fucking close.”

Apparently this was the second house. The first show wasn’t filmed, which is a pity because that’s the one where Campbell turned loose a herd of pigs which invaded the audience…

And then I met him — I was working in the Cinema Shop in Filmhouse, selling posters and books, and he came in and bought two copies of a dictionary of film & television terminology. Now, I don’t think it was possible to have a normal, run-of-the-mill encounter with Campbell, and this one isn’t particularly impressive, I suppose, but it’s in some way typical. The second book was a gift, and Campbell was concerned that the person it was for might come by and grab a copy for herself. “If a tall Chinese bird comes in, don’t sell her that book.”

For dramatic effect, he popped his head in half an hour later and repeated, “Remember, don’t sell the film dictionary to the tall Chinese bird!” I think he perhaps only did this because I was chatting to a friend and it would mildly blow the guy’s mind.

Sure enough, a tall-ish oriental girl came into the shop and leapt upon the volume of motion picture terminology. This was my chance, and I feel I rather underplayed it. You see, Coveney’s excellent book makes the point that life for Campbell was a form of theatre, and that the director’s job was to goad the actors into doing interesting things, “to kick ‘em up the arse and get them ON.” He’d assigned me a role in this scene, and of course the correct procedure was to wait for the customer to attempt to buy the book, and then, without explanation, refuse service. The ensuing conversation would slowly, as I allowed more information out, move from being sinister and annoying, “What do you mean, you won’t sell it to me?” into being funny and sweet. And it did kind of work, but I was to swift in unfolding the backstory. The girl, who I think was actress Sarah Lam with whom Campbell was infatuated — possibly the role model for the fictitious Emma May Wang, who appears dramatically in Campbell’s monologue Furtive Nudist, then wanted to know, “How did he describe me?” I opened my mouth, hesitated, and she said, “A tall Chinese girl?”

Campbell was at the Filmhouse to talk about SECRET NATION, a movie dealing with Canada’s sneaky annexation of Newfoundland, the London-born Campbell’s spiritual home. So I guess that dates the encounter to 1992. Again, if anybody has a copy of that film, which I’ve never seen, let me know.

Ken illustrates the enantiodromic approach to acting…

By now Campbell had aroused my interest. I think I’d missed a chance to see Recollections of a Furtive Nudist at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on its first appearance, but next time he had a show on, I went. This turned out to be Hail Eris!, the missing/suppressed monologue in Campbell’s Bald Trilogy, which otherwise consists of Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu. (“Deja vu is when you go somewhere and you’ve never been there before, and you get the feeling, I’ve been here before — Jamais vu — is when you go home and you say: ‘Fuck, I’ve never been here before!’“)

See, although Coveney’s book is excellent and you must buy it, using the link below, I guess the Financial Times doesn’t send their critic to Edinburgh, so he’s missed some good moments. I think I was drawn to Hail Eris! partly because Eris is the Greek goddess of discord, worshipped by the ontological terrorists of the Illuminatus! books, so I maybe had figured out Campbell’s collection to that book-cycle, or maybe it was a surprise…

On comes this bald man with eyes like radioactive marbles under a porcupine conga line of bushy eyebrows, and proceeds to tell us “seekers” about the backstory of his epic theatre production Illuminatus! One part of this saga not covered in detail by Coveney is the origin of the project.

“I was at a science fiction convention — I’m not sure why, except I think a group of us had resolved to do something every day that we’d never done before,” (an excellent project — every day becomes memorable, and the acceleration of life in middle-age is slowed down at least a tad, DC) “I picked up one book, which was called Stand on Zanzibar, and I was excited because I immediately got what it was about. I’d heard that you could stand the entire human race, shoulder to shoulder, on the Isle of Man, so this book was obviously about a future time when the human race would pack the whole of Zanzibar. The author was there, John Brunner, and I asked him, “What’s it all about, this science fiction? What’s it for? ” and he boomed back, ‘FUN!’”

I’m quoting from eighteen-year-old memory here, so you can expect around 60% accuracy… If it were longer ago, I could do better…

In fact, I’ve just remembered that the Fringe programme listed Hail Eris! as being a production of the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, so I knew it was genuinely connected to the original show — it was Campbell’s presence that was unexpected. “That’s that guy!”

Campbell’s attraction to Illuminatus!, based on the Yellow Submarine on the cover, is well-documented in Coveney’s book. His account of the play’s cult success, likewise. How TIME BANDIT leader David Rappaport, then working as a primary school teacher (“The most wonderful thing in the world is being able to look a child right in the eyes.”) had come in, apparently by chance, when they were looking for somebody to play anarchist dwarf Markoff Chaney (“The midget against the digits.”) How the play gave early roles to Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent (Campbell, having discovered Bob Hoskins, had already released him into the wild) and Chris Langham (“Most British acting always seemed to be in the past tense, but Chris was always in the present tense”). How Bill Drummond (later of the KLF) had created heroic sets which eschewed the abstract to give science fiction fans the super-computers, yellow submarines and Atlantean domes they required — all on a stage the size of a dining table.

But the account given of the more bitter aftermath differs between Campbell’s monologue and Coveney’s biography. Now, there are small inaccuracies in the book, but Campbell mythologized and theatricalized his life story, so there’s no way for me to offer an opinion on which is truer, but here’s what I recall of Campbell’s version –

Briefly, in the aftermath of the play, one of Campbell’s actors, cast as The Man Who Killed God, became increasingly preoccupied by the conspiracy theories recounted therein. At first he’d struggled to believe or get interested in any of it. Latterly he became obsessed. This was good for his performance, but it didn’t stop when the play finished its run.

Campbell found himself avoiding the guy. Then he got a call. “I’ve just killed an old woman.”

Campbell was called into the police station to explain all about “these illuminations”, by a very fat, jovial policeman. “I didn’t know you were allowed to be that fat and still be a policeman. “Your friend isn’t a criminal,” said the policeman, “He’s a nonsense case.” Apparently he’d strangled a bag lady, and then, uncertain whether perhaps his image would be recorded photographically on the retinas of her eyes, as the last thing she saw in life, he’d attempted to put her eyes out with a chair leg.

Campbell attempted to explain his nine-hour play cycle. More policemen drifted in, making cups of tea. The day wore on, as the playwright-actor-director attempted to make the story fully explicable. The sun had set when he finished. “We must have evenings like this more often!” declared the policeman.

He then told Campbell that his friend was now in the place where they keep nonsense cases, being looked after. And the old lady he’d attacked had not died — and she could see out of one eye, and the doctors thought she might be able to see out of the other one if she became able to open it. “And this incident has alerted social services to her plight, so she’s now in a nice place, being looked after by nice people — and she’s got a story to tell.”

A story to tell — Campbell had thought his deranged actor was put away for life. But in 1995, more or less cured — the paranoid schizophrenia he’d been diagnosed with under control — he was released, and Campbell retired Hail Eris! since he didn’t feel it was nice to be talking about the guy’s problems. The story is retold (with variations) in Coveney’s book, so I guess it’s OK now. He names the actor, I don’t, in case Campbell’s account is inaccurate and it might be doing the guy a disservice.

I learned about the reasons for Hail Eris!‘s disappearance from the Campbell canon on my third meeting with the Great Man, of which more later…

End of Part One.

Buy: Ken Campbell: The Great Caper

A fine documentary about Campbell, ANTIC VISIONARY, can be purchased here.

Shots of Scots: Topsy yvruT

Shirley Henderson and Kevin McKidd in TOPSY TURVY. Two remarkable Scottish talents, and apparently delightful people too.

After I complained that MiKe Leigh’s films typically leave me cold — cold and irritated — my good friend Comrade K., the Cobble Hill hierophant, advised me that I should really give TT a try. I was slightly reluctant to do so, partly because Comrade K. has a vexatious habit of being right, and one does hate to surrender a cherished prejudice, and partly because I have no great affection for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But these objections couldn’t really do, since if I enjoyed the film I could hardly count myself to have lost out by the experience, and it’s one of my precepts that one shouldn’t be overly influenced by a film’s subject: if I worshipped Gilbert and Sullivan, that still wouldn’t make Leigh’s film good, and so the fact that I’m mainly indifferent to them can’t make it bad. And if I liked their work any better at the end of the film, I could count the thing a success on that level, and a life-enriching one too.

From quite early on, I could see why K thought I would like the film — several of my objections to the usual Mike Leigh thing were overturned by the period setting. I never liked the way Leigh places broadly theatrical performances in real-world settings, without any visual stylisation to make them seem at home. The weirdness of the approach should appeal to me, maybe, but it never has. Well, the Victorian setting takes care of that, pretty well. Another, related objection is that I have found Leigh’s films mostly lacking in any kind of visual pleasure. TOPSY TURVY has plenty to feast the eye upon, in terms of sumptious costumes and settings, and Leigh’s work with his regular D.P. Dick Pope rises to the occasion at least somewhat. They at least film a lot of the theatre performances flat on, giving them a sense of symmetry and design. Symmetrical composition  can be the dumbest, crudest way of creating a sense of visual style (see Greenaway for a real one-trick-pony) but by alternating these shots with the usual loosely composed stuff they trade in, Leigh and Pope do get some variety into it.

The other thing I hate in Leigh is his use of music. That’s sorted here, because even if I’m not a big G&S fan, I can’t really argue that their music isn’t an appropriate choice for a film about G&S.

Moving from this grudging appreciation, we come to more positive stuff yet — I noticed, initially with some dismay, that Leigh frequently presented scenes, especially early on, in which there was no dramatic conflict or tension at all. A lot of these scenes were just introductions to minor characters, with a bit of humour perhaps, but very little discernible point. But then I had to grant that this stuff was rather entertaining, and that as the story went on, each scene revealed a structural purpose that had been hidden. and in these days of over-plotted, crudely structured blockbusters, a cunning structure is an especially appealing thing. If Leigh was keeping me entertained without plot or conflict, then that was pretty clever of him.

It’s also a very clever period film: the historical detail is nicely integrated, without that sense of it being served up for our delectation by a swooning, drooling window-dresser (like those Comrade K. calls the Ivory Merchants). There’s a lovely phone call scene, for instance:

Which leads to one of the great pleasures, the dialogue, which isn’t modern, but isn’t too horribly formal either. The elaborate politeness of some of it is very useful in heightening one of the film’s main themes, the delicate task of collaboration between over-sensitive, egotistic artists. One of the ironies of my disliking Leigh’s stuff generally is that I usually like the actors he uses, just not when they’re in his films. But nobody here rubbed me up the wrong way. Allan Corduner was terrific as the sickly and oversensitive Sullivan. Jim Broadbent was magnificent as ever, in fact even more so than usual, as Gilbert. Prickly, grandiloquent, often near-intolerable, he nevertheless inspires a good deal of affection in the role, perhaps because he’s Jim Broadbent. I laughed out loud at an exchange with Pidgeon, his servant (Kenneth Hadley), as they hang a samurai sword on the wall.

“Would that be Spanish or Italian, sir?”

“Neither, Pidgeon.”

The fact that Gilbert sees no need to actually enlighten his servant contains a world of information about class relations, without any of the heavy-handedness I find in contemporary Leigh. Of course, we do learn something about what makes the character so awkward, by meeting his mad parents. His father, played by esteemed relic Charles Simon, will not touch an electric doorbell for fear of instant death, while his estranged and bedridden mother, Eve Pearce (another Scot), looking like an emaciated bird of prey, warns her daughters, “Never have a humorous child.” These two grotesques take us from the world of G&S and into one more congenial to me, that of Mervyn Peake.

So far, so good. My biggest criticism is that the film is overlong and drawn-out. The central dramatic problem, which is established early on but grows with admirable indirection, is the clash between lyricist and composer. This conflict is resolved by Gilbert’s conception of The Mikado as an operetta to replace the piece Sullivan has rejected: from here it should be a speedy journey to the more-or-less happy ending. But we’re only half-way through the movie.

(Incidentally, in the charming material dealing with Gilbert’s discovery of Japanese culture, there are two surprises. Firstly, Leigh bodges the notorious “Gilligan cut” — the moment where we cut from a character swearing he shall not, under any circumstances, do something, to a shot of him doing it — which is unexpected incompetence from a comedy director. I mean, the Gilligan cut is pretty hoaky, and I don’t think you should necessarily do it at all, but if you’re going to do it, you have to DO IT. Secondly, Leigh tries a psychological track-in on Broadbent as inspiration strikes. It works, and it’s a rare moment of independant camerawork for Leigh.)

Much of what follows is amusing, but it could all be rendered redundant by a good ellipsis or two. The story of the production of The Mikado isn’t really a story. The story of Gilbert and Sullivan’s creative partnership and how it overcomes a crisis IS. So I was a bit disappointed by the flabby denoument. The loose construction of the first act had proved to be a cunning ploy, concealing smart design, but I couldn’t see any equivalent merit in the last act. The music was nice — some of those songs are VERY good — but nearly everything that happened dramatically was off the main spine of the story.

In spite of this, I found the film at all times enjoyable, and would recommend it to anybody who normally has a problem with Leigh, as I do. Perhaps a big part of the trouble is the lessons Leigh has learned from the British cinema around him, rather than endemic in his ability as a filmmaker. But it’s certainly hard to imagine the kind of films he might make if he’d been born elsewhere.