Correspondence

‘interesting fact: if you google “david cairns”, shadowplay comes out at the bottom of the page; if you google “christina alepi”, shadowplay is the first result. (!) Typing my own name is the quickest way to get to your blog (after bookmarking, but it can’t beat googling my OWN NAME!)’

~ Christina Alepi, via Facebook.

A few things happening with the old email and Facebook, which I just joined in a spirit of “Why not?” Maybe once I year I do something daft like that: about a year ago I started a blog. Yep, Shadowplay celebrates her birthday on December 1st. Will have to think of some special way to mark it. Suggestions welcome.

Some time back I got one of the few bits of negative commentary I’ve had here, after reviewing a depressing British horror “comedy” called THE COTTAGE. I’ve tended to avoid trashing stuff most of the time, since it’s nice to be nice and it seems more interesting to find the exciting or strange bits of films and pare away the dull stuff, but when it comes to modern British cinema I sometimes get a bit upset. Anyhow, the piece attracted an irked comment from someone pretty obviously connected with the movie, but I never knew who. But when I joined Facebook, it swept through my emails looking for contacts, and suddenly identified the commenter as actor Reece Shearsmith, one of the stars of the film. Mystery solved!

Not sure how I feel about this, since I’m a fan of the first two series of The League of Gentlemen, and would have said at least some nice things about THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN’S APOCALYPSE, which seemed an honorable attempt to do something interesting in British cinema. So it’s not like Shearsmith was ever on my shitlist. (Do I have a shitlist? Note to self: compile shitlist.) I may have said something about his performance in THE COTTAGE not quite working, but that’s kind of the same as calling him a flawless genius, since the rest of the film doesn’t work the way a dead horse doesn’t work as an air freshener.

More pleasant correspondence: after the excellent Charles Drazin suggested I contact David Thomson and let him in on The Great Duvivier Giveaway, my scheme to reshape the movie canon, in hopes of getting him to change his mind about Julien Duvivier and maybe rewrite his rather critical piece in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, I wrote to Thomson with a disc of LA FIN DU JOUR, and received this very charming reply:

Dear Mr Cairns,

I was touched to receive your letter and the DVD of La Fin du Jour.  On the spot, I proposed you to the House of Edinburgh Saints (your only fellow there is Mark Cousins – maybe you know each other).

[We do.]

As it happens, yours is not the first plea on behalf of Duvivier. The other one came from no less than Stephen Sondheim (at the Telluride Film Festival). So I am re-examining the matter, and I am very grateful to you for the prompting.

More to come, I’m sure.

All good wishes

David Thomson

So I seem to be in good company. I wonder, if you’re David Thomson, if you’re constantly getting grabbed by bloggers and composers and bums off the street who want to convert you to the cause of John Ford or Tony Richardson or William Wyler?

Makes me think I’m lucky I only have the cast of THE COTTAGE to contend with.

In other news: I was vaguely thinking of starting Borzage Week in a week’s time, but since I have a number of pieces all ready and nothing else to post of any substance, I’m bringing it forward to Monday 17th. That’ll still give us time to invent something suitably exciting for December 1st.

Roadkill

 

I’ve been sounding people out about my treatment of RED ROAD (in brief, watching it in episodes over an entire week and sorta live-blogging the experience). I was worried that I wasn’t being fair to it. I was much meaner about THE COTTAGE (and somebody, perhaps the director, has objected to this in the Comments section) but at least I saw that one in approved conditions, at the cinema and in one go.

Generally, friends said things like “You’re being quite even-handed about it, but the fact that it’s taking you a week to watch it…one can read between the lines.”

Well, without my even noticing, I managed to watch more that 24 minutes of it last time — in fact, it was more like 30! So I knew I had only one short burst left in store, but somehow I couldn’t quite settle down to it last night. I spent the evening making screen grabs of Anton Diffring’s arse exploding instead, which somehow felt more, I dunno, rewarding.

But, with Jaffa Cakes to the ready I finally completed my epic slog through the film. I was pleasantly surprised! As I had suspected, the long-delayed revelation that explains Kate Dickie’s erratic behaviour through the whole film was kind of a damp squib in dramatic terms, failing to exceed what I’d already imagined. And in the aftermath of her LADY VENGEANCE-style attempt at gaining retribution (a completely half-arsed scheme that could never have worked — does Andrea Arnold have any idea how appallingly hard it is to secure a conviction for rape?) the pace slows to a crawl, to the point where you expect it to start replaying backwards, like that bit in FUNNY GAMES. Kate’s in-laws make tea. We watch three cups being carefully poured, in real time. A biscuit is selected. Will her dad-in-law have a biscuit? No, he’ll not bother.

BUT! A happy ending. How surprising. Not overwhelmingly happy, but redemptive. Joy Division drone rapturously onto the soundtrack, just to stop us getting TOO excited, and this is accompanied by a high-angle shot that might as well have “The End” stenciled across it — the combination of song and locked-off composition rupture the carefully-preserved aesthetic of the rest of the film, but it’s arguably appropriate to do so. It seemed kind of wrong, though. Maybe making the shot a security camera view would have justified it.

This is the first in a three-film scheme originated by Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa Films, who have been drawn to Scotland by the preponderance of gloom. Like moths to a flame, only a flame that somehow makes the room darker. Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen created a core group of characters (a not-too-diverse bunch of working-class whites, alas) who are to feature in all three films. As I always say, it seems a screwy justification for making films, but if the films are good they won’t need any justification. I’m dining with the writer of the second film this evening, so expect GOSSIP.

RED ROAD seems to struggle slightly with the imposed form. At least one major character, Natalie Press, has no storyline of her own and no real involvement with anybody else’s. Martin Compston is only slightly more integrated. The film apes REAR WINDOW’s construction to a moderate degree, with Kate Dickie’s surveillance job affording her a window into numerous lives, but this isn’t exploited the way Hitchcock did it: there’s really only ONE supporting character, a man with a dog, and his “story” is extremely slight (dog dies, is replaced, a distant echo of one strand from the Hitchcock film). The surveillance work is smoothly woven into the central plot, but other elements, such as Dickie’s van-driving, premature-ejaculating lover, have no real narrative function and seem to occupy space that could be better filled.

My feeling is that the film’s constant hugging of its central enigma to its chest is a neurotic mistake. If we opened with the background tragedy, all Dickie’s behaviour would carry more emotional weight, while still being intriguing and baffling. The story overall has a decent heft to it, but it’s drawn out to staggering lengths, and what might help would be a bunch of supporting stories using the other characters. At present they don’t serve any purpose except to pad out a thin plot.

RED ROAD is a superior Scottish film. That’s my problem — it exemplifies an approach to filmmaking that ignores the need for complex narratives and replaces it with nothing but nice photography. It’s well shot, well-acted, well-scored (but some actual TUNES would have helped), but it seems parsimonious, refusing us subplots, tonal variety, changes of pace, fun. It’s the kind of film people abroad might expect from the Scots: dour and tight-fisted.

I don’t need each Scottish film to fulfill every possibility of cinema, but I’m tired of the sameness. A filmmaker as able as Arnold ought to separate herself from the herd by making something genuinely different for her next project. Scottish cinema needs a change.

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.”)