Millenium Bugger

I’ve done one day’s teaching this semester and immediately came down with a cold. So I distracted myself from the sniffles with Roman Polanski’s brand-new film maudit THE PALACE.

“Why are you watching a bad film?” Fiona asked.

“I’m not really sure it’s bad. I mean, it’s awful…”

At a luxury Alpine hotel, tireless staff try to make sure assorted rich Eurotrash have a Happy New Year as the clock ticks down to Y2K. Well, Polanski is certainly familiar with the jet set, and his grotesque comedy has a certain claim to at least accuracy. However, there are some familiar problems…

The unconvincing greenscreen which started to disfigure Polanski’s work from DEATH AND THE MAIDEN on, which disappeared more or less with THE PIANIST, is back. The snowscape surrounding this palace is a CGI Christmas card diorama which feels VERY CLOSE and VERY FAKE. A deliberate artificiality is always better than an unintentional one — but Polanski often uses fake scenery but always seems to want to achieve credibility.

The camerawork, I have to admit, is elegant. The cutting seems too eager to keep things moving, so that reactions to “funny” incidents are skipped. I can well understand the urge to shorten this farrago, but you can sense the missing footage. Alexandre Desplat’s score works hard to convince us that comedy is being done — always a bad sign.

Special guest star!

The comedy is crude, poorly timed, and very nasty. The pattern for the film may be the Altman network narrative of NASHVILLE or SHORT CUTS, but Altman’s films typically create a more convincing milieu, and the savage attack on the characters is justified by their various corruptions and meannesses, rather than mere disgust. And all Altman’s little stories, in his good films anyway, are STORIES. If you isolate and summarise a story from THE PALACE, you get something like “A rich crook inveigles an accountant into participating in an illegal scheme, the accountant gets drunk and we never find out what happens to the scheme.”

Polanski’s cruelty is particularly apparent in the use of a character with, it seems, dementia, whose antics we are supposed to find funny, and the various plastic-surgery-disfigured rich people who are played by real plastic-surgery-disfigured rich people. I don’t know whether I should feel sorry for Mickey Rourke or not, but at least the casting removes the active question “Does he realise what he looks like?” His trout mask replica features are here augmented by a bald cap and Andy Warhol wig. More dodgy is the casting of Sydne Rome, once the glamorous star of Polanski’s WHAT? It feels ungallant to remark on her appearance even if the person I want to criticise for it is the director.

When one goes to the places of the very rich, which I have only managed to do a couple of times, one does see these people, and so including them here is consistent with the film’s quasi-realist approach as well as its grotesque one. If you’re going to do satire… I should add that Rome gives a zesty performance. Why should Polanski cast people with natural faces and add makeup when there are plenty of good actors who have altered their features in such an extreme way that they can’t play anything other than modern rich plastic people?

The main argument against the casting is that it’s distressing, and the film is apparently meant to be funny. We don’t feel like laughing when we look at these poor bastards. Or I don’t.

A penguin wanders the corridors. Is this a nod to GREGORY’S GIRL?

There are SOME laughs, or at least amusing presences. Oliver Masucci from Dark is consistently fun to watch, just as he’s consistently dour in the time travel show. Rourke blowing his wig off with a champagne uncorking is stupidly funny. John Cleese is surprisingly good as a Texas billionaire, the first time in decades he hasn’t been mugging and overacting, and his fluting accent counters the gravel of his old man voice (ruined by all that shouting in his youth) so in his case a certain debilitating pathos is removed. He winds up reprising the Fawlty Towers episode about the corpse…

One bright spot is Polanski’s daughter Megane, who has appeared in a number of his films, usually in rather unflattering roles. Here she’s one of the few normal characters. A very un-starry role, but she’s completely convincing as a disgruntled chambermaid, has a certain low-key intensity, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of her in future.

Strange to see that this is co-written by Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and his writing partner and wife Ewa Piaskowska. None of whom is really a comedy specialist, nor do any of them speak English as their first language. But I can understand Polanski wanting to make what he says is to be his last film with Skolimowski, though, since he was a collaborator on Polanski’s very first feature, KNIFE IN THE WATER. I just think they should have chosen a more suitable subject for their proven talents.

I vaguely recall one reviewer (Derek Malcolm?) dismissing an earlier Polanski comedy (PIRATES?) by saying he wanted Polanski to get back to being unpleasant about serious subjects. I like dark comedy, but there are limits — sometimes, with Polanski, you get something that is really unpleasant and it seems as if the mere unpleasantness is what’s supposed to make us laugh. We cannot, surely, be amused by the sight of the lawyer in PIRATES who’s had his tongue cut out and now lives for booze. If he’s meant to be funny, we’re entitled to know WHAT about him is supposed to make us laugh.

Nothing here is QUITE that horrible, but it’s all quite witless — the sole “funny” thing about Fanny Ardant’s character is that her wee dog has diarrhoea. A retired porn star breaks his nose on the ski slope — and that is his entire character arc. “Am I going to have a bandage on my nose?” “Yes! You will look like that actor in that film… what was the name of that film?”

The Fast and the Curious

Ouch. So I was already nursing a cracked rib — my nephew, a big chap, bearhugged me goodbye on the eve of his emigration to Delaware of all places and I felt a distinct snap, never a good sign.

Then, hurrying across Lothian Road in the rain I slipped on a temporary street sign that had been knocked flat — a rainslicked steel panel, slippery as ice — and dived into a huge paddle, whacking my specs out of shape and crushing one hand between body and tarmac. My pinkie is now a bluegreeny. As for its shape — a young thumb.

Nevertheless, I am still watching things. I was amazed to discover a DVD of WEEKEND OF A CHAMPION, Roman Polanski’s documentary about racer Jackie Stewart, which I saw about forty years ago on TV and could only remember fragments of. I wondered if it was any good. It is!

Polanski produced and conducted the interviews, Frank Simon directs, fresh from his job shooting behind-the-scenes stuff on MACBETH.

Now, there’s little I hate more than sport, generally speaking. What I mostly hate is the NOISE, and Formula One racing is just about the worst for that, although at least the engines drown out the roar of the bloody crowd. (Even a comparatively inoffensive sport like swimming sounds like hell to me.) But I’ve found an insightful documentary like ONCE WE WERE KINGS can get me over my aversion — I can enjoy the filmmaking and sort of get the appeal of the strenuous activity. It’s kind of like reading a lovely poem singing the praises of someone you consider deeply unattractive.

Anyway, Polanski accompanies Stewart everywhere as he prepares for a big race (checks notes: the 1971 Monaco Grand Prix). In this accompanying, the film parts ways with my memory of seeing it on BBC2 — Polanski, I recall, blundered in on Stewart’s wife Helen en deshabille, and rather than saying “Sorry, sir,” (the tactful approach) he blames her for it — “You KNEW I was here.” That’s been cut, for understandable reasons given Polanski’s, ah, reputational problems.

Other than that, Polanski proves a very sympathetic interviewer, and Stewart an articulate explicator of his art. I did start to think of him as an artist. We ride round the track in a sort of dress rehearsal and he explains how he’s going to handle it. He mimes everything out. I don’t drive so I don’t really know one gear from another but the whole mad pursuit started to seem reasonable.

At one point, Stewart cuts himself shaving. “Get Roman in here, he likes blood!” RP makes his trademark pffft of weary disgust. He’s heard this joke before.

Without warning, the film segues at the end into a new conversation between director and racer, recorded a few years ago — they, like us, have just finished watching the film and reflect on changes in the sport, and male facial hair, in the intervening years. Stewart talks about how changes in safety features pushed for by him have now reduced racing fatalities almost to zero. Think of it: there must be hundred of idiots walking the earth today thanks to him. But seriously, it’s quite moving, as is Stewart’s discussion of his dyslexia, still undiagnosed back when the original footage was shot. He seems like a top bloke, apart from his questionable taste in filmic associates. (I seriously don’t know what I’d do if I met Polanski — I’d be fascinated to pick his brains, but would also be feeling like I shouldn’t speak to the man. Even though we see him here as a great conversationalist, even when listening.

Books on my floor

I did crazy good this week on book purchases —

The Laughton and Altman books came from the All You Can Eat book shop, which is rarely open but always affordable. £1 each. I know Simon Callow’s Laughton book is probably better than Charles Higham’s, but a cursory glance revealed this one to have some merit, and Elsa Lanchester cooperated in it. The Altman book is great and makes me think I should spend a week just catching up with oddities from his long career which have hitherto escaped me, from Combat to THE COMPANY.

I figured I’d read a few snatches of the Laughton — page 17, maybe, and in fact I did read the bit on Sternberg — and then forget it was there, but Fiona grabbed it and devoured it cover to cover so it’s paid its way. Also, there are some wonderful artists’ impressions of the Great Man:

Two by Elsa, and —

One by James Mason and one, a collage, by Brecht.

The Polanski book came from a nearby charity shop. A pretty handsome volume for £5. Polanski provides quotes on each film. There’s not a lot of meat to it — I read it in an afternoon — but it’s glossy and handsome. Many many of the pictures show Polanski doing other people’s jobs — sewing or arranging fights, swinging a log at an outsize opponent.

The Tod Browning one cost the most, from secondhand record-and-bookstore Elvis Shakespeare, a regular stop on my constitutionals. It happened to tie in with a little project I have on the go, so I couldn’t very well pass it up. £15. It’s pretty good — a series of essays on different aspects of Browning’s work. There are some howling factual errors — Roger Corman directing Christopher Lee in DRACULA — but they’re all sort of off-topic. On Browning’s films, the book is informative and insightful.