03.11.2011
Political naives and coffee cobblers
Jim Moody concludes his review of this year's London Film Festival
As usual, the London Film Festival has managed to bring excellent examples of current filmmaking to the annual event. These are a few more of the notable works it showcased.
360 (director: Fernando Meirelles): This film’s storyline is derived from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play Reigen (The round), which scathingly portrayed Viennese class attitudes and sexual mores. His ‘round’ was a commentary on class through sexual encounters across class divides, and referred obliquely to sexually transmitted diseases. But this time ‘round’, 360 has no such fascinating aspirations. Previous filmic outings of the story, Max Ophüls’s La ronde (1950) and Roger Vadim’s 1964 version of the same title, seem to have been ignored, their narrative disregarded. Instead, we are treated to a fairly disconnected and unengaging display of excellent acting talent going to waste. Only Anthony Hopkins, as a grieving father searching worldwide for his daughter’s remains, gets to make any kind of splash, with a good bout of monologue in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
A dangerous method (director: David Cronenberg): Brilliantly playing off each character’s strengths and weaknesses, the two principals give a real flavour of the early days of psychotherapy. Like any able and lively-minded scientist, young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) quite rightly has no fear of questioning the older Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). But instead of intellectual jousting, thanks to Freud’s standing on his dignity, Jung and Freud fall out. Part of this derives from one of Jung’s patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whom he treats at his Zurich clinic. Knightley’s near-gurning at the beginning almost topples into a parody of mental illness, but she soon recovers Sabina’s characterisation, as the young woman becomes first Jung’s student and then his lover. Jung’s bourgeois lifestyle, thanks to his rich wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon), permits his relationship with Sabina on the side, but things get interesting when he casts her off.
Bernadette: notes on a political journey (director: Lelia Doolan): Bernadette Devlin as was and what she became. In a historical tour of the Northern Ireland civil rights and republican movements, the younger Bernadette appears more militant than she does in later years, especially at the time she was a Westminster MP. However, Bernadette as interviewed in recent years by Doolan is quite honest, declaring that much of the time she was making it up as she went along in the early day.
More than a biopic documentary, Doolan has contrived to place something of the sweep of Six Counties politics through the troubles of the 60s and 70s to the present. In the earliest period, civil rights marches are laid into by police and British army, often with fatal consequences. Then we see the Provisional Irish Republican Army rise up to protect the nationalist population, something that Bernadette is not averse to, saying she does “not mind being in the shadow of a gunman”. Assassination of a series of civil rights campaigners almost included Bernadette, and she makes a point in an interview of listing those others who lost their lives to loyalist assassin’s bullets. More recent years have seen the so-called peace process, with its flaws and limitations and the evident transformation of ‘terrorists’ into acceptable mainstream politicians. Bernadette now works in community projects because there is nowhere else to go.
Better this world (directors: Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega): The title expresses the protagonists’ desire for political change. Two naive young men, Brad Crowder and David McKay, were entrapped by FBI agent Brandon Darby into thinking of committing political violence that would see them convicted and sent to prison for two and four years respectively. Crowder and McKay were arrested during the 2008 Republican National Convention, after having accepted Darby’s idea of bombing it in the face of police crackdown on legitimate protests; but they soon after abandoned this idiocy.
This ‘conspiracy’, set up by the Feds to smear all protestors, then allowed them to fit up Crowder and McKay pour encourager les autres. So-called justice then forced the accused to accept plea bargains rather than face the likely prospect of decades in dehumanising US prisons. Obscenely blatant, the US state is seen to be willing to use any means against perceived enemies. And louse Brandon Darby, who entrapped the pair and incited their ‘crime’, was set free as a bird: he has been transmuted into a mendacious, rightwing commentator.
Carnage (director: Roman Polanski): Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan Cowen (Christoph Waltz) are visiting Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael Longstreet (John C Reilly) in their apartment. Initially it is a very civilised occasion, considering the Cowens’ 11-year-old has bashed the Longstreets’ own offspring in the face with a stick, causing serious dental damage, but it is not long before the middle class veneer starts to peel. Closely based on the 2006 Yasmina Reza play, Le dieu du carnage (God of carnage), the film reveals that these ‘decent people’ are pretty venal when it comes down to it.
Penelope’s striving to keep a grip on proceedings is at extreme counterpoint to Alan’s continual resort to his mobile phone, as if his professional concerns mean the others must dance attendance on him while he is detached from their surroundings. Scotch follows coffee cobbler and, as the alcohol takes hold, some home truths and ugly attitudes start to surface, then explode like depth charges around the apartment. This is a tour de force by all four players that resounds vividly, thanks also to a faithful rendition of the play, translated by Michael Katims.
Dreams of a life (director: Carol Morley): Based on the true story of a woman whose skeleton was not found in her flat above Wood Green Shopping City until three years after she had died of natural causes. All of those who had known 38-year-old Joyce Vincent were ignorant of her fate until the news hit the press. This was all the more remarkable, as she is described by friends, including ex-boyfriends, as a warm and delightful person. Morley takes aim well to get to the nitty-gritty of why Joyce drifted out of human contact, away from family as well as friends, and, shockingly, why her body was undiscovered for so long. Blending considerate re-enactment with interviews goes a long way to helping round out the person who was Joyce Vincent. Realities are unearthed, but inevitably we are still left with the unfinished, if not unvarnished, truth. Isolation and alienation and other such perfectly valid conceptual attempts to complete the film have then to be the viewer’s prerogative.
Once upon a time in Anatolia (Bir zamanlar anadolu’da) (director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan): This is the kind of police procedural that sets reality as the tone. Grinding through one night, detectives, gendarmes, a doctor and a prosecutor try to find a body buried in a field in central Anatolia, two hours drive from Ankara. Commissar Naci (Y?lmaz Erdo?an) is losing not only face, but his rag too, while Dr Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) and prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) exhibit more sangfroid, as they engage with suspect Kenan (Firat Tanis). But, despite running two and a half hours, the piece never stalls, thanks to the admixture of the characters’ persistence, ennui and humour.
Rebellion (L’ordre et la morale) (director: Mathieu Kassovitz): Over two decades ago, the French Republic sent gendarmes and army troops to New Caledonia to suppress a rebellion. This is the story of how metropolitan political concerns overrode sensitive policing, leading to the brutalisation of French citizens. Thanks to political jockeying between president François Mitterand and prime minister Jacques Chirac, the very limited revolt of a few Kanak islanders on Ouvea saw a massive over-reaction, with troop landings and large amounts of military materiel made available. Kassovitz himself plays the real-life counter-terrorism negotiator, Philippe Legorjus, who was appalled at the barbarities inflicted by the invading forces and an unnecessarily bloody end to a rebellion and hostage situation. Legorjus’s book about the affair formed the basis for the film.
The black power mixtape 1967-1975 (director: Göran Hugo Olsson): This could have been subtitled ‘From politics to drug dealing’, since black power was destroyed by the feds’ deliberate introduction of drugs into the ghettoes. The mixtape itself is a curate’s egg, its patchiness explained by their origin in disparate reports for Swedish television over the years in question. Nonetheless there are some fascinating moments from the politics of the time, not least the opining of a sinister Louis Farrakhan and the political nous of the Communist Party’s Angela Davis during her persecution at the hands of the state. Rare footage of Stokely Carmichael at ease is a treat, too.
The Ides of March (director: George Clooney): Clooney’s fourth outing as a director sees him playing yet another liberal presidential hopeful, full of idealism about settling international disputes without wars, and other such guff. Such are the dreams of the USA’s Democratic masses, or at least were yet again before the present incumbent was elected.
It is as clear as day that time after time the Democratic Party and its candidates have as their main purpose the obstruction of independent working class organisation. That cynical groundhog day cycle is not even alluded to here. In its place we have false hope and false dawns. In the end, tawdriness reasserts itself even before he is elected: when governor Mike Morris (George Clooney) falls foul of the rule, ‘Don’t fuck the interns’, he is saved by double dealing. There is some small saving grace in the by-play between campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and young press secretary Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling).