Film Festival viewing: memories, masks and true stories

 One of the pleasures of watching films at a film festival is how you come to notice common themes. Both Jackie and Lion, which I took in as a double bill yesterday at Malvern, are based on true stories, and true stories are there again in Denial and in The Viceroy’s House, also in the Borderlines programme. In Lion, the story of how an Indian child was lost, adopted, grew up and retrieved his memories and his original home and biological mother becomes a semi-miraculous tale of survival and healing. The first half of the film, showing Saroo as a child blessed with resilience and luck, accrues incredible power from its undeniable documentary dimension. It was heartbreaking to watch the child unknowingly swept away, negotiating a place to sleep with other street children in Calcutta, and at the mercy of a range of adult strangers. Dev Patel as the adult Saroo has less to do in the second half, but the passages where he begins to remember through a Proustian encounter with the food he yearned for as a child, and as he eventually journeys back, back, along the alleys of his old home village, are archetypal. It’s a deeply satisfying film about regaining our childhood pasts.

If a true-life story can authenticate the untold experience of a street child, though (and offer a rare happy ending), a film like Jackie has a different task. The project here is surely to offer a new twist to one of the most familiar events of the twentieth century, and clearly the focus on Jackie Kennedy was always going to be about the tensions between her public role and her private emotion. Those images of her in the blood-stained pink suit, her dramatic black veil as she walked behind the coffin at the funeral, have always been memorable, and they are right at the centre of the film, a disconcerting combination of anguish and control. I was rather distracted, though, by the fairly extensive sections about Jackie’s ambitious ideals for the White House while she was First Lady. This was a different story, about the abrupt indignities of losing both status and home, immediately after undergoing the violent traumas of the assassination.

We see rather a lot of close-ups of Jackie as she ‘unwinds’ in private, which seems to amount to rather repetitive instances of staring into a mirror and of smoking. Natalie Portman gives a mannered performance of someone who was also a mannered performer for much of the time. In the end, the brittle persona of the young woman in the midst of immense loss (we are also reminded that she lost two babies) remains a bit of a mystery.

So, what about some common themes? In Saroo’s memories and dreams in Lion there was some consonance with the manipulation of Lee’s flashbacks and suppressed memories in Manchester by the Sea – both directors give us a fresh take on a conventional technique. In terms of the camera’s love affair with the human face, the scrutiny of a woman’s mask in Jackie was fascinating to compare with Asta Nielsen in the 1921 Hamlet, screened last Sunday at Hereford Courtyard. This by the way was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy a hugely complex performance – and it was a treat to enjoy the live piano accompaniment by Lillian Henley. Worth it just to appreciate the music and the skill.

Finally, houses, homes and bigwigs. I’m not sure that I can face The Viceroy’s House, with Hugh Bonneville playing another toff (why doesn’t he make more of the comedic abilities he displayed in 2012?) but there’s clearly a current preoccupation with the symbolism of bricks and mortar – the White House, Lutyen’s imperial buildings of Delhi - representing both state and family. Let’s hope that budding screenwriters are not seduced into thinking that this one has legs. I couldn’t bear a story about the pain of giving up No. 10.

Catherine Neale

North La La Land

Howdy from California! So here I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, overlooking the famous
bay and San Francisco itself, while wearing my Borderlines Film Festival t-shirt kindly sent from Hereford, 5242 miles away! This is my third year of writing for the festival, but I haven't always been a "foreign correspondent". Back when I proudly lived in Hereford, I remember the old Ritz cinema  only seemed to show films at weekends, and mostly blockbuster fare, and then The Courtyard Arts Centre opened in 1998, bestowing a new source of independent cinema upon the local cinephiles. Unfortunately, I left Hereford just before Borderlines Film Festival began, or else I'm sure I would have been keenly involved from the get-go. A few relocations later and now I am settled in the sunshine state, where cinema was born.

Where multiscreen cinemas are now the norm in the UK (indeed, my home town had Europe's first multiplex), many neighbourhoods here within the various Bay Area cities have their own independent "movie theater". My local cinema is an opulent art deco building that somehow survived the 1989 earthquake and a modern renovation. The next closest cinema has a Wurlitzer organ ascend from its main auditorium’s stage, as if to play-in the evening's films. Across the Bay Area, and California itself, these old local cinemas are often downtown focal points, somewhat mirroring the local demographic in their film programming.

I think this local investment in, at times, quite esoteric independent and international films is a positive knock-on effect of being in relative proximity to Hollywood. It may be sunny all year round down in Los Angeles, but here in Northern California there is less sheen, perhaps a holdover from the gold rush pioneers who braved the Sierra Nevada mountains to settle amongst the redwoods of the Pacific northwest. I like to imagine them imbuing the Bay Area with a progressive attitude that lives on in the creative industries, as we have so many film production luminaries based locally, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, and Lucasfilm. Living close to such a breadth of cinematic expertise is certainly a privilege, and Hereford and its surrounding countryside is lucky to have the equally pioneering Borderlines.

In recent months I've been fortunate to see films as diverse as Check It, Jackie, and Moonlight all in local independent cinemas that proudly screened them as part of film festivals (such as Frameline, or tangentially to the typically more mainstream Hollywood movies. It feels almost meta to have grown up with the first multiplex blockbusters in the middle of the UK, to living where scores of those movies were produced and filmed. There's certainly something uncanny about attending to one's daily business, only to recognise a hilly vista from Vertigo, or noticing that the latest Godzilla wasn't actually shot by the Golden Gate Bridge after all. 

So, leading up to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, celebrating what I would humbly say is a year of especially outstanding cinema, it dawns on me that I will do as I often have since falling in love with film in Hereford and look forward to the glitz of it all - except now from within the same time zone as Hollywood! Surreal. Hopefully there'll be some colourful wins this year. Now all I need to decide is whether to watch the Oscars on television from the comfort of home, or screening live down the block at the independent art deco flicks, here in North La La Land...

Duncan Wardlaw