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

The Making of Soy Cuba

Anyone fascinated by the very excellent Soy Cuba, or indeed by cinema as a whole, would find Vicente Perrez 2004 documentary about the making of 'Soy Cuba’, the oddly named I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth, well worth seeking out. It can be hard to find, but, fortunately for afficionados, it is available to watch online at the IDFA (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival) website. That site is a little idiosyncratic, but a search under ‘I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth | IDF’ should put you in the right place (more hit and miss:  even more hit and miss: ). It’’s well worth persisting - Perrez documentary covers far more than just the making of ‘Soy Cuba’, though it does that in satisfying detail - it sketches a history of Cuban cinema (and beyond), the technical aspects of making the film, discusses the terrible reception Soy Cuba got when screened in ’64, its rediscovery and critical re-appraisal, and all usually through the eyes of those who spent fourteen months or more making Soy Cuba back in 1962. Terrific.

Stephen Hopkins

Audience Member

Remaining films in our Cuban strand: Return to Ithaca and A Wedding in Havana.

Coming Soon to a Peripatetic Projector Near You: Part 2

After Almodóvar, and on the subject of singular directors: Café Society (Dir. Woody Allen, US, 2016). Every year I go to the latest Woody Allen movie. (I do know I didn’t back when they were better.) Everyone says it looks delightful – but even terrible movies can manage that these days. He deserves more respect. The movie starts very strongly, moves along nicely then fizzles out, perhaps because Steve Carell’s character just accepts his lot. There are many good gags and Ken Stott (Marty Dorfman) gets most of them. [Ken Stott’s agent: “Ken, I’ve got a Woody Allen film. Your character’s name is Marty Dorfman.” – “I can do that.”] Last year’s Allen, Irrational Man, was more satisfying in terms of plot, character development and a tidy ending. It reminded me of those American radio dramas from the 1940s that BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast occasionally, where Hollywood movie stars of the era give their reading of a James M. Cain script.

Some critics wonder why movie stars want an Allen movie on their CV. When his body of work is complete, and the reassessment comes, they will want to be part of it. There’s a story with acting required. Nice wardrobe, nothing dangerous. The shoot’s a wrap within a month. It’s an opportunity to make a studio-system-style movie few directors still know how to do. You know when you mooch about Freeview and you stumble across a 1950s B&W movie starring Humphrey Bogart so you give it a go. Then the opening credits reveal that it’s directed by John Huston, you wonder why the Information button never mentions the important details, and ninety minutes of enjoyable fluff ensue. That’s what I mean. Woody Allen is 81. Who else is going to make them?

The Borderlines 2017 programme features several ‘state of the nation’ movies from around the world: Aquarius (Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2016); Graduation (Dir. Cristian Mungia, Romania, 2016); Moonlight (Dir. Barry Jenkins, US, 2016); and, I, Daniel Blake (Dir. Ken Loach, UK, 2016) is ours. During December my home cinema, Number 8 Pershore, sequenced three trailers together: Allied (2016) – the UK news features graffiti; A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) – Luke Treadaway walks past graffiti; and, I, Daniel Blake (2016) – Dave Johns creates graffiti. The writing is on the wall. It recalls Loach’s My Name is Joe (1998) when Peter Mullan (Joe) daubs paint on the car of someone taking photographs of him. I, Daniel Blake also echoes Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), not to mention a thousand other examples of British social realist cinema, when a desperate young woman goes on the game. Ken Loach – his work has as many call backs as a Bond movie.

British films that comment upon recent UK social history have improved a great deal in the past 30 years. During the 1980s Channel 4 screened issue movies every month. There would be soap-box speeches and heavy-handed, broad-brush moralising – particularly during the comedies. Were The Comic Strip Presents that driven by a good word from the New Musical Express? A Keith Waterhouse script would include a rant about the friends he lost when he passed his eleven-plus. In Hanif Kureishi’s London Kills Me (1991) a young British-Asian man steals a police car, removes its roof, drives around – and nothing happens. Is it a dream sequence – or did I dream it? In Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Last Resort (2000), two policemen in a patrol car have nothing better to do than spend their shift spying on the common-or-garden asylum seeker housed in a Margate tower block. No they wouldn’t. It’s a good film otherwise. And as for that one with Pete Postlethwaite, rock climbing and electricity pylons, Among Giants (1998): it’s worse than water-boarding – but still preferable to Shopping (1994). When you’ve seen enough UK cinema you know what it is to suffer.

I, Daniel Blake merits its awards: Palme d’Or at Cannes, BAFTA Best British Film. Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) has no luck but his plight is entirely plausible and credible. Listen out for the opening bars of “Spring”, from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, on the soundtrack – and by the knowing groans of laughter from members of the audience you will know their line of work. You yearn for Daniel to drop into Citizens Advice but, after a lifetime of paying his stamp, it’s understandable that he might expect a bit more help from the public sector than he gets. And the moral is: Deference Always.

I don’t know where to fit Sweet Bean (Dir. Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2015) into this preview – and that’s quite right. We adore Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies but his 1950s films set in post-war Tokyo are much less known in the West. They’re a bit long. I’ve only seen Stray Dog (1949), the baseball stadium sequence is much-stolen, and Ikiru (1952), a very moving political drama. To my delight the cheap, made in China, Kurosawa box-set I own also includes Late Chrysanthemums (1954) – even though it was directed by Mikio Naruse. Neorealism wasn’t confined to Italian film-makers. The undercover detective in Stray Dog and the dying bureaucrat in Ikiru are your guides to post-war Tokyo: the American night clubs, the huge difference a few more Yen each week can make to living standards, the corruption. Like the superb Nobody Knows (2004) you are there with them: the sun in your lungs, street dust up your nose. Sweet Bean fits into this tradition: its tone, pacing and humanity. William Blake could “see a world in a grain of sand” and Kawase finds it in a quick snack.

A 76-year-old woman, Tokue (Kirin Kiki), short of money, wishes to work for a dorayaki pancake franchise owner, Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase). She has a superior sweet bean paste recipe she would like to live on after her death. Inter-generational understanding, a trade-off between business and teaching, develops gradually into friendship. I heard this film, and Ethel & Ernest (2016), described as “gentle”. Only if you’ve forgotten what bereavement feels like. They mean that it’s a thoughtful film with few characters. It’s also a food film: like Tampopo (1985 - noodles), Babette’s Feast (1987 – seven course banquet), Big Night (1996 - omelette), even Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014 – I don’t know but they looked delicious). The most humble of food films: a pancake paste.

Robin Clarke

Volunteer