REVIEW: Miss Julie (2015)

Twenty-four years have passed since Thaddeus O’Sullivan drew a potential connection between an emergent Northern Irish cinema and those of the countries of Northern Europe, particularly Sweden, with his minimalist December Bride. That Northern Irish cinema, and Irish cinema in general (a distinction is at best difficult), ultimately went the way of largely action comedy thrillers with the likes of Man About Dog and Whole Lotta Sole was a disappointment – not least due to the fact that O’Sullivan’s own subsequent films, particularly Ordinary Decent Criminal, were in much the same vein. Welcome then is the genuine thing, an adaptation from August Strindberg’s Swedish play ‘Miss Julie’, written and directed by Liv Ullmann, one of Ingmar Bergman’s closest collaborators, and produced by and filmed in Northern Ireland – primarily within the grounds of Castle Coole in Enniskillen, Fermanagh. Ultimately, the film is not without its flaws and, like December Bride before it, will most likely prove not to influence a new wave of serious cinema in Northern Ireland.

Set in Ireland in 1890, Miss Julie is a three-hander, which examines the power relations behind both gender and class. Miss Julie (Jessica Chastain) is a bored member of the aristocracy, first seen escaping her claustrophobic country house via a drawing room window only to wander within the walls of her estate, who finds some small respite in the classless freedom of the celebrations of Midsummer Night. However, her openness is treated with unease by her servant John (Colin Farrell) and cook Kathleen (Samantha Morton), who have some secrets of their own.

One immediate criticism of Miss Julie that has been thrown around is its apparent staginess. This is not a fair complaint, given that several films are just as stagey without equal criticism i.e. 12 Angry Men and because the film’s aesthetics have a purpose. The film is powerfully claustrophobic, intimately revealing the stagnancy of both sides of the class divide. Julie has more societal rules restraining her than John or Kathleen, though they are trapped within the narrow confines of their station. John and Kathleen are deeply terrified of the apparently unhinged Julie, whose willingness to ignore class puts them at risk of ridicule and dismissal. During the first half of the film, it is Julie who appears to be in control, using the authority and respect due her because of her place in the world against both Kathleen and John, who can only meekly obey and respectfully protest. John reveals that he was deeply in love with her when he was a child, his talk eloquent of the limits imposed on a young working class boy before he can even understand them. This breaks through Julie’s cruel exterior and they finally (albeit joylessly) consummate their relationship – Ullmann fading to black, acknowledging both their need for privacy and emphasising the obvious risk and pain that this lovemaking will immediately entail. This handling is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s similar ellision of the affair in ‘Anna Karenina.’

The second half of the film reveals then that, after sex, the power relations in the house shift to favour John. Though Julie still has her class against him, he now has a moral superiority (in 1890 terms) since he has degraded himself less than she. It is now his turn to be cruel and to threaten. The rest of the film details these three characters’ attempts to come to terms with their social, sexual and class transgressions.

Ultimately the film is about the various ways that each character is trapped and how they deal with it. The conversation regularly shifts as each character achieves a feeling of superiority over the others only for some other concern to bring them right back down again. Kathleen, a working class woman, is unexpectedly the most staunchly conservative with regards to the class system. However, there is an interesting shift towards the end when we realize that her devoutly-held faith is what gives her a feeling of self-satisfied superiority and complacency, since Jesus had said that the last will be first and the first last.

The film concludes then with Kathleen going to mass to pray for normalcy, John shaving and putting back on the uniform of his class and heartlessly encouraging Julie – the ultimate transgressor, against both her class and her sex – to cut her wrists. This she does by a river.

The original play was written by August Strindberg, who holds a central influence in Swedish theatre and cinema – this film indeed has a Bergman feel, which must mean that Bergman has a Strindberg feel. Liv Ullmann presents the play critically, revealing both the stultifying values of the time that the play criticizes and also those that the play may uphold. The film’s final shot, in which Julie lies dead in the river, could intentionally or unintentionally recall John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia and could intentionally or unintentionally be pointing to an inherent sexism and patriarchal hegemony in Western culture in general, then and, quite possibly, now. Equally the film’s late examination of Kathleen’s faith reveals that faith to be just as self-serving as the rules of class which give the aristocracy their place in the world – if not one of the primary forces for keeping the working classes in their place. Ullmann’s film has an intriguingly critical and open quality that all of these criticisms can be inferred without the reading feeling too close.

The film has a couple of great moments. The film is bookended with the image of flower petals drifting along a stream. We first see this from the perspective of the young Miss Julie after she has escaped from the confines of the house (possibly for the first time) and again later when Miss Julie is about to kill herself. Initially a symbol of the wish for freedom, the second time, however, Ullmann shows us the leaves getting stuck up against some jutting rocks, an eloquent and quietly heart-breaking evocation of the impossibility of even this small, vicarious escape. In another moment, Julie invites John upstairs. He follows her but suddenly stands still, as if he cannot physically cross the threshold between the servant’s quarters and the rest of the house without his livery – a nice Bunuelian touch. Also, look out for the moment when Kathleen rushes to the back entrance of the house to lock it against a marauding band of revellers – a powerfully haunting and deeply cinematic sequence. And the moment when Kathleen leaves the house for Mass – betrayed by John – and stands out in the bleak sunrise and starts to cry. Ullmann keeps the camera behind her and we can infer Kathleen’s tears from the slight shudders of her body, but it is an equally powerful and emotive scene, all the more so for its sheer economy.

That said, there is no getting beyond the fact that Chastain and Farrell’s performances are not particularly great. Both of their accents falter – Chastain doesn’t seem to be going for one at all whereas Farrell’s Northern Irish accent is lost in the emotional scenes. Neither performance is good enough to hold the film. This may be primarily a fault in the script. The dialogue feels a little over-written and a lot of the lines are difficult to believe and Chastain and Farrell definitely have difficulty making them work. Equally the always altering power relations between the two of them are too sudden and apparently without transition or cause, making it easy to get a little lost with the characters. It often has the feel of a rambling monologue (or soliloquy) rather than an authentic conversation. Sadly, all of this means that a large part of this otherwise powerful and maybe even excellent film just does not work.

Miss Julie then is far from a great film, though it has a seriousness of purpose and an engaging multiplicity of meaning and some unforgettably evocative moments. It does not ultimately work because it is badly written and overlong, but, for the moments where it grabs you, it is the real deal and Northern Irish cinema, if not European cinema in general, needs much more of this.

Monthly Film Challenge Part 6: The Tree of Life (2011)

Many film critics hailed Terrence Malick’s ambitious fifth feature, The Tree of Life, as a masterpiece at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’Or. But the film was highly divisive since its first screening, leading to a major backlash. When audiences got a hold of it, there was very little fence sitting with people either loving it or hating it. It is a film that has been endlessly argued over, in terms of both its quality and its meaning. It is also a film that is particularly hard to be objective about. Your tolerance or intolerance of it will ultimately act as a reflection on how and why you love cinema.

There is very little that can be said definitively about The Tree of Life, and any pieces written on the film may be more telling of the interests of the writer as opposed to the qualities of the film. Terrence Malick presents a clear dichotomy between “the way of nature and the way of grace” in the first line of the film, but from there on the film is left remarkably open to interpretation. Forgetting any pretence at objectivity then, for me, The Tree of Life is really about two different things, one massive and wide-ranging and the other, in comparison, highly specific. It is about life, the universe and everything, but also it is about Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) maturation from childhood to adulthood via puberty. The former encompasses a huge amount, from the place of human beings in the world to an examination of the need for compassion in spite of a fiercely natural world. We move from parents grieving over the death of a son (a hint of the specific to come) to the creation of the world, the beginning of life on earth and finally the joy of reproduction. The family is seen in a highly positive light, a cocoon against the ruthless competition that remains prevalent in many guises throughout the earth’s lifespan – the grace of the family versus the brutal realities of nature. It suggests the rather insignificant place that humans hold in the grand scheme of things, but gives hope. The human way of life may be meaningless, but the little things are what matters. It is not an original message, in fact it may seem rather conservative but this ceases to matter since the film’s aesthetics are entirely unique (to Malick’s cinema at least) and absolutely breathtaking. These preoccupations allow for a film that is majestic, beautiful and really rather moving. In a sense, it is Malick’s masterpiece.

With the birth of Jack, the film becomes more specific, less meta-physical, though the bridge between the birth of the universe and the birth of Jack is surprisingly seamless. The film now meditates on the act of growing up, from difficulties with parents to a burgeoning sexuality to the awareness and acceptance of difference. Here also, in the figures of Jack’s parents (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt), we see how the world works and the grace-nature dichotomy comes to fruition. The family becomes less a cocoon than a synecdoche of the world – full of dissatisfaction and rivalry, but also friendship and love. With this, the film successfully comes full circle, its two strains – the universal and the familial – coming together under the same themes, presented big and small.

However, having said all of this, the film’s greatest achievement is its lyricism. The Tree of Life is a visual and poetic film, which succeeds primarily thanks to the sheer beauty of its images, their marriage with music and the meaning through montage. The brilliance of The Tree of Life is not accurately expressed through its plot, or through an analysis of its themes – the above cannot take in the sombre modern-day scenes with the older Jack (Sean Penn), as interesting as it is, or the admittedly awkward impressionistic ending. What makes the film so powerful is that, by watching it, you find out something about yourself based on your reaction to what happens onscreen, whether you laugh out loud or get a lump in the throat. This may sound crude (and it is), but The Tree of Life is a film that can stun and move you while driving your best friend out of their mind with boredom. The Tree of Life is not as much a challenge to some people as it is for others, and working out why it worked or didn’t work for you might just tell you something about how you watch films and, maybe, how you see life.

The Tree of Life is a meditation, rather than a story. As a result, it is a unique and fascinating film that rewards multiple viewing. It is a film that is unashamedly, gloriously arty, if not particularly profound then remarkably beautiful and a fascinating example of the expressive potential of the language of cinema. Malick's images are beautiful, especially when considered alongside the editing and the brilliant music chosen to accompany them. There is another thing that is fresh and brilliant about The Tree of Life that has not really been touched on. It is a film about life and love and grace and nature made with ambition and an eye for beauty, but it is also extremely brave. Not politically brave, but artistically brave because it lays itself bare, dares you to laugh and succeeds in making you see and think about the world in ways that you never have before, all by virtue of one of the film’s most powerful attributes: its fearless honesty.

See the original, inaccurate review from the film's release in 2011 as an indication how one's opinion can change here.

La Jetee

Un Chien Andalou

The Seventh Continent

F For Fake
La Chinoise

REVIEW: Zero Dark Thirty (2013)

It is difficult to review a film like Zero Dark Thirty without referring to the controversy and evaluating where one stands on it. The pro-torture/ propaganda debate has stuck so tightly to Kathryn Bigelow’s film that it is difficult even to watch the film without constantly questioning it.

The plot is known by now. Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a new CIA recruit straight out of school. She doesn’t make many friends, at least initially, but she does very quickly take control of her own lead in the hunt for Osama bin Laden – his suspected courier Abu Ahmed. The film represents her determined eight-year (from 2003, when she assists in her first torture to 2011 when bin Laden is killed) hunt.

The film opens with a sequence of telephone calls coming out of the World Trade Center on 9/11. This sequence is obviously harrowing. The film then cuts directly to the first of two extended torture sequences, in which Maya is broken in by a CIA interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke) as he tortures Ammar (Reda Kateb). She passes Dan the bucket of water that he needs for waterboarding. There have been a lot of complaints about this scene, not least of all being the quick juxtaposition of 9/11 and torture seemingly suggesting that the one provides justification for the other. However, this is a little too simple a reading. First of all, when we first move into the torture chamber, it is not entirely clear who is who before Dan begins his monologue. We see a series of people wearing balaclavas, including, as it is later revealed, Maya. The balaclavas suggest that the interrogators are themselves terrorists before Dan makes it clear who is who. As well as this, the film does not sugarcoat the torture itself, though it isn’t nearly as drawn out and horrible as it is in the much more obviously critical Route Irish. It is uncomfortable viewing and Ammar’s screams are a lot more effective and moving than Maya’s short-lived queasiness. The true horror of the scene is that the torturers are people with a job that needs done and, to them, Ammar is a lead, not a human being.

There are many instances in which Bigelow represents the hunt for bin Laden as a dehumanising act. Dan is able to befriend a cage of monkeys when right next to them is a cage of humans. Maya scans through a series of interrogation DVDs, showing a host of detainees with potential leads rather than a series of images of human suffering. Later, she will blithely watch footage of a drone strike without a hint of a blink when a blast destroys two vehicles. No one talks about capturing bin Laden or of putting him on trial. They only speak of killing him, making him merely a target, like all the rest of the black and white images on the walls. With the CIA Director (James Gandolfini), all of the talk is off probabilities – the raid on the compound is discussed in terms of the likelihood of its failure rather than in terms of its human cost. When bin Laden, or UBL in technical abbreviation, is finally shot dead, we never see his face and his killing is rightly anti-climatic. The soldiers are immediately more interested in taking the hard drives from the computers and, back at the base, the collection of hard drives – which, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky points out in his thoughtful piece on the film, will only serve to perpetuate the War on Terror - is given more attention than the body in the bag. However, though the hunt is presented as dehumanising, there is barely a suggestion from the film itself that this is particularly a bad thing.

Similarly, the film shows that the toll that the hunt takes on the CIA personnel itself. Dan is eventually burned out from too much torture, his line, “You don't want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes,” being one of the most hateful lines in the film. Jessica’s (Jennifer Ehle) own hunt leads her to her grave due entirely to her willingness to trust a lead. Joseph (Kyle Chandler) is forced to walk away from the operation after so many years, unfulfilled and unrewarded, due to an unfortunate protest. Maya cries at the end of the film, either because she recognises that her determination and success has not made anything better or because of her sheer relief at it finally being over. Either way, she has no idea where to go now. Bigelow makes sure to humanise the CIA personnel, which makes for a slightly awkward situation in which the film allows only one side of the battle to be sympathetic. As accurate as this may be in terms of what modern warfare is like, it still leads to difficult sequences in which the music turns sinister every time we see a tanned, bearded face. By dehumanising one side of the conflict and humanising another, Bigelow risks merely perpetuating that very dehumanisation.

Bigelow seems to be primarily interested in the determination of the CIA personnel during the hunt for bin Laden. That is one of the things that she is not afraid to show. However, there is a lot that she is afraid to show.

Bigelow herself makes clear that Zero Dark Thirty is drama, not propaganda. But her choices, or more accurately her omissions, betray that statement. Bigelow shows people who are determined, but she does not show people struggling with the morality or immorality of their actions. She shows the camaraderie and fear of the soldiers who attack bin Laden’s compound but she does not really show the same for their counterparts. She follows the vicious shooting of a man and a woman by the American soldiers with a scene in which one of the soldiers comforts some crying children with, “It’s OK. It’s OK.” However, it clearly isn’t OK, since these children have just had their parents murdered right in front of them. Ultimately, what Bigelow does not do is judge, something that is ordinarily fine since audiences are clever enough to come up with their own opinions, but she does allow a scene in which one of the soldiers wanders around the house, clearly upset by the bloodshed. Is Bigelow suggesting that Americans can be as pseudo-fascist as they want because they will always feel kind of bad about it afterwards?

Another problem is timing. Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011. Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December 2012. The film follows the events so closely that it has absolutely no historical perspective. We are left with a film that follows the hunt for bin Laden in incredible detail but without any ability to show how important or unimportant this operation ultimately was. In her wrong headed attempt at reportage, Bigelow does not openly criticize American actions in the Middle East but merely presents them, albeit fictionally. What we are left with then is a horrible and really rather boring procedural about some deeply troubling real world events, which is deeply uncomfortable to watch but does not express an opinion. In this sense, it is one of the most facile and cowardly films that America has produced in recent years.

Is Zero Dark Thirty a disturbing glimpse at what the West has become? Is it a contempible and/or dangerous piece of propaganda, promoting the capabilities of a less than effective CIA or the virtues of America’s militaristic foreign policy? Does it suggest that torture works? It is difficult to conclusively answer any of these questions until time has passed. It could turn out that Zero Dark Thirty will be the first in a new series of films celebrating the CIA’s part in killings all around the world. Or maybe some day the CIA will orchestrate a mass genocide, the outcry from which will lead to a radical reassessment of recent American history. If either case occurs, where will Zero Dark Thirty and Kathryn Bigelow stand then? The most likely eventuality seems to be that this dirty, little film will be scorned as one of those films that stood by and refused to criticize at a time when reasoned criticism was most necessary. Zero Dark Thirty might not offer an opinion, but when it comes to American foreign policy, military assaults, the CIA and torture surely an opinion is what is needed most and Zero Dark Thirty’s stoic lack of one is the reason it is dangerous.

REVIEW: The Tree of Life (2011)

  Many film critics hailed Terence Malick’s ambitious fifth feature, The Tree of Life, as a masterpiece at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’Or. The film then went on to have a major backlash, and then a clear division between lovers and haters. It is a film that has been endlessly argued over, in terms of both its quality and its meaning. It is also a film that is particularly hard to be objective about. Your tolerance or intolerance of it will be a personal choice.

  For me, The Tree of Life is really two films of about equal length, one about life, the universe and everything and the other about Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) maturation from childhood to adulthood via puberty. The first film is a lyrical film about the place of human beings in the world and an examination of the need for compassion in spite of a fiercely natural world. This film is majestic, beautiful and really rather moving. In a sense, it is Malick’s masterpiece. We move from the feeling of dislocation and lose that comes with being an adult in a materialistic society to the creation of the world, the beginning of life on earth and finally the joy of reproduction. The family is seen in a highly positive light, a cocoon against the ruthless competition that remains prevalent in many guises throughout the earth’s lifespan. It suggests the rather insignificant place that humans hold in the grand scheme of things, but gives hope. The human way of life may be meaningless, but the little things are what matters. It is not an original message, but the film presents its idea brilliantly, using images to suggest ideas rather than to advance narrative cause and effect.

  However, the film soon shifts its attention to a similarly, though less successfully, lyrical portrait of the troubles that come with growing up. The film takes on new concerns and preoccupations to such an extent that the only signifier that it is the same film as the fact that it has the same actors playing the same parts. In this second film we follow young Jack as he experiences a sexual awakening, peer pressure from friends and intolerance from his domineering father (Brad Pitt). The family becomes less a cocoon than a site of dissatisfaction and rivalry. It is such a drastic shift in tone that the film never really recovers and had the two films been released separately, critics would argue that Malick was actively disagreeing with himself.

  Unfortunately, the second film is less original and a lot less exciting. Taken together, the two films tear each other apart and the main reaction once the film ends is one of extreme disappointment, not least because the last five minutes are something of a misstep. What makes the first film nearly a masterpiece is that, by watching it, you find out something about yourself based on your reaction to what happens onscreen, whether you laugh out loud or get a lump in the throat. With the second film, there is less room to manoeuvre. Malick becomes more blunt, more opinionated and no longer leaves the film open to whatever its audience might want to take out of it. While the first film allows you to see and feel what you will (whether positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic), the second film is more of an obviously didactic work.

  The film is entirely a visual work, one that lets the images move the film forward, rather than any plot points or dialogue. It is a meditation, rather than a story. Whether it is a good or great film may remain undecided, it is a breath of fresh air that such an ambitious film can be made in this day and age. After all, not every film should fit into a box designated by accountants in Hollywood. Some films can and should be unashamedly arty, whether profound or pretentious. It is a film of ideas in which some work better than others and the quality of the film, as well as its message, is, refreshingly, entirely up to you.