SHORT REVIEW: Attila Marcel (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here.

Attila Marcel feels like it should be a cartoon, which comes as no surprise since this is Sylvain Chomet’s first live-action feature. Best known for The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, Chomet’s style is one of freewheeling invention and madness barely contained within a slim storyline.

Beginning with a quote from Marcel Proust’s “The Captive”, himself hardly a plot-driven writer, about the dual ability of our memories to delight and poison, the film follows Paul (Guillaume Gouix), a mute pianist, as he tries to reclaim a clear picture of a traumatic past. With the help of Madame Proust (Anne Le Ny) and her seemingly drugged-up madeleines, Paul reignites his childhood memories of his deceased parents, mother Anita (Fanny Touron) and his sinister father Attila Marcel (also played by Guillaume Gouix).

The film has many cinematic forbears, from Tati to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and it is full of nice little observations and comic moments. A piano-tuning blind man (Luis Rego) stops to mend a staircase railing that doesn’t make the same noise as the others when he strikes it with his cane and some raindrops inadvertently play some sweet music on a ukulele. Paul’s journeys into his own memories are Chomet’s chief interest, shot in vibrant colours and seen entirely from a baby’s perspective and populated with seaside musical numbers and huge dancing frogs.

Back in the real world, the film is tellingly slight, with a number of minor characters (including a doctor whose true ambition is to be a taxidermist) and incidents that never quite add up to anything. The true story of the film is Paul’s emotional journey through his memories via a drug-fuelled fever dream, which means that whenever he is not under the effect of the madeleines, the film has nothing to do. It speedily tries to add interest through pathos by offering more insight into Madame Proust’s life and health, but it is clearly just killing time until Paul can take another madeleine. Though Paul’s story is ultimately emotionally satisfying at the end of the film, one may be left wondering what happened in the middle.

Though slight, the film is likeable and often surprising. Chomet has an eye for an interesting or odd image and the film does feel pleasantly homemade. It is just a pity that its best moments – the moment with the rain playing the ukulele in particular – feel like non-sequiturs.

DVD REVIEW: Is Vertigo (1958) the Greatest Film of All Time?

Vertigo is the greatest film ever made, according to the prestigious Sight and Sound poll conducted amongst a wide selection of film critics and academics once a decade, finally trumping Citizen Kane, which held the top spot for the past five decades. Although it is of course pointless to name any film as the best ever – such a reputation will only damage the film in the eyes of those yet to see it, creating a level of expectation that no film could ever life up to – it does represent the odd staying power of Vertigo.

Vertigo is nominally the story of a detective called Scotty (James Stewart) following Madeleine (Kim Novak) through the streets of San Francisco at the behest of her husband Elster (Tom Helmore), who seems to believe that she has been possessed by the spirit of the tragic Carlotta Valdes, who may be related to Madeleine and who committed suicide years before. The film was reviled when it was first released and it was slow to gain a following amongst critics and audiences. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the film was becoming less and less easy to dismiss as a languorous exercise in dull melodramatic excess with a ridiculous twist, and it has crept up the Sight and Sound poll ever since (appearing 8^th in 1982, 4^th in 1992 and 2^nd in 2002).

Vertigo isn’t the greatest film ever made – and, for my money, Sight and Sound where nearer the mark with Citizen Kane – but it does have its own distinct and eerie fascination, which will force the viewer to go back and watch it endlessly, a mysteriousness that looks forward to films like Persona and Mulholland Dr. As such, it is difficult to write about without spoilers.

Vertigo is a film about passion and love and trying to overcome the past, though all of these themes are problematized (the film is rarely as simple as it looks). Scotty falls in love with Madeleine as he follows her through the streets of San Francisco and beyond, though it is never clear when his obsessive tailing becomes obsessive love. The scenes of Scotty following Madeleine in his car are long and shots are held for much longer than they seem to need to be, but they convey an almost hypnotic quality, capturing the obsession and the strange intimacy that must come with following a stranger without their knowledge. But has Scotty fallen in love with Madeleine herself, or with Madeleine as Carlotta, since he is supposedly following Madeleine only when she has been ‘possessed’ by Carlotta. These scenes are complicated further on a rewatch when we know that Scotty is not following Madeleine at all, but an actress called Judy Barton who is pretending to be Madeleine. Scotty’s love, already perverse, is made stranger by the fact that he may be in love with three women or fragments of all three.

Either that or Scotty himself is simply a nut – Hitchcock leaves us little hints that Scotty himself is not entirely sane, though they remain subtle until the film’s final act. An example of one such hint follows Madeleine’s/ Carlotta’s/ Judy’s jump into San Francisco Bay. Scotty saves her, brings her back to his house and undresses her and puts her in bed. After this scene, Scotty seems to be much more enthralled with her, begging the question of what changed during the film’s fade out. The film becomes a subversive love story, the kind that Nicholas Ray might have made with swelling operatic music, ghostly locations and crashing waves.

Scotty promises to save Madeleine from Carlotta, but he fails. Thanks to his vertigo, he cannot climb up to the top of the clock tower to save Madeleine from throwing herself to her death. Numb with guilt, Scotty wanders through San Francisco, revisiting the locations where he followed Madeleine. He has a nightmare with ghosts and open graves and appears to go into a comatose state. There is a theory that the film ends here, or at least that the action does. The rest of the film takes place in Scotty’s head as he tries to find a way to resolve his guilt, inventing a mad story about Elster hiring an actress to play Madeleine in order to get away with the murder of the real Madeleine. Judy as Madeleine lured Scotty to the clock tower, knowing he couldn’t get to the top and yet would nevertheless be able to act as an eyewitness to Madeleine’s supposed suicide. Scotty, by inventing a story to relieve himself of the guilt of his failure to protect the real Madeleine, is trying to overcome the past by changing his perception of what that past was.

The above is just one interpretation and not a particularly interesting one since it imposes a little too much sense on this so fascinatingly odd film, but it does reveal in its own way the appeal of Vertigo, a film that is simple and yet incredibly ambiguous, supporting so many different possibilities.

Taking the final act at face value, we are left with a bizarre love story. By suddenly seeing Judy on the street, Scotty starts to try to bring Madeleine back to life (not realising that Judy was the version of Madeleine that he fell in love with), buying Judy new clothes and altering her appearance. Judy plays along, because she did genuinely fall in love with Scotty while she was playing Madeleine (which begs the question of how much Judy there was in the version of Madeleine that Scotty fell in love with), but now she is left with the odd situation of being in love with a man who is really in love with a different woman and the same woman. Judy becomes jealous of Madeleine, even though Madeleine is really her. Meanwhile, Scotty tries to recreate Madeleine, getting increasingly obsessive.

As an example of Hitchcock’s strategy with Vertigo and the film multiplicity of meaning, when Scotty is begging Judy to dye her hair to match Madeleine’s hair colour, she refuses and he says, “It can’t matter to you.” This line has two possible meanings. The first is that Scotty has indeed gone mad – of course it would matter to Judy that she dye her hair. The second is that Scotty knows that Judy has already played Madeleine and has, hence, dyed her hair before so it shouldn’t matter to her now. This suggests, however, that Scotty is complicit in the knowledge of what happened to the real Madeleine, but would prefer to ignore it until he can get his version of Madeleine back from the dead one more time. Only after he has finally got his Madeleine back – in a scene in which the green neon of the sign of Judy’s grotty hotel and Scotty’s undying, obsessive love for Madeleine seems to have a transformative power, bringing Scotty and Madeleine back through space and time to the moment when they were last together – he is able to allow himself to notice the giveaway necklace.

Vertigo is not a film that can support any particular interpretation. Even taking the plot at face value, there are some inconsistencies that don’t fit, such as Madeleine’s/ Judy’s disappearance from the McKittrick Hotel early in the film. Vertigo is a strange, eerie and perverse love story and it is the story of Scotty’s love for Madeleine (whoever she is and wherever in time she is) that is the subject of the film. It is a film of love and loss, shot through with obsession and darkness but also tenderness and real feeling, perfectly paced and wholly engrossing. The music swells operatically, waves crash on the shore just as the couple share their first kiss and everything is shot through with surreal colour and hazy filters. All one needs to see is that revolving shot when Scotty kisses Judy dressed up as Madeleine and is transported to know that, for all of Hitchcock’s tricks, Vertigo is utterly genuine.

Vertigo is being screened at the Dungannon Film Club at 7:30pm on Wednesday 10 September.

REVIEW: The Stag (2014)

The Stag has been getting a lot of attention in the Irish press because it seems to be one of the most patriotic Irish films made in recent years. This is an Irish film that is not about the Troubles, is not sombre about Ireland’s past or particularly worried about the Ireland’s current problems – failing banks and Church scandals. The characters are the kind of characters that would appear in a Woody Allen film if he ever included Dublin as part of his European tour. But does that make it any good?

Fionnan (Hugh O’Conor - the kid from Lamb) is getting married to Ruth (Amy Huberman) and is getting seriously involved with the wedding planning. Ruth thinks that he needs a break and that the wedding planner needs some peace, so she enlists Fionnan’s best friend Davin (Andrew Scott) to convince Fionnan to go away on a stag. He succeeds, and their friends Simon (Brian Gleeson) and the Kevins (Michael Legge and Andrew Bennett) agree to come as well. However, Ruth insists that they invite her brother The Machine (Peter MacDonald), despite the fact that everyone thinks he is a total eejit. They are desperate to avoid him but are ultimately forced to take him along. Comedic reversals and complications ensue.

The Stag is gleefully conventional and it feels very much like a Hollywood film. The six men each have their problems – all of which are resolved by the end of the film with a little help from their friends – but the film is far too optimistic to get bogged down with these. The overall impression of The Stag is of a film that is trying to brighten what can often be a rather dark national cinema and an even darker national psyche. The majority of the film is concerned with The Machine’s unorthodox attempts to help these five men learn to love life (and being Irish) again, learning some of his own lessons in the process. His success and his speech at the big wedding that finishes the film suggesting that we should forget about the banks and the Church and revel in being Irish and having a good time, have allowed suggestions that The Stag is that rarest of Irish films, a patriotic film. This, sadly, is unconvincing, since the wedding is so tacky, so cheesy that it can only be dismissed, an awkward attempt at heartfelt grand statements that fails to chime with the rest of the film. It is all too clear that, while they may have fun at this wedding, tomorrow they will be back worrying about their troubled love lives and serious financial debt. It is also a bit of a cheat, especially the fact that the lonely and heartbroken Davin manages to get a plus one for the wedding but we are never told who she is and the camera awkwardly avoids giving her a close-up. Meanwhile the issue of Fionnan’s dad’s (John Kavanagh) homophobia and his refusal to accept the two Kevins – one of whom is his son – is cleared up much too easily.

However, although the film’s message is unconvincing, it is pleasingly entertaining and pleasantly honest in its emotions – at least until the wedding scenes. There is a great moment, surprising in its length, in which Davin tearfully sings Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road”, the lyrics clearly meaning a lot to him. Director John Butler holds the camera on him, on a close-up, only rarely and briefly cutting away, and allows the poem – sung almost in its entirety – and Scott’s performance to speak for themselves. It is a surprisingly artistic moment in a film that would have otherwise not been too far away from an irritating Apatow film. In other words, despite the obvious clichés and the tacky, unconvincing sentimentality of the film’s final moments, the film is actually refreshingly heartfelt.

As for the comedy, the film is knowingly contrived in the kind of way that would seem lazy if you weren’t prepared to just go with it. It isn’t particularly funny, though there are a few laughs. It is likable as light entertainment – being more fun than funny – and it has a pleasing lightness of touch, that gestures towards serious problems in a way that marks them out for seriousness without allowing them to overwhelm what is essentially a happy film about overcoming failure and resolving one’s confused take on modern masculinity. As poor as the wedding scenes are, by the time we reach them the film has built a certain degree of good will, so that what would be awful in a lesser film is merely awkward here.

The Stag is surprisingly likable with good performances that make up for a somewhat lazy script. It is nice to see an Irish film being optimistic for once, even if the film’s final moments would suggest that such hopefulness requires you to live in an extreme state of denial. And while this kind of light entertainment will most likely never attain the heights of the best Irish films, all of which is much darker (see Rocky Road to Dublin, In The Name of the Father, Garage, In Bruges and What Richard Did), it is nice to see Irish cinema being cheery and proud to be Irish for once.

See also: 

I Went Down

When Brendan Met Trudy

REVIEW; Lone Survivor (2014)

Beginning with a montage of footage of a Navy SEALs training camp and the physical endurance and camaraderie therein, Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor seems like a film intended to cleanse the US military’s already tarnished reputation. However, the film is a little more complex than that, though it’s chipping away at the edifice of a military power too often represented as faultless and omnipotent are ultimately undercut by its mise-en-scène and a traditionally bombastic ending.

Lone Survivor is set in Afghanistan in 2005 during a seemingly everyday mission to murder Taliban leader Ahmad Shah (introduced beheading a supporter of the American occupying force – the only contextualising that this mission, entitled Operation Red Wings, receives). They fly into the area, walk into position and almost immediately their cover is blown and the radio doesn’t work. The four Navy SEALs (Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch and Emile Hirsch) are left stranded with a huge enemy force hunting them down. As is evident from the title, only one, Marcus Luttrell (Wahlberg) survives.

The SEALs are caught so quickly and, in a way, so inevitably – by a group of three sheepherders – that the film does not say much for American tactics in the war in Afghanistan. This is not a film about America taking control in a volatile region. Indeed, strip the film of its modern technology and this could be a Vietnam film, yet another war story about suffering Americans fighting an unknown enemy in the woods without any useful analysis of the victims on the other side of the battle or of the motives for America’s initial involvement. Taken this way, as a film about a past war rather than a film about current affairs (which, of course, it is), Lone Survivor is a reasonably successful simplistic war film. The action sequences are well put together and the actors are all reasonable, especially when taking into account their strictly by the numbers characterisation. The desperation and exhaustion of the characters and the confusion of the battle are brought out with great virtuosity in the editing, camerawork and sound mixing. It is the film’s middle section (of the hunt and the gun battles) that is the film’s primary focus and its major calling card, both the beginning and the ending being strictly generic – all remarkably similar to such straight-to-DVD fare as, say, France’s Special Forces. If any further significance lies within the film, it is purely up to each member of the audience’s own political leanings to seek it out.

It is difficult to know how seriously to take a film like Lone Survivor, one that is so contemporary in its themes and situations and yet staunchly avoids being anything more than a film about four soldiers’ experiences in a battle. Is it worth writing about specifics when the film attempts to be so general? Ultimately, the best answer is given by a film like Captain Phillips, which strives for both a realistic representation of a specific event but does not avoid the general picture, referring to it here and there by inference and pointed dialogue. Something as contemporary as Lone Survivor does need to be thought of in terms of current affairs, since its images of Taliban villains, wholesome American soldiers and army helicopters that can mow down an army of bad Afghans without hurting a single good Afghan are all helplessly loaded. A debate about whether or not to kill the sheepherders that spot them suggests a more critical view of the army but it is soon dismissed as not the American army’s way of doing things, despite the fact that, on many occasions today and in recent history, it has been. Clean images of dirty wars always need to be questioned, and as well made as Lone Survivor may be in the specific, in the general it presents a conservative and misleading picture. The key question is probably that images such as these are normalising, that we are getting used to seeing men with turbans as villains. Why, for instance, do we hear a lot of American groans of pain, but every Afghan we see getting killed in the film remain silent as the blood spurts out and they fall to the ground? The film does dehumanise the bad Afghans and the film’s action sequences frequently resort to POV shots in a way that recalls video games in an odd attempt to give the audience some kind of vicarious thrill very time a perfectly aimed shot blows away another faceless, voiceless Afghan. War is not the stuff of action films and any film that represents war as action (harmless and to be enjoyed) raises questions of its ideology and of its intent as propaganda for a war and a military power that are far from popular.

Further, although the film is clearly not about “America taking control in a volatile region” to quote this very review, such apparent criticisms are undermined by the fact that, in the end, the Americans get their act together to mow the bad guys down (minus, apparently, any collateral damage) and, most significantly, the film does not address the discord and effects of such a failed mission in this region. Ultimately, the film concludes with American power reinstated and, hence, could be said despite everything to be a film in which America does take control in a volatile region. In fact, the film could even be said to suggest an alternative to sending Navy SEALs into risky situations – to send in helicopters equipped with machine guns or, taking current affairs into account, drones.

Lone Survivor is, hence, a well-put together action film, though it is too heavily influenced by the visuals of “Call of Duty”, which leads it down a thoroughly unsavoury direction. Worse, its representation of war as action undercuts its seriousness as a film about humans suffering under extreme situations and its emphasis on ‘the brotherhood’ ends up having only an ideological intent. As it is, then, it is another American film that rewrites history and tries to sanctify dirty foreign policies.

See also:

Zero Dark Thirty (2013)

The Commander (1988)

Lebanon (2010)