Oct.misc: 'Julie & Julia' [6]; 'Violence at Noon' [6], 'Peeping Tom' [7], 'Black and White' [4]

JULIE & JULIA
... is Mamma Mia! all over again - i.e. a distinctly average, calculatedly crowdpleasing and female-oriented picture that's made enjoyable via a delightfully spirited performance by Meryl Streep.
   She doesn't get to belt out any tunes this time - but she does master the weirdly sing-song vocal intonations of her character, America's much-loved TV chef and food-author Julia Child. Child isn't very well known on this side of the Atlantic, but a brief inspection of YouTube clips confirms that Streep's impersonation (though of course it is much more than an impersonation) of this larger-than-life (6'2") eccentric is an eerily accurate one. And it's amusing to watch Child's culinary education in early-fifties France, learning from scratch as a way to pass her free time as the wife of a staffer at the American embassy. Stanley Tucci is her debonair little husband, and the interplay between these two middle-aged lovebirds is rather sweet.
   Low on drama but high on charm, the Paris sequences compensate for the relative dullness of a parallel story unfolding in 2002, in which frustrated writer Julie Powell (Amy Adams) blogs about her efforts to produce all the recipes in Child's famed, doorstep-sized cookbook. Adams, who's invariably good value, does her best within the material's limitations, but after two full hours there's still the sense that writer-director Ephron - whose approach is squarely conventional at all times, including a near-incessant, ever-so-perky hasn't really found the movie in what the characteristically twee opening titles describe as "two true stories."
   By far the most intriguing detail - Child's stern disapproval of Powell's blogging - is skipped over in cursory, evasive fashion, and it's hard to imagine Streep's irresistibly batty Julia taking such a negative view of Julie's project. Then again, perhaps she senses that Powell was essentially an attention-seeking self-publicist, who latched on to the Child recipes primarily because she wanted to be a successful blogger and writer, and intuited that this subject would appeal to a wide audience. Though naturally gregarious, Child never comes across as a fame-hungry lover of the limelight - and, though she'd probably get a kick out of Streep, it's hard to imagine her tolerating the manifold faults in the movie as a whole.
   8.10.09

VIOLENCE AT NOON
Startlingly bleak psychological drama, which presents a paralysingly downbeat vision of mid-sixties Japanese society - a dystopia of sexual violence, festering hypocrisy and widespread suicidal tendencies.
   The story concerns a murderous rapist who strikes at high noon - hence the title - the masochistic schoolteacher who marries him, a younger woman from their village who is repelled by the psychopath's crimes but (for reasons never satisfactorily explained) resists turning him in to the police, and the younger woman's lover, an idealistic would-be politician who hangs himself just as it's being announced that he has been elected to the national assembly.
   This suicide is the only one we actually see taking place - but many others are talked about, as taking one's own life seems to be the default solution to nearly all economic and social woes. Though it concerns a narrative that isn't particularly complicated, the picture has a brittle obliqueness thanks to its frenetically time-hopping structure, disorientingly rapid-fire editing and unsettling, Godardian camerawork - indeed, the results feel some way ahead of their time, especially in the frank approach taken to sexual transgressions (including necrophilia.)
   But, as well as some nebulous character-motivations that prove distracting, there's a chilly steeliness about the enterprise which, while bracing and intriguing, keeps us at a certain distance from the dire events. Optimism is a scarce commodity - but it's noteworthy that the most energetic, uncompromised character on view is explicitly identified as a 20-year-old - meaning that she was born immediately after Japan's defeat in World War II and thus represents a potentially dynamic future which may yet emerge from a nation still mired in a nightmarishly deep collective trauma.
   9.10.09

another peep at PEEPING TOM

(bold = what I wrote in 2005)

Quite unlike anything else in British cinema before or since, Powell's garish, deliciously perverse proto-slasher pic stands up at least as well as its better-known trans-Atlantic cousin Psycho.

Hmm... Not sure about that. I rated it 8/10 four years ago, now I'm leaning towards 7/10. Powell and his scriptwriter Leo Marks don't seem to be able to balance the picture's serious/disturbing psychological elements (and much of it is startlingly dark) with the jovial/jokey/flippant material that keeps popping up. The latter includes some pretty broad comic turns - especially during the sequences in the film-studio where a dire-looking affair entitled The Walls are Closing In is being shot (with psychopathic protagonist Mark serving as focus-puller.)
   Much of this stuff seems to have strayed in from a Norman Wisdom comedy - what's Martin Miller doing as a giggling, sneezing psychologist, if only to make psychology look buffoonish? Then again, maybe this light-relief is meant to balance out Mark's evil-incarnate dad, a psychologist of the most sinister and callous kind, one who uses his own flesh and blood as raw material for his experiments.

Intriguingly, both pictures kill off their nominal female lead - Moira Shearer gets second billing behind sweaty Karl Bohm, and while she only appears in one scene before meeting her grisly end, it's an audaciously extended sequence in which she gets off to show all those dance moves she perfected for Powell over a decade before in The Red Shoes.

Audaciously extended - but also distractingly out of place. Shearer's character, while sympathetic and vivacious, is simply the latest in Mark's series of kills, which proceed one after the other without much in the way of logic or progression to tie them together. The script mirrors Mark's haphazard, instinct-driven approach - it's full of plot-holes and credibility-straining gaps in motivation. The overall result, while beguilingly bizarre, at times may appear campy or kitschy to modern audiences - they're as likely to laugh at some of the wilder excesses as be chilled by their implications.

But the most prominent distaff performer on view is Anna Massey (12 years before Hitchcock's Frenzy) as a spirited young gal who starts to suspect that her young live-in landlord (Bohm) isn't quite the mild-mannered gent he seems. She's spot on - but to explain exactly why would be unfair to a picture about which the less the viewer knows beforehand, the better. It isn't giving anything away, however, to point out that there's rather a lot of humour in what is fundamentally a strikingly bleak journey into psychosis (mostly from Shirley Anne Field as a talentless starlet and Esmond Knight as her exasperated director); and that Maxine Audley steals the picture with her phenomenal performance as Massey's blind, whiskey-swigging mother. Two mysteries persist: why is the picture called 'Peeping Tom', when Bohm's character isn't really a 'peeping tom at all'? And why does Bohm's character - named Mark Lewis, born and bred in Blighty, speak with such a pronounced German accent?

Audley's is the best performance - she even manages to elevate Bohm to a respectable level during their one long scene together. But the German actor seems all at sea elsewhere - Mark is clearly intended to be a child-like example of arrested development, but Bohm goes way over the top into mannerism and basic over-acting. It seems beyond belief that Powell couldn't find a more capable performer from the ranks of British (/Australian/American) talent - Bohm's inadequacies threaten to derail the entire enterprise on more than one occasion. And his death scene - the picture's climax - is something of an overcooked embarrassment.
   18.10.09

BLACK AND WHITE
Insipid race-relations comedy/romance is about as imaginative as its title - and according to the IMDb there have already been well over 30 pictures called Black and White already. This one is a very old-fashioned kind of Italian affair revolving around family, infidelity and social embarrassment, one that paints a less than flattering picture of the country's current mindset while showing off a handful of familiar Roman landmarks - we even get an ill-advised Fellini homage in the Trevi Fountain at one point.
   Cumbersomely-developed story concerns supposedly happily-married computer repairer Carlo (Fabio Volo) who embarks on a torrid affair with Nadine (Aissa Maiga), whose husband Bertrand (Eriq Ebouaney) works with Carlo's wife Elena (Ambra Angiolini) at an African-aid agency. Carlo is white; Nadine is black - complications rapidly ensue, exposing pretty much everyone on view as a racist of one shade or another. Right down to the snotty receptionist at the fancy hotel Carlo and Elena use for one of their not-so-discreet trysts - Rome being, as we know, so very short on accommodation these days.
   Volo makes for a bland, milquetoast hero; Ebouaney is stuck in an undeveloped role as the wise, noble cuckold - who turns implausibly violent when he's confronted (in a typically credibility-straining scene) with his wife's dalliance. This is only one of the numerous daft developments that undermine the picture's attempt to tackle worthwhile and eminently movie-worthy subject-matter: namely, Italian society's ingrained, much-ignored problem of casual racism.
   The women fare better than the men, and Angiolini and Maiga do as well as can be expected with the flimsy material they're given. But in the third act even they can't stop proceedings descending to the level of soapy melodrama - fare better suited to the small screen (and not just because of director Comencini's flat-looking, muzak-reliant contributions.) The film is also in need of another edit or two - though only a fraction over 101 minutes, it feels considerably longer. La tediosa vita, indeed.
   20.10.09

Neil Young
October, 2009

BLACK AND WHITE : [4/10] : Bianco e nero : Italy 2008 : Cristina COMENCINI : 101m (approx) : seen 20th October at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (private educational screening for NSFW) [11/28]

JULIE & JULIA : [6/10] : USA 2009 : Nora EPHRON : 123m (BBFC) : seen 8th October at the Dominion cinema, Edinburgh (paid £6) [17/28]

PEEPING TOM : [7/10] : UK 1960 : Michael POWELL : 101m approx (BBFC) : seen 17th October at the Star and Shadow cinema, Newcastle (paid £4) - DVD projection [20/28]

VIOLENCE AT NOON : [6/10] : Hakuchu no torima : Japan 1966 : OSHIMA Nagisa : 99m (IMDb) : seen 8th October at the Filmhouse cinema, Edinburgh (paid £6.50) [16/28]

< Prev		Next >

[ Back ]