Neil Young's Film Lounge

for TRIBUNE : this week´s releases UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [7+/10]; PEEPING TOM [7/10]; ROBINSON IN RUINS [6/10]

“The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom,” wrote Tribune‘s Derek Hill in April 1960, “would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain.”
   Hill’s dismissal of Michael Powell’s thriller about a sexually-repressed, homicidal cameraman (Karl Bohm) is still, more than half a century later, perhaps the most famous and oft-cited single film review in the 73-year history of Tribune. It’s an extreme but representative example of the hostility which greeted this jarringly direct study of severe psychological dysfunction, and which is generally regarded to have effectively ended Powell’s career as a mainstream director.
   As David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, “it is revealing that Peeping Tom was dismissed in Britain as wayward nastiness” – Thomson called it his “most completely realized and intellectually somber film… [it] was reasonably criticized as an exercise in de Sade’s principles, and it is the one work in which Powell discarded all inhibitions.”
   Quite unlike anything else in British cinema before or since, Powell’s garish, deliciously perverse proto-slasher movie stands up at least as well as its better-known trans-Atlantic cousin Psycho, released around the same time. Intriguingly, both pictures kill off their nominal female lead at a surprisingly early juncture: second-billed Moira Shearer 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 (and his co-director Emeric Pressburger) over a decade before in The Red Shoes.
   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. These suspicions cue several sequences which mine a very English sense of social awkwardness to surprisingly comic effect – in a movie which is essentially bleak journey into psychosis. Further leavening is provided by Shirley Anne Field as a talentless starlet and Esmond Knight as her exasperated director, while acting honours go to Maxine Audley for her terrific work as Massey’s blind, whiskey-swigging mother.
   There are distracting minor mysteries along the way – why is the picture called Peeping Tom, when Bohm’s character (whatever else he is) isn’t really a ‘peeping tom’ at all? And why does the sweaty, tormented protagonist – named Mark Lewis, born and bred in Blighty, speak with such a pronounced German accent? But overall this is a film which remains potent stuff all these years later, an ideal companion-piece to Hitchcock’s Psycho in terms of a respected ‘elder statesman’ going for broke and finally laying bare his preoccupations with barely any mediation or evasion.
    This can, of course, be a dangerous gambit: Powell’s difficulties in obtaining funding after Peeping Tom have been well chronicled, and have become a tiresomely familiar story in studies of British post-war cinema. In recent years two luminaries of the 1990s had to endure a frustratingly protracted spell of absence from the big screen: eight years elapsed between Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth and his documentary Of Time and the City. For Blackpool-born Patrick Keiller, the gap was even more extended – after his debut London (1994) and followup Robinson in Space (1997), it’s taken more than a dozen years to complete the trilogy with Robinson in Ruins.
   The closest comparison is perhaps with Italy’s horror maestro Dario Argento – though the pair’s styles could scarcely be more different – whose equivalent trilogy comprised Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), and then, nearly three decades later, Mother of Tears (2007). In each case the long wait for ‘part three’ caused heightened expectations which the movie perhaps inevitably itself struggled to justify. And while Robinson in Ruins may not operate at anything like the masterpiece level of London and Robinson in Space, it’s great to have Keiller back, even if this latest effort feels like a protracted bout of throat-clearing and cobweb-blowing.
   As in the first two pictures, Keiller scrutinises the (southern) English landscape, presenting a series of fixed-camera shots which show a range of natural and man-made sights. On the soundtrack, a narrator (Vanessa Redgrave) relates a semi-fictionalised account of the wanderings of a mysterious researcher/theorist, Robinson. As in London and Robinson in Space, Robinson never appears on camera – and nor does the narrator, a role taken in the previous episodes by the late Paul Scofield.
   For all her weary gravitas, Redgrave doesn’t quite cut it as a replacement for the much-missed Scofield, nor do the crisp high-definition digital images match the muted celluloid splendour of the previous movies. Taken strictly on its own terms, however, Robinson in Ruins is an intriguingly topical rumination on current and recent events – specifically the banking crisis of 2008 and its worldwide ramifications – executed with intelligence and wit. Viewers are, however, strongly advised to check out London and Robinson in Space beforehand via DVD (hopefully some cinemas will have the sense to programme them in conjunction with this final section), otherwise the barrage of information is likely to leave them bemused and bewildered.

   The major new film of the week is the Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (pron. “A-pi-chaad-pung Weh-ra-sett-a-kunn”), co-produced, like Robinson In Ruins, by Illuminations Films’ Keith Griffiths.
   Whereas Keiller has struggled to get his films made, relying on teaching and commissions, Apichatpong (in Thailand the western first-name/last-name distinction is very fluid) has, for most of the past decade, has enjoyed increasing access to numerous international funding-streams, as each of his films has increased his renown and his regard.
   From his 2000 debut Mysterious Object at Noon, Apichatpong has crafted a series of beautifully elusive movies, heavily reliant on his own memories of growing up in the rural north-eastern area of Khon Kaen, and interweaving 1960s/70s Thai cinema with older myths. A continuation of a project that already comprises a couple of shorts, Uncle Boonmee is a dream-like, poetic horror film with very welcome comic aspects, in which a middle-aged man with a liver complaint (Thanapat Sasaiymar) returns home to die.
   Tended by friends and relatives, Boonmee – who, contrary to the title’s suggestion, never makes any reference to his “past lives” – is also visit by entities from the supernatural realm, including his long-dead wife and his son, who has transmogrified into to some kind of red-eye, ape-like jungle beastie.
   A beguiling mixture of the transcendent and the absurd – the mood is positively David Lynch-like on occasion – Uncle Boonmee was always a front-runner for the Cannes prize, mainly because Apichatpong had accumulated such a lofty reputation among the world’s more hardcore cinephiles, not to mention a stack of awards for his earlier pictures such as 2008′s Syndromes and a Century (which figured prominently in many best-of-decade polls.)
   Nevertheless, the announcement was greeted with headlines such as ‘Thai Film Pulls Off Cannes Shock’ (BBC), Apichatpong being much less well-known than previous Cannes laureates such as The White Ribbon‘s Michael Haneke. Uncle Boonmee, though somewhat impenetrable, represents a surprisingly accessible entry-point into Apichatpong’s rarefied universe – a network of symbols and associations which, one suspects, can only make perfect sense to the director himself (though even then, that’s far from certain to be the case.) But after the travails of Powell and company, there’s something gratifying about the fact that, in 2010, a film-making artist can transfer his images and moods to the cinematic medium with barely a hint of creative compromise.

Neil Young
2nd November, 2010 (written for Tribune magazine)

PEEPING TOM : [7/10] : UK 1960 : Michael POWELL : 101.5m
seen 17th October 2009 at 28th October 2010 at the Star and Shadow cinema (DVD projection), Newcastle (£4) : {20/28}

ROBINSON IN RUINS : [6/10] : UK 2010 : Patrick KEILLER : 101m
seen 28th October 2010 at Künstlerhaus, Vienna (complimentary ticket) — Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival)  : {17/28}

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES : [7/10] : Leung Boonmee raleuk chaat : Thailand/UK(/Fr/Ger/Spn/Neth) 2010 : Apichatpong Weerasethakul : 113m
seen 23rd October 2010 at Gartenbaukino, Vienna (complimentary ticket) — Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival)  : {20+/28}