Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • A Matter of Time

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Vincente Minnelli (1976)

    Watching A Matter of Time was saddening in more ways than one.  It’s Vincente Minnelli’s last movie; it was notoriously hacked about by the studio that made it (American International Pictures); and what may have been the visual glories of the original, which was photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, were obscured by the muzzy print that was the best the BFI could find.  Booking for this rarely seen movie was mysteriously problematic – perhaps the film was temporarily removed from the online booking system because of difficulties getting hold of a watchable print.  (It was described as ‘fragile’ in the careless pre-screening apology by Fraser McLean, who seemed more anxious that we knew his name than about the film – plain to see who his mentor is among the BFI’s front of house team.)   Saddest of all is that, while it’s hardly surprising that Minnelli wanted to make a film that was a vehicle for his daughter, this labour of love – given the story and the type of performer Liza Minnelli is – was almost bound to be a failure.  Her filmography on Wikipedia includes twenty-five items – starting with her uncredited appearance as an infant, with her mother, in In the Good Old Summertime in 1949.   In ten of the films in the list Minnelli appears as ‘Herself’ and the truth is that she appears as the same character, who we think of as herself, in many more.  She hasn’t had a big film role in more than thirty years (and that’s counting her role in Arthur (1981) as big).   Liza Minnelli tends to do too much on screen and she’s such a strong presence that it’s next to impossible for her to play a character who might pass through this world unnoticed.  This works perfectly in Cabaret.  As Sally Bowles eventually admits:

    ‘I’m self-centered, inconsiderate, and what was the third adjective? Oh, yes, and I have this infantile fantasy that one day I’ll amount to something as an actress.’

    Sally’s charisma – her dazzling numbers on stage at the Kit Kat Klub and her behaviour in her life away from the footlights – is her self-image, her fantasy.  But in A Matter of Time, as Nina, a nineteen year old Italian country girl who comes to Rome to work as a hotel chambermaid, Minnelli is meant to be unpretentious, invigorated by new experiences in the metropolis however modest these might be.  Her personality makes a nonsense of the conception.  In a supposedly climactic scene, Nina, who’s been spotted by a big time film director, does a screen test.  The sequence is meaningless:   Minnelli is so intuitively, intensely aware of the camera all the time there’s no way that she can suggest a different quality being transmitted at this particular moment.   Nina’s rise to international screen stardom is meant to be amazing but Liza Minnelli is irrefutably a star from the start.  The world’s recognition of Nina is only, and more than anything else in the movie, a matter of time.

    Minnelli’s intensity in the role may well be sincere but it’s mostly excruciating.  The only times when her hyperbolic enthusiasm isn’t a pain are in her scenes with Ingrid Bergman, which may say something about her respect for the older star (and much more versatile actress) or may be a consequence of Bergman’s own magic.  The fearfully ageing, increasingly gaga Countess Sanziani – living in a daze of memories and delusions, of old lovers and friends dead or disappeared – is a cliche but Bergman’s effortless vocal depth and power and the passion that she gives to the role transcend the cliche.   There’s meant to be some kind of spiritual kinship between the contessa and the chambermaid:  the old woman dresses up the young one in some of the clothes she used to wear and Nina starts to fantasise about living the countess’s past in opulent, glamorous settings (Liza Minnelli is somewhat better in these sequences, for obvious reasons).  Vincente Minnelli emphasises the connection between the two women through Bergman’s heavy kohl eye make-up.  She looks to be the panda-eyed Minnelli’s grandmother rather than fairy godmother but Bergman is too compelling to avert your eyes from.   Charles Boyer features briefly as Countess Sanziani’s ex-husband – the fact that this was his last screen appearance brings another note of melancholy to the proceedings.

    In her screen debut (as a nun at the dying contessa’s bedside), Bergman’s daughter Isabella Rossellini makes a stronger impression than anyone other than Minnelli, Bergman and Boyer.  It may well be that no one else is up to much (although the cast includes Fernando Rey) but the English dubbing of the voices is so bad that you can hardly blame the actors.   The chopped-up film is a terrible, arrhythmic mess; the impersonality of bits of Roman travelogue that the studio clumsily inserted destroys any mood there might have been in what Minnelli originally shot and cut.  The title song written by John Kander and Fred Ebb is very far from their best; the other music by Nino Olivierio is one of those scores that seem to carry on regardless of what’s on the screen.  The screenplay by John Gay is adapted from a 1954 novel by Maurice Druon called La Volupté d’être.  The script includes dubious insights like ‘People only die because we stop caring about them’ and ‘Be yourself – because life worships an original’.

    29 May 2012

  • A Matter of Life and Death

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1946)

    One of Powell and Pressburger’s best:  the questionable reality of each of the worlds featured probably helped.  The World War II airman Peter Carter is trying to nurse home his mortally wounded Lancaster bomber; in the moments before he jumps out of the plane, without a parachute, he talks with an American radio operator called June, who’s based in England.  When Peter comes to on a deserted beach, we don’t know if he’s dreaming or in an afterlife or in the real world.  Sitting on a hillside above the beach is a boy pan-piper, serenading goats, who disorients us even more.  Peter meets June, cycling back from her night shift at the RAF base, and they fall in love.  There are scenes in heaven (though it’s never quite called that), visualised as a vast, futuristic bureaucracy – and one that’s less than perfectly competent:  Conductor 71, who was meant to be collecting Peter (when he died after leaving his plane) to escort him to the next world, misses him thanks to a thick fog over the English Channel.   We’re never sure how much of what we’re seeing is taking place only in Peter Carter’s mind (and, if it is, whether he’s thinking or imagining posthumously) but A Matter of Life and Death is so breezily entertaining that the uncertainty is part of the pleasure of the film.

    From the very start, Powell and Pressburger combine high-flying visuals with earthbound English humour.  The screen is filled with stars and a voiceover comments on the universe ‘Big, isn’t it?’; planet Earth is described as ‘that little chap in the lower right-hand corner‘.  The fantastical qualities somewhat reduce the usual awkwardness of the Archers’ attempts at verbal wit – although it’s still embarrassing when Conductor 71, an aristocrat who lost his head in the French Revolution, describes the thwarting fog over the Channel, in a comedy-Gallic accent, as ‘Ow-you-zay – a peazooper?’.   If it’s right that Powell was the images and Pressburger the words in their collaborations, that awkwardness may partly reflect the fact that English wasn’t the Hungarian Pressburger’s native tongue.   But the Anglophilia is likeable here – particularly when it’s relatively unstressed, as in a conversation over tea in a church hall (with American GIs rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the background).  It also takes on a different dimension when we see, in the afterlife auditorium, the massed ranks of those who died in the recently-ended War.

    David Niven (Peter Carter) is very relaxed – his relievingly light touch makes him genuinely charming.  Kim Hunter’s June has a solidity that comes over as appealing resoluteness.  The exchanges of them both with Roger Livesey are especially good.  Livesey’s a fine actor – he has, as well as a lovely voice, dignity without a trace of pomposity and a slightly clumsy athleticism that’s distinctive and winning.  He plays June’s friend Dr Reeves who becomes available (he dies in a road accident) to act as Peter’s counsel when the latter is pleading for his earthly existence to continue because he’s in love with June.   Marius Goring is merely doing a turn as Conductor 71; it becomes less irritating only because it gradually runs out of steam.  Raymond Massey is tedious as the prosecuting counsel in the celestial trial, a man who still blames the British for his death in the American War of Independence.  But Abraham Sofaer has a charismatic presence as the judge, Richard Attenborough registers strongly in his brief appearance as a pilot now on the other side, and Kathleen Byron is rather charming as a briskly beautiful angel.

    The proceedings in the vast courtroom of the next world are the dramatic climax but not the best part of A Matter of Life and Death:  the point-making – culminating in the triumph of human love over inhuman law – is a bit too obvious here (and we already got the essential message through the prevailing colour scheme:  heaven is monochrome whereas human life is in Technicolor).  A book called ‘My Best Game of Chess’ appears at a couple of crucial points, including after the trial.   This and the shoreside sequence near the beginning naturally made me think of The Seventh Seal and wonder if Bergman had seen A Matter of Life and Death.  Probably not, and he certainly made it clear that a medieval church painting by Albertus Pictor was the inspiration for the man-playing-chess-with-death.  But the thought’s amusing because the temperaments of Powell and Pressburger are so utterly different from Bergman’s.

    26 November 2010

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