Daily Archives: Tuesday, June 2, 2015

  • Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Schlesinger (1967)

    I must have seen John Schlesinger’s film for the first time in the early 1970s, not long after reading Far from the Madding Crowd as an O-level set book.  I’d seen it at least once since then before going to this BFI screening a few days ago.  I watched it realising that part of its emotional pull was nostalgic but I’ve always liked the film and always had the idea I was in a minority in thinking well of it.  The current 72% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes is thanks largely to the positive appraisals by reviewers that have appeared in recent weeks to coincide with the release of Thomas Vinterberg’s remake of the Hardy novel.  The negative judgments on Rotten Tomatoes are mostly in reprints of 1960s reviews.   Was Schlesinger’s film underrated on its original release?  Is distance in time now lending enchantment to the view?  Is it the Vinterberg version that’s making Schlesinger look good in retrospect?  Probably a bit of all three – probably more than a bit of the first.

    The received wisdom has always been that Julie Christie’s Bathsheba Everdene is incongruous in place and time.  Penelope Houston (The Spectator, 26 October 1967) says that she ‘belongs ineluctably to the wrong century and the wrong context. Miss Everdene, one feels, is a weekender in Wessex’.  In contrast, among the 2015 re-reviewers, Peter Bradshaw thinks ‘Christie carries the film with her own insouciant vulnerability’ and Stephanie Zacharek praises the Schlesinger version for having ‘a star, Christie, whose mere presence is a kind of cliffside poetry’.  Zacharek’s review is looking for a stick with which to beat Thomas Vinterberg’s film, and Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba in particular, but her words point up an essential difference between Mulligan and Julie Christie.  The former is the more accomplished actress, the latter a more effulgent screen presence.  Compared with Mulligan, Christie is not emotionally precise – she sometimes seems to be surfing the character – but she is consistent in presenting Bathsheba as wilful, flirtatious and selfish, to an extent that makes her unsympathetic.  The theatrical release poster in North America alerted audiences to the first two traits (the strapline was ‘A willful [sic] passionate girl and … the three men who want her!’) but not the third.  One of Julie Christie’s gifts is emotional transparency and Bathsheba’s consequently transparent selfishness may well have contributed to the commercial failure of Schlesinger’s film in the US (although it did well enough at the British box office).  Whereas the resolve of Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba is rooted in the desire to be a fully liberated woman, Christie’s determination is born of an impulsive self-centredness:  when this Bathsheba is troubled, it’s because the dilemma she’s in is making things difficult for her.  It’s arguable that the Bathsheba of 2015, a gender-conscious and proudly capable manager, is more substantially incongruous in nineteenth-century Wessex than Schlesinger’s heroine.  The anachronistic elements of Christie’s Bathsheba seem, at this distance in time, to have less to do with her interpretation of the character than with her physical appearance (hairstyle, make-up and complexion).

    Terence Stamp’s Sergeant Troy is occasionally hampered in a similar way:  when Troy is in civvies after resigning his military commission, the tight cut of his suit trousers looks to me (though I’m no expert) mid-1960s rather than mid-Victorian.  Penelope Houston was right to describe his performance as ‘all bits and pieces’; when Troy is showing that he’s a nasty piece of work, Stamp is uncomfortable, verging on wooden.  But the good ‘bits’ are very good:  he conveys effortlessly the combination of sexual allure and humour that captures Bathsheba’s heart.  He also makes you believe in Troy’s shallow popularity among the farm workers, in the early days of his marriage to Bathsheba:  when he sings a song at the harvest dance, Terence Stamp expresses a sense of Troy’s genuine enjoyment of being part of (and a man of power within) the Weatherbury farm community.  There’s a similarly euphoric quality in Troy’s showing off to Bathsheba in the deservedly famous swordplay sequence and a genuine uncertainty and inconstancy in his feelings for Fanny Robin, who is touchingly played by Prunella Ransome.  Both Stamp and Julie Christie, although they express the weak or displeasing aspects of their characters, also get across their confounding charm.

    Peter Finch received the best reviews of the four main actors in 1967 and, though he looks too dashing, he is very fine as Boldwood.  He describes the corroding obsession of a man hitherto secure in routine and public esteem (and Boldwood’s plight is made more powerful by the extent to which it remains largely unnoticed).   Finch is especially moving in expressing Boldwood’s vast relief at receiving Bathsheba’s only modestly encouraging responses to his overtures.  Alan Bates’s Gabriel Oak is a noticeably well-spoken shepherd but this is an expertly judged performance and the longer running time of Schlesinger’s film allows Gabriel to recede into the background more than he does in Thomas Vinterberg’s.  Bates’s Gabriel is ever-present and watchful but his feelings are under wraps.  (I don’t agree with Penelope Houston that Bates wears the ‘confident, understated smile of the character who knows – and knows that we know – he will still be there at the end to claim the heroine’.)

    The passage of time is an important feature of Schlesinger’s narrative, as James Price summarised in his Sight and Sound review (Winter 1967/8)[1], and it’s a timepiece that supplies a memorable closing scene.  (Just as well because the preceding scene, in which Bathsheba asks Gabriel not to leave and he insists he’ll stay only if they marry, is a botch – it’s too hurried.)  Troy buys as a wedding present for Bathsheba a clock in a glass dome, with various moving parts; a miniature, red-clad soldier comes out each time the clock chimes the hour.   Immediately after their wedding, Bathsheba and Gabriel are together in the parlour.  It’s raining outside.  Gabriel smiles at his wife; although she smiles back, she appears more interested in reading newspaper announcements of their marriage than in her new husband.  The claustrophobic effect is deepened when, as the hour strikes, the camera moves to the clock on the dresser and the soldier appears.  It is the very last shot of the film.  A mechanism that records the forward movement of time is also a reminder that the newlyweds are caught up in the past.

    ‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.’

    These words of Gabriel, spoken when he first proposes marriage to Bathsheba and repeated when she finally accepts him, now ring ominously hollow.   Whenever Gabriel hears the clock, there will be Bathsheba’s real love.

    The timespan of the film itself enables Schlesinger to give Far From the Madding Crowd something of the novel’s amplitude and to connect the dramatis personae with their physical environment. He is much assisted in this by Frederic Raphael’s screenplay, Richard Rodney Bennett’s music and Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography.  The beautiful blend of promise and melancholy in Bennett’s score is never too insistent but always contributes potently to the atmosphere.  The visuals bring out the scale and the textures of the landscape, and the vagaries of the Wessex weather.  There’s as much murk as there is sunshine, and Roeg gives a vivid impression of muddy, plashing ground and constricted spaces, as well as of the enormity of open ones.  The camera sometimes takes a God’s-eye view of the arena – or, at least, a view that suggests the littleness of human beings’ ability to control their fate.  At the same time, the film imparts a sense of careless cruelty, on the part of people as well as of nature – the harsher aspects of Christie’s and Stamp’s portraits of Bathsheba and Troy are a significant element of this.

    Over the course of nearly three hours, Schlesinger is able to animate the rural community and to present the principals as both belonging to and standing apart from it.   There are some first-rate characterisations, comical and true, of the farm workers – especially Denise Coffey’s Soberness Miller, Brian Rawlinson’s Matthew Moon and, best of all, John Barrett’s Joseph Poorgrass. Fiona Walker is excellent as Bathsheba’s maid Liddy.   Schlesinger has assembled for the rustics a fine collection of faces:  John Garrie, as the malignant bailiff Pennyways, is particularly memorable and the character’s recurrence in the story (turning up like a bad Pennyways) is dramatically effective.  There are lovely, fresh moments, such as Bathsheba’s observing a small boy walking across a field, early in the morning, trying to memorise his catechism.  Richard Macdonald’s production design and the set decoration were for me almost entirely convincing (although the mugs used at the haymaking supper look a shade too pristine).

    There are echoes of Sergeant Troy’s sexualised swordplay in his listless lashing at cliff-side grasses shortly before he disappears into the sea and during his back-from-the-dead reappearance at a travelling fair.  Both are, in a lower key, no less incisive than the primary scene that they evoke.  The scenes at the fair, where Troy gets a job playing Dick Turpin, call to mind an earlier sequence, invented by Raphael, in which people have gathered on the beach of a coastal resort to listen to a colourfully illustrated account of Captain Cook’s travels.  We gradually realise the rich resonances between these two episodes.  In the first of them, which takes place before Bathsheba’s marriage to Troy, we see – but don’t hear the words of – her impassioned appeal to him, which takes place in the background to the Captain Cook show.   At the travelling fair, Bathsheba and Boldwood are in the audience; Troy knows they are there and makes urgent attempts to disguise his appearance by applying extra highwayman make-up; as she watches the show, Bathsheba, although she doesn’t quite believe she is watching Troy, experiences a wordless shock of recognition.  The rustic audience’s delighted and sentimental reactions to, respectively, the slapstick humour of the Dick Turpin routine and the demise of his mare Black Bess turn the sequence into a fine piece of social observation as well as a moment of great suspense.   The film was criticised on its original release for excessive length but these various rhymes are all made possible by John Schlesinger’s taking time to tell the story.  Largely admiring reviews of his Far from the Madding Crowd have taken their time too but, nearly half a century on, here they now are.

    13 May 2015

    [1] ‘Gabriel Oak has to labour in silence while Bathsheba first flirts with Farmer Boldwood, then marries Troy, then seems inclined to bow to Boldwood again.  Boldwood is told by Bathsheba to wait until harvest, then to wait until Christmas, then to wait for six years.’

     

  • Force Majeure

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Turist

    Ruben Östlund (2014)

    The time is the present, the place a ski resort in the French Alps.  A Swedish couple in their mid-thirties are on a five-day holiday with their daughter and son.  On the second day, a controlled avalanche is less controlled than expected; the family, along with others lunching in a terrace restaurant, momentarily panic.  The husband and father, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), tries to escape the avalanche without his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), or their children, Vera and Harry (Clara and Vincent Wettergren).  Ebba is appalled by her husband’s instinctive, cowardly self-protection.  Matters are made worse by Tomas’s reluctance to admit to moving fast to save his own skin.  Over the next two days, the couple’s marriage plummets into crisis.  On their last night in the hotel, Tomas, overcome by shame (and self-pity), breaks down and has to be consoled by his wife and children.  The next morning, the family go skiing together.  Ebba disappears in a fog and Tomas leaves Vera and Harry to find her.  He succeeds and returns, with his wife (who’s physically unscathed), to where the children have waited.  This may be a moment of redemption for the paterfamilias (in his eyes anyway) but the family’s departure from the resort throws things off balance again.  They and their fellow tourists are driven in a coach along steeply winding mountain roads, which the driver struggles to negotiate.  Ebba is convinced that he is incompetent and insists on getting out of the vehicle.  All but one of the other passengers follow suit.

    When the passengers leave the coach, they have no option but to continue their journey on foot.  We see them filing down the mountain slope and, in the final shot of the film, walking towards the camera.  Although the angles are very different, these closing images bring to mind the famous, repeated shot in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie that shows the six principal characters walking along a road – serenely impervious to the succession of setbacks they suffer in their quest for a satisfying meal.  In contrast, the affluent middle-class characters in Force Majeure experience a succession of crises of confidence.   They have a strong sense of entitlement, an expectation that the structures and technologies of their world will run like clockwork to guarantee their pleasures.  (Until the avalanche gets too close, the tourists are excitedly taking pictures of it on their phones.)  The writer-director Ruben Östlund, whose fourth feature this is, is out to demonstrate the fragility of their complacencies.

    Östlund accomplishes his aim confidently but obviously.  At the start of the film, the explosions that are regularly detonated in the beautiful Alpine landscape, to manage snowfall through controlled avalanches, are ominous.  There are other discomfiting noises on the soundtrack:  the grinding and moaning of mountain machinery contrast with the spare, spotless (and soulless) elegance of the hotel where the family are staying.  There’s a lift-to-the-scaffold quality to their journeys up to the ski slopes; the transport conveying them there not only creaks but is claustrophobic.  The articulation of marital fissures with disturbances in the natural world and strain in the ski resort’s mechanical substructure is confirmed as soon as Tomas’s and Ebba’s relationship starts to founder.  But Östlund keeps repeating the point and the sights and sounds of breakdown turn into no more than showing off his cleverness – even though the gaze of his camera is so transfixed by the snow and the hotel interiors (the place resembles, more and more, a luxury prison) that the viewer too is nearly hypnotised by these images, which are typically held for what feels like a long time.

    The moment of the avalanche is pivotal rather as the Marabar Caves episode is in A Passage to India.   These crucial incidents are, in a sense, non-events:  Dr Aziz doesn’t assault Adela Quested and the avalanche in Force Majeure doesn’t cause any physical damage.   One obvious difference between the two narrative turning points is that we have only Adela Quested’s word for what happens in the Marabar Caves whereas Ebba has photographic evidence of Tomas’s evasive action.  A larger and more important difference is in how convincingly the storyteller relates the pivotal event to what has gone before.  Adela’s claim that Aziz behaved improperly towards her in the caves is persuasive as a neurotic consequence of earlier, minor incidents which E M Forster includes to show that, as she attempts to engage with Indian landscape and culture, Adela Quested is increasingly unnerved.  Most reviews I’ve read of Force Majeure suggest that Tomas’s brief desertion of his family is a bolt from the blue – that it’s the unexpectedness of her husband’s contemptible selfishness that floors Ebba.  The marital situation isn’t as simple as this, though.  A structural and dramatic weakness of the film is that Ruben Östlund wants to have it both ways.

    Östlund sets things up from the start to suggest that Tomas, a businessman, spends too much time at work and not enough with his family.  On their arrival at the hotel, Ebba tells another guest that they need, and Tomas particularly needs, a holiday.  Her husband jokes, but with a hint of irritation, that he’s been told he’s going to enjoy the next five days.  As played by Johannes Kuhnke, Tomas exudes self-satisfaction:  it’s clear, well before the avalanche, he must be made to see the error of his egocentric ways.  What’s also striking in the early scenes of Force Majeure is that Tomas’s and Ebba’s kids, whenever they’re not absorbed in their iPads or are asleep, are brittle and obstreperous with their parents.  This is particularly the case with Harry, the younger child.  One of the strongest moments of the film arrives when Tomas, exasperated by his son’s behaviour, asks what’s wrong and Harry blurts out that he’s worried his parents are going to divorce.  It’s true that this exchange takes place on the morning of Day 3 (the film is divided into five daily chapters), after the avalanche incident, but Harry was fractious from the start and he can’t possibly have developed fears about the family breaking up solely on the strength of Ebba’s reaction so far to the events of the previous day (a reaction which is partly suppressed).

    When Tomas breaks down and lies weeping on the floor of their hotel room, Vera and Harry join Ebba in embracing and comforting him; their mother tells the puzzled, anxious children that their father is ‘sad’ and her explanation is mutely accepted.   By this stage, Vera and Harry have stopped being troublesome because it would get in Ruben Östlund’s way if they still were.  There’s no reiteration by Harry of the fears he expressed on Day 3, nor any mention, on the morning of Day 5, of Tomas’s breakdown the previous night – the children show no concern or curiosity about whether their father’s prostrating ‘sadness’ has passed.  Ostlund is, in both senses of the word, careless about the human realities of the family’s situation.  He’s preoccupied with arresting tableaux vivants – illustrations of the dismantling of the characters’ sense of security.

    I’d expected the film, in view of its reception as a red-hot-ice-cold comedy of manners, to be more amusing than it is:  its admirers seem to confuse Östlund’s sardonic attitude with a comic gift.  There’s a good punchline to the sequences involving a hotel worker (Johannes Moustos), who looks vaguely Eastern European, and who unsettles Tomas and Ebba.  The man observes their arguments in the corridor outside their room (so that the children inside don’t hear) and Tomas tells him at one point to stop spying on them.  The last time this man appears, Ebba has to ask for his help:  she and her husband have mislaid the swipe card for their room and Tomas has become a quivering, weeping wreck.  Force Majeure is substantially funny, though, only when Mats (Kristofer Hivju), an old friend of the main couple, arrives at the resort, with his much younger girlfriend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius).  He joins Tomas and Ebba for what, in spite of Mats’s attempts to defuse the situation (it’s Day 3), becomes an increasingly uncomfortable evening.  On the way back to their own room in the hotel, Fanni tells Mats that she would have expected him to run for cover, as Tomas did, when the avalanche threatened.  She doesn’t say this to start an argument but her remark gives Mats a sleepless night and he therefore ensures that Fanni has one too.  This episode works partly because you wonder briefly if Östlund is going to create a comic epidemic of male-female discord among the hotel guests (he doesn’t) and partly because Kristofer Hivju is, by some way, the strongest screen presence and the most likeable performer in the film.

    While deriding the privileged vulnerability of his characters generally, Östlund also has a more specific satiric focus, on male vanities and expectations of ‘manhood’.  Mats is insulted by Fanni’s aspersions of cowardice.  Tomas’s deepening depression is lifted when two young women tell him he’s the most attractive man staying at the hotel but it’s a short-lived respite:  the women then apologise to him – they were confusing Tomas with someone else.  The female lead in last year’s Winter Sleep was, like Ebba, a wife on the receiving end of her husband’s self-centredness and this element of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film was weakened by the limited performance of the actress concerned.  The same thing happens here.  Ebba is meant to be sympathetic, at least compared with Tomas, but the beautifully woebegone Lisa Loven Kongsli plays her monotonously.  A more interesting female character is Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg), another guest at the hotel, who shocks Ebba when she explains that, although she’s married, she continues to enjoy various relationships, short-term and long-term, with other men.  In the finale to Force Majeure, Charlotte is the one passenger who stays on the coach, with the driver.

    16 April 2015

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