Daily Archives: Friday, July 24, 2015

  • Ida

    Pawel Pawlikowski (2013)

    The hook of Ida is the discovery by Anna, a young Polish novitiate, raised in an orphanage then in the convent where she is shortly to take her vows, that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered during World War II by Polish Catholics.  In fact, this is one of two interwined stories in Pawel Pawlikowski’s film (his first feature, strange as it seems, made in the language of his native Poland).  The other story is that of Anna’s second thoughts about her vocation.  These thoughts are brought on, it seems, less by the truth of her ethnic-religious ancestry than by a different aspect of her exposure to the outside world – terra incognita until the head of the convent instructs Anna to visit her one living relative, an aunt, before she takes her vows.

    The aunt’s name is Wanda Gruz.  The time is the early 1960s and Wanda has had a successful career as a prosecutor and a judge in Communist Poland.  Now in her forties, she’s bitterly disillusioned with the regime and loathes herself for being its functionary, especially for sanctioning political executions; she drinks heavily and sleeps around.  It’s Wanda who matter-of-factly tells her niece, when Anna turns up at her apartment, that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and about the fate of her Jewish parents.  She takes Anna/Ida to the smallholding where Wanda believes the killing took place and the two women try to discover from the man who now lives there – and subsequently from his elderly, ailing father (whom Wanda believes hid her sister and brother-in-law before betraying them) – where the bodies are buried.  It transpires that the killings were carried out not by the older man but by Feliks, the younger one, when he was a teenager; and that the victims included Wanda’s own son, left in the care of her sister so that Wanda could concentrate on her work for the Polish Resistance.  When Anna asks why she was spared, Feliks explains that she was too young and fair-haired for anyone to know that she was Jewish, unlike her ‘dark and circumcised’ older cousin.

    During her visit, Anna also accompanies Wanda to a club that she frequents.  It’s here that the younger woman, still wearing her religious uniform, experiences jazz for the first time and, in particular, a good-looking saxophonist called Lis.  She finds his playing of a John Coltrane piece captivating; Anna’s unusual attractiveness has a similar effect on Lis.  There’s an immediate spark between Agata Trzebuchowska’s Anna and Dawid Ogrodnik, who plays the saxophonist (very well), yet it’s hard at first to tell how much Anna is drawn physically to Lis.  Wanda, irritated by Anna’s religious piety, has asked earlier in the film if she ever has impure thoughts.  Anna admits that she does but her answer to Wanda’s next question – ‘Carnal thoughts?’ – is no.   Besides, Agata Trzebuchowska is nothing if not inscrutable.  Her appealingly childish, Slavic-featured face holds the camera but gives little away – her response to the news that she’s ethnically Jewish appears as dispassionate as Wanda’s informing her of it sounded.  Once the family graves have been found, Anna returns to the convent but apologises to God that she’s not ready to take her vows.  She watches her peers taking theirs then goes back outside, in the direction of her aunt’s apartment.

    The experiences of recent days have depressed Wanda beyond the point of no return:  she turns up the volume on a piece of Mozart on her record player and commits suicide, stepping out of the high apartment window in the straightforward manner in which she revealed to her niece her Jewish origins.  Pawel Pawlikowski then cuts to Anna in the same room that Wanda has exited.  Anna puts on not only the Mozart record but also one of Wanda’s slinky dresses; she smokes a cigarette and consumes alcohol greedily.  She then returns to the night club.  When Anna first met Lis, my reaction was to think it was a pity they wouldn’t be able to get together but I needn’t have worried.  They now go to bed at his place.  In their post-coital conversation, Anna asks what happens next.  Lis says they’ll get a dog, get married, have children (I’m sure the dog came first) – in other words, live the sort of life that people live in a non-celibate world.  Anna smiles in response but, when she wakes next morning, she leaves Wanda’s dress and high heels on the floor, puts on her novice habit and goes back to the convent, presumably ready – now that she’s had sex and been given a clue of what she can expect to follow it – to take her vows and dedicate her life to God.  I’m not sure if her decision is meant to be surprising but it wasn’t to me.  I couldn’t help thinking the clinching factor was the prospect of marrying someone who, however charming he might be in other respects, was always going to be playing jazz.  I could see why entering a closed order for the rest of your life might be a preferable alternative.

    The black and white images of Ida are meticulously composed and lit (the cinematographers are Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski) but the visual studiedness is intrusive, sometimes counterproductive.  When the jazz band first appears, it’s apparently late in the evening and the club is pretty deserted.  Pawel Pawlikowski shows Lis and his colleagues in the background; in the foreground is a littered floor.  Each of the pieces of litter looks perfectly placed – the detritus has the quality not of mess but of set dressing.  Pawlikowski often positions people low in the frame (occasionally with their faces cut off at the mouth) – they are dominated by the blank exterior of buildings or the minimally decorated walls of the convent chapel or the nuns’ cells.  This is certainly distinctive but I struggled to understand its meaning (it’s not as if the human beings ‘don’t matter’ compared with where they live).  In contrast, the shot of Feliks (Adam Szyszkowski) confessing to the killings of Anna and Wanda’s family and hunkered down in the grave he’s just excavated, is too emphatically claustrophobic.  Just as blatantly fancy is the image of Anna, once she’s wearing Wanda’s dress etc, wrapped in a transparent curtain and swivelling drunkenly in her aunt’s apartment.  I did like a shot, held for some time, in which Anna and Lis stand next to each other, with her left and his right elbow so close together that it’s hard to tell whether they’re touching or if she is avoiding touch.

    Agata Kulesza’s performance as Wanda has been particularly praised and won prizes at festivals and this year’s Best Actress ‘Eagle’ in Poland’s national film awards.  (Dawid Ogrodnik won the Best Actor Eagle at the same awards for a different film, Life Feels Good, in which he plays a man with cerebral palsy.)  Kulesza, a big name in Poland, is a strong presence although I found her playing actressy compared with that of the rest of the cast, which also includes Jerzy Trela, as Feliks’ father, doing a familiar turn:  a person on their deathbed gasps out significant-but-cryptic remarks.  There are omissions in the script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Pawlikowski that are frustrating and/or convenient.   Has Wanda tried before to locate the family graves (if not, why not)?  How do the convent powers-that-be react to Anna’s deciding against taking her vows and heading out a second time?   Does Lis find Anna, in her femme fatale get-up, attractive in the same way he did when she was dressed in a habit?  (He doesn’t remark on the wardrobe change.)    Pawlikowski, as well as Agata Kulesza, has been honoured for Ida, which was awarded Best Film in last year’s London Film Festival; but, beneath the impressive control and construction of its chilly images, the film seemed to me unimaginative – even clichéd in the way that Anna turns temporarily into Wanda/a woman of the world.   I suspect it’s because Ida deals with ethnic and political identity and guilt so obviously (and on the surface) that critics have decided it must have creative insights into these themes.

    30 September 2014

     

  • The Boy with Green Hair

    Joseph Losey (1948)

    Losey’s first feature is clearly symbolic but the multiple meanings of the symbols are increasingly confusing.  The film was introduced at BFI by Losey’s grandson Marek, who read out correspondence – written 20 years after the picture’s original release – between the director and (I think) the writer, Ben Barzman, in which both men acknowledged they had tried to say too much.  That is putting it mildly. The Wikipedia article on The Boy with Green Hair shows what is presumably the original poster, which carries the legend, ‘Please don’t tell why his hair turned green! – After you’ve seen … ‘.   This don’t-spoil-the-surprise instruction would have been unnecessary in my case:  I’m not sure I understand why the eponymous hero’s hair changed colour.

    At the start of the film, a young, shaven-headed runaway is in a police station.  A child psychologist persuades this silent child to speak and the boy tells his story.  He’s Peter, a war orphan (his parents were killed in London during the Blitz), living in a small town in (I guess) the American mid-west with a kind of foster-grandparent, Gramps.   One morning, Peter gets out of the bath and discovers his hair has, unaccountably, turned green.  (The previous evening he and Gramps have had a conversation in which Gramps has recommended always having a plant – a bit of greenery – in the house:  ‘Makes you kinda hopeful somehow’, or words to that effect.)  Although a couple of the local kids are briefly intrigued, they and other children are soon – like virtually the entire adult population of the place from the word go – treating Peter with great suspicion.  At one point, he’s trying to escape a gang of boys and finds himself in a glade, where he encounters another group of children, of various ages and ethnicity.  These are the war orphans from around the world, whose photographs Peter had previously seen on a schoolroom wall:  his teacher, Miss Brand, has been doing a project with the class, trying to raise their awareness of the orphans’ plight.  One of the orphans tells Peter that his green hair, far from being a stigma, is a great gift – his uniqueness will enable him to attract everyone’s attention and get across to them that ‘war is bad for children’.  Peter is inspired by what he hears and rushes back home to spread the word but the townspeople grow increasingly hostile and even kindly Gramps eventually agrees that Peter should have his hair cut off.  The barber does the necessary.  (The image of the hanks of shorn hair on the floor is striking although the barber is remarkably light-hearted about it, considering the traumatising effect the green hair has had on him and the rest of the town.)  Peter runs away and is picked up by the police.  At the end of the film, when he has told his tale and emerges into the lobby of the police station, Gramps, Miss Brand and the family’s doctor, Knudson, are waiting to take Peter home.   He tells them that he’s convinced that his hair will grow back green and that he’s once more determined to deliver his message.

    Although the references to war orphans and post-war international political tensions are there throughout, they don’t seem to connect with the green hair until Peter meets the orphaned children.  (This sequence is staged very strangely:  the impact of the transformation of the other kids from pictures on the wall to real human beings is weakened by Losey’s filming the scene as a near-tableau, so the orphans are barely animated anyway.)  Up to this point, the hair seems to signify someone who appears different (or – to extrapolate from that – who has qualities which it’s hard for normal people to comprehend):  the film might be read as a straightforward anti-discrimination tract.   Once Peter starts his anti-war campaign, his hair is linked with the political message – a message which, it’s implied, is a difficult one for people to hear and accept.  There are no illustrations, however, of negative reactions (or reactions of any kind) to what Peter has to say; people still just don’t like the way he looks.   And the meeting with the war orphans sits oddly with the earlier scene when these children appeared on posters at the school.  In that sequence, we don’t get the sense that Peter’s classmates are ignoring the orphans – it’s more that Peter resents being himself regarded as one of them, so much so that he fights with the boy who says, ‘You’re a war orphan too’ (and guiltily defaces the photo of the adolescent boy orphan who later gives him moral instruction).

    Losey and Barzman are so preoccupied with presenting a parable that they fail to bring it to life as drama, and so fixated on the green hair that they treat the reactions to it purely as illustrations of their political and humanitarian message(s).  They don’t bother to dramatise the fact that the change of colour – regardless of how much or little people are disposed to tolerate it – is a mystery.  The goodies – Gramps, Miss Brand, Dr Knudson – have no problem with the green hair but recognise that those less enlightened than them will give Peter a hard time.  They don’t see his hair as extraordinary – they see it as a problem because of its effect on the narrow-minded.  (It’s as if this virtuous trio can accept the hair without comment because they’ve seen the script and know that it’s symbolic.)  It appears too that the green hair is luminous:  if not, what is the explanation of the scene in which Peter worriedly puts on a concealing cap to walk through the streets to visit Dr Knudson but the benighted community, who’ve not seen his new topping before, stare at him even though very little hair is visible under his headgear?  The filmmakers clumsily impose the pacifist-cum-anti-discrimination moral of the story on a dramatic structure instead of absorbing you in a drama and allowing you to infer the moral.   They also fudge or blandly falsify important elements of the material.    Peter, miserable because he feels his parents abandoned him, grows to learn that they died on behalf of a noble cause – a pious fiat which doesn’t come close to addressing the boy’s understandable pain and incomprehension that his mother and father thought the children of the world mattered more than their own son.    Peter’s certainty that his hair will grow back green supplies a conveniently upbeat ending but, since Losey and Barzman ignore the implications of what this would mean for the way he lives his life, it’s hollow.

    It might have been more convincing (though less commercial) if Peter had lost his hair.  That would have chimed with the character’s bereavement and have been enough for the other kids to make fun of him.  If the script had also given the adults in the town a reason to be wary of Gramps and Peter from the start, the film might then have been a more compelling story of accumulating, irrational antipathy to the unconventional.  The young Dean Stockwell, as Peter, certainly looks much more different with a shaved head than with his green wig (especially as poor continuity or lighting means that there are shots in which the green tinge disappears).   Stockwell, who was twelve when the film was released, had acted in pictures before, notably as Gregory Peck’s son in Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, but this must have been one of his first major roles.  He occasionally seems too proficiently precocious – there are moments when he looks as if he’s working out how an adult actor would handle a line or a gesture.  But his technical resources are impressive for one so young and he carries the picture – his unhappiness imposes itself.  The humorously saintly Gramps, as played by Pat O’Brien, is pretty hard to take and, whether or not this is a coincidence, seems to feature in a number of the more awkward  and stagy moments.  Barbara Hale (Della Street in Perry Mason) is the too-good-to-be-true schoolteacher, Samuel S Hinds the scarcely less benevolent Dr Knudson.   Although the role is impersonally written, Robert Ryan gives an intelligent, discreet performance as the psychologist.  One of Peter’s uncredited classmates, according to IMDB, is played by Russ Tamblyn.

    The Boy with Green Hair isn’t a good picture but it has its place in cinema history – not just as Losey’s debut but also as a politically ambitious piece, released on the cusp of the McCarthy era, and as one of the last RKO pictures (Howard Hughes had just taken over the studio when the film came out – he didn’t, of course, commission it).   The film’s notably liberal producer Dore Schary was an active opponent of the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood, as a result of which both Losey and Barzman were black-listed.    The film is remarkable too for its soundtrack.  There’s an intrusively overactive score (by Leigh Harline) and a baffling comedy number, performed by Pat O’Brien and Walter Catlett (both of whom had spent much of their careers in vaudeville).   In an interview in the BFI handout, Losey says that he should have done more of the film in this style – seeing things through the eyes of the child.  There’s no way you can believe that the fiercely solemn boy that Dean Stockwell suggests could ever have imagined this routine, even in the happy days before his parents went AWOL.  But, in addition to these musical aberrations, there’s also ‘Nature Boy’, which was written (by Eden Ahbez) as a theme song for this picture.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the famous song immediately took off in a way that meant it was never primarily associated with The Boy with Green Hair (where it’s sung by an uncredited chorus).  During the summer of 1948, Nat King Cole’s version of ‘Nature Boy’ spent eight weeks at the top of the Billboard charts.  The film wasn’t released until November of that year.

    2 June 2009

Posts navigation