Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • See How They Fall

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Regarde les hommes tomber

    Jacques Audiard (1994)

    Perhaps it was the presence of the sad-eyed Jean Yanne, who played the title character in Le Boucher, or just the reference to ‘the French thriller’ in the title of BFI’s Jacques Audiard season that brought Claude Chabrol to mind as I was watching See How They Fall.  Its tone and trajectory could hardly be more different from the studied intellectual approach of Chabrol; Audiard is ultimately much more persuasive too.   This was his first feature (A Prophet, more than fifteen years on, is only his fifth) but he had a very strong cast – Yanne, Mathieu Kassovitz, Bulle Ogier and, best of all, Jean-Louis Trintignant.  Simon Hirsch (Yanne) is a fiftyish salesman, who realises he’s aging and wonders what to do with the rest of his life.  When Mickey (Yvon Back), a policeman friend, is shot and killed, Simon devotes himself to finding who killed him.   I may not have understood the timeframe properly (although I was struggling to stay awake, a warm BFI theatre on a cold night had the usual effect) but it seems that Audiard then goes back in time two years to tell the story of an elderly card sharp Marx (Trintignant) and a dim-witted youngster (Kassovitz) who teams up with him.  (The youngster changes his name from Frederic to Johnny to please Marx.)  The development of their criminal partnership, as a means of clearing Marx’s gambling debts, is intercut with scenes from Simon’s life during the same two-year period.

    One of the things I liked so much about Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped was the quick tempo that helped bring out the farcical aspects of the story – the black comedy of a son trying to live his life in ways designed to satisfy the diametrically opposed, irreconcilable expectations of his mother and his father.   For much of the time, See How They Fall moves along smartly too; the succession of short scenes and Audiard’s cool presentation of the characters, supported by Alexandre Desplat’s sprightly score, combine to give the film a kind of bracing grimness.  Audiard both draws you in and, because there’s no intellectually good reason for being amused by the grubbily violent lives described but you’re amused nonetheless, keeps you uncertain.  The homosexual theme in the story emerges both suddenly (in Simon’s encounter with a gay man (Yves Verhoeven) – Simon wants to know from him what it’s like to live in a gay relationship) and stealthily (in Marx and Johnny’s realisation of what they mean to each other).   Plenty has been written about the sexual substrate of films about gangsters and other lawbreakers – the gun as a phallic symbol, the ambiguousness of male criminal partnerships and so on.  The BFI note on See How They Fall, which included a good Sight and Sound piece by Chris Darke (and a subsequent interview between Darke and John Hillcoat, also from S&S) confirms that Audiard’s treatment of the gay potential of the genre is manna from heaven to serious students of cinema.   But Audiard and the actors make it dramatically powerful and psychologically truthful, ensuring that it doesn’t feel like an academic enterprise.

    Jean Yanne gives a fine performance as a man who keeps thinking he’s at the end of his tether then keeps having to think again.   There are a couple of sequences where Audiard presents Johnny’s lack of intelligence a bit too broadly but Mathieu Kassovitz is always inventive and entertaining in the part, and he’s marvellous in the scene in which Johnny gets things right in order to shoot a man dead:  the fusion of shock and relief is perfect.  Trintignant is outstanding as Marx:  he’s utterly convincing in the physical details – always conveying a sense of Marx’s gradual dilapidation (as John Hillcoat says in the interview with Chris Darke, ‘you can smell and taste’ the character), waking suddenly in the night and coughing his guts out.  What’s also masterly about Trintignant is that, once the homosexual dimension of the partnership of Marx and Johnny is expressed, you realise it’s been implied throughout, but very subtly, in his  characterisation.  Women don’t feature very much in See How They Fall – Ogier (as Simon’s wife) and Christine Pascal (his daughter) have cameos – although it’s striking that the few bits of narrative are read by a female voice.  Audiard wrote the screenplay with Alain Le Henry; it’s adapted from a novel called Triangle by Teri White – who, from the few references to it brought up by a quick Google search, I assume to be American and female.  The cinematographer is Gérard Stérin and the editor is Juliette Welfling (who has cut all of Audiard’s films, as well as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

    8 January 2010

  • God’s Pocket

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Slattery (2014)

    The UK premiere of God’s Pocket at BFI was an unhappy experience.  The film is John Slattery’s debut as a cinema director and features one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last screen appearances so it’s a double pity that it’s not good.  To make things worse, the screening was followed by a Q&A chaired by Jonathan Romney.   It was pretty clear he didn’t think much of the film but that was no excuse for the tetchy questions Romney put to John Slattery and Christina Hendricks, who has the main female role.   Too many of these questions were about Mad Men (which evidently and reasonably exasperated Slattery), including the obvious and, for good actors, insulting ‘When you play a character in a long-running television series, do you find them taking you over?’  When Romney, after hogging the interview for twenty minutes, turned to the audience in NFT1 and demanded questions in a half-condescending, half-peremptory tone, I decided it was time to go.

    One thing the Q&A did convey strongly was that this was a labour of love for John Slattery but that’s probably part of what’s wrong with the film.  Adapted by him and Alex Metcalf from Pete Dexter’s first novel, God’s Pocket is set in the late 1970s in a working class area of Philadelphia (clearly based on ‘the Devil’s Pocket’, part of the real Philadelphia.)   Slattery, born in 1962 to an Irish-American Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts, explained that he felt a connection with the people in the story although his own upbringing had been more comfortable than theirs.  Jonathan Romney was right that the film’s register ‘keeps slipping around’ – from grim, lower-depths realism to black comedy and back.  Slattery in response insisted that these shifts mirrored the original novel and he’s clearly anxious to treat the characters generously; but it’s difficult to realise the locals as anything other than a dismal, often menacing tribe – especially when the protagonist and most sympathetic person in evidence, Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), isn’t a God’s Pocket native (as others keep reminding him).  Mickey and his friend Arthur Capezio (John Turturro) are meat-packers but their work regularly brings them into contact with organised crime.  It’s the people who prop up the neighbourhood bar, rather than the mobsters, who most lower the spirits, however.

    Lance Acord’s muddy lighting, which obviously matches the mood of the piece, is monotonous; my eyes aren’t good but I don’t usually need to peer to make out the faces on the screen.  The black comedy provides some of the better moments – particularly a sequence involving Mickey, who has to arrange the funeral of his stepson Leon, and the mortician Smilin’ Jack Moran (Eddie Marsan).  Mickey’s unexpected entrance makes Jack jump just as he’s applying the finishing embalming touches to Leon’s corpse; later in the scene, the two men come to blows and Jack falls over, accidentally banging the coffin lid shut.  There’s physical abuse much more garish and gory than this in the course of God’s Pocket; for example, when Joyce Van Patten (John Slattery’s mother-in-law), as an elderly florist, whips out a gun and dispatches two hoods.  Van Patten plays the scene straight and makes it work but even when the violence verges on the cartoonish, it sits uneasily within a film that’s largely realistic.  Slattery handles other comic bits rather lamely:  a shot of an advertising sign missing a letter; a sequence in stalled traffic where the celebrity local journalist Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) is trying – audibly – to compose deathless prose, to the amusement of the blue collar man in the car alongside.  God’s Pocket would have been a more coherent piece of work – although probably more dislikeable – if it had been directed by someone as confidently misanthropic as the Coens.

    Philip Seymour Hoffman’s presence dominates.  This isn’t just because of his recent death although that inevitably affects how you see him on screen – especially as Mickey spends a good deal of God’s Pocket dealing with the funeral.  (The bit in which Hoffman chooses a coffin is hard to watch.)  It was interesting to hear from John Slattery that he first approached Hoffman about playing Richard Shelburn rather than Mickey Scarpato.  Hoffman understandably felt that Mickey would be a greater challenge but Slattery’s original instinct was probably right.  In the Q&A Slattery quoted the opening of Pete Dexter’s novel:  ‘Mickey Scarpato was forty-five and didn’t understand women … the way poor people don’t understand the economy’.  Mickey in the film is powerfully oppressed and struggles to communicate but he never seems uncomprehending: Hoffman had an extraordinary ability to suggest different kinds of intelligence but he’s a shade too sharp-witted here.  Richard Jenkins is always witty and shows how Shelburn has come too easily to accept his faults but it’s hard to credit how this man has become a big name in the neighbourhood (and not just through his daily newspaper column – he’s someone whose face is recognised by the locals in the bar).  I wish Philip Seymour Hoffman had played Shelburn; he would have been so good (as he was in Doubt) at distinguishing the journalist’s public and private faces.  Christina Hendricks is barely adequate as Mickey’s wife Jeannie, who’s convinced that the death of her borderline psychotic, coked-up son Leon wasn’t the work accident it’s supposed to be.   The audience, having witnessed what happened, knows that Jeannie’s intuition is right but it’s never proved to be right.  That makes it all the more important for Christina Hendricks to suggest that it’s this gut feeling that keeps Jeannie going in the immediate aftermath of Leon’s death but she’s blank.  Eddie Marsan is just right, though, as Jack Moran and Peter Gerety is admirably nuanced as the bar owner McKenna.  As Leon, Caleb Landry Jones does the kind of make-the-most-of-it overacting which makes you pretty sure the character isn’t long for the film – or makes you hope they’re not anyway.

    4 August 2014

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