Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • How I Ended This Summer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kak ya provyol etim letom

    Alexei Popogrebsky (2010)

    Two men – one in his twenties, the other about forty – work at a meteorological station on an Arctic island.  (The filming was done at the Valkarkai polar station on the Chukchi Sea in Arctic Russia.)  The place is deeply isolated:  Pavel and Sergei are stuck there with just each other for company, apart from the voice at the other end of the radio link when they’re filing their reports, and the landscape.  And the viewer is stuck with them, and the landscape – which is really breathtaking, because its beauty is so vastly implacable. The composition of the images, photographed by Pavel Kostomarov, and their colour-grading – the first time I remember seeing a credit for this (for Kirill Bobrov) – is superb.  There are wonderful shots of the land and sky darkening then moving into the light of the following day.  It’s not just the spectacular aspect of the visuals that makes this such a good film to look at:  details like fish, caught and smoked by Sergei and hanging on a line, are strong too.  Vladimir Golovnitsky’s fine sound editing is similarly unnerving – the radio, the helicopter, the sea, the wind, creaking floors and doors.  Dmitri Katkhanov’s score is played as music on Pavel’s walkman, as music inside the young man’s head – music which asserts his generational difference from Sergei and reminds him of a world outside the station.  It’s not hard to sympathise with Pavel:  this minutely observed film is a punishing match for its setting.  I was always wanting it to end (and it is too long) but it’s an impressive piece of work.

    How I Ended This Summer is about doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.  Pavel (whom Sergei often calls Pasha) is alone on the station when news come through the radio link that Sergei’s wife and child have died in an accident.  Pavel loses his nerve when Sergei returns and can’t bring himself to break the news.  Nick Hasted suggested to the writer-director Alexei Popogrebsky in an S&S interview in May that this panicky oversight might not have mattered so much in a different environment, and Popogrebsky agreed.  Pavel’s moral failure forces him into showing physical resourcefulness and daring:  he eventually tells Sergei and, terrified that the older man will kill him, goes on the run in this arctic wilderness.  The physical transformation of Pavel is one of the most remarkable I can remember seeing on screen.  Grigory Dobrygin appears to age decades, his face hollowed out by what he experiences (when he and Sergei eventually part, Pavel is hunched with shame).  The heavy-set, unsmiling Sergei comes to emotional life only when he’s responding to the text message from his wife, telling him that she and their child are going to visit him.  (It’s that text that sends Sergei out fishing for arctic trout and so away from the station when news of his loved ones’ death comes through.)  As the story develops, Sergei Puskepalis as Sergei uses his eyes – they express both threat and hurt – marvellously.  It’s to the credit of the two actors, and Popogrebsky, that you root for both men equally – and, at the same time, feel infuriated by Pavel’s cowardice and nervous that Sergei is going to turn into the bogeyman that Pavel fears.

    Pavel takes down the message about Sergei’s wife and child on a sheet of paper, which gets dropped on the floor shortly before Sergei’s return from his unauthorised fishing trip.  Once he fails to tell Sergei what he needs to know, Pavel rushes back into their cabin to recover the message.  This obvious melodramatic detail seems to come from a different kind of film – the too slow realisation of the voices down the radio link that Sergei’s still in the dark about his wife and child feels contrived too.  Minimising the background information intensifies the material, and strengthens the starkness of the men’s situation and opposition.  Even so, Popogrebsky would have done better to give us a clearer idea of why Pavel is working at the station in the first place.  Do we take literally Sergei’s sarcastic remark which gives the film its title – ‘You just want to write a swanky essay “how I ended this summer”’ – and assume Pavel’s a student doing a dissertation of some kind?   It seems unlikely:  Pavel doesn’t seem to be, even before the going gets tough, an adventurous, game-for-anything spirit, the kind of young man who would opt for such extraordinarily arduous fieldwork.  So is he simply a junior meteorologist who’s bored and a little careless in his work?  It limits our understanding of Pavel’s later metamorphoses when we don’t quite know where he started from.   (In any case, the title sounds more like an awkwardly-translated variant on a school child’s ‘what-I-did-on-my-summer-holidays’ than any more advanced education assignment.)

    Popogrebsky’s obliqueness works very well at the end of the film, however.  Pavel leaves the island – a helicopter arrives at last – and Sergei stays.  Why does he stay?   On a realistic level, I wasn’t sure; in psychological terms, it’s very clear.  He belongs in this bleak place, through long experience of it and now that he’s lost the only people he loves:  the end of the world is where Sergei lives.  (This place is also full of radioactive material, which plays its part in the story.)  It seems surprising at first that he doesn’t react more to the news of his wife’s and his child’s deaths, when Pavel eventually tells him.  But only at first:  you come to see Sergei as a man whose natural habitat is grim isolation and whose bereavement returns him to it.

    27 April 2011

     

     

     

  • In Secret

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlie Stratton (2013)

    Emile Zola is regarded as a pioneer of ‘naturalism’:  in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin he claimed that he ‘set out to study temperament, not character’.  The novel is, nevertheless, essentially a psychological melodrama.  Zola was anxious to stress the modernity of his approach but, in the pre-Freudian age in which Thérèse Raquin was written, ‘temperament’ derived from the medieval concept of humours – so Thérèse herself is ‘melancholic’, her lover Laurent, with whom she murders her husband (and cousin) Camille, is ‘sanguine’, and so on.  Fortunately for Zola as a storyteller, contemporary medical knowledge also regarded such temperament as potentially changeable.  What he does in Thérèse Raquin is, in effect, manipulate character – he says that he’s dealing with ‘temperament’ rather than ‘character’ in order to increase the ‘scientific’ credentials of the novel.  As the late Robin Buss noted in his 2004 translation and edition of Thérèse Raquin for the Penguin Classics series:

    ‘The use of … medical vocabulary shows Zola trying to back up his study of character [sic] with the latest scientific understanding of human psychology.  … after the shock of Camille’s murder, Laurent’s sanguine nature is becoming more nervous, like Thérèse’s, while she is moving into a state of hysterical hyper-nervousness. …’

    In fact, the shifts that Buss describes are only one stage in the torturous aftermath to the drowning of Camille:  Zola seems determined to adjust the personalities of Thérèse and Laurent as often as he can, in order to wring out every possible drop of melodramatic misery for the homicidal couple.  Thérèse Raquin is an increasingly wearisome read (although it’s short – under 200 pages in the Penguin Classics edition) but it’s often been adapted for the theatre and the screen.  (The core of the story – frustrated wife and hot lover get rid of her dreary husband then pay the guilty price – forms the basis of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself the source material not only for American film adaptations of Cain’s novel but also for that landmark of Italian neorealist cinema, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione.)   Charlie Stratton’s screenplay for In Secret, the latest film version of Zola’s novel, is adapted from a stage version by Neal Bell (that Stratton directed in the theatre).  The director isn’t completely faithful to Zola.  That’s not necessarily a fault, of course, but his choices as to when to depart from the original are curious, and he fails entirely to co-ordinate the ‘natural’ and melodramatic aspects of Thérèse Raquin.

    Stratton flattens out the emotional shifts of the story – in relation to both the settings and the protagonist.  The interiors are generally underlit:  this is fine for Mme Raquin’s symbolically dingy haberdasher’s shop but it’s just as gloomy upstairs, where Thérèse and Laurent make passionate love on the sly.  Zola frequently describes his characters as ‘like animals’ but Stratton presents Thérèse’s carnal desire as animal passion in the wrong way:  she’s so indiscriminately anxious for sex – from the word go – that the film loses any sense of Laurent arousing something unsuspected in her.  While the Raquins are still living in rural Vernon, Thérèse practically has an orgasm just watching a strapping labourer at work on the river bank.  Shortly after her arrival in Paris, Stratton frames her in the shop window as if she were behind bars yet he also shows Thérèse as willing to have sex with Camille – the problem, it seems, is not that her husband disgusts her but that he’s libido-less.  In the novel, the orphaned Thérèse shares a bed with her sickly male cousin when they’re children:  Stratton, unlike Zola, suggests that this continues through to young adulthood (but has stopped before Thérèse and Camille are married).  Elizabeth Olsen, who plays Thérèse, takes her melancholic temperament too literally:  Olsen always seems miserable, even in the first flush of the love affair with Laurent.  (Lily Laight, seen briefly as the child Thérèse, who’s deposited by her recently widowed father with Mme Raquin, his sister-in-law, anticipates only too well the young woman that Olsen’s Thérèse becomes.)  Olsen has a good moment with her instant, unequivocal answer to Laurent’s question as to whether he owns her (‘Entirely!’) but she doesn’t seem frustrated enough that she can’t, while her husband is alive, be with her lover all the time.

    Charlie Stratton may be trying to tone down the melodrama but he can’t do without it and the effect of the toning down is to make the story dull (in any case, Gabriel Yared’s score keeps telling you you’re watching a melodrama).  Stratton gives little idea of what things are like for and between Thérèse and Laurent in the immediate aftermath of Camille’s drowning.  In the novel, Laurent is drawn repeatedly and ineluctably back to the morgue where Camille’s corpse lies; in this film, he appears there only once, it seems to identify the body. The portrait that Laurent paints of Camille is on the bedroom wall on Laurent and Thérèse’s wedding night and Thérèse has a nightmare imagining Camille in bed beside her.  You never get a sense, though, that the dead man is haunting the couple continuously and, by doing so, eroding their relationship.  There are bewildering moments in the film – as when Camille tells Thérèse that they and his mother will move back from Paris to Vernon for the sake of his health.  He’s only coughed a couple of times since they’ve been in Paris, much less than he did when he was breathing the clear air of Vernon.  And one of those two coughs seems to be faked in order to get out of having sex with Thérèse.

    The faults in plotting and the weakness of the central performance do for In Secret but there’s some good acting in other parts.   As Camille, Tom Felton is made up to look so greenish in life that his posthumous appearances are anti-climactic but Felton gives the character a pedantic self-satisfaction that credibly grates on Thérèse’s nerves.  Oscar Isaac makes a fine entrance as Laurent when Camille brings him home for the first time during one of Mme Raquin’s weekly domino sessions – he lights up the tenebrous parlour.  Isaac’s very good at showing how Laurent gets on the right side of Mme Raquin: he does what he needs to flatter her – and she’s almost flirtatious in return – but you sense his contempt for her.  Isaac also fuses interestingly Laurent’s sexual self-confidence and appetite, his manipulativeness, his essential weakness and his increasing desperation.  The film has been poorly received and opened in London very quietly – I discovered only by chance that it had been released the same week as another film featuring Oscar Isaac, The Two Faces of January.  What little praise there’s been for In Secret has been reserved for Jessica Lange as Mme Raquin.  Lange’s variety certainly exposes Elizabeth Olsen’s lack of the same; the passion of the mother’s grief at the loss of her son strengthens retrospectively her smothering and fussing over him in the early scenes; but the screenplay makes Mme Raquin too unkind to the child Thérèse and, later on, cool towards her niece and daughter-in-law to the point of antipathy.  This weakens the impact of Mme Raquin’s eventual discovery of Laurent and Thérèse’s crime.  Among the domino players, John Kavanagh is fine and Shirley Henderson’s natural eccentricity serves her well but Matt Lucas, though he looks good, is a shade effortful.  It’s a shame as well as a disappointment, given the quality of Lucas’s characterisations in Little Britain, that he seems constrained in the company of ‘proper’ actors – especially when the domino players also include Mackenzie Crook from The Office, who’s more at ease than Lucas here.

    21 May 2014

Posts navigation