Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Black Swan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2010)

    In 1977 Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point aimed to domesticate ballet for mainstream American audiences.  More than three decades later, we’re back to pathologising it – as the epitome of driven, loony perfectionism in the making of art, and perhaps (and perhaps less consciously on the part of the film-makers) as an illustration of the pernicious tendencies of European kultur.  It’s not just the Manichean elements of Swan Lake that come in handy for Darren Aronofsky’s purposes:  the artistic director of the production during which the ballerina Nina Sayers loses her mind is a martinet Frenchman.  What’s disappointing about Black Swan – also, I guess, the secret of its success – is that it’s so leaden and humourless.  It was obvious from the trailer that it was tosh but I was expecting, even though it’s an Aronofsky picture, self-aware and entertaining tosh.  Instead, the grim, largely monotonous insistency reminds me of another heavy duty shocker The Exorcist which, on its release in 1973, was taken very seriously by its admirers – even though it seems to have become a camp classic with the passage of time.   The New Statesman’s Sanjoy Roy describes Black Swan as ‘campily enjoyable’ but Roy is a ballet critic, not a film critic, and that isn’t why the film has garnered twelve BAFTA nominations, with Oscar nominations to be added to the tally tomorrow.  These accolades are largely thanks to Aronofsky’s taking himself too seriously, and infectiously so.  Although he’s a crude and uninteresting filmmaker, he has an acute commercial sense:  he understands that people might like the idea of a ballet film but be bored by mere ballet.  He’s spiced things up by making a horror movie set in the ballet world but he’s given it the solemnity of prestige, prize-hungry drama so that the audience can come out feeling they’ve partaken of art.   His other means of persuading us that this isn’t just a recycling of backstage melodramas about dying for one’s art and stop-at-nothing theatrical rivalries include a good supply of fucks (in word and deed) and the camera lingering on naked female flesh as much as possible, in case the husbands that have got dragged along to the film are falling asleep.  These things seem meant to give Black Swan a modernity that sets it apart from The Red Shoes and other forerunners.

    I don’t know why I should feel sorry for Natalie Portman, who’s winning awards for her portrayal of Nina, but I do.  Nina has for some years been a super-conscientious member of the corps de ballet in a company presumably meant to be the New York City Ballet.  She’s now reaching the age where her chances of a starring role are receding fast and we see what lies ahead, in the persons of both her resentfully over-protective mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), who never became a star, and the has-been prima ballerina Beth (a cruelly cast Winona Ryder), who can’t face the wilderness decades now upon her.  Beth is already an hysterical lush – even though she hasn’t quite retired until she breaks her legs in a traffic accident (or was it an accident?)  Natalie Portman is getting plenty of praise because she did her own dancing in Black Swan but I think she’ll impress a lot of people just as much because her face, as the character offstage, resembles the received idea of a ballet dancer’s face on stage – a mask of tragedy.   If the plot of Black Swan took off from the idea of Nina’s selling her soul to the devil by sleeping with Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the Svengali-cum-sergeant-major director, who’s promising a ‘stripped down, visceral’ version of Swan Lake which will rejuvenate the piece (Tomas doesn’t deliver on his promise), then the lurid, hallucinatory comeuppance Nina gets might be amusingly disproportionate.  But Nina never seems sneakily or skilfully ambitious:  she just seems unhappily desperate from the word go.  She gets the part of Swan Queen not through going to bed with randy Thomas but by resisting him – with a bite on the lips – when he makes a pass at her, after she’s turned up to plead lamely with him to give her the role.  He’d cast someone else because, although he can see Nina as the White Swan, he thinks her dancing is too ‘frigid’ and lacks the abandon needed for the Black Swan side of Odette/Odile.  The bite changes his mind.

    It’s an unhappy fact that one of the more convincing aspects of Portman’s portrait is that she accurately conveys the expressive limitations which have held back Nina’s career.  And there’s no good reason – other than that it mirrors the acting limitations of many illustrious dancers – why the range of emotions her face expresses should be so limited too.  As Lily, the little minx who becomes Nina’s understudy (on the eve of opening night) and nemesis, Mila Kunis at least proves it’s possible to play a professional ballet dancer and move your face like a human being.  I’d expected Nina to become so malignantly obsessed with succeeding as the Black Swan that we’d see her grow into the role of heartless seductress which this ‘sweet girl’, as her mother calls her, has been told she can’t play; so that the supernatural appurtenances that her body starts to develop – the scratches on her back, the sharp black quills sprouting under her skin, the webbed feet – would be not only expressions of her obsessive identification with Odile but her just desserts.   Natalie Portman doesn’t change, though, and she lacks the passionate mania needed to make Nina’s hideous metamorphosis seem either the price of fame or the manifestations of psychological breakdown.   Her Nina is too weak a personality to deserve her fate and the doppelgänger aspect of the material isn’t developed in a way that allows Portman to play different characters.  The double trouble is realised in purely visual terms, as Nina, in her paranoid imaginings and usually for a split-second at a time, sees her own face staring unnervingly at her, or the faces of her mother and Beth and Lily – members of a noxious sisterhood of lethal rivalry – imposed on her face or each other’s.

    It’s a cliché that dancers will go to excruciating lengths to perfect what they do on stage and Darren Aronofsky exploits unpleasantly our ideas about practising hard enough to cause stress fractures and bloodshed:  the gashed fingernails and bleeding toes, just the start of the mutilations and self-mutilations, are considerably harder to watch than the right arm coming off in 127 Hours.  It might seem from this that Aronofsky has succeeded in making something irrefutably scary but it’s the physically horrible quality of the flesh wounds, rather than the horror of the ideas underlying them, that get to you.  A drama-queenly woman just behind us at the Richmond Filmhouse (perhaps an ex-dancer herself:  at one stage she had her leg up over the back of the seats on our row, as if to prove she could still do barre work) was clutching her head at the end of Black Swan – its dramatic power was all too much.  (And it’s true that Aronofsky’s technique is concussive:  Sally didn’t last much longer before walking out than she did with The Wrestler.)  Sight and Sound praises Aronofsky for his brilliant originality in fracturing the formality of classical ballet by jagged editing (Andrew Weisblum) and hand-held cameras (Matthew Libatique is the DoP) but aren’t these techniques the most obvious way of making an impact?  I found the pyrotechnics getting in the way of Benjamin Millepied’s choreography.  The climax, in which Nina realises herself as the Black Swan, is thrilling not least because few other dance sequences in the film are.

    The supporting characters aren’t nearly as entertaining as the archetypes they are might lead you to hope.  Vincent Cassel, when he’s playing an English-speaking character, not only lacks incisiveness when he speaks the lines (in a synthetic, toneless voice); as Thomas (as in Eastern Promises), he seems physically diminished too.   I liked the idea of the mother being potentially rabidly envious of her daughter – used to comforting Nina on not getting a big break, used to herself feeling comforted that her daughter isn’t getting that break.  When Nina lands the Swan Queen, Erica buys a celebration cake which her calorie-phobic daughter refuses.  This moment has a Wicked Queen vs Snow White/Sleeping Beauty appeal (and so evokes another nineteenth century ballet plot).  I looked forward to its being the first of many attempts by Erica to sabotage Nina’s big chance but it’s never repeated, except in the comical moment when she assures Nina, after a very rough night before first night, that it’s OK:  Erica has phoned work and told them that the star of the show is feeling off colour and won’t be in the office today.   Barbara Hershey and Natalie Portman match up well as mother and daughter – and Hershey gives you a sense of where Portman got her glazed, on-the-edge-of-madness look from; but the mother would be much stronger if she was allowed to be engaging as well as alarming.   There are one or two other moments which are inadvertently amusing:  when Thomas tells the girls auditioning for the Swan Queen that those he’s touched should go to usual practice and those he hasn’t should come to see him in his studio later, we’re veering into X-Factor territory.  The terrible screenplay – an original screenplay yet! – is by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin.

    23 January 2011

     

  • Whatever Works

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (2009)

    Whatever Works is no great shakes – compared, that is, with Sleeper or Annie Hall or Zelig or Hannah and Her Sisters or Sweet and Lowdown.   It’s still better than most other recent comedies (though not as interesting as Greenberg).  I’m surprised how harshly some reviewers want to criticise Woody Allen – how meagre the reserves of goodwill he has in the bank with them appear to be.   Pieces by Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman and Leo Robson in the TLS talk about how far Allen’s stock has fallen in a tone which suggests less the fury of disappointed former admirers than a willed, uneasy censoriousness.  There’s an implication that Allen has only himself to blame for his decline as a film-maker because he left Mia Farrow for her (and André Previn’s) adopted daughter Soon-Yi, when the latter was in her early twenties and Allen his late fifties – as if a morally questionable person can’t be expected to make a decent movie.  Of course it’s hard not be reminded of Allen’s biography by the May-to-December scenario of Whatever Works;  and it’s far from the first time in one of his movies that a central relationship has concerned a man and a woman young enough to be his daughter (Manhattan, Mighty Aphrodite) – or, in the case of this latest film, granddaughter.   You can understand why the particular, very explicit philosophy enshrined in the title – human existence is meaningless, enjoy it while you can,  go with the lifestyle that makes you feel good – sticks in the craw of some people because of what really happened between Allen and Soon-Yi Previn.  But how relevant would Allen’s personal life be to the artistic worth of his films if, say, he had left Farrow to set up home with a twenty-something stepson?   Do these presumably liberal-minded critics have no sympathy for someone who was once notoriously unable to find pleasure in his closest relationships?  (The name Annie Hall is alleged to derive from Allen’s original working title for the project: Anhedonia.)  And how many major directors’ work has improved between their mid-sixties and their mid-seventies anyway?

    In Whatever Works, all the main characters end up in a pairing that’s right for them.  It’s a pat, even preachy conclusion yet there’s a lot to enjoy in the process of getting to it.  On this occasion, Allen’s representative-on-film is Boris Yelnikoff, a sixtyish ex-physicist.   He now spends his days teaching chess, and slagging people off – to his few friends and, talking to camera, to us.  When a homeless and, in Boris’s contemptuous view, brainless twenty-year-old called Melodie, arrived in New York from deep in the Bible Belt, turns up on his doorstep, he takes her in and, within a few weeks, they’re married.  Then Melodie’s God-fearing mother Marietta turns up, looking for the daughter she feared kidnapped; within a few weeks, Marietta is into ‘artistic’ photography, drugs and a ménage à trois with Boris’s friend Leo and his business partner Morgenstern.   Marietta doesn’t change, however, in her disapproval of Boris – and tries to fix Melodie up with someone much nearer her own age, a young actor called Randy Lee James.   Some time later Melodie’s father John arrives on the scene, in the hope of getting the family back together, but is deeply shocked by an exhibition of his ex-wife’s porno-photographs.   John drowns his sorrows in a bar, in conversation with a gay man called Howard – a conversation which is enough to make John realise he’s gay too.   Melodie leaves Boris for Randy.  Boris, for the second time in his life, fails to commit suicide.   He jumps out of his apartment window but a passing woman called Helena breaks his fall and her legs.  When he visits her in hospital, she suggests they go out to dinner.  The picture ends with Boris throwing a New Year party.  He’s now in a relationship with Helena – as is Melodie with Randy, Marietta with Leo and Morgenstern, John with Howard.   As they celebrate, Boris turns again to camera and exhorts us to have fun in life with ‘whatever works’.

    The metamorphoses of Melodie’s parents are crude.  Boris’s marriage to Melodie seems nothing more than a necessity of plotting.  There’s the odd irredeemably crap line (like John cursing Marietta’s ‘ménage et trois … should never have trusted those goddamned French’).  For the most part, though, Woody Allen can still write comic dialogue good enough to alchemise crummily conceived scenes.  The meeting of John and Howard is the best example of this.  John launches his tale of woe with, ‘My wife left me, you see …’ Howard says, ‘So did mine’, but it soon becomes clear his wife was male.   John listens in baffled astonishment.  Howard then goes on to explain his devotion to his mother.  After a pause, John asks uncertainly, ‘Is your mother a woman?’  When John lets Howard know he’s a Christian and doesn’t approve of homosexuality, Howard asserts that God is gay.   ‘How can you say that?’ asks John, ‘He made the blue sky, the trees, the beautiful flowers’.  Howard nods:  ‘He’s a decorator’.   There are other cherishable punchlines.  Boris, at length, reminds friends about to go out on a date that the universe is pitiless and our lives absurd before adding, ‘Don’t let me spoil your evening, though.’   There are jokes that seem dumb but are actually acute.   When she learns that Boris was nearly nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics, Marietta gets it into her head that this had something to do with the Oscars (which it did – the word ‘nominated’).  There are some unaccountably pleasing images too, like Gandhi peeping out from the edge of the frame in a sequence in a waxworks museum.

    One thing that has declined in Woody Allen’s movies in recent years is the all-round quality of the performances.   Patricia Clarkson is enjoyable as Marietta and, as her ex-husband, Ed Begley, Jr, after a desperately awkward start, gets a lot better.   Evan Rachel Wood as Melodie is game and sometimes charming (as when she’s talking about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) but the role has been better done.  I liked Jessica Hecht as Helena but Allen seems to have developed a baffling taste for some charmless actors – both individuals (Christopher Evan Welch, who was the narrator of Vicky Cristina Barcelona and who plays Howard) and types (uninteresting young British men – Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Match Point, Henry Cavill here in the role of Randy).    Allen’s disappearance from the screen has various effects.  I think his very absence makes me nostalgic for the days when he nearly always had a main part in his pictures – and having other actors playing his role has been problematic even in more successful films (John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, for example).  To start with, Larry David as Boris is rather alienating – although I’d not seen him in Curb Your Enthusiasm (or anything else) so hadn’t any preconceived idea of his screen persona, I felt that Boris’s smug misanthropy was a quality of the performer as much as the character.  But David grew on me:  Boris’s nastiness in dismissing Melodie from his life, when she’s wounded him by defecting to Randy, is persuasive (and recalls the ‘Hurt people hurt people’ line in Greenberg).

    When Woody Allen played himself, the character had a stylised charm which lightened his pessimism.  Larry David’s acidic temperament can make Boris’s nihilism bleaker – the relief from this comes from the fact that so much of Boris echoes characters incarnated in earlier films by Allen.  When Boris explains that, ‘My favourite Bible character was Job’s wife:  she chose death unlike that masochistic husband of hers’, it rather calls to mind Alvy Singer in Annie Hall admitting that, watching Snow White, he had sexual fantasies about the Wicked Queen.  And Boris is a close relative of Woody Allen’s hypochondriac incarnations.  Discussing what to have for dinner, he pleads, ‘Not that crayfish thing again – last time I thought I had thyroid cancer’.  A panic attack has him gabbling, ‘I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die …’ Reassured that he’s not, he replies irritably, ‘Not now – but I’m gonna die eventually’.  This is a choleric variation on the moment in Hannah and Her Sisters when Mickey Sachs is told by his doctor that he doesn’t have a brain tumour but abruptly stops feeling relieved as he makes his way home, realising this is merely a reprieve from the terminal condition he’s bound to have eventually.

    As usual in a Woody Allen film, the score comprises popular tunes given a jazz arrangement.  This accompaniment functions in his work as a cheerfully obstinate antidote to morbidity – almost like the invincible recording of Sophie Tucker singing ‘Some of These Days’ that makes Antoine de Roquentin’s life momentarily worth living in La Nausée.  It’s no surprise that everyone here, in their different ways, rejects Christianity but Whatever Works seems more relaxed than Allen has often been about a godless universe.  Even in a film as recent as Match Point (which really was a stinker), he seemed to think the operation of blind chance as the determinant of human fate was a shocking enough idea to form the basis for drama rather than comedy.  The improbabilities in Whatever Works are at least played for laughs and I think they deliver them a lot more often than some harshly unforgiving young critics would have you believe.

    7 July 2010

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