Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • The Passionate Friends

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1949)

    The BFI season in June-July 2008 to mark David Lean’s centenary has given prominence to this fascinating film, one of Lean’s least well-known.   It was made three years after Brief Encounter and can be seen as some kind of companion piece.  The audience coming out of the National Film Theatre seemed to want to see it that way – with jokes about the characters being frightfully noble, etc.   But The Passionate Friends is a very different piece of work.  It’s much more psychologically complex and disturbing than Brief Encounter and the characters are similar only to the extent that they talk in accents which (now anyway) sound like those of the couple in the better-known film and that Trevor Howard plays comparable roles in both films.  It’s hard to think that The Passionate Friends’ relative commercial failure at the time of its release was due to people feeling that it repeated Brief Encounter.  It’s much more likely that audiences found at least two of the three main characters hard to like.

    The narrative structure of the film moves in flashback from Switzerland in the late 1940s to a ball that brings in New Year 1939 to the first phase of the romance between Mary (Ann Todd) and a young academic Stephen (Howard) some years before that.   At that time, Mary refuses to marry Stephen because she sees being in a strong, loving relationship as a pressure, an intensity that she doesn’t want.  Stephen tells her that if she lives for herself her life will be a failure.  By the time of the New Year ball, she has married Howard (Claude Rains), a successful banker; it’s immediately clear, of course, that this marriage is not a passionate relationship.  A few weeks after the ball, Stephen renews the relationship with Mary while her husband is abroad.   (It’s less than clear whether this is for a matter of days or weeks.)  On the point of leaving him for Stephen, Mary steps back again and stays with her husband.   The next meeting with Stephen in Switzerland, like the one at the ball, occurs by chance and there’s no suggestion that the relationship will be sustained beyond it:  Stephen himself is now married with two children.   Mary’s husband, however, files for divorce, and this triggers the film’s climax.  Mary is an unusual protagonist, given when the film was made – perhaps she would be unusual even now.  There’s nothing feminist about her desire for emotional autonomy:  she has no pretensions to being independent in any visible aspect of her life.  She rather wants the freedom to be self-centred.  Sexual activity or even sexual ambition doesn’t appear to be part of that freedom, except when Stephen appears and reappears on the scene.

    The film yields up powerful ironies.  We realise that Mary and Howard are chilly kindred spirits – it’s completely believable when Howard says that he’s filed for divorce because Mary’s behaviour has caused him emotional turbulence with which he’s uncomfortable.  When Stephen describes his family life, we sense that he too has come to feel the attractions of an emotionally limited marriage.  Mary waves an impassioned goodbye to Stephen as a motorboat carries him away from her outside the hotel window in Switzerland – and there’s a startling sense that the parting is thrilling to her:  she can preserve the latest short meeting with Stephen in memory, without having to deal with the messy complications of a continuing relationship, until the next time their paths cross – which she can now believe they’re predestined to do.  Howard, who sits unseen behind her in the hotel room, doesn’t read her excited behaviour in this way.  What stops The Passionate Friends from being a masterpiece is a tendency to overemphasis, an occasional loss of nerve when the story takes a conventional route and Ann Todd’s limitations in the main part – even though it’s a fascinating piece of casting.  The first time that Howard dictates a business letter and its text is code for the emotional subtext of the moment is wonderfully done by Claude Rains and has great impact.  The effect is, however, dissipated by repetition.  (And there are smaller ironic details that David Lean pushes too hard – like the ‘Keep Smiling’ legend of the Guinness advertising poster that’s a backdrop to Mary’s suicide attempt in the London underground.)  After Howard has explained his convincing motivation for divorcing Mary, his announcement that he realises he’s now fallen in love with her rings false (and his knowing exactly where to find her so that he can pull her back from the jaws of an approaching tube train is laughable).

    Ann Todd is quite lacking in fluidity:  we can see the effort in her emotional shifts (and her failure to convey these fully).   When, lying awake at night, Mary stares into the dark, knowing that her life has been the failure Stephen predicted, she conveys a kind of constipated unhappiness.  This may well emanate from Todd the actress but it fuses powerfully with the character she’s interpreting.  Her bloodless quality is, though, the cause of a crucial weakness in the material.  Trevor Howard (especially in the two lunch scenes with Mary) gives a fine performance as Stephen – and creates a more fully developed character than the doctor he played in Brief Encounter – but he can’t make you believe that clever, attractive Stephen, at ease with himself and with a capacity for contentedness, would be continually fascinated by Mary.  Claude Rains gives a subtle portrait of a man whose good-humoured, wary complacence develops into something more aggressively mean-spirited in defence of his half a loaf.   It’s a pity that he’s landed with the most melodramatic bits (including a puzzling visit to a theatre to view the empty seats he must know Mary and Stephen won’t be filling since she’s left their tickets at home for Howard to find there).

    Isabel Dean is excellent in the fairly thankless role of Stephen’s girlfriend and eventual wife – especially when she dances with him at the New Year ball and we see her fixed smile and frightened eyes looking out for Mary as she whirls round the floor (although Lean maybe has one too many shots of Dean doing this).   Betty Ann Davies is the husband’s secretary.  Wilfred Hyde White has a cameo role as a divorce lawyer, in which he does amusing business fiddling with a pencil.  There are remarkable shots in the film:  at the New Year ball, as Mary and her husband look from a balcony to the revellers below;  the camera’s movement round the couple’s large house with its gelid parquet floors and adamantine pillars;  Mary’s and Stephen’s ascent through clouds to an almost heavenly picnic on the top of a Swiss alp.   The over-insistent music – the one element which makes the film-making seem antique – is by Richard Addinsell.  Based on a 1913 novel by H G Wells, The Passionate Friends was adapted from the screen first by Eric Ambler, then rewritten by Lean himself and Stanley Haynes.

    12 June 2008

  • Blue is the Warmest Colour

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La vie d’Adèle:  chapitres 1 et 2

    Abdellatif Kechiche  (2013)

    The title sounds like a translation but it was hard to believe it was invented for the film (for all that the film’s French title is very different) and it wasn’t:   the screenplay by Abdellatif Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix is adapted from a 2010 graphic novel by Julie Maroh called Le bleu est une couleur chaude.  Before seeing this movie, I knew that it was about a lesbian love affair, and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with the prize being awarded, unprecedentedly, to the two main actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, as well as the director.  I also knew that Blue is the Warmest Colour contained sex scenes lengthy and explicit enough to make it a succès de scandale (this may explain why it’s being shown in cinema chains as well as on the arthouse circuit in Britain) and that Kechiche had been accused of exploiting his two leads in these sequences.   I knew virtually nothing else and I’m glad I was able to watch Blue is the Warmest Colour with relatively few preconceptions.  (If I’d known beforehand, for example, that Exarchopoulos and Seydoux were among those who’d criticised Kechiche, I would probably have viewed the film very differently.)

    There are hints from the start that this is going to be an unusually detailed character study.  Kechiche shows Adèle, a high school student in Lille, going about her daily routine.  She comes out of her house in the suburbs and, as she goes to catch a bus into town, adjusts her jeans – she does the same thing the next time she’s shown setting out and she’s always fiddling with her hair, which is the kind that never stays in place.  Kechiche swiftly conveys what Adele thinks of her school teachers as well as describing her interactions with other students.  In one sense, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a very simple story – what the French title says on the tin.  That means it’s potentially very difficult to sustain interest but Adèle is a great character, wonderfully played by Adèle Exarchopoulos.  Of course it helped that Exarchopoulos, who was just eighteen when she got the part (she’s twenty now), was new to me, unencumbered by the associations of previous roles.  She’s so natural that she hardly seems to be acting at all yet you know this is because what she does is so skilfully shaped and expressed.  The timespan of the film is around six years and Adèle changes considerably during that time.  As a high school student, she has an exuberant, opinionated intelligence – there’s some good writing to illustrate what certain books and food mean to her – but she wants to teach in a nursery school and that’s what she goes on to do (by the end she’s teaching in a primary school).  Adèle Exarchopoulos affectingly creates a character open to and continuously interpreting new experience.  Adèle’s relationship with Emma, who’s several years older, leads to great distress and, as far as the viewer can tell, permanent disappointment for the younger girl.  A good deal of liquid comes out of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s face – snot as well as tears – in the course of Blue is the Warmest Colour.

    The early conversations between Adèle and Emma, as between Adèle and her short-lived boyfriend Thomas, are invigorating.  French people of all ages, on screen at any rate, are forever aphorising and philosophising but there’s a reality to bright kids of conventional student age doing this.  I especially liked the moment when Adèle complains about teachers telling her what to find in literature and, as she sees it, prescribing limits to her imagination; in response, the science student Thomas admits to being grateful to the teacher who pointed things out in Les liaisons dangereuses which Thomas wouldn’t have perceived on his own.  Adèle’s relationship with Thomas (well played by Jérémie Laheurte) is a beautifully crafted part of the film.  When they go to bed, her unhappy recognition that she can’t respond physically in the way that she needs is particularly strong.   The sexual dynamics of the high school are always interesting – not least in the suggestion that, in this co-ed environment, boys are accepted as gay more easily than girls.   At any rate, it appears that Adèle’s friend Valentin (Sandor Funtek) is known to be gay and doesn’t have a hard time because of it; and a scene in which Adèle is accused of being lesbian is particularly startling (although the actress playing the most provocative and bitchy member of the lycéennes looks too old).  Adèle’s insistence that she’s not gay is a powerful mixture of anxious denial and anger that other people should be more certain about her sexuality than, at this stage, she is herself.

    Although Léa Seydoux is an established name, I don’t remember her from other films I’ve seen her in (Lourdes, Inglourious Basterds, Midnight in Paris).  As the blue-haired art student Emma, Seydoux is a striking presence; she too gives a very good performance (there’s an undeniable butch streak in Emma which she expresses subtly but strongly) – although it is more obviously a performance than that of Adèle Exarchopoulos.  This is probably inevitable, given the conception and development of the character of Emma, who becomes a successful artist.  (The visuals of this side of Blue is the Warmest Colour are relatively weak – the female nude statuary that Emma and Adèle gaze at in a gallery, and Emma’s own work.)   Diane Kurys’s Entre nous (1983), also about a lesbian relationship, was released in this country as Coup de foudre, the French equivalent of ‘love at first sight’.  Although that’s something of a theatrical construct, the love at first sight element of Blue is the Warmest Colour is substantiated by how Adèle, after she’s first glimpsed Emma, goes looking for her in gay bars, and how Emma then pursues Adèle.  The second half of the film, which picks up the story of their lives together some two years on, is less strong because the decline of the relationship is structured more mechanically than the way in which it’s been developed.  You don’t notice this at first:  there’s so much going on in the extended sequence that begins the second half, in which the couple host a party, that it obscures the obvious indicators of things turning sour.  The pasta that Adèle makes for the party is a touching reminder of her father’s culinary speciality – but, from this point onwards, you hear no more about her parents (Aurélien Recoing and Catherine Salée).  Earlier in the film, when Emma came for dinner with the family, Adèle was obviously concealing the true nature of their friendship.  Adèle’s parents must surely know by now that she and Emma are lovers; if they do, how has this affected their own loving relationship with their daughter?  It’s because that relationship registered strongly that you feel you need to know what’s happened since:  the lack of explanation sets a pattern for the remainder of Blue is the Warmest Colour and increasingly seems like convenient elision.  It’s true that there’s not much background information in the earlier parts of the film either but I didn’t feel I needed it there.  Because Adèle’s development is so rooted in her daily routine, the lack of detail of what life is like for her in terms of relationships with others at the kindergarten and primary school feels like an omission.

    In the extended sex scenes between Adèle and Emma you can’t fail to be conscious of the actresses’ nakedness or of the beauty of their bodies.  Even if Abdellatif Kechiche isn’t exploiting Exarchopoulos and Seydoux as women he’s exploiting their beauty – it would be tough to watch two less then perfectly formed naked people going through these couplings.   The sequences are powerful, however, in a more positive way – in the relief that the two girls express in these moments when complications and ambiguities disappear.  And because you can’t easily forget the bedroom scenes, when things go wrong in the relationship you keep remembering that Adèle and Emma had this physical and, it seems, emotional intimacy.  In other respects too, Kechiche is very skilled in creating resonances between scenes showing the same activity but with differing emotional registers.  These are never clumsily, even when they are closely, juxtaposed.  The two girls’ visits to each other’s parents for dinner are nearly consecutive in the story and the contrasting menus are obvious but what you get from these scenes are the beautifully detailed atmospherics – Adèle, who hates seafood, giving into amiably firm pressure from Emma’s parents to try oysters, what Adèle’s mother says, as she talks to Emma, about getting a job and having a husband.   There are other fine, less proximate juxtapositions.  Sequences of wandering into bars and clubs:   Adèle going to the gay bar in the hope of spotting Emma there and, when their relationship is falling apart, to a place where she expects to find a male nursery school colleague who wants to date her.  Street demonstrations:  it’s a relief to Adèle to be part of collective political protest after her relationship with Thomas is over – she’s less sure on the gay pride parade but she does want to be with Emma there.  Adèle’s conversations on a bench near a copse of trees, first with Thomas then with Emma.  And, perhaps most memorably, Adele’s dancing:  you watch her taking part in a nursery school conga and you think back to her passionately involved movement, at her eighteenth birthday party, in the sounds of a lovely song called ‘I Follow Rivers (Deep Sea Baby)’ by Lykke Li.

    30 November 2013

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