Daily Archives: Sunday, August 2, 2015

  • Mr Arkadin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1955)

    Orson Welles’s judgment, as quoted in his official biography by Barbara Leaming, was that:

    ‘More completely than any other picture of mine has been hurt by anybody, Arkadin was destroyed because they completely changed the entire form of it:  the whole order of it, the whole point of it … Ambersons is nothing compared to Arkadin!’

    Not only is The Magnificent Ambersons notorious as a film maudit – Welles’s moviemaking from that point onwards might be termed an oeuvre maudit.  In describing Mr Arkadin in the above terms, he knows whereof he speaks.  The picture was released in Britain (with the title Confidential Report) and Spain in 1955 and in other parts of Western Europe the following year.   It didn’t get an American release until October 1962.

    The film has two main characters:  the eponymous Arkadin, a mysterious business tycoon and socialite, and Guy Van Stratten, a small-time American smuggler, working in Italy in the aftermath of World War II.  On the Naples waterfront one night, Van Stratten witnesses the death of a man called Bracco who, before he expires, gasps out to Van Stratten two names, one of which is Gregory Arkadin.  Van Stratten, motivated (as I understood it) by self-interest rather than the pursuit of justice, resolves to track Arkadin down.  Mr Arkadin was made largely in Spain but also includes sequences shot in London, Paris, Munich, the French Riviera and Switzerland.  That list of locations hints at the international scope of Arkadin’s influence and Van Stratten’s detective work (although both extend beyond Europe:  there’s a Mexican episode too).

    I assume the version of Mr Arkadin screened by BFI this July was what’s described by Wikipedia as the ‘Criterion edit’ of 2006:

    ‘Whilst no version of the film can claim to be definitive as Welles never finished editing the film, this is likely to remain the closest version to Welles’ original vision. … It uses all available English-language footage, and attempts to follow Welles’ planned structure and editing style as closely as possible, incorporating his comments over the years on where the other edits went wrong. However, it still only remains an approximation …’

    The film I saw was often visually impressive.  The camerawork can be strongly disorienting, through the angles Welles favours and the speed at which the camera moves.  The repeated shots down flights of stairs and alleyways are arresting – so too the opening and closing images, involving an unpiloted aeroplane.  Mr Arkadin lacks narrative rhythm but one’s naturally inclined to blame the studio butchers for that, rather than its writer-director.  It’s harder, though, to absolve Welles of responsibility for the characters in the story and the way most of them are played.   Robert Arden as Van Stratten is embarrassingly inexpressive.  The cast also includes, among others, Akim Tamiroff, Grégoire Aslan, Michael Redgrave, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou, Suzanne Flon and Jack Watling.   That’s to say, some of the heavily accented English is genuine but, whether it is or not, most of the playing is too busy.  The result is characterisation that is often described as ‘delicious’ but which I find indigestible.  (Katina Paxinou and Suzanne Flon are honourable exceptions to this, and Jack Watling is OK in a pretty feeble role.  Paola Mori, who plays Arkadin’s daughter and who became Welles’s third wife, is an exception too but only because, like Robert Arden, she doesn’t seem up to acting, let alone overacting.)

    Orson Welles’s story and screenplay were inspired by episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime radio series, a spin-off to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, in which Welles famously played Harry.  As well as casting himself as Arkadin, Welles reads the voiceover at the start of the film:

    ‘On December 25th, an airplane was sighted off the coast of Barcelona.  It was flying empty.  … Investigation of this case reached into the highest circles … and the scandal was very nearly responsible for the fall of at least one European government.  This motion picture is a fictionalized reconstruction leading up to … the appearance last Christmas morning of the empty plane.’

    This has flavours of both the radio War of the Worlds and the newsreel framework of Citizen Kane and, when Arkadin eventually appears, he looks a cross between the elderly Charles Foster Kane and Mephistopheles.  Unfortunately, Welles’ bizarre hair and make-up, his calculated air of mystery and his richly diabolical laugh (heard too often) turn Arkadin into a ludicrous rather than a charismatic figure.  Whatever others may have done to disfigure Mr Arkadin, you get the feeling that Orson Welles was a major contributor too.  On this occasion, he seems less a cinema auteur than a man playing his greatest hits in hope rather than expectation.

    31 July 2015

     

  • Before Midnight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2013)

    In the latest (and otherwise unwanted) complimentary issue of the New Statesman to arrive, Ryan Gilbey’s review of Before Midnight is very candid about the personal importance of what is now a trilogy, and how events in these films by Richard Linklater intersect with Gilbey’s own experience of relationships beginning, producing kids and ending.  David Denby compares Before Midnight with the Seven Up television documentaries – ‘heartbreaking as a record of the progress toward death’.   Before Midnight certainly got to me but for different reasons, although I did feel something akin to what I felt watching the most recent Michael Apted film – 56 Up:  a vague depression – caused not by a sense of the proximity of death but by a realisation that the lives being described might now be unlikely to change or develop much in the future.   Richard Linklater and his leads, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, seem to want to suggest that too (as with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the three of them co-wrote the script).  In fact, the settledness of Céline and Jesse is hardly comparable with that of some of the superficially more prosaic lives in 56 Up.  Linklater’s couple (I took it they weren’t married) have young children and interesting jobs even if Céline feels professionally thwarted, at least compared with the successful novelist that Jesse has continued to be.  But their lives are in relative stasis after their whirling encounters in the two previous films.

    My memory may deceive me but I recall the camera in Sunrise and Sunset moving quickly around in Vienna and Paris.  The shifting locations chimed with the snatched, urgent meetings between Céline and Jesse – at least until the action came to rest, and Before Sunset ended, in her apartment in Paris and uncertainty about whether or not he was going to leave to catch his plane back to America.    After a flight is caught at the start of Before Midnight – with Jesse seeing off his now teenage son (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), who’s returning to his mother in Chicago, via London – most of the movie comprises long sequences in more or less static situations.  First, there’s  a car drive back from Kalamata airport to the villa on the Peloponnese coast where Céline and Jesse and their twin daughters are holidaying (this sequence is a single shot).  Next it’s dinner with their host (played by the famous cinematographer Walter Lassally, making his acting debut at the age of eighty-six) and his other guests.  Then a walk to the posh hotel – a one-night stay there is a present to Céline and Jesse from their friends from the villa – and an argument in their room.

    In Sunrise and Sunset there was a rationale to the torrential conversation between Céline and Jesse:  they had a lot to say to each other and limited time in which to say it.  It’s not the same here – in spite of plenty of words about the passage of time and mortality, there feels like too much time for talk.  (When death does occur – Jesse gets a phone message that his much-loved grandmother has died – it has remarkably little impact on his mood and chatter.)  What’s more, the couple’s exhausting articulacy is the same in each situation.  Much of the dialogue is clever – and seems shrewder when we learn that, according to Jesse anyway, Céline spends hours each day whining and bitching.  You get the retrospective sense that the couple keep up the joshing to keep down evidence of the rifts between them.  This is how they eventually recover from their big falling out, in a final reconciliation that’s alarmingly fragile.  In other respects, though, the climactic row is unconvincing:  in my experience of these things anyway, the combatants get to know their techniques and to exploit them.  One or both of Jesse and Céline would surely resort to, say, silence or laconic name-calling so as to deny the other scope for building up verbal momentum.

    To be honest (and I’m finding this increasingly), there were other elements of Before Midnight that saddened me not because of the piercing, beautiful transience of what Linklater was showing but because the characters were simply in situations or doing things that lower my spirits:  being in an airport;  the prospect of Céline and Jesse stopping their car to look at ancient ruins (I was relieved they took advantage of their daughters’ slumbers, in the back of the car, to chicken out);  going to a supermarket in a foreign country; the dinner conversation about sex; and the relentless verbal facility itself.  The silence in the hotel room at one point in their big argument is such a relief – but this is transient:  it’s soon broken by Ethan Hawke’s sighs and the intervention of Graham Reynolds’ heartstring-plucking score.  The film naturally relies to some extent on the audience’s familiarity with the characters (it’s likely that a high proportion of viewers of the two previous films will come back for more).  Hawke and Julie Delpy know these characters so well by now that they’re perhaps too easy in the roles – perhaps assume they must be playing them right:  I think  Hawke overacts occasionally, particularly in the opening scene when Jesse’s saying goodbye to his son.  The tensions in the relationship are prepared for in Before Midnight in a way that made me nostalgic not for the passing of time but for the superiority of the film’s predecessors.  By the end, I’m not sure that I wanted Céline and Jesse to break up but I longed for them to shut up.

    3 July 2013

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