Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Mamma Mia!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Phyllida Lloyd (2008)

    Technically inept in ways you rarely notice in a big budget film.   Whenever a number involves more than a couple of people, it always ends up as a frenetic, crowded mess in terms of movement (choreography is hardly the word).  The relentlessness of the ABBA songs, even if they are mostly abbreviated, works against expectations that the numbers in a musical will be high points.  The script is nonsense in terms of the apparent ages of the characters vs the past events that trigger the story.  In some ways, it isn’t like a film at all – more animated karaoke.  Not surprisingly, this is more than enough for many people to reject the picture in toto.  But, in spite of everything, Mamma Mia! is really enjoyable.  It does deliver on one of the essential qualities of a screen musical – characters expressing heightened emotion through song and dance.  It supplies the variety of pleasures to be had in singing and dancing by actors not known as singers or dancers – and ABBA’s melodious impersonality means that you can listen to these renditions without worrying that the originals are being travestied.  And because the main performers are such a bizarre collection in terms of their respective filmographies (a dream cast in the sense of an unaccountable assortment) – and because they’re far from young – there’s a palpable sense of their understanding that this is a one-off experience and that they’re determined to have a ball.  Which they do.

    Sally and I saw the film on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh.  Given my enthusiasms for Edinburgh and Meryl Streep (and, to a slightly lesser extent, ABBA), it might seem a safe bet that I would like Mamma Mia! and I was even better disposed to it after reading ludicrous reviews in the Guardian and the Independent on the train up to Scotland – ludicrous not least because the snotty authors seemed to assess the film against serious dramatic criteria and, in order to demolish it, felt they had to explain the plot in some detail (and then dismiss it).   It goes without saying that the ‘storyline’ is a highly primitive framework for the songs and one sentence is enough.  Mamma Mia! is about the lead-up to the wedding of Sophie, whose mother Donna runs a taverna on a Greek island and who, in her youth, had affairs with three men, any of one of whom might be the daughter’s father, all three of whom Sophie has invited to the nuptials in the hope of finding out more.  Donna is played by Meryl Streep.  The three men are Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård).  Two of Donna’s friends, Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), are also among the wedding guests.

    When Pierce Brosnan sings ‘SOS’ – a tune that is one of the best examples of Benny Andersson’s ear for delicate plangency – the fact that Brosnan can’t really sing makes this duet with Meryl Streep more expressive:  his vocal limitations are fused with an I’m-doing-the-best-I-can urgency.  The fact that Streep can sing has the effect of creating a distance between them; the lyrics of the song are charmingly (and amusingly) dramatised.  We know from Silkwood and Postcards from the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion that Streep can not only sing but sing in character.  I’d always found ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – as a pop single – tediously, mechanically melodramatic (it was originally released at the time of the Moscow Olympics).  As a number in a film musical, interpreted by a great actress, it’s transformed.  It would be daft to pretend that Donna is a substantial dramatic role but the athletic demands of the part – or the way in which she’s decided to play it, at any rate – are such that we see Meryl Streep, in her sixtieth year, more physically reckless than she’s ever been on screen before.  (It’s going to be a considerable irony of film history that Mamma Mia!, and its huge box office success, have given Streep, long admired without being much loved by mass audiences, popularity on a scale she’s never previously had.)

    Julie Walters’ ability to make her characters seem true prevails even here – and even though part of the pleasure of hearing her sing ABBA numbers in a big screen musical is the sense of her amused, incredulous self-awareness in doing so.   She does some great physical comedy (especially trying and failing to keep her balance in a dinghy).   As Bill, the man she sets her sights on, Stellan Skarsgård is relaxed and genial.  It’s evident that Christine Baranski is a more professionally assured musical performer than some of her co-stars – although I didn’t like her big number, ‘Does Your Mother Know?’  The lyrics are adjusted so that it’s sung to a young boy rather than a young girl; the staging seems to make fun of the older woman, which is both unkind and completely unjust, given how good Baranski looks.  Among the six principals, Colin Firth sticks out as wrong:  this is partly inevitable – he looks a generation younger than the other five.  But it’s also partly because Firth, either through misjudgment or lack of self-confidence, chooses to play Harry as if there were a proper character there.

    It’s more difficult for the younger performers who, by definition, don’t have the range of associations on which their seniors can draw.  Even so, they’re dreary:  as Sophie, Amanda Seyfried is competent but, in a sizeable part, her repertoire of gesture and facial expression is very limited (it might have been better to cast a less technically accomplished, more naturally expressive performer).   Dominic Cooper, as her fiancé Sky (sic), is as charmless here as in The History Boys.  The two bridesmaids (Ashley Lilley and Rachel McDowall) are hideously effortful, an effect made worse by the director’s predilection for close-up – as if that was the only way of keeping control.

    Phyllida Lloyd directed Mamma Mia! in the West End and on Broadway but she shows no aptitude at all for working behind a camera (this is her first feature).  It’s not just the presence of Julie Walters that brings to mind ‘Acorn Antiques’ in some of the set-ups.  The visual possibilities in the locations are largely wasted; no thought has been given to how the colours of set decoration and costume are going to work together.  Technical limitations aside, Lloyd comes up with some breathtakingly stupid details:  Dominic Cooper is given a cigar as a prop for ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ – for no other reason than to make sense of the lyric “You thought that smoking was my only vice”.  It’s a pretty desperate idea to start with but it might at least have been pot rather than a panatella.  Yet perhaps this ineptness contributes to the success of the film.  It has a numbing effect:  after a while, if you’re well disposed to Mamma Mia!, you get used to it  – but you stay alert to the fantastic performing talents on the screen.  The slackness and lack of daring of the photography and editing mean at least that the numbers aren’t splintered in pyrotechnic fragments as in Chicago or Moulin Rouge!   And, thanks to the magic of screen chemistry, the climax to the story works.  You don’t really care who Sophie’s father is but you do want the man who meant most to her mother to emerge – and the connection between Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan leaves no room for doubt who that is.  This means that the wedding scene, which is hopelessly clumsy, is emotionally satisfying too.

    12 July 2008

  • Two Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

     La Ciociara

    Vittorio De Sica (1960)

    It was originally intended that Anna Magnani would play the lead in the screen adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1958 novel La Ciociara and that Sophia Loren would play her daughter.   Magnani had just turned fifty and Loren was in her mid-twenties but it seems Magnani was insulted to be considered old enough to play Loren’s mother.  She angrily suggested that Loren play Cesira, the older woman, herself and that’s what happened.   I haven’t read the Moravia novel and don’t know Cesira’s age in the book but it seems that Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, who wrote the screenplay, made her more youthful to accommodate Loren’s casting.  The film-makers certainly reduced the age of Cesira’s daughter:  Rosetta is a twelve-year-old schoolgirl – the same age as Eleonora Brown, who plays her.   Because Sophia Loren is such an imposing figure, she seems older than her twenty-six years.  At the same time, she’s young enough to make you feel Cesira’s fairly short life has been remarkably eventful:  a widow as well as a mother, she’s run a grocery shop in Rome until the Allied bombing raids on the city in 1943-44 force her and Rosetta to leave.   Making Rosetta a child rather than a young woman turns out to have different and problematic dramatic consequences.

    For her performance in Two Women, Sophia Loren became the first actor to win an Academy Award for a role in a language other than English.  (Anna Magnani had also won the Best Actress Oscar, six years previously, but for her performance in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo.)   Loren pulls out all the stops; her emotional range and power are impressive; but, partly because she’s so formidable, I wasn’t moved by her character – in the well-staged, frightening air raid that opens the film, the tigerishly defiant Cesira has a bombproof quality.  A scene between her and Giovanni, the man she’s currently having a relationship with, is promising but we never see him (Raf Vallone) again.  Cesira and Elvira leave Rome and make their way, by train then on foot, to Ciociaria, the rural, mountainous region of Central Italy where Cesira was born and grew up.  Once Allied troops have ended the German occupation of Rome, mother and daughter set out on the return journey there.  From the point at which Cesira’s and Rosetta’s travels begin, Two Women turns into a succession of striking, sometimes melodramatic incidents, and the narrative is choppy.  The incidents may reflect the unpredictable dangers of a war zone; the unsettled movement of the story might seem to correspond to the chaotic aspects of the time and place – the uncertainty of who’s in charge in the period of transition from German to Allied control of Rome.  A more negative explanation is that the film’s lack of rhythm results from desperate attempts in the editing room to shape it dramatically.  Armando Trovajoli’s sensitive, varied score is a valiant attempt to support the narrative, to give it a balance of turbulence and nuance that’s lacking in Vittorio De Sica’s direction and the structure of Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay.

    There are some relatively good sequences in Ciociaria.  The community life is well described and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s inclusion in it helps.  His voice dubbed into Italian, Belmondo isn’t obvious casting as Michele – an earnest, bespectacled young Marxist, who is principled and romantically inexperienced to a nearly comical degree.  Nevertheless, the quiet charisma (combined with, perhaps, a slight uncertainty) that Belmondo brings to the role is engaging.  The unresolved nature of Michele’s relationship with Cesira and of the effect he has on Rosetta supplies emotional life to their interactions.  I liked a scene in which Cesira gives a meal to two British soldiers, with Rosetta and Michele also at the dinner table.  Cesira drinks plenty of wine and Sophia Loren makes her tipsy sentimentality very amusing.  She toasts Giovanni, the Englishmen join in the toast but Michele asks, ‘Who’s Giovanni?’

    Needless to say, this lighter-hearted interlude is hardly typical of the film.  The grimmest episode occurs about fifteen minutes before the end, when Cesira and Rosetta, on their trek back to Rome, rest in an empty church and are gang-raped there by Moroccan soldiers.  (They are part of the Allied forces – although they wear robes rather than Western military uniform, and this undoubtedly contributes to the presentation of them as an alien horde.)  The horror of this attack – particularly from the point of view of the chaste, devoutly religious Rosetta – is too great to be absorbed in what remains of the story:  the violation of the twelve-year-old child completely eclipses the later news of Michele’s murder by German soldiers.  And the aftermath to the rape is powerful in spite of an element that should detract from its power (but which adds to the discomfort of watching the last part of Two Women).  Eleonora Brown is a weak actress:  as a result, the traumatised, petrified Rosetta isn’t sufficiently different from the inexpressive girl we’ve been watching up to this point – even though we realise intellectually that she has been profoundly changed.

    The film ends with a long-held shot of the mother cradling the daughter in her arms.  The image seems meant to crystallise Vittorio De Sica’s main intention – to describe the horrific effects of war, on two particular women.  (The outrage in the church has, in the most brutal sense, made a woman of Rosetta.)  All that stays in your mind, however, is Cesira’s furious exclamation after the rape – to a group of American soldiers and within the child’s hearing – ‘Look at my daughter – she’s ruined forever!’   You really do feel the assault on Rosetta is an irredeemable event:  the plot synopsis of Moravia’s novel on Wikipedia indicates that the rape ‘so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution’.  The novel isn’t short (416 pages in paperback, again according to Wikipedia).  Part of me wonders if De Sica would have done better to make a longer film – to have given himself more scope to create a texture that’s missing from what he’s put on screen.  But the picture he ended up with is so increasingly unsatisfactory that I was relieved when, after a hundred minutes, Two Women was over.

    15 August 2015

     

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