Monthly Archives: September 2015

  • Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ieri, oggi, domani

    Vittorio De Sica (1963)

    It’s unbelievable that Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (in 1965) but it’s better than the following year’s Vittorio De Sica-Sophia Loren-Marcello Mastroianni effort, Marriage Italian Style.  This is an anthology comedy, with the stars appearing as different characters in each of the three episodes.  The primacy of the women played by Sophia Loren in these stories – and, no doubt, of Loren in the international marketing of the picture (produced by her husband, Carlo Ponti, and Joseph E Levine) – is reflected in their titles.  In ‘Adelina of Naples’ (written by Eduardo Di Filippo and Isabella Quarantotti), the title character supports her unemployed husband Carmine (Mastroianni) and their child by selling black market cigarettes.  When she’s threatened with jail, Adelina gets pregnant since the law of the land proscribes the imprisonment of women who are either expecting or have a baby less than six months old.  The same stratagem is repeated until Carmine, after fathering seven children, is exhausted and Adelina chooses prison in favour of impregnation by the couple’s mutual friend (Aldo Giuffrè).  When the whole neighbourhood collects money and petitions for her release, she is freed and reunited with her large family.  In ‘Anna of Milan’ (adapted by Cesare Zavattini, Bella Billa and Lorenza Zanuso from an Alberto Moravia novella), Loren plays a tycoon’s wife, who decides that her husband’s Rolls Royce is more important to her than her lover Renzo (Mastroianni), with whom she’s driving in the car when they have an accident.   In ‘Mara of Rome’ (written by Zavattini), the heroine is a high-end prostitute, working from home; Mara’s clients include Mastroianni’s Augusto, the avid but twitchy son of a(nother) wealthy industrialist.   A young seminarian called Umberto (Gianni Rodolfi), staying with his morally conservative grandparents in a neighbouring apartment, is smitten with Mara and threatens to join the French Foreign Legion if she rejects him.  A desperate appeal from Umberto’s distraught grandmother (Tina Pica) determines Mara to set the boy back on the path to righteousness.  The increasingly frustrated Augusto is persuaded to assist in bringing her virtuous plan to fruition.

    Vittorio De Sica does a fine job of animating the life of the Naples community in ‘Adelina’ and the basic joke of the story is a good one – but not good enough to justify its running time of around forty-five minutes.  At the start, I was hopeful that De Sica was going to treat the slender material playfully, almost fantastically – as when the local women and schoolboys take up in turn the chorus ‘She’s breeding!’ and it becomes a peripatetic, quasi-musical number.  Accomplished as Loren and Mastroianni are throughout, the later stages of ‘Adelina’ are desperately protracted.   It’s as well that ‘Anna’ is by some way the shortest segment.   A Christian Dior-dressed Loren may be meant to make the protagonist irresistible but Anna’s rich, bored selfishness is rebarbative.  As Renzo, Mastroianni achieves a decent characterisation, against the odds, moving from being sexually compelled by Anna to laughing at himself.  It probably helps that, once ‘Mara’ begins, you know you’re in the home straight but this is the most entertaining part of the film.  Sophia Loren is especially amusing when Mara takes her religious vow to restore the young priest to his celibate vocation.   (Gianni Rodolfi, much more effective here than as the eldest of the Loren character’s illegitimate sons in Marriage Italian Style, is graceful and rather touching as Umberto.)   The best-known bit is Mara’s concluding striptease for the sex-starved, sulking Augusto.  Loren, although she was supposedly nervous about doing this scene, carries it off with great aplomb.  Sitting taut with anticipation on the bed in Mara’s boudoir, and yelping occasionally, Mastroianni is extremely funny.   The first part of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is set in 1953; since the second and third parts both appear to happen in the present day, the ‘today and tomorrow’ distinction in the title doesn’t mean a lot.  The print we saw at BFI, although the result of a recent restoration job, was still not in great visual shape and the sound level was unsteady.

    29 August 2015

  • Absolute Beginners

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julien Temple (1986)

    I knew that Absolute Beginners was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made in Britain and a much-hyped flop at the box office.  I somehow expected it to be a more interesting failure than it is (or than its first half is:  Sally and I didn’t see it through).  The messy scene-setting number that opens the film – in stylised Soho streets – suggests material adapted from a stage musical that worked in the theatre but which a film-maker isn’t sure how to translate to the screen.   In fact, there’s no such excuse:  Absolute Beginners, based on Colin MacInnes’s novel, is an original movie musical.  According to Pauline Kael, in her surprisingly indulgent review of the film, MacInnes’s title ‘is taken from the lowest category of dance classes’.   You could say there’s therefore a dismaying aptness to the chaos of the choreography (credited to David Toguri and Jonathan Thornton) – or, at least, the chaos of Julien Temple’s presentation of the dancing, which is enough to make Mamma Mia! look like Cabaret.    Temple was known at the time as the director of the 1979 mockumentary The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle; of the filmed record of one of the Amnesty International ‘Secret Policeman’s Ball’ fund-raisers, featuring the Pythons et al; and, especially, of pop videos, including Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Come on Eileen’ and the Kinks’ ‘Come Dancing’.  He hadn’t previously tried his hand at anything as ambitious as a ‘Drama, Fantasy, Musical’, which is how IMDB defines Absolute Beginners.

    Colin MacInnes’s book was published in 1959.  The story is set in London in the summer months of the previous year and the film’s opening titles are accompanied by a series of photographs meant to evoke the late fifties (Harold Macmillan, and so on).  Almost as soon as the action is underway, however, the historical milieu becomes less certain.  The two central characters in the story are Colin (Eddie O’Connell), a young photographer, and the girl he adores, Crêpe Suzette (Patsy Kensit), who’s ambitious for success as a fashion designer.  Appearing in Colin’s imagination as he gets ready for a night on the town, Patsy Kensit’s Suzette isn’t a 1950s image:  her look immediately brings to mind one of the iconic Swinging London models’ faces of the following decade.  As the film goes on (beyond the point we parted company from it), the musical contributions – from Sade, The Style Council and others who were big at the time when Absolute Beginners was made – become more unashamedly anachronistic yet the film seems still to want to confirm its 1958 credentials, including sequences based on the Notting Hill race riots of that year.

    Although the narrator of the novel is the unnamed, eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year old photographer on whom the Colin of the film is based, MacInnes was in his mid-forties when he wrote Absolute Beginners.  A main theme of the book is the advent of the teenager in 1950s Britain – the sense of liberation this brought with it, the instant commercialisation of teenage culture that accompanied it:

    ‘This teenage ball had had a real splendour in the days when the kids discovered that, for the first time since centuries of kingdom-come, they’d money, which hitherto had always been denied to us at the best time in life to use it, namely, when you’re young and strong, and also before the newspapers and telly got hold of this teenage fable and prostituted it as conscripts seem to do everything they touch.’

    Julien Temple’s version of Absolute Beginners comes across as an illustration of the commodification of the teenage brand that MacInnes was critiquing.   But ‘come across’ isn’t the right phrase:  the film is so incoherent that it’s bewildering.  (For example, in that opening routine, Colin describes the cast of regular Soho ‘characters’ but they are visually a succession of blurs:  the introductions are pointless.)  There were moments when I wondered if the mostly terrible performances were deliberate – a parody of the kind of ropey acting you often get in late 1950s and early 1960s British pop films aimed at a teenage audience.  (In retrospect, I don’t think this was the intention.)  Eddie O’Connell, as Colin, has the look, as well as the wooden delivery, of a one-hit wonder of the era; it’s not surprising that this actor has been little heard of since.   Patsy Kensit is incredibly pretty – even though, wearing fluorescent lipstick, her face is sometimes lit in a way that gives her a moustache.  She’s incredible too as the heartless careerist she’s meant to be (Suzette is summarised in the list of characters in the Wikipedia article on the novel as ‘a promiscuous negrophile who intends to enter into a sexless marriage with her boss’).   Patsy Kensit is innocuous – and embarrassing when she’s pretending to be vampish.   She’s less cringe-making, though, than the likes of James Fox, hideously knowing as a camp Mayfair couturier.

    The cast also includes David Bowie, Ray Davies and others who wrote the songs they perform.   I didn’t stick around long enough to see Bowie but he sings the pleasant title track over the opening credits.  I stayed just long enough to see Davies, who plays Colin’s put upon father and sings a number called ‘Quiet Life’, which at least has a bit of the melancholy wit and charm of his better-known compositions.  This is damning with faint praise in the circumstances but I was glad that Ray Davies’s acting was relatively OK and his singing voice is so distinctive that his contribution is a highlight.  The image of the family home that introduces Davies’s number – a cross-section of its rooms that gives a doll’s house effect – is one of the few visual details that I saw which had any charm.  Colin’s sexually available mother is played by Mandy Rice-Davies, a nudge-nudge piece of casting.

    The screenplay is credited to Richard Burridge.   That name rang a bell and, writing this note, I remembered from where.  Later in the 1980s, a Richard Burridge became well known as the owner of Desert Orchid.  Sports news reports routinely referred to the owner’s connections with the film industry, describing his great horse’s triumphs as a-fairy-story-no-Hollywood-scriptwriter-could-dream-up etc.   It is the same man.  In interviews in the winner’s enclosure, Burridge invariably seemed a nice chap, and I hope his name will always be associated with Desert Orchid rather than Absolute Beginners.

    17 September 2015

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