Daily Archives: Monday, October 19, 2015

  • Alps

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alpeis

    Yorgos Lanthimos (2011)

    The world in Dogtooth, while real for the grown-up children imprisoned in it by their father, was aberrant and pathological in relation to the larger world outside it.  In his new film, Yorgos Lanthimos creates another kind of make-believe – this time in the public world and, not only for that reason, less hard to reject as a perverted distortion of reality.   A group of four people – two men, two women – bring relief to the recently bereaved by ‘substituting’ for their lost loved ones, imitating the conversation, interests, opinions and other characteristics of the deceased.  The quartet call themselves ‘the Alps’ and each takes the name of a particular mountain:  Mont Blanc, the harshly domineering leader of the group, explains that the Alps, as a mountain range, can replace any other range but nothing can replace the Alps (whatever that means).  I thought Lanthimos made a few logical mistakes in Dogtooth but the universe that he created was detailed and compelling to visit.  The big idea in Alps seems, on paper, to have satirical comedy potential – on the extent to which we see even those closest to us as our possessions and, to that extent, perhaps not irreplaceable.  The problem is – and it’s soon obvious this is a problem – that Lanthimos is either unable or unwilling to dramatise the motives of the bereaved in engaging the Alps.  A couple whose daughter – a keen tennis player – has died in a road accident are shadowy, emotionless figures.  When Monte Rosa pretends to be their daughter, the camera is close up on her face; the faces of the parents are out of focus in the background of the shot.  Of course Lanthimos is free to decide what he does and doesn’t want to concentrate on but it’s unsatisfying that he builds his film on an extraordinary premise that turns out to be the hook on which to hang a story which, for all the unusual style of Alps, is a more familiar one.

    One of the questions the Alps routinely ask of potential clients – or of the about-to-die loved ones of potential clients – is who their favourite actor was.  (The answer is always an American or, in one case (Jude Law), a British male.)  Films about successful actors, whether real or fictional, conventionally describe how the actor is able to bring other people to life but unable to get her or his own life in order.  Alps turns out to be a peculiar variation on this theme.  Monte Rosa lives with her recently widowed father.  The climax of the film sees her violently dispatched from the Alps (with a brutal assault on her that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of an episode in Dogtooth); then, under feeble cover of the technique that she’s used with other clients, trying to replace her dead mother by making sexual overtures to her father (he reciprocates by slapping her face and telling her to get lost).  Monte Rosa is increasingly the main focus of Alps and, as suggested above, of Lanthimos’s camera.   Aggeliki Papoulia (the elder daughter in Dogtooth) is an evidently committed actress but the character is too obviously conceived for her to be able to sustain much interest in Monte Rosa.  The close-ups of Papoulia make it clear from the start that Alps is going to be about Rosa’s feelings rather than those of the people she’s ostensibly helping, and Lanthimos develops her story in ways that are occasionally startling but which contain no real surprises.

    Monte Rosa works as a nurse in the same hospital where one of the other Alps (Aris Servetalis) is a paramedic.  These seem appropriate jobs for their choice of second career but the other two Alps are a rhythmic gymnast (Ariane Labed) and her tyrant coach, Mont Blanc (Johnny Vekris).  The film begins with the gymnast begging the coach to let her perform a routine to a pop track.  This coach-pupil relationship is less obviously connected to the substitute theme than is Monte Rosa’s story; indeed, the gymnast, who’s younger than Rosa, has hardly any bereaved clients that we see.  At the start, the coach threatens the gymnast with a beating, which he eventually administers to Monte Rosa instead.  Impersonating the teenage tennis player, Rosa is asked by her parents to bite her nails; a few screen minutes later, we see the gymnast doing the same.  The trajectories of the two women change when the gymnast tries to hang herself; Rosa saves her and tells the coach that she (Rosa) will do anything if he’ll let the gymnast do a routine with a pop track.  I’m not sure what these resonances – and the theme of male hypocrisy and exploitative cruelty that runs through the movie – add up to.  (Mont Blanc objects strongly to the idea of the female Alps having sex with clients but takes a different view when he’s a participant.)  Alps has a happy ending of sorts.  Instead of Carmina Burana, the gymnast performs to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’.

    18 November 2012

  • All That Jazz

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bob Fosse (1979)

    The protagonist of All That Jazz is Joe Gideon, celebrated both as a director-choreographer for the Broadway stage and as a movie director.  As well as being creatively driven and demanding, Joe is a chain-smoking, pill-popping womaniser.  He’s in the throes of preparing a new stage musical, striving for something radically erotic in spite of the anxious conventionality of the show’s songwriter and the play-it-commercially-safe prejudices of its producers.  At the same time, Joe’s editing a movie about a scabrous, dark curly-haired, stand-up comic.   Joe collapses with chest pains and undergoes open heart surgery.  Shortly after he devised Chicago for the stage (All That Jazz takes its name, of course, from that show’s opening number) and completed his screen biopic of Lenny Bruce, Bob Fosse fell seriously ill with heart disease.  Joe Gideon dies at the end of the movie.  Fosse died, aged only 60, in 1987.  All That Jazz is personal film-making of a peculiarly literal and exciting kind, and, in retrospect, a self-lacerating commemoration of the man who made it.

    One of the highlights of Fosse’s first movie musical, Sweet Charity, is his staging of ‘The Rhythm of Life’.  The rhythm of Joe Gideon’s life, even though his death becomes its subject, is what All That Jazz has abundantly, thanks in no small part to Alan Heim’s brilliant editing.  The film starts at full pelt and, although the tempo changes once Joe is in hospital, its momentum is never lost – until, perhaps, the final, overlong ‘Bye Bye Life’ number (a big production take on the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’).  Fosse punctuates the narrative with a repeated (but, at each repetition, slightly varied) montage of Joe’s morning routine – pills, eye drops, shower, a look in the mirror as he tells himself ‘It’s showtime!’  The routine is scored by Vivaldi’s concerto for strings, a striking contrast to the pop and show tunes used elsewhere in the picture.  Like its main character, All That Jazz survives – thrives – on its energy levels.  The satire of Broadway and Hollywood production is broad, not to say crude, but the hyper-vitality carries you along, persuades you that it couldn’t be done any other way, and makes the hectic, detailed caricatures enjoyable.  Some things are pushed to ludicrous extremes – like a smoker’s cough competition between Joe and his heart specialist, which the latter wins convincingly – but these sequences are still amusing.

    The film includes some brilliant pieces of choreography, not all of them featuring dance as such.  There’s a read-through of a script in which the laughing faces of the actors are accompanied not by their voices but by the amplified sounds of Joe’s dissatisfied, irritably tapping fingers.  The normal soundtrack returns with the final line of the script – ‘I guess only in America can a 24-year-old girl like me own a house like this in Beverly Hills’.  This is spoken by Joe’s ex-wife, Audrey, who, we already know, he thinks is way too old for the part she’s reading for.   Among the actual dance sequences, the one in which Audrey’s limber exercises try to convince Joe that she is right for the role – and which make her hopeful she’s succeeded – is startling.  There are some characteristically brilliant ensemble pieces – especially an exaggeratedly carnal air flight – but it’s the numbers in which characters use dance with either dialogue or song to express their feelings in relation to Joe that have the most impact.  A routine performed in his apartment by Joe’s daughter Michelle and his current girlfriend Katie, accompanied by ‘Some of These Days’, is especially successful.

    In a remarkably imaginative piece of casting, Roy Scheider, best known at the time for playing shrewd, essentially undemonstrative men in The French Connection and Jaws, is Joe Gideon.   Because Joe is so obviously Bob Fosse, you worry at first that Scheider will be expected to be no more than Fosse’s on-screen proxy and it’s a very challenging role.   The director’s self-portraiture in All That Jazz has been compared to Fellini’s in 8½ but Fosse’s thoroughgoing self-criticism gives the actor representing him less scope to be sympathetic than Marcello Mastroianni had.  It’s to Scheider’s credit that he overcomes this difficulty – that he makes Joe a charismatic and, in some respects, likeable bastard.  (Fosse may well have enjoyed that, of course.)   And Scheider’s electricity is a revelation.  Of the many women in Joe’s life, the main ones are played by Leland Palmer (Audrey, supposedly based on Gwen Verdon), Ann Reinking (Katie) and Erszebet Foldi (Michelle).  Although she’s incarnated by Jessica Lange, the least successful female character is the Angel of Death, who converses with Joe.  The Angel is relatively disappointing probably because she’s an idea rather than a character.   Among the men, John Lithgow is amusing as the bitchy rival director brought in to stage Joe’s show when he’s in hospital.   Cliff Gorman is so good as the subversive stand-up he makes you wish that he, rather than Dustin Hoffman, had played the lead in the film Lenny (Gorman had played the role in Julian Barry’s play on Broadway).    Fosse’s accustomed flair for realising the tawdry vitality of show business is particularly in evidence in the sequences where the teenage Joe (Keith Gordon) is performing in burlesque clubs.  The movie is also a celebration of the bodies of dancers, especially female dancers.  (The cinematographer was Giuseppe Rotunno.)  Viewed at this distance in time, All That Jazz makes you nostalgic for the days when a film like this could be made in Hollywood (by 20th Century Fox) and a film-maker was prepared to put his life on screen in such an idiosyncratic and exhilarating way.

    9 February 2014

     

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