Daily Archives: Friday, December 4, 2015

  • Benny’s Video

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Haneke (1992)

    Michael Haneke wants the audiences of his films to be aware of ourselves as viewers or voyeurs. It’s less clear how he sees himself but Flaubert’s dictum comes to mind:

    ‘L’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit être, comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part.’

    This is not least because Haneke’s stern loftiness can suggest a God’s-eye view.  You’re so conscious of Haneke’s moral severity and scrupulous composition – and he sometimes allows so little human detail to intervene – that he can be by far the strongest presence in a movie.  This isn’t the case with Hidden or The White Ribbon or Amour.  It isn’t continuously the case with Funny Games (or the original at any rate:  I’ve not seen the English language remake), where the power of Ulrich Mühe’s and Susanne Lothar’s acting drew us into the horrific situation of the people they were playing.  But Haneke upstages everyone else involved in Benny’s Video (his second feature).  The main character, the eponymous Benny, is played by Arno Frisch (seventeen when the film was made).  His acting is more natural here than it is as the psychopathic killer in Funny Games but Benny is intentionally an empty vessel:  Frisch’s affectless quality is what Haneke is after.  Benny’s Video describes the soul-destroying effects of multi-channel television.  The linkage – which verges on merging – of what’s playing on TV screens with what Benny shoots on his video camera and plays back on tape is established so quickly and with such cold condemnation on Haneke’s part that the film from this point onwards is essentially repetitive.  Haneke made TV films for fifteen years before his first cinema feature (The Seventh Continent (1989)) and has returned to televsion since (most recently with an adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle in 1997, with Ulrich Mühe as K).  But he evidently doesn’t approve of the medium.  I see now that my suspicion that the old couple’s ordeal in Amour might have been alleviated by some light entertainment on the box was an impure thought.

    The beginning of Benny’s Video is startling and the replay of this opening sequence certainly sharpens your awareness of your own reactions to it.  Even though I knew this was how the film began and Catherine Wheatley, in her very good introduction to the BFI screening, explained it in some detail, I was still shocked to watch at normal speed a pig being slaughtered – shocked as much by the terrified sounds of the animal as by the captive bolt pistol that renders it senseless before it is killed.  When this was revealed to be a video recording – the tape is wound backwards before being replayed in slow motion – there was a momentary sense of relief.  Because the images were manipulable I somehow felt that what had happened to the pig was alterable.   During the replay, I noticed the textures of its body and was briefly uneasy that I could have an aesthetic response to what I was seeing.  Then I was struck by the pricking of the animal’s ears as the pistol is discharged:  in that moment, the pig seems more alive than it did when the sequence was played at normal speed and the effect is poignant.  The opening sequence is by some way the best one in the whole of Benny’s Video but even this scene feels a little less strong by the end of the film.  When it’s replayed again, you notice that a man in the yard where the pig is to be slaughtered and who waves the camera away is Benny’s father (Ulrich Mühe).  This is the same man who, later on, secretly disposes of the corpse of the teenage girl (Ingrid Stassner) whom his son – while the parents are away for the weekend – brings home and kills, using the same weapon as was used to dispatch the pig.

    Benny is unpleasantly different from his contemporaries to a degree that makes it hard to see him as exemplary.  His (only?) school friend Ricci, whom Benny treats like shit, has a reality that Arno Frisch lacks:  it would be more shocking if Ricci (Stefan Polasek) did what Benny does (also because Ricci seems younger too).  Benny doesn’t, however, stand out within his gloomy family.  (Literally gloomy – I don’t recall seeing Mühe’s face in daylight until the final scenes of the film.)  The silence over breakfast after Benny’s parents have found out that he’s killed the girl is hard to distinguish atmospherically from the one that reigned at dinner before they saw the video.  Haneke’s killjoy tendencies mean that, once they’ve seen it, the father Georg seems just a bit more pissed off than before and the mother Anna (Angela Winkler) a bit weirder.  (Georg and Anna are, of course, Haneke’s standard names for a married couple – or Georges and Anne in the Paris-set Hidden and Amour.)  There’s no connection between this husband and wife – rather more between mother and son, who share a bedroom on the holiday in Egypt to which they escape after the killing, while the father gets rid of the body and does a proper job of cleaning up the scene of the crime.  This Oedipal flavouring isn’t uninteresting but it seems disconnected from the main themes.  As Anne, Angela Winkler gives a too self-aware performance; Ulrich Mühe is frustratingly constrained by what Haneke wants from him.  When Georg tells Benny that he loves him he does so quite emotionlessly.

    Haneke is not at all interested in making any of the human reactions realistic:  the parents appear shocked by what Benny has done only to the extent that a crime now has to be concealed. Georg, carefully analysing what’s happened and what, as a result, needs to happen, at one point reaches the puzzling conclusion that because the dead girl didn’t go to Benny’s school then his son should be in the clear.   Eventually, Benny goes to the police with his video.  The sound recording on it is of remarkably high quality – so that the parents’ whispers from the other side of Benny’s slightly open bedroom door supply clearly audible incriminating evidence.  Haneke leaves open the question of why Benny goes to the police.  Is he feeling guilty or does he just want to know how it feels to make a confession of murder and get his parents charged too (as he wanted to know how it would feel to kill the girl)?  This ambiguity makes for an effective last scene to go with the strong opening one.   Between these bookends, the film is often surprisingly boring.

    Catherine Wheatley explained that, for much of its life, Benny’s Video had been available only on French and German videotapes:  although seeing it now for the first time on 35mm would be a ‘treat’ for her, Wheatley implied that the film, because of its theme, might be most effective watched on a television screen – or, at least, on one the size of 1990s TV screens – with the medium of transmission of Benny’s video having the same dimensions as the screen on which it’s played in Benny’s Video.  It may well be that watching on television increases the power of the film, makes it harder to escape from.  But the added layer of objectivity that a cinema viewing allows reinforces the piece’s studiedness:  you look at the screen and see open doors which reveal Benny writing at a desk in front of the TV screen on which we see the images he has filmed.  When Benny gets a skinhead haircut, you’re watching the barber and his customers looking into mirrors; the clever composition isn’t anything more than that.  Haneke creates a glum, desensitised world – there are any number of gleaming, clinical surfaces and bleak corridors in evidence as well as the anti-Americanism which was reprised in Funny Games.   Benny’s moral shortcomings include going regularly to McDonald’s (and ordering the same meal) and a mild interest in rock music.  A potentially redeeming feature is his membership of a school choir preparing for a concert performance of a Bach motet Trotz dem alten Drachen (‘Despite the ancient dragon’).   During choir practice, however, Benny is collecting money for a pyramid scheme (his elder sister, who lives away from home, and his parents are into pyramid selling too).  Benny’s absence in Egypt immediately before the concert surprisingly doesn’t prevent his taking part in it and his mother goes to watch, smiling her weird smile.  The choir sings:  ‘Despite the ancient dragon, despite the gaping jaws of death, despite the constant fear, let the world rage and toss. I stand here and sing in perfect calm’.   We get the message.  In fact, we get it over and over again in Benny’s Video.

    6 February 2013

     

     

     

  • Belle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Amma Asante (2013)

    In 2007, an exhibition was held at Kenwood House in Hampstead to mark the bicentenary of the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament.  The exhibition included a painting of 1779 (by an unknown artist, although it was once attributed to Johann Zoffany) from the collection of the Earl of Mansfield.  This painting, which normally hangs in Mansfield’s ancestral home at Scone Palace, Perth, shows two young women, Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Elizabeth Belle.  The former is white, the latter of mixed race.  The portrait was extraordinary in its time in that the attitude and positioning of the women suggest affection between them and Dido is not subordinate to Elizabeth.   The English Heritage web page describes the Kenwood exhibition and supplies a potted biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle:

    ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle grew up at Kenwood House … She was the great-niece of William Murray, The First Earl of Mansfield, who as Lord Chief Justice presided over many of the historic cases that affected enslaved Africans. … Dido was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Mansfield’s nephew, Sir John Lindsay, a British Navy captain, and a woman (of whom it has been previously suggested, was enslaved) whom Sir John encountered while his ship was in the Caribbean.  … She was sent to England by Lindsay, and from the 1760s, Dido was brought up in aristocratic surroundings at Kenwood House by the childless Lord and Lady Mansfield, along with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died.’

    The film-maker Amma Asante visited this exhibition and the painting inspired her to find out more about Dido Elizabeth Belle.  The result is Belle, which describes the eponymous heroine’s self-realisation as a woman of colour and her social experience both within Lord Mansfield’s household and when she and Elizabeth ‘come out’ in London society.  (It’s an irony that Dido, although stigmatised because of her mixed blood, has inherited a substantial fortune from her father; the ethnically impeccable Elizabeth finds her marriageability compromised by the lack of any such dowry.)   At the same time that Belle is experiencing the ways of the severely stratified world in which she lives, her great uncle is considering an appeal brought against the judgment of a lower court on the case of Gregson vs Gilbert, regarding what became known as the ‘Zong massacre’.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘The Zong massacre was the killing of approximately 142 enslaved Africans by the crew of the slave ship Zong in the days following 29 November 1781.  The Zong was owned by a Liverpool slave-trading syndicate that had taken out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo. When the ship ran low on potable water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw slaves overboard into the sea to drown, in order that the remainder could survive. The owners of the Zong made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the slaves. When the insurers refused to pay, the resulting court cases held that in some circumstances the deliberate killing of slaves was legal, and that insurers could be required to pay for the slaves’ deaths. …’

    The King’s Bench (Mansfield sat with two other judges although the film implies the judgment was his alone) found in favour of the insurers and overturned the verdict of the earlier trial by jury.  The ruling was seen as an important one and, in combination with other judgments involving Mansfield, as helping to pave the way for the legislation of 1807.   (There are references to the slave trade in Mansfield Park (1814) and it’s possible that Jane Austen named the Bertram family home with the first Earl in mind.)   In other words, the inspiration for Amma Asante’s film and the subjects it deals with are extraordinarily interesting.

    Yet Belle, as a drama, is awful (one good thing about going to see it is that you thereby don’t have to watch a trailer for it too – the film’s been a coming attraction at Curzon for what feels like months).  Authorship of the screenplay has been the subject of arbitration by the Writers Guild of America, resulting in the writing credit going solely to Misan Sagay rather than Asante, but the script, whoever’s responsible for it, is nothing to be proud of.   This isn’t because Asante and/or Sagay have played fast and loose with the historical facts, or even because of the script’s anachronistic use of ‘devastating’ or of ‘progress’ as a transitive verb.  It’s because the writers have used audience expectations of the formality of dialogue in Georgian costume drama as a pretext for the speechifying that in Belle almost entirely replaces conversation.  The film is perfect for people who like the sound of the moral uplift they think might be had from watching 12 Years a Slave but don’t fancy any of that disagreeable brutality.  Rachel Portman’s music – a kind of syrup sledgehammer – is always on hand to tell you how you should be feeling, ie moved and eventually inspired.  I usually felt embarrassed by the film’s relentless worthiness.  Although Belle is visually unremarkable for the most part, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many jaws clench and bosoms heave with righteous indignation in less than two screen hours.

    In spite of what they’re asked to do, some of the cast make the film watchable.  I’ve never much liked Tom Wilkinson – good actor as he is, he tends to have a slightly pompous quality on screen, regardless of the role he’s playing.  That’s no less true here but, as Lord Mansfield, Wilkinson draws on that quality to help create a man of convincingly divided feelings and views:  he’s the most touching character in the story.  Emily Watson plays his wife more subtly than the script seems to expect:  she’s excellent at showing, through quietly incisive looks and inflections, how Lady Mansfield runs the household, less persuasive when she’s sizing up prospective husbands on the London circuit.  This isn’t Watson’s fault:  the script in these bits leaves the actress playing Lady Mansfield with no real option but to be histrionic and obvious; Watson, refusing to be either, seems merely uneasy.  As Lord Mansfield’s sister Mary, Penelope Wilton looks set to be obvious too.  The film laboriously establishes that Lady Mary is an old maid but it’s remarkable how much emotional depth Wilton finds in the character.  Miranda Richardson, not for the first time, registers more with her first couple of lines than throughout the rest of her performance although, to be fair, the role of the hideously prejudiced and mercenary Lady Ashford isn’t one that can easily be taken to surprising places.  As her husband, Alex Jennings has a much smaller part but he and his quizzically raised eyebrow are around long enough to be tedious.  Matthew Goode, as Dido’s father, appears even more briefly; this would normally be a cause for regret but not in this case:  Goode has to say things like ‘What is right can never be impossible!’  Lauren Julien-Box, the little girl who plays the infant Dido, is extraordinarily beautiful and her face is intriguingly hard to read when she first arrives at Kenwood and looks up at pictures in which blacks are shown as exotic appendages to the white principals:  her expression is blank but you sense a mind at work underneath.  She grows into Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is also beautiful but who, unlike Lauren Julien-Box, has the disadvantage of having to speak a great many lines.  She does so with confidence and passion but, because the script conceives Dido as a socially and morally significant historical personage rather than a human being, her lines, and Mbatha-Raw’s performance, lack characterisation and variety.

    It’ll be clear enough from the above that Amma Asante and/or Misan Sagay have little interest in ambiguity or complexity of character and the two chief sufferers in the cast are Sam Reid and Tom Felton.  Reid plays John Davinier, a parson’s son and, as such, socially despised.  John aspires to a career in the law and loves Dido:  his earnest rectitude is relentless and monotonous.  If it’s not easy to see what Dido sees in him, it’s impossible to understand why Elizabeth Murray has the hots for the Ashfords’ elder son, James:  with Tom Felton in the role, he’s an unprepossessing as well as a thoroughly nasty piece of work.  Felton oozes clammy viciousness; it’s pretty offensive that his looks are used in this way to signal his moral shortcomings.  Sarah Gadon does well enough in the hardly rewarding role of Elizabeth and there’s excellent work from Bethan-Mary James in the small part of a black maid but the best performance from among the younger generation comes from James Norton as the second (and therefore unmoneyed) Ashford son, Oliver.   It isn’t just because Oliver Ashford is so different from the psycho rapist and murderer that Norton played, frighteningly, in the recent BBC serial Happy Valley.  He impresses in Belle because, unlike his contemporaries in the cast, he suggests to the viewer that what’s going on behind Oliver’s eyes may be rather different from what the world sees and infers from the social exterior of this amiable, naive but somehow troubled young man.

    13 June 2014

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