Daily Archives: Monday, December 7, 2015

  • Berberian Sound Studio

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Strickland (2012)

    Peter Strickland’s second feature, which he also wrote, is highly accomplished.   Berberian Sound Studio is the tale of Gilderoy, a sound effects man – specifically a ‘foley artist’ – working on an Italian ‘giallo‘ horror movie of the 1970s, and a long way from home.   Strickland has created an aptly grisly soundtrack and he uses things like fruit and vegetables to combined visual and aural effect.  The effect is also both startling and comic.   The opening credits sequence, a pastiche of giallo style and colour, immediately sets the film’s disorienting tone.   Strickland’s camera contemplates with fascination – nearly fetishises – the artefacts of a film studio and the tools of the sound mixer’s trade:  the ‘grid’, the packets of magnetic tape sheaths, etc.   The viewer is shown nothing of the crappy film that Gilderoy’s working on but he sees all:  the repeated viewings of lavish violence and sadism, far from desensitising him, heighten his anxieties and drive him into a continuous nightmare. The increasing lack of distinction between what’s happening inside and outside Gilderoy’s paranoid (or is it?) mind is reflected in seamless transitions between the worlds without and within his head – we also see things from his point of view.  The more conventionally satirical elements are amusing enough:  the lurid lines from the screenplay to give an idea of the scene that’s being worked on; the producer’s pretentious words about his movie output.  Strickland manages to make the English aspects of the piece both ludicrous and poignant.  These include Gilderoy’s mother’s infantilising letters to her son and a travelogue documentary short that one assumes he worked on in an earlier, more benign assignment.  The lighting and commentary on the Box Hill travelogue are spot on:  the comical plummy tones of its narrator contrast with the sense of escape from the increasingly claustrophobic studio in Italy that’s conveyed in the shots of green and pleasant Surrey countryside.  ‘The Lark Ascending’ on the soundtrack conveys Gilderoy’s longing for home.  (I wondered if there was a hint of autobiography here on the part of Strickland, who made Katalin Varga in a country whose language he couldn’t speak.)   As Gilderoy, Toby Jones is very good.  He expresses the man’s disintegration economically but powerfully and has some exquisite moments of inadequacy and discomfort.

    Strickland’s deep fascination with the processes and objects of film-making is clearly enough to sustain not only him but the cinéastes who’ve raved about Berberian Sound Studio.   It wasn’t quite enough for me.  What happens to Gilderoy succeeds in being creepy but the most disturbing element is the infiltration of nightmare into the idyllic England of his memory – home thoughts from abroad are subverted by what abroad is doing to his head.   Strickland chooses to render this horror not through the lineaments of giallo but in the manner of an elaborately enigmatic art film.  The result of his preoccupation with style is that the core story is weakened.  That story is also unsurprising.  The studio is decidedly ominous from the start and everyone, including the film’s director (Cosimo Fusco), is openly hostile towards Gilderoy, except for the embittered star actress (Tonia Sotiropoulou) and the producer (Antonio Mancino).  (The latter’s easy charm could turn into something else – when he pops a grape into Gilderoy’s mouth, it’s seductive – but never does.  This works well.)  The delay in reimbursing Gilderoy for his air fare too quickly gets to the point of the studio accounts department’s claiming there never was such a flight from Heathrow.  In the climax to Berberian Sound Studio, reels of film are destroyed and Gilderoy’s work will have to start all over again.  The implication seems to be that he’s stuck for all eternity in the studio but you don’t feel the horror of Gilderoy’s fate.  This ending can also be read as Peter Strickland’s total absorption in making cinema.   Although I eventually felt disappointed by Berberian Sound Studio, I’ll look forward to Strickland’s next film:  he’s a true original in the stories that he wants to tell on screen.

    28 April 2013

  • Chico and Rita

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (2010)

    One of the great strengths of Waltz with Bashir (2008) is that it leaves you in no doubt why Ari Folman decided to make it as an animated film.  Although the images are disturbingly powerful, they nevertheless put Folman’s experiences in the Israeli army in Lebanon in 1982 at some kind of distance and, since one of the themes is how hard Ari in the film finds it to face those experiences, the distancing is expressive too.  Chico and Rita is a very different animated film for grown-ups.  Why did Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal choose this medium to tell the story of the repeatedly interrupted love affair of a jazz pianist and a dazzling girl singer who becomes a star, a story that begins in Havana in the late 1940s and ends in Las Vegas sixty years later?   It’s an unusual thing to do.  And this must be one of the first pieces of animation to contain violence and sex enough that it might have raised eyebrows with human beings doing the same things on screen.  (The film, which contains a fair amount of cartoon female nudity, has a 15 certificate.)  So the film-makers have their reasons but these don’t give Chico and Rita much substance.   I found it dreary because its form renders the ‘adult’ distinctiveness innocuous and because its clichés – this is a very familiar showbiz romance – aren’t meant to matter, because the animation is so technically ingenious.

    In other words, Chico and Rita is a reminder that you expect less from a piece of animated cinema than from a live action film.  You expect it to be visually inventive and engaging (and this is).  You maybe also expect the moving drawings to be enhanced by a good soundtrack (Cole Porter songs and the music of Thelonious Monk and other stellar jazzmen see to that here).  The design and colouring of the cityscapes of Havana and New York and Paris and Vegas are very pleasing.  Trueba and Mariscal filmed people and gave this human ‘optical information’ to the animators.  It’s sometimes very striking to see how animation can present a particular expression or emotion so that it seems not only real but definitive.  But – unlike with human actors on screen – only one expression or emotion at a time (or, at the very most, as Sally – who really liked the film – argued, perhaps a facial expression at odds with a bodily attitude).  Rita is a caricature of Afro-Hispanic glamour; Chico always seemed a bit vacant to me and, as a result, a bit more interesting – although I wasn’t sure if the vacancy was intentional.  There’s a worrying sequence when he has a nightmare and it seems that, in deference to the era of screen musicals to which the film nods, a dream ballet is going to outstay its welcome.  It’s a relief that he wakes up quickly but it was also a relief to me when Chico and Rita was over.

    8 March 2011

     

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