Daily Archives: Friday, December 11, 2015

  • Woman in Gold

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Simon Curtis (2015)

    Woman in Gold is based on the true story of Maria Altmann.  Born in Vienna in 1916, Altmann came from a wealthy, cultured Jewish family and was the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the model for several paintings by Gustav Klimt, including the famous ‘Woman in Gold’ portrait.  (It’s referred to more than once in Simon Curtis’s film as ‘the Mona Lisa of Austria’.)  The painting, formally ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’, was among the thousands of art works appropriated by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s.  In 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Germany, Maria Altmann and her husband escaped from Vienna to the United States, where they settled in Los Angeles.  During the 1990s, Austria came under increasing pressure to confront the Nazi skeletons in its cupboard – pressure that was probably intensified by the revelations about the Wehrmacht past of the Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary-General.  In 1998 a change of law in Austria brought increased transparency to the process of dealing with petitions for the restitution of artworks looted during the Nazi period.  The new law enabled Hubertus Czernin, an investigative journalist, to discover, in Ministry of Culture archives, that Adele Bloch-Bauer’s husband had not donated his Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery, by which they were now supposedly owned.   Czernin’s findings sparked a campaign, conducted by Maria Altmann and her young American lawyer, Randol Schoenberg (the grandson of Arnold Schoenberg), to have five paintings, including the ‘Woman in Gold’ portrait, returned to Maria’s family.  The negotiations with the Austrian authorities and a legal case brought against the Austrian government lasted several years.  In 2004, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Austrian government was not immune from such a lawsuit; two years later, an arbitration panel of three Austrian judges ruled that Austria was legally required to return the artworks to Maria Altmann and other family heirs.  Later in 2006, ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ was sold to the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135m and has been on display ever since in the Neue Galerie in New York City, which Lauder established in 2001.

    It’s hard not to be affected by the story of Woman in Gold.  The éclat of Jewish culture in European cultural centres like Vienna in the early decades of the twentieth century does more than give a particular resonance to the appropriation of the Klimt paintings:  it serves as a symbol of the larger, more appalling dispossession that the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis.  But the screenplay, by Alexi Kaye Campbell, is primitive and perfunctory.  The characters are hardly developed at all in the script – the actors are expected to do the work.  When Maria first returns to Vienna with Randol (Randy), they spend time with Hubertus Czernin – who is there simply to provide background information.  That remains his function throughout the film until, late on, Czernin reveals his feelings of shame at the discovery that his father was a Nazi.  Having got that off his chest, he smiles a couple of times.  (As Czernin is played by Daniel Brühl, the smiles make a welcome change after his recent grim turn in The Face of an Angel.)   Czernin seems to have more screen time also because the character of Randy is so underwritten.  Ryan Reynolds is likeable enough in the role but the coverage of Randy’s family life back in America is feebly simplified.  He quits his job as a lawyer to devote himself to Maria’s cause.  His wife Pam (Katie Holmes), who’s expecting their second child, is momentarily angry but almost immediately accepts that Randy has done-what-is-right.  His lineage is potentially important to the material (Arnold Schoenberg left Europe for the US shortly after Hitler came to power) but there’s hardly any sense of what this means to Randy – other than when he goes to a concert in Vienna, featuring his grandfather’s music, and the camera moves in on Randy’s face to show that he’s deeply moved.  This is a typical moment in Woman in Gold, which is full of bits the film-makers appear to recall having seeing in other movies and which they think must therefore be sort of OK.  Simon Curtis did a competent job on My Week with Marilyn but he’s directing by numbers here.

    It’s hard to understand why Randy isn’t more irritated by Maria’s habitual treatment of him (she’s forever scolding him – affectionately but, I thought, condescendingly too); and why, as a lawyer, he’s not more exasperated by her tendency to make impulsive, unopposable decisions.  The offputting trailer for Woman in Gold made it only too clear what Maria would be like and the film as a whole doesn’t explore her character.  It merely multiplies the examples shown in the trailer of what a feisty, demanding, tactless but ‘colourful’ old girl she is.  In Maria’s recollections of her youth in Vienna, Helen Mirren hints at something more but Alexi Kaye Campbell has given her virtually nothing to work with.  Mirren is also fundamentally miscast.  Maria Altmann died in 2011 at the age of ninety-four; she was in her early eighties when she set out to recover the family paintings and ninety when she finally succeeded.  Helen Mirren is not quite seventy and looks younger.  In one sense, it’s a relief that she and Simon Curtis decided against a full-scale geriatric characterisation but Mirren’s walk often seems as rapid as her speech and the changes in her facial expressions.  (Judi Dench would have been better able to embody the contrast between Maria Altmann’s bossy indomitability and her physical vulnerability.)  Maria says wryly to an Austrian government adversary, ‘You’re hoping I’ll die before the lawsuit is settled – but I feel I could live another forty years!’  The remark has no impact because Helen Mirren looks as if she could do just that.   Her natural authority means that her Maria is in charge in the wrong way – she’s overbearing.

    The best performance in Woman in Gold comes from Tatiana Maslany, the Canadian actress who plays Maria as a young woman.   Appealing and emotionally fluid, Maslany made me want to know more than the film is going to tell us about what happened to Maria in America in the years after her arrival there with her husband Fritz (nicely played by Max Irons) – how she turned into the Mirren Maria.  The flight from Vienna, although it’s essentially conventional, is shot (by Ross Emery), edited (by Peter Lambert) and played in ways that bring out the speed and danger of the couple’s escape to exciting and upsetting effect.  The flashbacks to pre-Nazi Vienna aren’t imaginative but I liked a sequence, at Maria’s and Fritz’s wedding, when they and their families dance and the camera spins with them.  The music credit goes to two composers, Martin Phipps and Hans Zimmer, and I expect Zimmer was responsible for the grandiose rather than the sentimental-reminiscent sections.  There are effective cameos, as judges at different stages of the legal process, from Jonathan Pryce (whose Cardinal Wolsey was the best thing in the BBC’s recent, hugely overrated Wolf Hall) and Elizabeth McGovern; but the most striking person in a small part is called Susi Spitz[1].  She plays an elderly witness, with Maria and others, at a public hearing about the restitution of art works stolen by the Nazis.  In the few seconds she’s on screen, Spitz gives the woman she’s playing a documentary reality and power.  The undeniably interesting subject of Woman in Gold and the poor film that’s resulted make you wonder:  why, if film-makers are going to be as dramatically unimaginative as this, don’t they just make a documentary?  It’s a rhetorical question, of course:  Woman in Gold cost $11m; less than a month after its release, the box-office receipts are $17.7m.

    12 April 2015

    [1] I think … I’ve arrived at the name by process of elimination from the IMDB cast list.

  • Black Narcissus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1947)

    The gulf between the Archers’ visual imagination and their lack of touch with actors is undiminished here but the effect of the discrepancy is extraordinary.  Based on a novel by Rumer Godden (Powell and Pressburger did the adaptation), Black Narcissus is about some nuns who set up a school and hospital in the Himalayas, and the efflorescence of hysterical (in both senses of the word) tensions within the group.  Their enterprise is, of course, doomed to failure:  the film would have a lot more surprise if the nuns converted the locals to Christianity and coped with the geography.  We’re told at the start that they’re trying to succeed where a monastic order has already tried and failed.  The expeditionary force is an offshoot from an Anglican order based in Darjeeling.  The Mother Superior there (Nancy Roberts) tells Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), the leader of the project, that she’s too young for this kind of responsibility and we can see from the arrogant glint in Sister’s Clodagh’s eye and her poised smile that she needs taking down a peg or two.

    The colouring of Jack Cardiff’s photography and the production design by Alfred Junge are truly breathtaking (they both won Oscars for their work).  They make the settings lushly super-exotic and the sculpted whiteness of the nuns’ figures is beautifully contrasted with the exultant vibrancy of their surroundings.  The trompe l’oeil is quite remarkable.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘The film was made primarily at Pinewood Studios, but some scenes were shot in Leonardslee Gardens, West Sussex, the home of an Indian army retiree which had appropriate trees and plants for the Indian setting. The film makes extensive use of matte paintings and large scale landscape paintings to suggest the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, as well as some scale models for motion shots of the convent. Powell said later, “Our mountains were painted on glass. We decided to do the whole thing in the studio and that’s the way we managed to maintain colour control to the very end. Sometimes in a film its theme or its colour are more important than the plot.” ‘

    The look of the film, the garishness of the story, the broad, melodramatic conception of the characters, and the intensely stiff (or stiffly intense) performances are an unarguably bizarre combination.  The whole thing seems mad – and real admirers of Powell and Pressburger would, I’m sure, claim that this is just what they were aiming for:  that they wanted people to experience the film as if it was taking place within, and expressing, the febrile, dislocated collective psyche of the nuns.   Yet the acting style – the clipped accents, the obvious facial reactions – is incongruous with the other elements of Black Narcissus:  I don’t believe that incongruity is intentional but it heightens the disorienting effect of the piece (at the same time as making it laughable).   Although Deborah Kerr is the lead, the standout performance in the picture – and the epitome of its crackpot carnality – is from Kathleen Byron as the glamorously deranged Sister Ruth.  We can see immediately that this maniac-in-waiting doesn’t belong in a habit and wimple.    Once Ruth has admitted that she’s consumed with desire for Dean (David Farrar), the district agent whose brusque masculinity, shorts and increasingly exposed chest hair drive the nuns wild, she changes into civvies – a wine-coloured dress and red shoes (yet) – and applies brilliantly scarlet lipstick.  Kathleen Byron looks spectacularly, ideally beautiful but the idea is so tawdry and her presence still so cultured that she’s ridiculous too.

    In their big verbal set-to (the fish before the meat of their physical confrontation on the edge of a mountain), Sister Ruth accuses Sister Clodagh of herself being infatuated with Dean.  We already know by this stage that Clodagh has a sensual past:  she keeps having flashbacks to a teenage romance in her native Ireland – with a young man (Shaun Noble) so dull and snotty that it’s no surprise Clodagh took the veil.   The tonal contrasts between the alabaster, habited figure and the auburn-haired Irish girl in her sky-blue party dress are the most effective thing in Deborah Kerr’s performance.   As so often, she’s capable but mechanical:  she overstates the character’s private reactions to overheard remarks and, when Sister Clodagh is experiencing warring emotions, Deborah Kerr’s face presents them one at a time, as if we were meant to tick them off.   Flora Robson as the troubled Sister Philippa, who finds her spirituality dwarfed and overpowered by the scale and mystery of her new surroundings, is more convincingly complex; and David Farrar, although the role of Dean is remarkably obvious, gets across a sense not just of the man’s physical relaxedness but of his emotional exasperation too.   The other nuns are played by Judith Furse (pretty good) and Jenny Laird (bonkers).  Except for Esmond Knight as the silent wise man (an ex-soldier) who keeps a looking-into-eternity vigil on the margins of the convent, the Indian characters are ludicrous, whether they’re ethnically the genuine article or white actors in make-up.  Sabu is startlingly camp as an Anglophile princeling who comes to the nuns for his education.  In the film’s one visual failure, the Archers manage to make Jean Simmons look tacky, as well as act clumsily, as a lower caste dancing girl.    The film takes its name from a perfume the Sabu character buys from the Army & Navy store in London.

    18 October 2010

     

     

     

Posts navigation