Daily Archives: Thursday, December 24, 2015

  • Smiles of a Summer Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sommarnattens Leende

    Ingmar Bergman (1955)

    The sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, set at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, sees Ingmar Bergman at his most light-hearted (that’s a relative term) and displaying a perfectly light touch.  The time is midsummer and the place is Sweden so darkness visible is not much in evidence.  Even so, the passage of time is structurally important and, as so often in Bergman, a persistent memento mori, both sonic and visual.  There are ticking timepieces, a crowing cock and, eventually, a dawn chorus.  Whenever a clock chimes the hour, worried-looking figures emerge from and move round it, a death’s-head among them.  The principals in the story – four men and four women – are Bergman’s means of exploring different kinds of desire, lust and love.  Some of the partners at the start seem ill-matched; by the end of the film, each coupling is the right one.  The characters’ impulsions are expressed in different social registers, ranging from the blunt to the would-be sophisticated.  They combine to create a celebration of love and of the folly of love.  Bergman must have had A Midsummer Night’s Dream in mind when he wrote Smiles of a Summer Night:  the picture often brings to mind Hippolyta’s judgment of the mechanicals’ play as ‘the silliest stuff’.  The farce form helps Bergman bring out the humour in this all-is-vanity roundelay but he, his actors and the cinematographer Gunnar Fischer find poetry too.

    Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand), a middle-aged lawyer, has been married to the beautiful Anne (Ulla Jacobsson) for two years but the marriage is still unconsummated.  Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), Fredrik’s son from his first marriage, is slightly older than his stepmother, who’s not yet out of her teens.  Henrik is studying to be a minister of the church but tormented by his feelings for Anne – feelings that she secretly reciprocates.  After a visit to the theatre, Fredrik goes backstage to renew his acquaintance with the famous actress Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), Fredrik’s lover between his two marriages.   Desiree, who broke off that relationship, now has a young son (also called Fredrik) and is currently the mistress of an army officer, Count Carl Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle).  He is the husband of Charlotte (Margit Karlqvist), a long-time friend of Anne Egerman.  The fourth pairing is Anne’s maid Petra (Harriet Andersson) and her lover Frid (Åke Fridell), also a servant.  Others in the cast include Bibi Andersson, in a cameo as an actress, and Naima Wifstrand, as Desiree’s mother, who invites the principals to a midsummer night’s party, at which she presides.  The ancient-looking Mrs Armfeldt tells her guests that she’s kept her health by never listening to what other people have to say.

    The main characters – just now seems a good time to call them ‘the loveful eight’ – are beautifully written by Bergman and, in all cases, beautifully interpreted.  Especially memorable are Eva Dahlbeck’s voluptuous, nearly overripe Desiree; Jarl Kulle’s Count, who, with his exaggeratedly straight-backed military bearing, is very comical; Harriet Andersson’s earthy, funny, vivid Petra; and the pivotal Fredrik Egerman.  From his first appearance, striding along the street in his close-fitting business coat, Fredrik is a figure of fun.  He is never in control in his dealings with women; he’s confidently authoritative only in conversation with his anguished son.  (This young man – shortly before he eventually elopes with Anne – tells God that, if His world is sinful, ‘I want to sin’.)  The confrontation between Fredrik and the Count climaxes in what is surely the most (the only?) enjoyable game of Russian roulette in cinema history.  Gunnar Björnstrand’s exquisite comic performance reaches a peak in this episode but it’s superb throughout.  Fredrik Egerman repeatedly loses his dignity.  As played by Björnstrand, he knows how silly he looks but he keeps trying unavailingly to limit the damage.  He is a true fool for love.

    It’s never difficult to get the gist of what’s being said in this film but the subtitling on the print I saw at the BFI this November was remarkably skimpy.  I can always find plenty to criticise about BFI, of course, but this is probably the right note in which to admit that I’m not sure what I’d do without it now:  I’ve a particular fondness for Smiles of a Summer Night not only because it’s a wonderful film but also because it was the very first one I saw after joining BFI in early 2003.  (I joined because they were running a full Bergman retrospective and I wanted to find out more about his work.)  Conversations between Frid and Petra explain the film’s title.  He tells her that the summer night has three smiles.  The first smile is ‘between midnight and dawn, when young lovers open their hearts and loins’.  The second is for ‘the jesters, the fools and the incorrigible’.  The third smile is for ‘the sad and dejected, for the sleepless and lost souls, for the frightened and the lonely’.  When the night smiles this last smile, it’s morning.  Out in the fields where Petra and Frid are, the windmill, on which Bergman’s camera finally rests, is still turning.

    21 November 2015

  • Brighton Rock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rowan Joffe (2010)

     Neds and this in the space of five days:  the best and worst of British film-making in rapid succession.  The Boulting brothers’ 1947 version of Brighton Rock, with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown and a screenplay by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan, is good enough to be a hard act to follow.  The solution seized upon by the director Rowan Joffe, who also did the screenplay, is to ‘update’ the material.  The new film is set in 1964, Greene’s Brighton racecourse gangs are replaced by mods and rockers, a television set is reporting political debate about capital punishment, and Ida Arnold mentions the atom bomb and the pill.   Aside from the sets and clothes, this is about how far and deep the recasting of the novel, published in 1938, and the first screenplay goes.   As for capturing the Catholic dimension, Joffe has Rose praying in a vast, empty church in the shadow of vast Daliesque Christ, and there’s some vaguely religious chanting worked into Martin Phipps’s ludicrous score. Elsewhere, the music, with its drum rolls, rippling rise and fall and booming ominousness, is like a bizarre pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Diver crossed with Sibelius.

    I can’t remember when I last saw a film where it was so immediately and dismayingly obvious what you were in for.   Having said that, this Brighton Rock is such an aberration that for a little while I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and wondered if Joffe was aiming for a postmodern effect.  There are times when his picture seems less like a remake of Brighton Rock than an account of film people working out how to do a remake.  Watching Andy Serkis as the gang boss Colleoni (which sounds like Corleone – it might have been worth updating this name), you think there must be more to this than meets the eye.   All that actually meets the eye is Serkis laboriously working out how he’s going to read a line or execute the holding of a cigar or a coffee cup.  (He takes so long the cigar must have gone out and the coffee cold in the meantime.)  Are the utterly unvarying pace throughout and the vice-like sombreness meant to convey Pinkie’s predestination (or something)?  Is it simply to differentiate his version from the Boultings’ that Joffe presents a depopulated Brighton in which there’s no contrast between its energetic public face and the gangsters’ underworld?  The film was shot in Brighton and Eastbourne but it looks to be taking place in the Coastal Resort of Lost Souls.

    In Sam Riley, Britain may have found its own Leonardo DiCaprio (they share, as well as limited talents, a slight facial resemblance).  As Pinkie, Riley is so monotonously inexpressive that he’s almost compelling:  you look harder and harder at him – you think there must be something there, but you’re wrong.  Or, at least, all that comes through is Riley’s awareness that he’s playing a soul on his way to hell.  He misses out entirely on any suggestion that Pinkie might have divided feelings.  When his devoted Rose says, ‘You look worried, Pinkie’, you know she must be imagining things.  In all the scenes featuring Riley, the pauses between lines are vast stretches of emptiness:  there’s nothing going on between him and anyone else (I expect Riley’s admirers will explain that this is because Pinkie’s a psychopath).   Andrea Riseborough as Rose deserves respect and pity:  this is a good actress with an impossible task.  What could make Rose swear eternal loyalty to a boy as dully charmless as Riley’s Pinkie, who never gives her any kind of a good time?   Yet Riseborough is skilfully sympathetic in suggesting a girl who’s a bit thick but at least as determined.  Her shifts between looking plain and pretty hold your attention.

    On the whole, though, Rowan Joffe pays so much attention to artifical, emphatic lighting of attention-seeking images (shot by John Mathieson, much of the film is photography rather than cinematography) that he seems to ignore the cast.  The unchanging mood and the metronomic pacing turn perfectly good actors like Phil Davis and Maurice Roeves into obvious, uninteresting ones, and Steve Evets is saddled with an awfully crude bit as Rose’s unloving, mercenary father.   I’m strongly prejudiced in favour of Sean Harris but I do think he is one of the best things in the film:  his Hale combines menace with neediness in an arresting way.  (Harris also has the advantage of being killed off early.)  There are moments when you think Joffe forgot to tell John Hurt, as Ida’s pal Phil Corkery, that the source material had been moved on a quarter-century but Hurt is at least entertaining.  Thank goodness, though, for Helen Mirren.  You can understand why she was attracted to playing Ida Arnold and she does it with panache.  The unnuanced torpidity of most of what’s going on around her may give Mirren’s playing the appearance of overacting but I don’t think it is.  The earthy, used glamour in her presence and bearing, and the practical moral urgency, are right and have substance, and Mirren’s ability to change the emotional temperature of a scene has never been more desperately needed.  (The dialogues between Mirren and Riseborough and the one short exchange between Riseborough and Sean Harris are the only moments of dramatic life in the whole film.)

    Once Pinkie has fallen to his bloody, broken death (off a cliff which the characters seem to spend an awful lot of time on the edge of), I must have relaxed, knowing the end was nigh.  I couldn’t stop laughing in the last few minutes, especially during the closing sequence in the home for unmarried mothers where Rose ends up, pregnant with Pinkie’s child.  Joffe retains the startlingly effective end of the 1947 film but he prepares for it very (and laughably) slowly.  A parcel arrives for one of the inmates and the others run excitedly to her bed.  The place is run by nuns – or a nun anyway, who commands the girls, ‘Get back to your beds!’   (The choreography of their movement and expressions is like something out of a silent movie; the mute chorus of inane-looking girls who work with Rose in the teashop that Ida manages aren’t much better.)  It turns out that inside the fascinating parcel is a small gramophone.  Whoever sent this must have had a sick sense of humour – the recipient’s circumstances are hardly conducive to playing records – but they must have known it would come in handy.  It’s just what Rose needed to hear the disc she persuaded Pinkie to record in the booth on the Brighton sea front.  The year is young but Brighton Rock has staked a strong early claim to be the worst picture of 2011.

    5 February 2011

     

     

     

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