Daily Archives: Sunday, January 10, 2016

  • Clerks

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kevin Smith (1994)

    I knew of it but didn’t know, before reading the BFI note, how it got made:  for $27,000,  in three weeks, when twenty-three-year-old Kevin Smith – like the film’s protagonist – was a check-out clerk in New Jersey.  Dante (Brian O’Halloran) has dropped out of college and works in a Quick Stop convenience store.   His friend Randal (Jeff Anderson) has a job in a nearby video store and Smith’s film was made not long after Quentin Tarantino had demonstrated what that kind of job could lead to.  It isn’t hard to understand why Clerks became a cult indie comedy.  Given the circumstances of its creation, it’s an amazing piece of work.  Even so, I found it less easy to experience it, fifteen years on, as a classic of its kind.

    Clerks includes, as proof of Kevin Smith’s literacy, not just plenty of words but even punctuation.  The action – which takes place during the course of a Saturday when both Randal and Dante find themselves at work – amounts to a succession of personal frustrations and crises for Dante, whose day off it should have been.  The film is divided into sections each of which is introduced by a single word that suggests – straight-facedly – an academic, formalist approach.  (The headings are ‘Vilification’, ‘Syntax’, ‘Vagary’, ‘Purgation’, ‘Malaise’, ’Harbinger’, ‘Perspicacity’, ‘Paradigm’, ‘Whimsy’, ‘Quandary’, ‘Lamentation’, ‘Juxtaposition’, ‘Catharsis’ and ‘Denouement’.)  Except for two brief excursions – to the roof of the store for an abortive hockey game and on the road to a local funeral parlour – Clerks is shot inside or just in front of the minimart and video store.  Because he had to film after hours, the metal shutters on the store where Smith worked were down; when Dante arrives at the Quick Store, he constructs a makeshift sign for the shutters.  (He writes the words in shoe polish and his hands smell of it for the rest of the day.)  The sign reads ‘I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN’ (although it doesn’t stop nearly everyone who comes into the store from asking, ‘Are you open?’).  I really enjoyed that semi-colon.  Inside, there are other hand-written notices, created by the same sarcastic wit (‘If you plan to shop lift, let us know’).

    These are some of the good examples of Smith’s verbal facility but, although his script is clever, there’s too much of it and it’s written in a single voice.   Smith himself plays Silent Bob, a role which is significant but, except for a few parting words of sexual worldly wisdom to Dante, non-speaking.  The rest of the cast are good enough actors to do a character but they’re not sufficiently accomplished to give their readings the variety which, because it’s so copious, the dialogue badly needs.  Lisa Spoonhauer, as Dante’s ex-girlfriend Caitlin, has more vocal colour (and looks more striking) than the others but she’s also one of the more self-conscious performers.   The one-damned-thing-after-another structure works well enough (the film doesn’t really build) but I thought it was only the gross black comedy highlights that were really funny – and where the dialogue comes into its own.  While his deliberately limited camera work can get tedious (ping-ponging between two characters having a conversation), Smith makes a virtue of budgetary constraints by having the most terrible incidents described in words rather than by staging them.  An elderly male shopper asks to use the store’s toilet and for a porn magazine while he’s in there, and Dante reluctantly obliges.  During the evening, Caitlin uses the facility even though the lights aren’t working and she can’t see.  She emerges thinking she’s had great sex with Dante.  It turns out to be the old man who had managed an erection before pegging out on the toilet floor.  The erection is sustained in rigor mortis.

    Some sequences start promisingly but are developed and resolved in a pretty conventional way.  A succession of shoppers who want to buy cigarettes are deterred by a rabid anti-smoking campaigner.  He turns out to work for the company that makes the gum he encourages people to buy instead of fags.   Others, such as the routine with the macho creep of a customer who impugns Dante’s physical fitness, are just not very good.  But there are also some decent small jokes with a pleasingly believable edge:  Randal neglects his post to go and rent a movie from a better video store.  The main characters may be whingers and/or slackers but they’re good company for most of the ninety-odd minutes.  That said, by the end of their long Saturday, you share Dante’s and Randal’s anxiety to get out.  I’m not sure this is due entirely to empathy.  Jason Mewes is Jay, the talkative complement to Silent Bob in the duo of stoners who hang out in front of the shop.  Marilyn Ghigliotti is Dante’s current girlfriend, Veronica.  The film was shot in black and white by David Klein.

    23 September 2009

  • Cléo from 5 to 7

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cléo de 5 à 7

    Agnès Varda (1962)

    I once read a review by Kenneth Robinson of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  Robinson was frustrated that Petra spent too much screen time in a bed with white sheets and kept hoping she would get up, go out and meet a man in a dark suit ‘against whom the subtitles would be clearly legible’.   I kept thinking the same watching this equally famous film, Agnès Varda’s portrait of a beautiful young Parisian singer as she anxiously awaits the results of medical tests which may reveal she has cancer.  Cléo’s glacially chic apartment, with its acres of white walls and endless white floor, was a particular problem area.   Cléo from 5 to 7 takes place in more or less real time, a screen concept that has always appealed to me:  it may just be that High Noon was one of the first pictures that made an impression on me as a young child and that the continuous timeframe was part of what penetrated.   But I find the idea of a story in real time exciting at a more conscious level too – I like the idea of fusing a lifelike passage of time with an artistic obligation to dramatise this in a probably unlifelike way.   Maybe it was the pressing awareness of what was actually going on in London outside BFI as we were watching Cléo – Gordon Brown resigned and David Cameron set off for the Palace – that distracted me but I don’t think that’s a  complete explanation of why I didn’t much like Varda’s movie.  It’s certainly a very stylish piece of work.  In the end, though, it seems to me not much more than stylish – so artful it’s weightless.   The scenario is a grim one and I’m not sorry Cléo wasn’t more gruelling.  Perhaps what stays with me most is the contrast between the essential and substantial sadness of The Beaches of Agnès, the documentary autobiography which the octogenarian Varda made recently, with her much younger self’s ability here to treat fear of mortality as a thoughtful but coolly confident jeu d’esprit.

    Corinne Marchard as the eponymous Cléo is a real problem, I think.   Much of the time she kept reminding me of other people – a young Alison Steadman (at least until Cléo sheds her wig), Patsy Kensit, Debbie Harry.   I felt a strong resistance to a sequence in which a couple of Cléo’s zany friends turn up at her apartment and start clowning around with one of them, played by Michel Legrand, making up tunes on the piano.  I must admit, though, that the main melody that Legrand/Bob the pianist starts playing does have a plangent pull – and that Corinne Marchand comes to life emotionally as she sings it.  (Also, this bit is nowhere near as excruciating as a later ‘silent comedy’ short – including cameos from, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina – made and shown to Cléo and her sculptor’s model friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blank) by the latter’s boyfriend.)  Corinne Marchand never gives you any sense, though, of a character under the pressure of an absorbing, nagging anxiety.  That may not be a problem if you accept that Varda is making the point that Cléo is so shallow that her anxiety comes and goes or is obscured whenever she’s hasn’t time to think about it.  I don’t really believe this, though:  I thought we were simply watching an erratic and inadequate actress.   As I understood it, we were meant to think at the end of the film that Cléo has risen above scared self-absorption, through the relationship she’s begun to develop with a soldier, on his last day of leave from service in Algeria, whom she meets in the Parc Montsouris.  But I got that message from the pointed editing and camerawork, and from Antoine Bourseiller as the soldier, more than from Corinne Marchand.

    I liked the film’s opening sequence, in which we hear Cléo listening to her fortune being told by a tarot reader and watch the cards being laid out before our eyes.   The cards appear in different combinations but, framed within a barely changing camera shot, they impart an increasing claustrophobia, a sense of Cléo being trapped.  The tarot sequences are in colour.  Varda then cuts to the two women in black and white and the effect is almost brutal.   Elsewhere the chiaroscuro of the film, photographed by Jean Rabier and Alain Levent, is beautiful and expressive in its juxtaposition of bright sunshine – the events take place on the longest day of the year – and the deep shadows that seem to be ready to envelop Cléo.  Yet you’re always aware of the ingenious design of the light and shade.   It’s fascinating too to see Paris in the early sixties captured in a documentary style.  But each street shot that rings true – because you receive it as something glimpsed and, so preoccupied is she, barely noticed by Cléo – is cancelled out by an image that’s obviously contrived.  The latter images are sometimes accompanied by what’s meant to be a snatch of overheard conversation but this sounds explicit and artificial.  Cléo’s perambulations on the way to getting her test results (at the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital, where Princess Diana died many years later) are various and each detour makes its point – although you never get the sense that the heroine is intentionally (or even unconsciously) avoiding her inevitable destination.  This being bohemian-intellectual Paris, a good few of the people Cléo encounters have seriously sententious tendencies – even if they seem unlikely bohemian-intellectual material.  The prime example of this is the pleasant soldier.  He’s so given to aphorisms that even Cléo comments on it.

    11 May 2010

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