Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Let the Right One In

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Låt den rätte komma in

    Tomas Alfredson (2008)

    Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also did the screenplay), this Swedish film blends the lineaments of the vampire movie with familiar themes from what might be called the cinema of childhood isolation and growing pains.  Twelve-year-old Oskar is the child of a broken marriage and he needs a friend (cf ET).  He’s ridiculed and bullied at school (cf Carrie).  Friendship/first love arrives in the form of Eli, the vampire girl next door in the apartment block (in a Stockholm suburb) where Oskar lives with his mother.  Eli also proves to be his avenging angel as far as the school gang is concerned.  Oskar is pre-pubertal; Eli tells him she’s been twelve for a long time.  At the end of the film, we see Oskar in a train compartment, tapping out the Morse code which he and Eli have used throughout.  It’s not clear that he’s headed anywhere but the two of them appear to be in a long-term relationship, perhaps an imperishable communion.  (We assume that Eli is packed in Oskar’s luggage.)  Let the Right One In is a rite-of-passage picture of a peculiar kind.  It seems to be about deciding not to grow up.

    The children here are the dominant psyches and agents – Oskar, Eli, the bullying Conny and his acolytes – and their looks reflect some imaginative physical casting.  In the role of Oskar, blond, pale Kåre Hedebrant has a slightly androgynous quality.  He can appear ordinary, as well as ethereal – so that he seems sometimes to belong to a different species from Eli, sometimes to express the fact that they’re made for each other.  As Eli, the dark-haired, gracefully grave Lina Leandersson suggests an arrested development – arrested at a point at which Eli had already achieved an inchoate sexual presence:  Oskar always seems younger than her, in body and soul.  The fact that Conny and his henchmen are conventionally good-looking kids who are not expressionist studies of their souls reinforces their vicious impact.  In comparison, the grown-ups are ineffectual.  Oskar’s mother isn’t much more than an unremarkable pretty face:  she consoles or scolds her son but she’s perfunctory and empty-headed in either mode.  His father, whom Oskar visits regularly, is handsome, genial and seemingly weak-willed.  (A scene in which he and his son are playing a game together, which is interrupted by the arrival of a (male) friend of Oskar’s father, has an emotional weight that’s oddly increased by the fact that nothing overtly dramatic happens as a result.)  The hispanic PE teacher at the boys’ school is comically (or that’s the idea) ridiculous.

    In spite of the rate at which deaths in suspicious circumstances occur in the community, the police, after an early visit to speak to Oskar’s school class, are often conspicuous by their absence.  The only adult character of substance and consequence is Eli’s companion Håkan – a father figure even if he’s not her biological father.  Håkan is a serial killer – in order to supply Eli with the nourishment she needs.  When his latest intended victim escapes, Håkan disfigures himself (by pouring acid onto his face) so that he’s unrecognizable.  He then turns himself in.  Eli visits him in hospital, where he offers his neck and she accepts the offer.  From this point onwards, she has to seek out her own victims.  The moral seems to be that parents are inevitably disappointing – they can’t satisfy the demands of their children.

    There’s another group of adults, who congregate in a local bar and in the grungy apartment of one of their number.  (The apartment is dominated by a collection of stray cats which, if they’re not feral to start with, certainly are once they sense the approach of a vampire.)  This collection of no-hopers are, at different stages of the story, both witnesses to and victims of the attacks by Eli and Håkan.  When they’re not themselves being assaulted, they show a remarkable lack of initiative in doing something about what they’ve seen.   (They include a man called Lacke and his girlfriend, Ginia, the one woman in the group.  When Eli lands on Ginia, Lacke intervenes to detach the two women and one of his pals comes running along to help – but they make no effort to apprehend Eli, who doesn’t disappear that quickly from the scene.)  Perhaps Tomas Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist are using these characters to underline the uselessness of grown-ups but I think they’re given more screen time than they’re worth.  They also seem to interrupt the child’s perspective that prevails throughout most of the film.

    Let the Right One In oftens looks very beautiful.  Alfredson (who also edited the film, with Daniel Jonsäter) and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, create some images which are tonally and texturally marvellous.  They use both the natural and manmade aspects of the locale to do this:  the sparkling winter trees and the glum apartment blocks seem equally soulless.  The colour schemes and contrasts, powerfully simple, apply to the people as well as to the landscapes:  Oskar is blue and golden-white, Eli black and red.   The blood in the film is photographed so that it achieves what might be described as emotional fluidity.  Although there’s plenty of mayhem, Alfredson balances it with scenes that derive their power from the threat rather than acts of violence.   And some of the vampiric tropes are very effective – especially the way that Eli launches herself on her victims.  At these moments, this weightless creature becomes startlingly substantial.

    I think I was the oldest person in the small audience I saw the picture with.  I couldn’t help but be struck by the enthusiasm for the gory high points – especially the shocking violence of the climax.  Yet the twenty-somethings giggling that the film was ‘so brilliant, really funny’ were, I thought, kidding themselves – although I’m not quite sure how.  Their laughter was forced – perhaps to subdue their being shaken by what they’d seen, perhaps an expression of uneasy puzzlement.  Let the Right One In is a clever, stylish and unsettling piece of work but I didn’t like it (it’s been more enjoyable thinking about the film and writing this note than it was to watch it).  I find that hard to explain too.   I think it may have to do with Tomas Alfredson’s rather shallow attempts to present Eli’s vampirism as a human predicament (almost as a form of disability) – and the relationship between her and Oskar in a way that provokes in us the emotional responses we’re primed to make to a story of less unusual thwarted lovers.  (The emotionality of parts of Johan Söderqvist’s music is certainly conventional.)  Alfredson’s thoroughgoing manipulation doesn’t exactly reduce the effectiveness of the picture but it’s alienating.  Iit confirms it as an exercise in style which is heartlessly sophisticated.  Heartless sophistication is OK if it’s funny but, in spite of the overemphatic laughter I heard around me, Let the Right One In doesn’t have a sense of humour.

    13 May 2009

     

     

     

     

  • Father of My Children

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le père de mes enfants

    Mia Hansen-Løve (2009)

    This is the third French drama I’ve seen in recent years which has a real hook but then works itself out evasively and conventionally.  In François Ozon’s Time To Leave (Le temps qui reste, 2005), the terminally ill protagonist was at first notable for his self-centredness – a quality the young man didn’t seem to rise above but which Ozon increasingly overlooked as death approached.    Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, 2008) was the story of a woman who’d been in prison for murdering her son and of how she coped in the world she was released into – but hardly anyone other than the audience learned her secret.   Now there’s Father of My Children, the third film directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (who is only twenty-nine) and winner of the Special Jury Prize in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section at Cannes last year.  Grégoire Canvel, a film producer, beset by financial crises but whose family adore him and who seems to adore them back, commits suicide.  ‘Why did he do this?’ asks his perfect, loving wife Sylvia.  Having voiced the question, she shows no signs of pursuing it either in her own mind or in what she chooses to do after her husband’s death.  The nature of that death seems shockingly thoughtless – Grégoire stood on a Paris street and put a bullet through his brain – and, you might think, traumatising for those he’s left behind.  For all the difference it’s made to his family by the end of the film, the stress of imminent bankruptcy might just as well have brought on a fatal heart attack.

    Father of My Children is better than the Ozon and Claudel films:  for as long as Grégoire is in the picture, it’s absorbing and unnerving – and he is the nearly continuous dramatic focus right up to the moment that he kills himself.  The film begins with a montage of short sequences showing him always on the move and always on his mobile – leaving the office, crossing the street, behind the wheel of his car in a traffic jam, speeding home on the motorway.   It’s an obvious way of establishing his high-pressure professional life but it’s effective in building a momentum which, until Grégoire disappears, Hansen-Løve never loses.  Whereas Colin Firth in A Single Man wears his suicidal intentions on his tailored suit sleeve, Louis-Do De Lencquesaing as Grégoire keeps things inside.  You can believe, as you can’t believe in A Single Man, that no one would perceive his desperation.  Once we see Grégoire reaching the end of his tether, we realise that his earlier tenacious affability must have had a desperate edge that we didn’t register at the time.  As his financial position gets more impossible, De Lencquesaing expresses Grégoire’s apprehension of defeat with great skill:  towards the end, he seems to keep walking only through an act of diminishing will.   Hansen-Løve gets an ominous pressure into even Grégoire’s apparently relaxed moments with his family – when the kids are putting on a little play at home or the family goes swimming, during a short break in Italy.  Grégoire and Sylvia’s three daughters are sparky but willowy.  Pascal Auffray photographs their milky limberness in a way that makes the children touchingly vulnerable.

    Father of My Children is confidently and fluently directed yet Mia Hansen-Løve’s cleverness eventually becomes little more than that.  The fact that he seems so happy with his kids makes Grégoire’s death all the more horribly baffling – why would he deprive himself of the joy he gets from them, let alone deprive them of him?  You begin to realise, however, that Hansen-Løve has stressed the happy family life only in order to maximise the impact of its savage termination – and that she is not going to probe the implications of what has happened in the lives of the survivors.  (Once you start to read the director in this way, other things, which you had admired, seem something of an artifice too – like the complete interiorisation of Grégoire’s anguish in the opening scenes.)  A more basic problem with the film is that, once Grégoire is dead, the life goes out of the story.  It struck me at an early stage that the beautiful, guileless-looking Chiara Caselli as Sylvia wasn’t registering strongly. I didn’t know in advance exactly what the story comprised but I had seen trailers that made it obvious that Grégoire departed the scene.  I therefore wondered how Caselli would manage the move to centre stage once De Lencquesaing was gone.  The simple answer is that she doesn’t and nor does any other character.  The effect of the irrevocable removal of the centre of our attention is odd because no attempt is made to replace him.  And, apart from their immediate expressions of grief, the particularity of his death doesn’t reverberate powerfully in the lives of his wife and children.

    There are good performances by, as well as De Lencquesaing, the three girls who play his daughters – Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss and, especially, Alice De Lencquesaing (presumably Louis-Do’s real-life daughter), as the fifteen-year-old Clémence, who is affectingly poised between being a child and a young woman.  This actress looks capable of animating the horror of losing an adored father through unexpected suicide yet Hansen-Løve gives her no opportunities to do so.  Instead, Clémence starts reading letters from Grégoire’s first wife Isabelle about their son Moune – who, on the evidence of the letters, seems pathologically withdrawn – and goes to visit her.  (It’s unclear quite how little Clémence knew about her father’s first family up to this point.)  She learns from his mother that Moune, now a husband and father himself, loathes Grégoire for walking out twenty years ago.  Isabelle, however, bears him no ill will at all.  Once she finds this out, Clémence seems to have no further curiosity about the matter.

    Although film producers have traditionally been stigmatised as ‘mere’ moneymen, we’re immediately more engaged by Grégoire than we would be if he were a workaholic businessman with a job outside cinema.  We’re engaged even before we learn what a bright, cultured man he is and how passionately he wants to invest in creative filmmaking talent.  The picture briefly goes off at an interesting tangent, when Clémence spends time with Arthur Malkavian (Igor Hansen-Løve, Mia’s brother?), a young screenwriter whom Grégoire signed up shortly before his death.  Arthur chatters on to Clémence about the latest draft of his screenplay (with ‘Johnny Remember Me’ on the soundtrack – giving an inevitably powerful twist to the proceedings as far as I was concerned).  I wondered for a moment if Mia Hansen-Løve was heading for Tarantino country, about to suggest that even if life doesn’t go on, cinema always will.   By contrast, Sylvia’s attempts to save her husband’s company, centred on a dull sequence with the notoriously ‘difficult’ Swedish director whose budget overrun was responsible for a good part of the financial mess, are anaemic.  In spite of the widow’s saying she’ll fight to the end to save Moon Films, she seems to be going through the motions.  When the company finally goes into liquidation, it doesn’t seem to matter much.  The scene in which Sylvia and the three girls go to the company offices to say their goodbyes and pick up various mementos is no more than sweetly, sadly amusing.

    Of course we can accept that, in life rather than art, a fatal act like Grégoire‘s might remain horrifyingly inexplicable but I get suspicious when ‘realism’ is used to avoid the issue in the way Mia Hansen-Løve uses it here.  The writer-director seems strangely uninterested in what Grégoire’s suicide – as distinct from his death – means to the people he leaves behind.  Perhaps the explanation is in this quote from Hansen-Løve, which appears in a piece on the film in this week’s The Big Issue:

    ‘The film is inspired by the story of Humbert Balsan who passed away in 2005 … Balsan was a risk-taker and fond of young people.  He was producing my first feature film when he committed suicide.  … His actions didn’t alter anything.  … Of course, perhaps a month later, he would have put things in perspective and things wouldn’t have felt so dramatic.  But what matters is that at this particular moment, his feeling of despair overruled.’

    The story of a man who discovers that, like it or not, his life revolves ultimately round his work rather than his family is a very credible contemporary theme and it’s clear that the material means a lot personally to Mia Hansen-Løve.  But if all she has to reveal is that ‘at this particular moment’ her protagonist’s ‘feeling of despair overruled’, Father of My Children might has well have wrapped at the point at which Grégoire pulled the trigger.

    7 March 2010

     

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