Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Diana

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oliver Hirschbiegel (2013)

    The days following Diana’s death in the first week of September 1997 also saw the passing of Mother Teresa and Georg Solti – you couldn’t say a bad word about any of them.  It was a relief that Jeffrey Bernard expired in the same week:  was it a Private Eye cover that commemorated that event with a balloon from Bernard’s mouth, ‘They can’t blame this one on the paparazzi’?  Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana biopic has been mauled, by the press and members of the public alike, but those who’ve branded it ‘disrespectful’ can only mean that an extremely ropy film about Diana is, in effect, disrespectful to her.  The intention of Hirschbiegel and his star Naomi Watts appears to be quite the opposite – and a main reason why Diana is so feeble. The picture tells the story of the late princess’s relationship with a heart surgeon called Hasnat Khan during the last two years of her life.  If I ever heard about this liaison, I’d forgotten about it.  It’s not the obvious focus for a Diana drama in the way you might expect becoming a thorn in the side of the royal family or her affair with James Hewitt or her final fling with Dodi Al-Fayed to be.   The film-makers’ choice looks to be based on (a) the idea that it was Hasnat Khan’s job caring for the sick and saving lives that whetted Diana’s humanitarian appetites and (b) the suggestion that, if Khan had properly returned her love and put aside selfish worries about the effect – on him, his family in Pakistan and his professional career – of a life with ‘the most famous woman in the world’, Diana would never have accepted Dodi’s invitation to that notorious Riviera holiday, would never have been in Paris on 31 August etc etc.  Even as she prepares to go down in the lift at the Hotel Ritz, Diana is hoping that Hasnat will reply to the message she left for him:  she’s in two minds about going back to her suite for her mobile phone.  If Dian-olaters feel the movie besmirches her memory, how must Hasnat Khan – still practising as a heart surgeon and being blamed here for denying Diana the lasting happiness she craved and, in effect, for causing her death – be feeling?

    The present queen, her father and Mrs Thatcher have all been Oscar-winning roles in the past decade so Naomi Watts may have liked her chances but Diana is now set to become more a matter of career damage limitation for her.  Watts’s portrait seems designed primarily not to offend – a futile strategy to the extent that some of Di’s admirers will accept no substitutes, and an essentially wrong approach anyway.  Watts is a good actress and does very little here to suggest otherwise but one of the mistakes she does make is to give Diana credit for being in the same acting league as herself.   In the notorious Panorama interview in 1995, Watts sounds much less transparently calculating than the original when she comes out with the ‘queen of people’s hearts’ stuff and ‘there were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded’.  In other words, Watts plays this like the good actress she is and Diana wasn’t.  A more surprising, and more fundamental, problem is how physically wrong Watts is for the role.  This British-Australian may pass for an English rose but she resembles the Diana of the early 1980s rather than the mid-1990s.  One of the amazing things about Diana was her transformation from the shy, full-faced kindergarten teacher into the glamorously gaunt creature of her last years – the big eyes and nose made her look crazily purposeful, almost predatory.  She always kept the little-me voice but it sounded increasingly practised and its contrast with her assertive mien and movement was remarkable.  Watts gets the walk, and the hand movements, and the angle of the head.  In individual shots (as on the poster for the film), she looks the part but the effect vanishes once the camera stays on her face or moves with her body.  Perhaps wanting to make the audience feel sorry for Diana, Watts turns her into someone unrecognisably innocuous.   She looks schoolgirl pretty rather than, as Diana unquestionably was, distinctively beautiful.

    The screenplay by Stephen Jeffreys is based on a 2001 book, Diana:  Her Last Love, by Kate Snell.  Some of the dialogue suggests that Sylvie Krin should also have had a credit but Diana is not as flamboyantly bad as I’d hoped (and as, for example, Ryan Gilbey’s amusing review would lead you to expect) – even though there are plenty of absurdities.  Hasnat dashes into a London pub to catch the Panorama interview – standing room only (he arrives just as she gets to the bit about self-harming).  The interview ends and the pub empties instantly, except for Hasnat, sitting alone at a table.   The first split between the pair occurs when the press gets hold of the affair and Diana, equally publicly, denies it.  (Hasnat’s reaction here is one of the better bits of the film.  It suggests a glimmer of believably divided feelings:  this self-regarding man is horrified at the idea of becoming public property but the slight on his romantic credentials adds insult to injury.)  He breaks things off and a distraught Diana goes round to his flat, bangs on the door and, when there’s no answer, stands in the street yelling his name in a way unlikely to keep her out of the public eye.   Oliver Hirschbiegel then cuts immediately to her opening the door to Hasnat’s flat with a key.  On a visit by Diana to Italy, a blind man in the crowd is desperate for contact with her.  You almost expect her to say, ‘And what’s your name?’ and him to reply, ‘Bartimaeus’ and you get the next best thing as the blessed cover-girl allows him to feel her face with his gnarled old fingers, and his sightless eyes fill with tears.

    Diana and Hasnat have to resort to meeting under cover of darkness in London parks.  This leads eventually to the following, especially scintillating dialogue:

    Diana:  This must be the only London park we’ve not been in before …

    Hasnat:  We’ve been to all the others!

    The other dodging-the-media tactics are mildly interesting – so is the anomalous suggestion that Diana tipped off a particular journalist of her whereabouts with Dodi Al-Fayed, which enabled the hack’s paper to get the famous pictures of them on the yacht.  As Sally said when I told her about this, Diana was probably wilful enough to do it – but the tip-off is incongruous in Hirschbiegel’s presentation of her.   Hasnat sees the yacht photos and despairs of Diana.  Next day, she’s on the front page embracing a refugee from the Balkan War under the headline ‘Is this the true Diana?’  He and the film-makers seem to have the same attitude towards Diana – recognising that even a secular saint deserves a bit of fun but still feeling frustrated when she’s not realising her salvational potential.  In that connection, the film has a happy ending:  the closing legends virtually ascribe to Diana the reform of international policy on landmines.   Hirschbiegel includes a variation on those scenes in 1980s films (Plenty, Prick Up Your Ears) in which the main couple have it off while half-watching the Coronation on television:  Diana and Hasnat make out as Labour comes to power in May 1997.  ‘He’s just what this country needs’, says Hasnat, as Tony Blair makes his speech at the Royal Festival Hall.  Perhaps this is meant to be one of the lead weight ironies in the script (there’s more than one ‘foreshadowing’ of what will happen in Paris).  If so, it was effectively lost on someone like me who still thinks Blair was (and continues to be) exactly that.  I don’t remember seeing Naveen Andrews since The English Patient (1996):  he’s not bad as Hasnat although he’s put on enough weight over the years to make him seem older than the real Hasnat Khan, two years younger than Diana, was at the time.   Douglas Hodge is (I think intentionally) amusingly creepy as Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell.  Geraldine James is (I suspect unintentionally) amusingly fey as her Oirish spiritual adviser Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo (sic).  The power of Diana’s posthumous authority is evident in the fact that even Juliet Stevenson, playing another of her friends, doesn’t dare to compete for the camera’s attention in her scenes with Naomi Watts.  Cas Anvar is Dodi.

    22 September 2013

  • Monsieur Lazhar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philippe Falardeau (2011)

    Monsieur Lazhar gets off to an improbable start.  Simon (Emilien Néron), an eleven-year-old Montreal schoolboy, looks into a classroom to see a woman’s body hanging from the ceiling.  Horrified, he rushes off but the camera stays put.  The rest of the class congregates in the corridor.  Teachers dash in among the children, telling them to go back outside and not to ask any questions:  it seems unlikely the staff would take a panicked kid’s word for what they’d find in the classroom without even bothering to look.  The dead woman is Martine Lachance, Simon’s form teacher.  The school head, Madame Vaillancourt (Danielle Proulx), is immediately worried she won’t be able to find a replacement – ‘No one wants to come to this school anymore’.  Is staff suicide a recurring problem there?  Next, Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Said Fellag – known simply as Fellag) arrives in the head’s office.  He is, he says, following up an advertisement for the position that he saw in the paper.  Bachir explains that he taught for twenty years in a college in his native Algeria but he’s not accredited to teach in Canada.  Mme Vaillancourt explains there are procedures to be gone through – she can’t simply take him on.  That’s exactly what she then appears to do. The fact that her decision is key to the film’s conclusion makes it no less incredible that she’d commit such a professional error but, then, she’s working in a system where none of the supply teachers on her list needs the work or feels they can help out a school suffering the trauma of a staff member’s sudden, unexpected death.  There’s no good reason for Philippe Falardeau’s screenplay, based on a one-character play by Evelyne de la Chenelière, to be so unrealistic.  I could never really believe in the film after this beginning.

    Although Falardeau’s implausible characterisation of the Quebec school system results from his need to get the story of Bachir Lazhar underway and his inability to find a more convincing way of doing it, Monsieur Lazhar does have a persistent bee in its bonnet about one aspect of contemporary education – the veto on teachers having any physical contact with children, whether it’s hitting them or hugging them.  Bachir is reprimanded early on for instinctively smacking Simon’s head.  It turns out the boy’s claims that Martine Lachance hugged him (true) and kissed him (which he eventually admits was untrue) may have led to her suicide (although we’re also told that she was already prone to anxiety attacks).  In the final shot of the film, when the school year has ended and Bachir’s employment as a teacher with it, he hugs another child, Alice (Sophie Nélisse).  (His favourite pupil, she adores him too.)  But the don’t-touch theme isn’t used for the dramatic climax I expected and which, given the theme’s salience in the movie, would have made good sense.  When Simon eventually breaks down in class and admits he embroidered his story of the extent of Martine Lachance’s physical affection, Bachir goes to comfort him.  It’s a strong moment because you think the man can’t possibly put his arm round the boy.  Yet he does more than that – Bachir’s hand even seems to linger on Simon’s shoulder.  The child doesn’t appear to register the significance of the kind embrace.  Nor, more surprisingly, does the spiteful clever clogs Marie-Frédérique (Marie-Eve Beaugregard), who reminded Bachir when he clipped Simon in the earlier scene, ‘We’re not in Saudi Arabia now’.  Nor does the sensitive, watchful Alice.  Falardeau could have shown her responding as if to say, ‘we know this is against the rules but we realise there are times when the rules aren’t good enough’.  But there are no reactions at all.

    And no follow-up either.  I assumed the helping hand to Simon would cost Bachir his job but Philippe Falardeau’s use of his themes is mechanical.  At this point, he has another one he can use to dismiss Bachir so he decides he doesn’t need the physical ‘abuse’ one, in spite of its centrality.  The other two strands of the story concern the protagonist’s personal circumstances and the aftermath of Martine Lachance’s suicide.  Bachir, whose wife and children died in a fire in Algeria shortly before they were due to join him in Canada, is still seeking political asylum there.  Mme Vaillancourt brings in a psychologist (Nicole-Sylvie Lagrande) for Martine’s class.  Both these themes are thin and the working out of them is perfunctory.  We see Bachir talking to his lawyer, then under questioning in an asylum hearing, then back to the judge to learn the good news that he can stay in his adopted country:  it’s been confirmed that the fire that killed his family wasn’t an accident and that Bachir would be in danger were he to be deported to Algeria.  These scenes are complemented by conventional details like Bachir gazing sadly at a photo of his wife and children.  (The other significant photo in the film, one of Martine on which Simon has drawn a rope behind her head and angel’s wings, just happens to be sticking out of the boy’s back pocket – to allow another kid to swipe it and get the momentum of Simon’s exposure going.)  Alice, the only other child to see Martine’s corpse, writes an honest, unhappy essay about the death and its aftermath.  Bachir is much impressed by this and wants the text circulated to all the kids in the school.  Mme Vaillancourt, not unreasonably, says no.  We’re meant to think Bachir is sympathetic to Alice’s struggling to move on from the suicide because he hasn’t got over his own loss.  Although this connects the two themes, the traumatisation of the class doesn’t amount to much more:  Alice and Simon are the only ones affected.  Indeed, only four other kids are characterised at all:  the egregious Marie-Frédérique; a boy who gets migraines and nosebleeds (Vincent Millard); another from an Arab immigrant family (Seddik Benslimane); and Boris, an overweight and dim boy who’s made fun of (Louis-David Leblanc).  Boris’s father is Chilean – it turns out his grandfather was a victim of the Pinochet regime.  Each child has their sliver of significance or chimes neatly with the central character.  In the case of Boris, we’re supposed to take him more seriously because of what happened to his grandfather:  he’s not a stupid fatso after all.  Falardeau is careless: Marie-Frédérique’s parent are knowalls, like their daughter.  In the crucial scene, before he embraces Simon, Bachir makes a sarcastic reference to them.  This too has no follow-up although you know Marie-Frédérique would go straight back to her parents and they’d file a complaint.

    Introducing himself to the class, Bachir explains that his forename means ‘bringer of good news’ and his surname means ‘good luck’ (as, of course, does the surname of his suicidal predecessor).  But Monsieur Lazhar is really just Mr Nice – Fellag plays him with sensitive intelligence but the character isn’t complex enough.  Bachir was educated in Algeria and a civil servant there before he turned his hand to running a restaurant.  (It’s a typical moment when Mme Vaillancourt eventually asks him what he did in Algeria and he tells her about the restaurant – ‘Oh, shit!’ she exclaims – but not the civil service past, which presumably wouldn’t have earned an expletive.)  The most interesting thing about him is his old-fashioned adherence to a French colonial educational tradition.  His interactions with other characters, like the thirtysomething woman teacher who invites Bachir to dinner (Brigitte Poupart), are unremarkable.  So are most of the rest of the cast, although Sophie Nélisse is consistently good and Emilien Néron improves rapidly:  Simon’s breakdown is emotionally the strongest moment in the film.  Monsieur Lazhar is easy enough to watch but that’s the problem.  Given its themes, you feel it shouldn’t be.

    5 May 2012

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