Daily Archives: Wednesday, February 17, 2016

  • The Collector

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1965)

    Thanks to my ignorance of how things turn out in The Collector and to William Wyler’s direction, I found this adaptation of John Fowles’s 1963 novel (from a screenplay by Stanley Mann and John Kohn) truly suspenseful.   Frederick Clegg (Terence Stamp), a Reading bank clerk who’s an amateur but deadly serious lepidopterist, wins big on the football pools and raises his pathologically possessive game.   He buys a big, isolated house in the countryside of south-east England and uses chloroform rather than a butterfly net for his next capture.  Miranda Grey (Samantha Eggar) is now an art student in London but Freddie has had his eye on her since they travelled on the same bus when they were schoolkids in Reading.  He stalks and kidnaps Miranda, drives her back to his house in his van, and locks her in the cellar, which he’s set up with things he thinks she’ll like (art books, a wardrobe of fashionable clothes) as well as things she’ll need (a bed, a small electric heater).  Freddie explains to Miranda that he loves her and wants her to get to know him.  Whatever happens, he tells her, having her there with him will have been worthwhile.  He agrees to release her after four weeks and she counts the days colourfully, marking them off on the bricks of the cellar wall with the art materials Freddie readily buys for her.

    Mona Washbourne makes a fleeting appearance as Freddie’s Aunt Annie, in a flashback to the moment her nephew learns he’s won the pools.  An actor called Maurice Dallimore, as a superannuated military neighbour who calls at Freddie’s house at an awkward moment, is on screen for a few minutes.  But The Collector is virtually a two-hander.  (The original cut of the film also included scenes featuring Kenneth More as a doctor but these were removed from the version released in cinemas.)  Psychological battles between a pair of characters – with the regular changes of upper hand that these require – can seem contrived and mechanical, and to be more about the actors than about the people they’re playing.  It’s tempting to assume, ten minutes into The Collector, that you’ve got the whole film summed up.  Yet the two leads and Wyler, with his deep understanding of the dynamic between performers and his mastery of rhythm, prove you wrong.   The tensions between Freddie Clegg and Miranda Grey are remarkably sustained and the outcome is always in doubt.

    Their relationship is never a case of Stockholm syndrome.  The one between Freddie and the audience, or this audience member anyway, is something akin to it, though.  Terence Stamp makes Freddie so engaging that I was rooting for him:  when, for example, he grumbles about all the trouble he’s gone to, part of me agreed with Freddie that Miranda might be more appreciative of his conscientious hospitality.  I suppose I’ve always thought that both Terry and Julie (linked forever by ‘Waterloo Sunset’, even if the connection never occurred to Ray Davies) are lookers in more ways than one.  It’s not just that the camera loves Terence Stamp and Julie Christie; they also tend to be less convincing performers whenever they’re speaking lines.  Christie has often been greatly effective but it’s only in Away From Her that I’ve thought her a fully accomplished actress as well as a beautiful star presence.  Watching Billy Budd and The Collector on the same evening changed my mind about Stamp’s acting abilities.

    His best work may well have been at the very start of his career but in both films the character he’s playing is impressively absorbed.  It’s apparent that Stamp uses his tight, somewhat ill-fitting suit to work up Freddie Clegg’s gait and gestures but he gets into the young man’s head too.  On what should be Freddie and Miranda’s last evening together before her freedom, he prepares a romantic dinner for two – champagne, caviar, the works.  During their tense, halting conversation Wyler closes in on Stamp’s face and the blue eyes are suddenly merciless:  they tell Miranda that Freddie’s going to renege on his promise to let her go.  Casting Terence Stamp in the role might seem like a piece of typical, wrong-headed Hollywood beautification but I think Wyler could see that Stamp’s good looks would enrich the material as well as hook the audience.  Because he’s so handsome it’s, at one level, baffling that Freddie is cut off from human relationships, and that Miranda isn’t in some way taken with him:  Stamp’s presence guarantees a sexual undertow to the proceedings.   Yet his characterisation of Freddie makes you believe in his isolation – and when an increasingly desperate Miranda tries to seduce Freddie, his disgust is more powerful than it would be if he were physically unprepossessing.

    The Collector involves other reversals of expectation.  Although I hoped things would work out for Freddie, I also wanted and expected Miranda to escape eventually.  When the sociable neighbour arrives inconveniently you think he’s bound to come in useful again but he never reappears.  Fowles’s story is a subversive illustration of how money can buy you happiness – or get you close to it anyway.  The script contains plenty of witty lines but the funniest, as well as the most startling, is Freddie’s rejoinder, when Miranda tells him he’s out of his mind, ‘There’d be a blooming lot more of this sort of thing, if more people had the time and the money’.  Samantha Eggar’s success as a film actress was short-lived but she’s increasingly interesting as Miranda:  the girl’s situation is appalling; her resourcefulness and resilience are admirable; but she’s rarely as likeable as her captor.  The class difference between the two characters is a crucial element of the story and Eggar is unafraid to suggest that Miranda, as well as being angry with and frightened by Freddie Clegg, also despises his lack of breeding and culture.  There are moments when Eggar brings to mind not just Katharine Hepburn’s colouring but also her scathing forthrightness.

    Maurice Jarre’s music is intermittently effective at best; Wyler certainly uses it too much.  There’s the odd bit of plotting which creaks, particularly in the closing stages.  I was doubtful that Freddie would lock Miranda in his butterfly gallery, given that she threatened to disturb his precious specimens the first time he showed them off to her.  When she hits and hurts him with a shovel and, after getting her back in her dungeon, Freddie drives himself to a hospital for treatment, the medical staff are remarkably incurious about how he got his injury – the blood from which is a rather too brilliant red.  For the most part, though, the vivid colouring – Robert Krasker and Robert Surtees both have cinematography credits – works well, and the images of a picture- postcard English countryside are a nice counterpoint to what’s going on inside the house.

    It’s fascinating, when Freddie drives up to town to trail and abduct Miranda, to see central London just as it was turning into Swinging London.   (There’s a self-referential joke shot of a cinema showing Ben-Hur:  although it was released in 1959, it’s not so hard to believe, given the box-office longevity in Britain of big hits of half a century ago, that the film would still be showing several years on.)   In the early stages of The Collector I was puzzled as to why Wyler made immediately clear what Freddie Clegg was up to, why he didn’t take the story in chronological order from before the point at which Freddie wins the pools.  Wyler’s decision proves to be shrewd:  the structure he uses helps to ensure that the audience’s feelings about Freddie are continuously volatile.  Because he has a brief voiceover at the very beginning you assume that Freddie will survive to the end of the story.  But you’re never prepared for quite how this story ends.

    1 May 2013

  • In the Name Of

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wimię...

    Malgorzata Szumowska (2013)

    Although there’s plenty wrong with it, In the Name Of is more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the protagonist Father Adam.  Malgorzata Szumowska and her co-writer Michal Englart have created a complex character; Andrzej Chyra plays him brilliantly.  Adam is conceptually familiar, a Catholic priest struggling unsuccessfully to suppress the desires of the flesh.  He’s been transferred from a parish in Warsaw to a small rural one, where he runs a centre for teenage boys with behavioural difficulties.   The teenagers are themselves transferred there from a reformatory; the centre is a potential stepping stone to their reintegration into society, and finding paid employment.   Adam and his lay assistant Michal (Lukasz Simlat) have impressed the church authorities with how successfully they’ve tamed some of these feral boys.   Needless to say, there are plenty of outdoor and sporting activities.  Adam is amiable and joins in the football and swimming but he evidently has something on his mind, and a shot of him masturbating in the bath confirms that the something is sexual:  the centre’s community of adolescent males, forever rough-housing and seen often with their tops off, makes it pretty obvious that it’s homosexual.  When Michal’s bored wife Ewa (Maja Ostaszewska) tries to seduce Adam, he tells her, ‘I’m already taken’, and the viewer knows by now that he’s not referring to his vow of celibacy (although Ewa assumes he is).  As a drama, In the Name Of is in suspense for some time after this scene – but that suspense chimes with Adam’s state of mind.

    The priest keeps himself fit jogging in the woods around the centre in a vain attempt to develop mens sana in corpore sano.  The towering trees are a fine image (and the lighting – Michal Englert was also the cinematographer – is expressively varied throughout) but the idea is clichéd:  Adam is running-away-from-himself.  I wasn’t convinced either that the boys – whom we see from the very first scene as capable of cruelty both physical and verbal – would accept a hardly macho priest as sexually above reproach simply because he’s a dude (fortyish Adam wears brand jeans and trainers when he’s not in his clerical outfit).  There’s brief speculation among the boys about what Adam does for a sex life but no suggestion is made that he might be gay until a crucial point in the narrative.   Szumowska’s storytelling is sometimes puzzling or careless, perhaps both.  The boy that Adam is particularly attracted to is Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz):  he has Christ-like looks but his alias is Humpty (I never got this nickname) and he’s regarded as a joke by the more assertive boys.  Lukasz can’t swim but takes his turn diving into a lake with the others; he doesn’t resurface and has to be rescued by Adam and Michal.  Back on dry land, the two men try to revive Lukasz, the other boys gather round, and Adam’s face expresses terrible anguish.  Szumowska cuts – before it’s clear whether Lukasz has started breathing again – to the rest of the community at a refectory meal, where a newcomer Adrian (Tomasz Schuchardt) is introduced.   You wonder if Lukasz has died and Adrian has taken his place at the centre.  Lukasz reappears, alive and well, in a subsequent scene.

    Another boy, Rudy (Kamil Adamowicz)[1], tells Adam how he once gave a man a blow job; he’s scared what would happen if the others ever found that out.   Not long afterwards, Adam witnesses Rudy being anally raped by the ominously Aryan Adrian (aka ‘Blondie’).  Gimlet-eyed Adrian, who seems from an early stage to have got Adam sussed, is presumably responsible for daubing ‘The priest is a faggot’ on the door of the centre.   Adam, returning from an early morning run, storms into the boys’ dormitory to demand who wrote the words.  The interrogation is barely underway when Adam discovers that Rudy is missing.  The boy has hanged himself.  It’s odd that, when the police arrive, nothing more is said about the graffiti – even more odd that, when Adrian openly accuses Adam of being queer, the other boys say he must be joking and don’t seem particularly struck by the normally pacific Humpty’s fighting with Adrian to defend Adam’s honour.

    Michal has growing doubts about Adam’s relationship with the boys and goes to report him to a bishop.  In the Name Of, which has so far presented Adam sympathetically, looks to be turning conventional about the scandal of the Catholic Church’s turning a blind eye to paedophile priests.  The bishop is obviously played and given obviously ironic lines.  (He tells Michal that, of course, the Church would never cover things up but that he has no worries in this particular case, that what led to Adam’s transfer from Warsaw has an innocent explanation, etc.)  Yet from this point onwards, the character of Adam gets all the more interesting.  This crystallises in a Skype call to his sister in Toronto.  Adam tried to contact her before and anxiously muttered, ‘Come on, pick up …’ when she didn’t answer.  He wanted the opportunity to speak his mind sooner.  When they do talk, you begin to understand how tormented Adam is – he has a real faith and takes his religious vows seriously – and the extent to which he too is a victim of the Church’s self-protective secrecy:  part of him would like not to be transferred again.  Adam admits to his sister that he’s attracted to the teenagers – that he’d like to ‘fuck the lot of them’ – but he also insists that, ‘I’m not a paedophile, I’m a faggot’.  This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Adam drunk and his sister dismisses what he says as the drink talking: ‘I won’t talk to you when you’re like this – you’re a good priest and a good person’, she insists.  She doesn’t want to hear the uncomfortable truth from her brother but she’s right too – he is good, in both these respects.  (This powerful sequence also makes you appreciate the similarities and differences between Skype and the confessional.)

    At this stage, Father Adam hasn’t evidently had sexual intercourse with Lukasz (or with any of the other boys) although there’s no doubt that their interactions have been sexually gratifying to Adam.  After the incident at the lake, Lukasz asks Adam to teach him to swim.  The swimming lesson that follows is visualised rather predictably (suggesting both baptism and, as Adam supports Lukasz’s body in the water, a different kind of initiatory rite).  It’s followed by an episode which, although it may be too weighted and visually flamboyant, has undoubted impact.  Lukasz runs off into the middle of a vast field of shoulder-high corn and Adam calls for him.  There’s no answer except for ape-like calls, which Adam reciprocates.  In a later scene, Adam and Lukasz are in a stationary car together and the priest lays his head on the boy’s shoulder.   Adam does get a transfer to another parish.  A church procession along a country road to mark the end of his time in the rural community and his leave-taking of Michal (very well played by Lukasz Simlat) are differently impressive, as is Adam’s final exit from the place.   As he drives away, he glimpses Lukasz at the side of the road and steadily increases speed.  The narrative then jumps forward to what seems to be some weeks or months later.  The centre is burned to the ground.  Adam’s successor is building a new church in its place and Lukasz has a job on the building site.  The other men talk about what a good job the new priest is doing, how dodgy Adam was and that he was transferred to another parish.   Lukasz immediately leaves home to find him.   (I wasn’t sure how since the other building workers don’t name the place Adam’s gone to – they just say how far away it is.)   When he turns up at Adam’s door – late at night, in heavy rain (as you might expect) – the priest welcomes Lukasz and the two finally consummate their feelings.  There’s no sense that Lukasz has been corrupted by Adam.  They love each other.  Next morning, Adam is lying in bed and hears a single ape-call from nearby.  The reprise of this sound is obvious but emotionally effective.

    Malgorzata Szumowska closes with a sequence of (what I took to be) a group of newly-ordained priests chatting in calm, decorous surroundings.  These young men and the wild boys of the centre who opened proceedings bookend In the Name Of:  two apparently different groups which share the quality of being at least homosocial.  The camera stops on the face of one of the young priests – someone has taken his eye and, by implication, his fancy.  In Szumowska’s previous film, Elles, her treatment of a sexually interesting theme was hollow and Andrzej Chyra, who played one of the student  prostitutes’ clients, didn’t make much impression.  He is a revelation here.  This is a superb example of an actor letting the viewer see into the soul of the character – behind behaviour which would not draw attention to itself among the people with whom that character lives his life on screen.   Chyra’s significant looks are finely controlled and dissimulated.  As well as being moving in the Skype call, he’s extraordinary in an earlier scene in which Adam, alone in his room, gets drunk and plays rock music.  He takes a framed photograph of the pope (Pope Benedict XVI) from the wall and you fear he may do the melodramatically conventional thing and smash it to smithereens.  Instead, he dances with the photograph then replaces it on the wall then dances with it again, still in at least two minds.  Andrzej Chyra expresses Adam’s mixed feelings exquisitely; the effect is suspenseful, sad and funny.   There’s the same rich ambivalence as Adam lies in bed in a later scene, thinking with pleasure about Lukasz and with guilt about the pleasure.

    8 October 2013

    [1] This may not be the right name or actor.  I thought this boy was called ‘Grovy’ or similar but there’s no such character in the IMDB full cast list.

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