Daily Archives: Thursday, February 18, 2016

  • Cassandra’s Dream

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (2007)

    Londoners Ian and Terry are brothers, both around thirty.  They buy a sailing boat for a knock-down price.  They call it ‘Cassandra’s Dream’, in honour of a greyhound of that name.  Gambling-addicted Terry backed the dog and it came in at a price big enough to pay for the boat. The brothers’ parents, Brian and Dorothy, have run a restaurant in London for years.   The place has kept going but only just.  Ian helps out with the restaurant and his anxious, unassuming father assumes his elder son will spend the rest of his working life there.  Dorothy is a more aggressive advocate of the importance of family but despises her husband’s lack of financial success.  She thinks her sons’ role model should be Brian’s brother, Howard, a successful plastic surgeon and businessman, now based in the US – and Ian has big commercial ideas, to invest in hotels in Los Angeles.  On the way back from a day’s sailing on Cassandra’s Dream, he meets and immediately falls for Angela Stark, a beautiful and ambitious young actress.  He wants to impress Angela and shoots her a line that he’s in the LA hotel business:  his dream suddenly needs to become reality.  Terry, who works at a garage, loses disastrously at cards and desperately requires funds to pay his debts.   When Uncle Howard pays a visit to London, his nephews think he’s the answer to their prayers.  Howard reveals, however, that his shady business past is about to catch up with him – unless Martin Burns, the former colleague ready to incriminate him, can be got rid of.   Howard agrees to give Ian and Terry the financial help they ask for, in exchange for their killing Burns.  To cut a longer-than-usual-for-Woody-Allen story short, the brothers carry out the job; Terry is crazed by guilt; Ian plans to kill him to keep things quiet; Terry accidentally kills Ian then commits suicide.

    The cast of Cassandra’s Dream are dealing with the verbal equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes.  Since the dialogue is written by Woody Allen, they can’t believe they’re talking in secondhand melodramatic cliché but they usually are.  As always happens when Allen sets his story in this country, the lines are lifeless and phony too.  It may be arguable as to whether he gets English social nuances and it’s unarguable that he has no ear for English locutions.  One of the smaller examples:  at their first meeting, Angela gives Ian ‘two tickets for my latest show’ and he instantly replies, ‘Oh, you’re an actress’   It’s unlikely that someone with a part in the kind of play Angela’s appearing in would describe it, even if she were pretentious, as a ‘show’.  It’s certain that someone like Ian wouldn’t assume from hearing the word ‘show’ that it was a play. (He’d probably ask ‘What sort of show?’)  A third layer of unreality in the dialogue is created by the casting of Ewan McGregor (Ian) and Colin Farrell (Terry) in the two main parts.   They struggle manfully to sustain their London accents and you’re very conscious of the effort.  There’s the odd passage in Cassandra’s Dream that makes you feel it might work if the character speaking were American.  This occurred to me especially during the lengthy monologue in which Uncle Howard, in tones of increasing anger and alarm, explains his predicament to Ian and Terry.  Tom Wilkinson as Howard has reasonably opted for a mid-Atlantic accent but, as he delivers the speech, you can almost hear the force it might have had given, say, the Alec Baldwin treatment.  When Ian speculates on the best way to kill Martin Burns, you register how different this would have sounded issuing from the mouth of the young Woody Allen.  (His excited lack of familiarity with the potential weapons named – ‘a hammer, maybe – or a knife …!’ – would have made the lines funny.)  For the most part, though, the dialogue in Cassandra’s Dream probably wouldn’t sound good as any kind of English.  The words echo in your head all right – not because they’re resonant but because they’re hollow.

    I used above the phrase ‘someone like Ian’.  I mean by that – it could equally be ‘someone like Terry’ – someone who names his boat for a winning bet on the dogs and blithely ignorant of Cassandra the prophetess of doom.  Someone unlike Woody Allen and the audience that he expects to get – and chuckle or grimace at – the reference.  This sense of superiority to the characters in the film isn’t likeable.  It’s also pretty rich when the occasional attempts to present Cassandra’s Dream as an updated Greek tragedy are so feeble.  If Ian is meant to be a good man brought low by a tragic flaw, it’s hard to see what the flaw is.  Both he and Terry initially reject Howard’s deal.  Ian appears to change his mind, and forces Terry to join him in dispatching Martin Burns, for no better reason than one sleepless night, thinking about what the money would mean to them both.  (It would make more sense if Terry were the prime mover:  at least he needs to pay his gambling debts quickly to avoid getting his legs broken etc.)  Is Dorothy’s enjoining her sons to remember the paramount importance of ‘family’ meant to be a crucial factor in propelling Ian and Terry to murder on behalf of their uncle?  Probably – although the brothers are (understandably) bored when their mother comes out with this clearly oft-repeated spiel.

    Ewan McGregor, who never gets below the nice guy in Ian, gives Woody Allen the weak performance he deserves for writing such a poorly-motivated character.  (Even Ian’s jealousy, when other men look at Angela and she reciprocates, comes and goes.)  Colin Farrell does rather better:  it’s a sort of compliment to say that, when Farrell’s Cockney accent slips, it’s because he’s engaging with the character more strongly than McGregor (who holds the accent better) is able to do.  Some of the cast who are either real Londoners or have regularly played Londoners manage to create a semblance of truthfulness:  Sally Hawkins, as Terry’s girlfriend (at least until things get serious); Phil Davis, as the ill-fated Burns (his short stay in the film probably helps Davis); John Benfield, in his quieter moments as Brian.  Clare Higgins is stridently and monotonously over the top as Dorothy.  Hayley Atwell is Angela:  in Brideshead Revisited, Atwell showed she was capable of much more than you’d ever imagine from her playing here.  Philip Glass’s dynamic score merely exposes the weediness of what it’s accompanying.    In the sense that it’s the story of hitmen rather than of the man who employed them, Cassandra’s Dream could be seen as a kind of debased companion piece to Crimes and Misdemeanors but, in the Woody Allen canon, it’s more strongly akin to Match Point.  In spite of the chance-rules paraphernalia, the moral of Match Point seemed eventually to be that crime pays.  Maybe that’s why the message of Cassandra’s Dream – crime doesn’t pay – is meant to strike you as original.

    14 February 2016

  • Forbidden Games

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jeux interdits

    René Clément (1952)

    A famous film but I knew next to nothing about it and its lack of compromise took me by surprise – right from the start as German planes drop bombs on refugees fleeing Paris during the Battle of France in 1940.  These sequences have a documentary rawness.  The family that you think may be singled out for safety – a husband and wife, their young daughter and her pet dog – turn out to be no less vulnerable than anyone else in the confused, frightened crowd.  The startled terrier scampers off over a bridge; the child runs after and recovers it; another shell explodes; her parents and the animal are killed instantly.  Five-year-old Paulette, who is not physically injured, is taken in by a peasant family, the Dolles, and the central relationship of the picture is between her and the family’s youngest son, eleven-year-old Michel.  Paulette hears the adults talking about the German attack, about how terrible it is that the bodies of those killed aren’t properly interred but are buried instead ‘in a hole – like dogs’.   The little girl is acutely aware that, when Michel told her there would be another dog on the farm, she left the corpse of her own dog Jock on a river bank, in the open air.  In the local churchyard, Paulette asks Michel why the graves are all together there.  He says it’s so that the dead people aren’t alone.  Giving Jock a decent burial and company under the earth is how the children’s ‘forbidden games’ start.  They create their own cemetery in an abandoned mill, stealing crosses from the churchyard to mark the animals’ graves.

    The Dolles are caught up in a comically exaggerated feud with another local family, the Gouards.  They discuss the war at one remove from it and the only active participant in the armed forces, Francis Gouard, returns as a deserter.   The Dolles are not, however, immune from death:  one of Michel’s elder brothers, Georges, although he seems at first to be a figure of fun, dies from the injuries inflicted by a horse that kicks him.   Ridiculous as they often are, the adults also turn out to have a crucial power.   When police arrive to take Paulette to a refugee camp, Michel agrees to tell his father where the stolen crosses are, on condition that Paulette can stay with the family.   His father appears to agree but, after Michel has revealed the whereabouts of the crosses, fails to keep his part of the bargain:  after all, the police are the police and Michel is only a kid:  Paulette is taken away.  The distraught Michel gets to the barn in time to throw all the crosses, and a wreath that marked his brother’s new grave, into the river – lost, one assumes, without trace.  It’s in this episode, and the final sequence in a Red Cross camp that follows, that Forbidden Games is at its toughest and most upsetting.  Paulette is left alone in the camp for a few moments and hears calls from others of ‘Michel’ and ‘mama’.   She runs towards the calls and disappears, crying and lost, into the crowd of refugees.

    These are far from the only affecting scenes in Forbidden Games, which Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost adapted from a 1947 novel by François Boyer called The Secret Game.  (According to Wikipedia, Boyer originally wrote the story as a screenplay but, after failing to excite any studio interest in it, rewrote it as a novel.)  It’s deeply sad and moving to watch Paulette tenaciously retrieve the body of Jock and cling on to it, even though she knows the dog is dead – and that her parents are too.  Pauline Kael rightly praised the subtlety with which René Clément describes this displacement activity (a subtlety which obviously chimes with the child’s lack of consciousness of the psychological explanation of what she’s doing).  The correspondence between the funerary rituals of the children and those of the church after the death of Georges is conveyed with a similar lightness of touch and incisiveness.  The power and the comedy of religion in the family’s life is nicely caught in Michel’s semi-sarcastic jumbling of the words of the Lord Prayer’s and the Magnificat.  The physical texture and routines of the household are convincingly portrayed – the sleeping arrangements, the fact that clothes look to be changed only for an outing to church, the flies settling on people’s faces and expiring in milk.

    The long-snouted, bulky mother, played by Suzanne Courtal, is a particularly strong image.  The other older actors include Lucien Herbert (the father), Jacques Marin (Georges) and Amédée (Francis Gouard) but it’s the two children who are the jewels of Forbidden Games.  Brigitte Fossey’s combination of frailty and stubbornness as Paulette is truly remarkable:  René Clément succeeds in shaping her performance without a trace of child acting.  Georges Poujouly as Michel partners her beautifully – he’s especially good at expressing how this boy understands he’s brighter than anyone else in the family of which he’s part.   The guitar music ‘Romance’, played by Narciso Yepes, is familiar (to a modern audience anyway) but it nevertheless provides a haunting accompaniment.

    12 April 2014

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