Monthly Archives: 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

  • For Your Consideration

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Guest (2006)

    Christopher Guest’s reputation as a pioneer figure in the mockumentary genre is unchallengeable:  he wrote and acted in This is Spinal Tap and has directed well-received films like A Mighty Wind (about a folk music reunion event) and Best in Show (a dog show).  We gave up on This is Spinal Tap after half an hour; we managed even less of A Mighty Wind, even though that had twenty years’ less excuse for seeming primitive.  For Your Consideration isn’t exactly a mockumentary but it is a lampoon of the inside world of another branch of entertainment.  It’s about the making of a picture, a low-budget Jewish family melodrama set in the American South.  There are no stars in the cast of ‘Home for Purim’ but rumours get started that one then another of its actors is a dark horse for an Oscar nomination.   The Hollywood awards industry might seem almost too easy a target but there should still be rich pickings for any satirist worth their salt.   But For Your Consideration is tediously crude – in the way that made Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, for me, unwatchable.  I think the only reason I watched this one all the way through was because its subject was impregnably appealing.

    The film is bad because the script is bad – and certainly doesn’t meld with the largely hyper-realistic style of performance.  If the dialogue was mainly improvised by the actors (as is claimed on Wikipedia – although the screenplay credit goes just to Guest and Eugene Levy) they must all have been unsuccessful gag writers in a past life.  The lines don’t even sound as if they might have been improvised originally but too much worked over by the time the film was shot.  The script is never able to go for more than a couple of exchanges without a punchline and it’s rarely a good one.  The pattern of the writing is established right from the start.  As aging, careworn actress Marilyn Hack drives into the film studios, the man at the gate asks if he knows her face from a particular film.  When she says no, he tells her where he recognises her from, and, when she denies it, goes into a little routine, ‘You weren’t in that movie?  You sure you weren’t in that movie?  You should have been in that movie.  That was a good movie’.

    Marilyn, who plays the dying matriarch in ‘Home for Purim’, is the first of the cast to be whispered for an Oscar nomination.   Then it’s the turn of another veteran, Victor Allan Miller, a public face through his enduring career in frankfurter commercials; then the young Callie Webb, whose background is in failed feminist stand-up comedy.  The only person who doesn’t get a whisper is Brian Chubb, Callie’s boyfriend until, stressed by the prospect of a nomination, she dumps him for not being ‘supportive’.  On the day the Oscar nominations are announced, the embittered Brian doesn‘t want to know about them and determinedly sleeps in.  He’s the only one nominated (for Best Supporting Actor, obviously).   It’s typical of For Your Consideration’s laziness that there’s absolutely no follow-up to this.  Brian’s nomination is the punchline – we never see him again, let alone find out how the news affected him or his relationship with Callie (or if he won).  This is in spite of the fact that we’re given contemptuous, completely unsurprising back-to-real-life-after-the-moment-of-fame updates on Marilyn, Victor and Callie.

    When Marilyn, suddenly replete with breast implants and facial cosmetic surgery, goes on the talk show circuit to campaign for the newly-renamed ‘Home for Thanksgiving’, she reminds the TV audience that Thanksgiving is ‘not only non-denominational but the start of the awards season’, a remark which exposes FYC’s concentration on the Oscars to the exclusion of all other film prizes.  The breathless succession of nomination and award announcements from late November through to the Oscars in (currently) mid-February could have supplied some kind of comic spine to the film.  The proliferation of awards is a big part of what makes them ridiculous.  Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the scene knows that the Oscar nominations are preceded by the Golden Globe nominations, and that regional critics’ circle prizes emerge on a nearly daily basis from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  Guest doesn’t make use of this because he’s not actually interested in satirising the awards industry.  FYC is laughing more at the egos and the brittle vanity of actors, a theme which isn’t sufficiently new or distinctive to support an entire picture.

    It’s no surprise, then, that ‘Home for Purim/Thanksgiving’ is far too crap for any self-respecting awards aficionado to condescend to give it a second thought.  In this respect too, the joke seems to be less on Hollywood than on the hopeless self-delusion of the company of losers involved in the making of the film.  Guest and Levy could have been more daring and politically incorrect about the kind of sleeper picture that regularly springs into contention at awards time.  Seeing The Soloist the following night made me all the more aware of how anachronistic FYC‘s ideas were of what the industry might go for.  The Soloist does have stars (and it’s probably too lethargic actually to get awards nominations) but, as a prescription for Academy Awards consideration, it’s a credible satirical notion for twenty-first century Hollywood:  black, mentally ill, artistic-genius performer meets hard-bitten journalist who has never learned how to love.  And it’s Based On A True Story.  ‘Home for Purim’, with its archaic melodramatic acting and situations, might have worked better if Guest and Levy had had one of the people behind it realise the film was so bad that its naffness could be its commercial salvation – with an audience different from the one for which it had been originally designed.  (Even then it wouldn’t have been likely to get awards buzz – but Guest and Levy might have made that happen as a result of the expected contenders all turning out to be so boringly worthy that they died at the box office.)  I expect plenty of people are happy to enjoy FYC at this dumb level and that they’d see the criticisms I’m making as ‘taking things too seriously’ – but I bet plenty of the same people will also be ready to applaud the film as a razor-shape exposé of the movie industry. Guest and Levy make no effort to try to suggest why film producers and agents might be seen as ridiculous.   They rely on really hopeless jokes to make people look silly:  for example, virtually no one involved in ‘Home for Purim’, behind or in front of the camera, is able to use the internet.  In 2006.

    There are plenty of evidently talented people in the cast, including Catherine O’Hara (who actually won the National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as Marilyn), Harry Shearer (Victor), Parker Posey (Callie), Christopher Moynihan (Brian) and, in smaller parts, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr and Sandra Oh.   Guest himself plays the director of ‘Home for Purim’ and Levy an agent.   At one point Ricky Gervais turns up as a studio executive (it’s he who gets the film’s title changed so that it’s not ‘too Jewish’).  Gervais is a very limited performer but his presence here reminds you how sophisticated The Office was compared with the mockumentaries with which Christopher Guest is associated (although I’ve not seen Best in Show).  Gervais’s Extras was also much more sympathetic than For Your Consideration is to the desperate ambitions of actors and writers.

    7 October 2009

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