Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Ex Machina

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alex Garland (2015)

    Alex Garland wrote a good screenplay for the film version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel about human cloning.  In Ex Machina, his debut as writer-director, Garland engages with artificial intelligence.  Caleb is a computer-coder for a Silicon Valley company that has developed Bluebook, an online search engine that enjoys a 94% share of the global market.  He’s chosen from among all the company’s staff to spend a week at the home of Nathan, its reclusive CEO.   Caleb is dropped by helicopter in the middle of Nathan’s vast estate, the pilot explaining that this is as close to the boss’s actual residence as he’s allowed to come.  Caleb has to make the rest of his way there on foot, through woodland.  (The location of the spectacular mountainous landscape above the house and woods is unspecified in the film but is actually Norway.)  Nathan explains to Caleb that his assignment during his week-long stay will be to participate in an experiment to discover whether a machine developed by Nathan is able to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human – the so-called ‘Turing test’.  Caleb will interact with what Nathan claims is the world’s first true AI, built in the body of a robot girl, known as Ava.  Caleb has a key card which opens some but not all doors in the place.  Before his interactions with Ava begin, Nathan gets his guest to sign ‘the mother of all non-disclosure agreements’.

    Nathan loses no time either in telling Caleb that his home ‘is not a house but a research centre’.  The clinical atmosphere and sci-fi-ish design of the place are eerie enough but, like horror-movie residences of earlier eras, its recognisably domestic aspects also help to make it unnerving.  What Caleb eventually finds inside the wardrobe units in Nathan’s bedroom is more startling than it would be if discovered in a laboratory.  Ava, whose fleshly face, hands and feet are interspersed by obviously cyborg sections, is beautiful both in her humanoid bits and as android construction.  The film’s sets and special effects amount to an impressive piece of design.  Ex Machina is clever and interesting but the process of making it look good has caused Alex Garland to treat his story rather too respectfully.  It should have been possible to give AI the serious consideration it merits without losing a sense of humour, which the film mostly lacks.  And although the subject seems up-to-the-minute, the storyline depends on familiar dramatic apparatus – hubristic scientific creation, a human falling in love with a non-human, and so on.

    The beginning of Ex Machina is admirably brisk.  Caleb finds out that he’s the chosen one and reaches Nathan’s base in less than five minutes of screen time.  As the film goes on, though, Alex Garland’s brevity gets to seem like evasion.  At one point, Nathan lies to Caleb that he was selected because he’s the company’s best coder.  Caleb is naturally ready to accept this flattering explanation but I was never clear what he thought he was in for at the outset:  is he expecting to be involved in IT development or just to meet the mysterious CEO?  Caleb is AI-literate enough to be self-confident in early conversations with Nathan, even daring to dispute one of two things that the boss says, but the plot comes to depend on Caleb’s switching between naïveté and resourcefulness, according to Garland’s needs.  The film ends with Nathan killed by the work of his own hand, Caleb locked in the facility and Ava taking his place on the helicopter return flight to the outside world.  In one of their sessions together, Ava conducts a lie-detector test on Caleb.  Her questions include, ‘Are you a good person?’, and his answer, ‘I think so’, doesn’t register as an untruth.  And, though his intelligence is erratic, Caleb isn’t a fool.   All in all, he doesn’t deserve his eventual fate:  you feel at the end that Alex Garland has eclipsed Nathan in the heartless inventor stakes.  If Garland means for Ava’s final integration into human society to be alarming, he doesn’t really succeed.  This is partly because Ava’s lovely, sad expression and gentleness have made her naturally appealing but also because it’s hard to accept that Nathan’s disappearance and Caleb’s failure to reappear from his week’s leave will go unnoticed for long – or that the police will be as constrained as the helicopter pilot was from venturing too close to Nathan’s home to investigate.

    Ex Machina would be a better film if Alex Garland’s direction had more of the qualities of Oscar Isaac’s playing of Nathan.  The disappointment I felt about Isaac’s performance in A Most Violent Year, which I saw three days previously, was erased by what he does in Ex Machina.  He’s not constrained by seriousness here.  His Nathan is a vividly entertaining, black-bearded baddie – an exuberantly nasty fellow in his human interactions with Caleb as well as an evil IT genius.  Nathan lurches between bouts of heavy drinking and intense physical exercise by way of morning-after compensation.  It’s not convincing that he’s so inclined to make himself vulnerable by getting regularly hammered (and this is crucial for taking the plot forward) but Isaac’s physical dynamism is, in all Nathan’s moods, so exciting to watch that it’s hard to mind.  He has a great bit dancing with Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), the mostly silent Japanese girl who lives in.  Isaac is vocally no less dexterous:  he’s brilliant at conveying how irritating Nathan finds Caleb – there’s a sarcastic edge to his voice even when’s he’s back-slapping and addressing the young man as ‘dude’.  In the company of others whose humanity is variously dubious (Kyoko’s appearance turns out to be predictably deceptive), Domhnall Gleeson is very effective in making Caleb unequivocally human and sympathetic.  Alicia Vikander is Ava:  it seems rather too soon after Jonathan Glazer’s film for more under-the-skin-of-the-female-body revelations but Vikander’s face and slender form are so perfect that the moment when Ava puts on her full human exterior is oddly touching.

    29 January 2015

  • Port of Shadows

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le quai des brumes

    Marcel Carné (1938)

    Watching Le quai des brumes (in a packed NFT1), I didn’t understand why the tragedy of the story was so predetermined.   Then I read the BFI note, an extract from Child of Paradise (presumably a biography/study of the works of Marcel Carné) by Edward Baron Turk, which explained the film in terms of the profound political defeatism that prevailed in France in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II.  I’d known when the film was made but not expected it to be informed by a sense of hopelessness in the way that Baron Turk suggests.

    The main character is Jean – a soldier and evidently a deserter from the army, although this is never made explicit.  At the start of the film, he hitches a lift to Le Havre with a truck driver.  On the way they talk about the weather – ‘le brouillard’, in particular.  The passenger says something about the fog inside – he taps his head – as well as outside, an immediate indication of the psychological meaning of the dark sea-misted place that Jean is heading for.   (The English translation of the title makes the point rather more obviously than the French ‘brumes’.)  Jean and the truck driver nearly come to blows when Jean grabs the wheel, swerving to avoid a stray dog in the road.  The dog, a white mongrel with a lot of Jack Russell in him, attaches himself to Jean and doesn’t leave his side in Le Havre, where Jean is looking to find a means of escape from France.

    To cut a not long (89 minutes) but exceedingly gloomy story short, Jean – on board a ship about to leave for Venezuela – feels impelled to disembark to return to Nelly, the girl with whom he’s fallen in love.  He kills Zabel, her psychotically possessive guardian (the act is a startling fusion of self-defence and self-assertion).  Jean then is himself shot, as he’s leaving Zabel’s shop, by Lucien Lagardier, a local hood whom Jean has previously humiliated.  As Jean dies in Nelly’s arms, the little dog, waiting in a ship’s cabin for Jean’s return, breaks free from his leash, scampers back to shore, out of Le Havre and back into the darkness of the road from which he, and Jean, emerged in the first place.  Unhappy or fatal events have also overtaken other characters along the way.

    Le quai des brumes raises the question of how much an audience needs – or should be expected – to understand the historical context of a film in order fully to appreciate it.  Even if one accepts that a work of art is inherently likely to express something of the circumstances in which it came into being, this doesn’t mean that it’s a pure, involuntary emanation of its original time and place – or that the artist hasn’t consciously exploited the zeitgeist in order to strengthen themes and messages on which he may have chosen – without being predestined – to focus.  Carne’s direction and Jacques Prévert’s screenplay (based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan) have a clarity and concentration tha give the film the authority of a classic.  Eugen Schüfftan’s photography and lighting are richly expressive.  Maurice Jaubert’s highly effective score has a martial rhythm weighed   down by a trudging quality – it suggests that Jean has been on the march for years, looking for a place of greater safety.   But I still found myself resisting the preconceived misery of Le quai des brumes – and thinking it unlikely that Carné and Prévert weren’t personally predisposed to what Pauline Kael calls the ‘poetic fatalism’ that is essential not just to this film but also to the same pair’s Les enfants du paradis.  (The latter, although it was made during the latter stages of the Nazi occupation of France, is based in what was surely a new era in terms of national morale.)

    There’s at least one salient feature of this picture that has its roots in theatrical convention rather than in the psychic-political weather of the late 1930s in Western Europe.   Nearly all the minor characters are eccentric and the histrionically accomplished playing of these roles becomes not just tiresome but also, because the element of performance is so dominant, gets in the way of believing that these characters represent some kind of human truth.    (This kind of eccentricity is also an element of Les enfants du paradis – but the theatrical metaphors of that film are so thoroughly woven into the material that the effect is very different and infinitely more satisfying.)

    This isn’t true, however, of any of the four principal performers.   Jean Gabin, as Jean, epitomises the film’s doomed sense of futile struggle against an implacable force of destiny, and he is magnificent.  Gabin must be one of the most effulgently ordinary stars in cinema history – the strength and simplicity of his technique, as well as his looks, make him seem both like everyman and like no one else.    He’s deeply convincing here as a man whose taciturnity is as much about keeping secrets as about not feeling the need to say more.   He is marvellous in the love scenes with Michèle Morgan, as Nelly, not just in what he expresses but in how he animates her extraordinary but, up to this point, rather inscrutable beauty.  Morgan is impressive in the remaining scenes.  (Now in her eighty-ninth year, it’s remarkable that she actually was only seventeen – the age Nelly claims to be – when she made this film.)    Pierre Brasseur, as Jean’s nemesis Lagardier, is well cast, not least because he’s a very different kind of actor from Gabin.  Brasseur’s portrait of a petty (in every sense) criminal is very fine.  His natural theatricality gives a lift to his scenes but it has depth too – it’s a splendid rendering of both the physical and the emotional sides of cowardice.  And Michel Simon is powerfully disturbing as Zabel.  His humpbacked ugliness is used expressionistically, as the look of a warped, resentful spirit.

    14 February 2009

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