Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Glorious 39

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Poliakoff (2009)

    Stephen Poliakoff (a) demonstrates that there was a powerful pro-appeasement movement before (and after) Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 and (b) proposes – ironically, in view of (a) – that the English upper classes close ranks against outsiders in their midst.  These familiar insights seem to be the only ones Glorious 39 has to offer.  The two premises are combined so that when Anne, the adopted eldest daughter of Conservative MP Alexander Keyes, chances upon startling proof of what the appeasers are up to, she puts herself in the firing line.  An aspiring film actress, Anne is an alien in the patrician Keyes family through more than a lack of biological connection (the parents thought they couldn’t have children of their own, then had two after they’d adopted her).  Her younger brother Ralph tells Anne (whom he also nicknames Glorious) that she has gipsy blood in her veins.  The appeasers either kill or cause to kill themselves a sequence of men that Anne’s taken a shine to:  Hector Haldane, a dynamic young Scottish Tory MP, who’s a vociferous opponent of appeasement; Gilbert, an unsuccessful actor colleague of Anne’s, who takes a lively interest in politics; eventually her lover Lawrence, who works at the Foreign Office.  The other two men who really matter to Anne, her father and brother, are at the heart of the appeasement movement, along with a suavely sinister government official called Balcombe.  He visits the Keyes home and leaves behind him crucial evidence – recordings of secret meetings and interviews disguised as 78s of innocuous popular songs and dances.

    There’s no doubt an audience (and a motley one) for this kind of material, with its historical setting, period frocks and country house appurtenances, skewering of the English class system.  Danny Cohen’s lighting creates some brilliantly-coloured pictures of the summer before the outbreak of war and the images in a shed full of euthanised animals are striking but Glorious 39 is a poor show.  It barely deserves to be described as drama at all, let alone as the thriller it purports to be – what happens is over the top yet unexciting.  In perhaps the only shocking moment in the whole film, Anne puts on a record that plays a telephone conversation, in which a distressed Haldane begs his political opponents to stop pestering him and his parents; a maid barges in, knocking over the gramophone and smashing the record in pieces.  Anne doesn’t seem much bothered either by what she’s heard or by what the maid has done.  Otherwise, Romola Garai does pretty well in the main part, given what she has to shoulder.  Characters seem to get killed off not because they oppose the Nazis but because they give decent performances – David Tennant (Haldane), Hugh Bonneville (Gilbert) and Charlie Cox (Lawrence) are just about believable and likeable against the odds (and, in Bonneville’s case, despite very ropy lines to speak).  I was pleased Anne survived because I thought Romola Garai deserved to.

    Which is more than can be said for the senior members of the cast.  (Or for Eddie Redmayne as Ralph, who telegraphs that he’s a rotter.  Juno Temple, the other sister, doesn’t register much.)   As Alexander Keyes, Bill Nighy sustains the same tone of voice throughout:  it’s meant to be paternally reassuring at first and chilling once Keyes is exposed but it’s such a studied and improbable effect that it marks him out as dodgy from the word go.   A miscast Julie Christie provides a commentary on, rather than a characterisation of, smiley-nasty Aunt Elizabeth, although Jenny Agutter is rather effective as Keyes’s strangely distrait wife.  The subtlety of Jeremy Northam (Balcombe) isn’t much help to him in a role as crudely conceived as this one.  Worst of all, are Corin Redgrave and, especially, Christopher Lee as the old men that two young boys in the main story grew into:  it isn’t the latter’s fault that Poliakoff gives him a load of clumsy exposition to introduce the flashback to 1939 that occupies most of the film; but Lee delivers the reminiscence with such hollow sonority that he makes it even more laughable.

    2 September 2011

  • Gloria (2013)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sebastián Lelio (2013)

    Gloria Cumplido (Paulina García) has been divorced for twelve years.  It seems she’s been a fixture on the Santiago singles club scene for much of that time without having any long-lasting relationships.  This Chilean-Spanish film, which the director Sebastián Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, tells the story of what happens after Gloria, one evening in the singles club, locks eyes with a man who changes all that.  She has a grown-up son and daughter, a baby grandson, a job, a social life beyond the singles bars.  Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), the man with whom she starts a relationship, has been divorced for only a year; he keeps Gloria such a secret from his two daughters and his ex-wife that she’s soon suspicious he may not be divorced at all.   Paulina García is in nearly every frame of the film and she’s absorbing to watch.  She gives Gloria a very distinctive quality of wary flirtatiousness.  She makes her seem tipsy even when Gloria’s not had a drink (although she has plenty of drinks in the course of the film); and switches easily into a contrasting and intriguing anonymity.   But the plotting of Gloria is exasperating.

    Gloria isn’t glamorous but she’s hardly a frump; she’s neither socially not sexually inhibited.  If she’s anxious not to live alone, it’s hard to credit that she hadn’t found a suitable candidate before Rodolfo – I didn’t believe either that she would be irresistibly attracted to this man.  (According to Wikipedia, he’s meant to be seven or eight years older than Gloria.  The age difference looks to be more than that – even though Sergio Hernández is in fact only three years older than Paulina García.)   Rodolfo disappears from Gloria’s son Pedro’s birthday party without telling her or anyone else; Gloria is understandably angry and, although Rodolfo pleads with her, she refuses to see him again.   One day – shortly after her daughter Ana has gone to live in Sweden with the young man whose child she’s now carrying – Gloria is in a shopping mall.   She hears tinny music and is curious to find out what a group of people, gathered at the spot where the music’s coming from, are watching.  It’s a busker with a skeleton marionette and the puppet’s solo dance of death sends Gloria back to Rodolfo.

    It’s believable that Ana’s departure and the memento mori in the mall would impel Gloria to seize the day (she kneels conspicuously to give coins to the busker) – but why with Rodolfo, who of course deserts her again, this time midway through their romantic weekend in a swanky hotel at a coastal resort?  The answer seems to be that Sebastián Lelio needs to crank up Gloria’s misfortunes in order to cause her to rethink her life and deliver a big finish.  The closing stages of Gloria are effective in the moment but Lelio arrives at them through a storyline that’s not only contrived but exposed as such because it doesn’t make sense in relation to the convincing character that his lead actress has created.

    In a conversation about Chilean politics, at the dinner table of friends of Gloria, Rodolfo laments the country’s lack of strong leaders nowadays.  Rodolfo is an ex-naval officer, who now owns an amusement park with some sort-of military attractions like paintball:  I thought at first that his secretiveness was going to be connected to a previous existence as a Pinochet henchman but Rodolfo’s shadiness turns out to be no more than marital.  After his second desertion and its lurid aftermath – the heroine gets drunk, has a one-night stand with another man and wakes up the morning after on a deserted beach – Gloria goes back home to Santiago.  She ups her dose of the drugs which her loco neighbour, who spends his days bawling misogynist abuse and threatening suicide, left outside Gloria’s door one night when he couldn’t find his own apartment.   Gloria is by now so resigned to failure that she starts to make welcome a furless cat whose earlier visits got on her nerves; then its owner, the noisy neighbour, comes to reclaim the cat.

    This is followed by the most enjoyable sequence in the film:  in her climactic paintball attack on Rodolfo and his family home, this viewer got angry frustration out of his system just as Gloria did.  The most engrossing episode – because of the various emotional cross-currents in evidence – is Pedro’s birthday party. This is Gloria’s first meeting with her ex-husband Gabriel since their divorce; we’re told the idea for the reunion came from Gabriel’s new wife Flavia.  (I inferred that a social event of this kind hadn’t happened before because Gloria wouldn’t have had a partner to bring with her, although this may be wrong. Other things I didn’t understand included why Pedro was bringing up his son alone and where the boy’s mother had got to – and whether Gloria realised from the start who the Sphynx cat belonged to.)   The evidence of this gathering is that Gloria has never chosen well:  Gabriel (Alejandro Goic) is drearily vain and self-centred – it’s believable this man would leave his wife for a younger model.

    Gloria takes off her spectacles only when she goes to sleep.  Halfway through the film, she goes for an eye test and learns she has glaucoma and must take eye drops every day for the rest of her life.  At the start of the story, driving in her car, she sings along to songs on the radio – songs with lyrics about wanting somebody to love and be loved by.  (Once the affair with Rodolfo is underway, this starry-eyed view of love is displaced and the singing stops – but you remember it each time you see Gloria at the wheel of her car.)  She takes her paintball revenge en route to the wedding reception of her friends’ daughter.  At the reception, as in the skeleton scene, she’s drawn to the sound of music and to a group of people involved with the music:  the song playing is ‘Gloria’ (Laura Branigan had a hit with the English-language version in the early 1980s); the dancers to it are mostly women.   Gloria removes her spectacles and joins them.   (This was a relief partly because, dressed up for the occasion, she somewhat resembled Dustin Hoffman in drag in Tootsie until the glasses came off.)

    Gloria dances without a partner – it’s a reminder that, when she first met Rodolfo, she told him she liked dancing on her own.  The song lyric on the soundtrack is no longer about a dream lover but about a woman called Gloria – herself.  The implication is that she’s learned, through her experience with Rodolfo, that she was blind even with her specs on and will now manage on her own (even though she’s aging and her eyesight’s getting worse).  This gives Gloria a final flourish but it doesn’t bear much scrutiny.   Gloria’s a woman who evidently feels the need for a man and has to express that need.  How does that stop because Rodolfo was a heel?

    20 October 2013

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