Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Neighbouring Sounds

    Old YorkerFilm review

    O Som ao Redor

    Kleber Mendonça Filho (2012)

    The title sounds like a translation – awkward and limited compared with the original Portuguese, which you can tell is more mysteriously allusive.   This is the first dramatic feature by Kleber Mendonça Filho and it’s certainly impressive, not least because of how long it remains absorbing, even though most of its 131 minutes feel anticipatory and its abrupt ending is disappointing.  The neighbourhood is a street in Recife, the fifth-largest city of Brazil, whose inhabitants are predominantly middle-class.  A preliminary montage of black-and-white photographs depicts a way of life – rural, impoverished, but with suggestions of a close-knit community – very different from the urban ones Mendonça goes on to describe (he also wrote the screenplay).  The immediate implication is that the world of the photographs is somehow the basis for the world of the city dwellers; the connection is clarified once it’s revealed that Francisco, who still owns much of the property in the neighbourhood – made his fortune as a sugar baron.  (Mendonça’s title – which means, literally, ‘the sound from round about’, surely refers to a context larger than the immediate physical environment.)

    You wouldn’t expect a character such as Francisco to be a nice guy and this sharp-minded silver fox (W J Solha) is evidently a nasty piece of work.  His scions are more ambiguous.  One grandson, the European-educated João (Gustavo Jahn), is in effect the family’s estate agent but has a gently melancholy air.  Another, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), is a university student by day and a delinquent car thief by night.  As João’s new girlfriend Sofia (Irma Brown) prepares to leave his place next morning, she discovers her car’s been broken into and the CD player removed (a trademark Dinho crime).  The security presence in the street doesn’t until now extend beyond a dog that seems to bark continuously.  This gets on the nerves of Bia (Maeve Jinkings), another of the residents:  on the night Sofia’s car is burgled, Bia has hidden drugs in a piece of meat she throws to the dog, which shuts it up.  The next day, two men from a private security firm arrive to offer their services.  Other characters in Neighbouring Sounds suspect that Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and his one-eyed sidekick haven’t appeared by chance – João asks how they knew about the car thefts, Francisco asks how they knew who he was.  Clodoaldo’s answers are plausible but the viewer too assumes the security men must be there for a reason.

    The film’s name gives primacy to the aural and Mendonça, with his sound designer Pablo Lamar, has created an absorbing soundtrack.  Its overall effect is unnerving but its component parts are various:  you’re reminded how familiar repeated noises can range from the reassuring to the infuriating as well as how unaccustomed ones can be frightening.  Mendonça continues to play sounds throughout the closing credits – you stay with these in case of missing something significant even at this late stage.  You keep thinking that something horrific is going to happen in Neighbouring Sounds.  It never quite does, although the combination of the sound design, a couple of carefully placed dream sequences (one culminating in a waterfall that turns to blood and covers João) and the odd subliminal image (a dark figure glimpsed in the apartment where Clodoaldo and Francisco’s housekeeper Luciene (Clebia Sousa) are quickly having sex) is disquieting.

    Mendonça is known as a maker of documentaries and the fine naturalistic acting, the spare dialogue he’s written for the cast and the realisation of the neighbourhood give the movie a quasi-documentary anchor.  Occasionally, the film seems to be happening in real time and the effect is both boring and intriguing (a meeting of the residents’ association to discuss how to dismiss a past-it concierge is an example of this).   Mendonça seems to imply that Brazil’s recent interracial and economic history bred not only the desire for revenge that (as is eventually made clear) the working-class Clodoaldo is looking to take on Francisco but also the dissatisfaction of younger generations exemplified by the well-off but purposeless João, Dinho and Bia.  The last named – as desperately tense as she is bored – is especially striking in this respect.  These people live their lives in apartments that are more than spacious.  They seem vast and the characters are stranded in them.

    1 April 2013

  • Negatives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Medak (1968)

    It’s so late 1960s that it made me occasionally nostalgic but Negatives is a silly and eventually boring film, which spends its last half hour refusing to end.  Theo (Peter McEnery) runs his ailing father’s ailing business – a London antique shop – while the old man (Maurice Denham) lies dying in hospital (in the Mary Celeste wing).  To try and breathe life into his relationship with his partner Vivien (Glenda Jackson), Theo and she dress up and pretend to be Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve (or sometimes Belle, the wife that Crippen murdered).  These routines are mostly futile:  the ball-breaking woman scathingly mocks the subdued, melancholy man, and this isn’t acting in Edwardian character – it reveals Theo and Vivien’s own sexual identities and feelings about each other.  Then a German photographer called Reingard (Diane Cilento) appears on the scene. There’s a brief suggestion of lesbian attraction between her and Vivien but Reingard’s principal intentions are evidently to (a) take pictures of Theo and Vivien’s life, (b) suggest a different fantasy persona for Theo and (c) destroy his relationship with Vivien.  Does Theo realise, asks Reingard, that he bears a striking resemblance to Manfred von Richthofen?  Peter McEnery looks nothing like the photographs of the Red Baron that Reingard shows him and Theo’s metamorphosis takes time to get going:  it’s delayed, for example, until Theo and Reingard have played a showy scene in which they visit Crippen and the other waxworks in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s (which is conveniently deserted).  But by the closing stages of Negatives, Theo, his hair cut short by Reingard, is wearing German military uniform and has rescued a Gipsy Moth plane from the scrapyard and painted it red with iron crosses.  There’s no need to say much more about the script, which Peter Everett adapted, with Roger Lowry, from Everett’s novel, except that the power-games- and-construction-of-identities themes must have been old hat even when the film was made.  The only surprises are that the source material is a novel rather than a stage play and that the significance of Theo’s father’s death in the scheme of things isn’t as obvious as you expect it to be.  It doesn’t trigger a definite change in Theo; he merely wanders round a sylvan graveyard, looking a little unhappier than usual.  In other words, the plot could manage without the father – he’s just vaguely Freudian filler.

    There’s a somewhat unfortunate correspondence between the power balance of the characters and that of the actors.  Peter McEnery very occasionally surprises with a flash of anger but his Theo is underwhelming – he isn’t quietly fascinating – whereas Diane Cilento and Glenda Jackson have histrionic energy to burn.  This was Jackson’s second cinema role, after Marat/Sade (this isn’t counting her uncredited brief appearance in This Sporting Life), and she must have been a startling presence.  More than forty years later, she still is, especially in her vocal power, but, as Pauline Kael pointed out in the mid-1970s, Glenda Jackson, for all her great abilities, soon became a self-parody of her most salient characteristics – a fluent but relentless vocal rhythm, snarling stridency, what she does with her tongue and teeth.  The combined effect of these idiosyncrasies is that she seems to exude sexual tension from every pore.  Even so, Jackson shows much greater emotional variety than Diane Cilento, who’s competent but monotonous.  The heavily accented English underlines the sense of Cilento’s putting on a turn; in spite of her good looks, she sometimes suggests a man in drag.  (This may be meant to resonate with the let’s-pretend theme of Negatives but I doubt it somehow.)  Maurice Denham is good, as usual.  With Billy Russell as an elderly man who helps out at the antiques shop and who, until close to the end, is remarkably indulgent of Theo’s behaviour.  There are cameos from Norman Rossington (an auctioneer) and Stephen Lewis (a scrapyard dealer).  The sound is distinctive in its insistent highlights – hair clippers, plane engines, and so on:  it gets on your nerves as much as Theo’s.  The music by Basil Kirchin isn’t as unconventional as some of his other output might lead you to expect.

    12 August 2013

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