Daily Archives: Sunday, June 19, 2016

  • Fire at Sea

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fuocoammare

    Gianfranco Rosi (2016)

    Luchino Visconti’s film The Leopard (1963) is based on the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.  The protagonist of The Leopard is the representative of a moribund aristocracy in Sicily; the man who wrote the book was himself the last prince of Lampedusa, the Sicilian province that is also the largest of the Italian Pelagie islands.  Until a few years ago, Lampedusa always connoted, for me and I guess for many people, the writer who inspired Visconti’s movie but the place Lampedusa, by featuring repeatedly on television news, has now changed the word’s primary significance.  Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Fire at Sea, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, reinforces this new meaning of Lampedusa.  Since the start of this century, it has been a primary entry point to Europe for migrants from Africa and the Middle East.  In October 2013, an estimated four hundred migrants died in two shipwrecks, which occurred within a few days of each other, off the island’s coast.  Over the years, many more have drowned or died as a result of burns or poisoning by fumes from the diesel used en route to refuel the craft on which they travel so precariously.

    Presenting Gianfranco Rosi with the Golden Bear, Meryl Streep, as chair of the Berlin jury, described Fire at Sea as ‘a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do’.  This is right enough.  After brief scene-setting legends on the screen, Rosi deploys no voiceover commentary or other obvious mechanism of audience manipulation.  He alternates description of the migrants’ plight and of the lives of a handful of islanders – a twelve-year-old boy from a fishing family, his father and grandmother, a school friend, an elderly married couple, a middle-aged doctor who treats migrants as well as the locals.  ‘Alternates’ is the word:  with the notable exception of the doctor, Pietro Bartolo, the two sets of people in the film don’t overlap much.  Members of the Italian coast guard are in evidence, of course, but not individualised – their faces are virtually invisible behind the masks that put the finishing touch to their white coveralls.

    In terms of screen time in Fire at Sea, the migrants occupy a supporting role.  In terms of impact, of course, they dominate – as human beings and, no less troublingly, as cinematic images which simultaneously degrade and emphasise their humanity.  The shiny safety blankets draping newly-arrived migrants suggest a nightmarish gift wrap.  The serried unconscious bodies unloaded from boats – perhaps alive, perhaps not – bring to mind a terrible catch of fish.  A Nigerian man speak-sings an account of the ordeal and survival of himself and his companions, who shout endorsement of his rhythmical words.  (He is like an extraordinary rapper with a gospel church backing group.)  Late on in the film, a succession of women’s faces is more quietly and gravely eloquent.  As in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, you’re reminded, where you don’t expect it, of the global ubiquity of soccer – and of sporting partisanship too:  the migrants have a game of football that’s essentially impromptu but with the teams organised strictly according to nationality.

    The passages that show the continuing lives of the Lampedusa natives include some fine pieces of ‘pure’ documentary description – such as the morning ritual of a woman making her and her husband’s double bed, saying her prayers, kissing the religious statuettes and the family photograph at the bedside.  The ‘deliberate storytelling’ to which Meryl Streep referred is most evident in the sequences featuring the young boy Samuele Pucillo.  He’s a remarkable subject although there were times – for example, when he’s sucking the sauce from his spaghetti as noisily as possible – when I wondered if he’d grown a bit too aware of Gianfranco Rosi’s camera.  (The director is also the cinematographer.)  Samuele has various ailments and insecurities – a lazy eye, anxiety attacks, difficulty in manoeuvring the oars of a rowing boat.  These are all presumably real.  But they seem designed also as metaphorical indicators of the larger anxieties of a place – Sicily, Italy, Europe – faced with a migrant crisis that it can’t manage, let alone solve.

    16 June 2016

  • The Man Between

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carol Reed (1953)

    Further evidence that Carol Reed may be the most consistently good of all British film directors, Hitchcock included.  Susanne, a young British woman visits her brother and his wife in Cold War Berlin and is caught up in an espionage ring, smuggling secrets between the two sides of the Iron Curtain.  By the end of the opening scenes of Susanne’s arrival in the city and the events of her first evening there, you marvel at how strongly but unobtrusively Reed has built an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion.  All the way through, narrative development and character development are very well co-ordinated, and feed each other:  the suspense builds as the plot thickens and the people in the story become richer and more absorbing.  (Susanne’s lack of German is used to excellent dramatic effect – there are no subtitles so the audience is in the same boat.)

    The film is very well acted.  The title character, Ivo Kern, is a former lawyer who fought for the Nazis and is now selling his expertise to German communists to kidnap and transport West Germans to the eastern bloc.  There’s a strong streak of self-loathing in James Mason’s Kern.  Mason also puts the character on a knife edge between carelessness and daring to care, and Kern eventually becomes an heroic and courageous figure.  Claire Bloom gives Susanne a truly resourceful spirit, which impels her into increasingly dangerous adventures and which keeps us rooting for her.  As Susanne’s sister-in-law Bettina, Hildegard Knef, although she reads her lines quite deliberately, is a strong and lovely presence.   Geoffrey Toone, as her doctor husband (and Susanne’s elder brother), creates a convincing blend of humane professionalism, uxorious affability and fraternal anxiety.  The scenes featuring Aribert Waescher as one of Kern’s key contacts are rather leadenly melodramatic but those involving a young boy on a bicycle (Dieter Krause), who’s devoted to Ivo Kern, are both dramatically effective and affecting (and remind you of Reed’s unfailing skill in directing child actors).

    The Man Between is naturally compared with The Third Man, set in Vienna and which Reed made four years earlier.  Although the received critical wisdom is that The Third Man is his best film, I prefer this one (and others – The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, especially The Fallen Idol).  The screenplay for The Man Between is by Harry Kurnitz and Eric Linklater (based on a story by Walter Ebert). There are probably too many words – to explain the multiple deceptions taking place and the backstory – but the dialogue is often witty, and less self-consciously so than in The Third Man.   (I tend to think of Graham Greene’s script for The Third Man as paving the way for the tedious, cynical epigrammatism of John le Carré’s high-falutin spy writing.)   The location filming in Berlin makes the piece historically fascinating:  the production design was by Andrej Andrejew and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson.

    6 October 2009

Posts navigation