Daily Archives: Monday, June 20, 2016

  • The Spectacular Now

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Ponsoldt (2013)

    The protagonist of The Spectacular Now is a high-school senior called Sutter Keely.  It takes a bit of time to adjust to this character – not only on account of his did-I-hear-that-right name but also because Sutter, described in the Wikipedia synopsis of the film as ‘charming and self-possessed’, seems at first an arrogant jerk.  Although – to be honest – he doesn’t stand out as especially awful within the American high-school social and sexual culture depicted here.  Having liked Miles Teller in Rabbit Hole and Whiplash (which The Spectacular Now predates), I hoped he’d make it worth staying with the film.  He does – and so do other plenty of others:  the acting is strong throughout.  There’s a lot to like too about James Ponsoldt’s sensitive direction (his next feature after this was The End of the Tour) and the fluent, incisive dialogue in Scott Neustadter’s and Michael H Weber’s screenplay, adapted from a novel by Tim Tharp.

    Sutter Keely is living for the present, hence the movie’s title.  On the face of it, that doesn’t make him stand out from his high-school contemporaries either but Ponsoldt reveals, without being too obvious about it, that Sutter is more alcohol-dependent and less focused on tertiary education than others in his peer group.  It’s his drinking that causes his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson) to break with Sutter and brings about his meeting with Aimee Finecky [sic!] (Shailene Woodley).  Sutter is ambivalent about the switch from Cassidy to Aimee and keeps backtracking – partly because he still has feelings for Cassidy, partly out of vanity and a need for sexual prestige.  Cassidy is more glamorous than Aimee – and Cassidy’s replacement boyfriend (Dayo Okeniyi) more conventionally handsome (though less verbally witty) than Sutter.  Aimee is regarded as a booby prize even by Sutter’s pal (Masam Holden) – and he’s inexperienced with girls.  Shailene Woodley is a doubly important element in enhancing The Spectacular Now.   She’s a good actress and her portrait of Aimee is finely detailed:  Aimee’s shy hesitations and nervous giggles are complemented by the determined underlying personality that Woodley expresses through her eyes.  The viewer (this one anyway) experienced some irritation with the giggles; Sutter, as his insecurity and self-dislike come to the fore, finds it hard to accept Aimee’s intimidating goodness.  While it’s hard for a viewer (this one anyway) to credit that someone as pretty as Shailene Woodley would be deemed a no-hoper in high school, she is – according to Hollywood definitions of beauty – relatively ‘plain’.  This makes the popularity Woodley’s achieved in mainstream cinema almost heartwarming – and casting her as a romantic heroine interestingly apt.

    Sutter lives at home with his mother Sara (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who looks to have some kind of receptionist job in a hospital.  His father departed the scene when Sutter was a young boy.  He wants to get in touch with him and Aimee, whose own father has died, encourages Sutter to do so.  Because Sara has always opposed the idea, Sutter gets his father’s phone number from his elder sister (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and calls him.  The genial voice on the other end of the line says he’d be delighted to see Sutter again.  The episode in which he and Aimee visit the father, Tommy (Kyle Chandler), is the best part of The Spectacular Now.  The way this meeting goes downhill – inevitably but not melodramatically – is highly convincing.  Tommy Keely, an inveterate drinker, exists in an unspectacular but inescapable now.  In his few minutes on screen, Kyle Chandler brilliantly conveys Tommy’s guilty conscience and intransigence, and convinces you the combination is a recipe for stasis.

    From the point at which Sutter and Aimee drive back from seeing Tommy, the film begins to strain towards resolution.  Finding her loving steadfastness intolerable, Sutter orders Aimee out of the car; as she gets out, she’s hit by an oncoming vehicle.  This is shocking but Aimee isn’t seriously hurt:  while that’s a relief, it also raises suspicions that what he’s done to her will bring Sutter to his senses.  It’s not quite as simple as that but the moment when he determines to turn over a new leaf is only being delayed.  Aimee leaves town to start college in Philadelphia.  Sutter, having said he’ll go with her, mistreats her again by failing to turn up at the bus station.  He abandons his part-time job in a gent’s clothing store (Bob Odenkirk is excellent as the sympathetic boss), gets drunk and crashes his car outside his home.  He breaks down and sobs to his mother that he’s just like his father and will never be any good.  Sara, who’s been tetchy with him in all their exchanges hitherto, now assures Sutter this isn’t so and that he’s really a lovely person.  By this stage, there’s a major tension between the seriousness of Sutter’s hang-ups – Miles Teller makes these believable – and the obligation James Ponsoldt feels to deliver an upbeat conclusion to the film.   You therefore expect that, when Sutter belatedly drives to Philadelphia, his final reunion with Aimee will make for a weak, fake happy ending.  In the very last shot, Ponsoldt and Shailene Woodley save the day.  Sutter appears before her just as Aimee is coming out of class.  She smiles at him – amazed, delighted but almost immediately anxious too.  She doesn’t speak but her face is asking Sutter if he really thinks he can go through with this.

    17 June 2016

  • The Marquise of O

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die Marquise von O…

    Eric Rohmer (1976)

    The film of The Marquise of O has an international pedigree.  The director, who also wrote the screenplay, is French.  The characters in the 1808 novella on which the screenplay is based are Italians and Russians.  Heinrich von Kleist, the novella’s author, was German.  So are most of Eric Rohmer’s actors (if they’re not, they’re German Swiss or Austrian) and German is the language spoken in the picture.  It’s difficult for an English-speaking audience – a monolingual one, at any rate – to see the people on screen as anything but German.  Although this flattening out of ethnic differences among the characters is in one sense problematic, I think it also, in effect, helps to make The Marquise of O intriguing.

    The setting is ‘M …’ – ‘a town in northern Italy’ – during the Napoleonic Wars.  The first scene takes place in a local tavern, where three men are discussing an extraordinary announcement, placed in a newspaper by the Marquise of ‘O …’   In it, she explains that she is unaccountably pregnant, and wishes the father of the child she’s expecting to present himself and marry her.  One of the fellows in the tavern finds the announcement a laughing matter but his companions are shocked, in view of the social distinction of the Marquise’s family and her own, hitherto irreproachable, moral character.   The description of the events that have led up to the piece in the newspaper forms a large part of the story that follows.  A citadel in M … is overrun by Russian forces.  Julietta (Edith Clever), the titular marquise, is the daughter of the citadel commandant.  A widow with two young children, she is about to be raped by a group of Russian soldiers when their compatriot, ‘the Count’, intervenes to prevent the assault.  The traumatised Julietta is put to bed by her servants and given poppy seed tea to help her sleep.  The Russian troops, having secured the commandant’s surrender, depart next morning.  Sorry not to have been able to thank the Count for saving her honour, Julietta is – as are her grateful parents – dismayed to hear a few days later that he has been killed in battle.  The report turns out to be inaccurate:  some time later, the Count presents himself at the family home and asks for the Marquise’s hand in marriage, indicating that he must do so to set his mind at rest.  Although she had resolved on her first husband’s death never to remarry, Julietta feels that her debt to the Count is such that she should accept his proposal.  Her father advises the Count to go to his next posting, in Naples, which is expected to last a few weeks, then return to claim his bride.   The Marquise has already begun to experience symptoms very similar to those she remembers from when she was pregnant during her marriage.  While the Count is in Naples, a doctor and a midwife both confirm to the horrified and incredulous Julietta that she is indeed expecting another child.  Her appalled parents banish her from their home.  She takes refuge, with her children, in her late husband’s country house and, in desperation, places the public announcement.

    The Kleist book also opens with that announcement and Eric Rohmer follows the original closely, except in one important respect.   In the novella, it’s soon clear that the Count had intercourse with the Marquise and that the rape was an impulsive act – one that took place in the dark and amid much confusion.   In the film, Rohmer implies that the rape occurred after Julietta had been rescued and while she was sedated.  He also supplies a second potential impregnator:  both the Count and a young servant, Leopardo (Bernhard Frey), are shown looking meaningfully at the Marquise, as she lies sleeping.  (As Gordon Gow points out in his Films and Filming review, which the BFI used as their programme note for the screening of The Marquise of O, the attitude of Julietta’s unconscious form calls to mind the female figure in Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare.)   The story reveals a considerable amount of deception, self-deception and tunnel vision on the part of its principal characters:  unless there’s even more dissimulation going on than I realised, it’s eventually confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that it was the Count who impregnated the Marquise.  Changing what he does from a heat-of-the-moment sexual act into a more considered one is significant in two ways.   It turns Kleist’s hot-blooded Count into a man who fits more easily into the tradition of thoughtful male protagonists established in Rohmer’s ‘contes moraux’.  (The Marquise of O was his next feature film after Love in the Afternoon, the last of the six moral tales, in 1972.)  It also means that casting the saturnine, reflective Bruno Ganz in the role makes more sense than it would have if the Count had, as in Kleist’s story, been motivated by immediate erotic compulsion.

    Rohmer’s adjustments are still not wholly satisfactory, though.  First, the setting up of Leopardo as a possible alternative rapist is a very obvious manoeuvre to keep the viewer guessing.  One’s pretty sure it can’t be him – that would be too simple a violation of order in the complex world of class-ridden assumptions that the film constructs and explores.  Second, Rohmer appears to leave the Count’s impulsiveness intact for the rest of the story – particularly in his behaviour when he returns to propose marriage and is willing to jeopardise his military career for the sake of winning Julietta.  Third, nothing in Bruno Ganz’s persona suggests a nationality-based temperamental difference from the Marquise’s family (albeit that Ganz himself is Swiss, not German):  one can’t help feeling that such a difference is needed.  Yet these weaknesses increase the unusually absorbing nature of this film.  It’s difficult for a modern audience to appreciate in any case the imperatives of the time and social setting of The Marquise of O.  Julietta is horrified to discover that the Count is the father of her child.  They marry but, having done so, live apart until, in the film’s final scene, she explains that she would not have considered the Count such a ‘devil’ had she not first seen him as the ‘angel’ who saved her from the other Russian soldiers.  (The Marquise finally accepts the Count:  in the last shot, they embrace happily.)  It’s less clear why her parents don’t suspect the Count at an earlier stage.  Is it taken as read that an aristocrat (even an aristocrat from an invading country) could not have committed such an act?  Or are the commandant and his wife, like their daughter, blinded by the Count’s heroism in seeing off the army colleagues who were about to rape Julietta?  One watches the film in a state of fascinated puzzlement – a feeling that’s only increased by the fact that Bruno Ganz is a particularly strong screen presence, his Russian comes across as no different from the Italians, and they all seem to be German anyway!

    As the Marquise, Edith Clever has a blend of emotional transparency and comic sense that is very appealing – and it’s refreshing after the moral tales to see a female point of view dominate in an Eric Rohmer film.  Rohmer balances Julietta’s genuine distress and the farcically changing attitudes of her parents (Edda Seippel and Peter Lühr) and brother (Otto Sander) very skilfully.   The moment when her father sees that he’s misjudged his innocent daughter and kisses her repeatedly has an incestuous charge that’s all the stronger for being unexpected.  Rohmer leaves little doubt as to the literary origins of the material:  if anything, there are too many intertitles explaining the passage of time etc.  The film is wonderfully lit by Nestor Almendros.  The lustrous colour frequently gives the images a once-upon-a-time, storybook quality – this is not only lovely to look at but, thanks to the moral convolutions of the narrative, amusingly ironic.  The tendency to film in ‘natural light’ is nowadays obscuring an increasing number of cinema and prestige television period pieces.  It’s especially pleasing to see Rohmer and Almendros forego this kind of visual realism in the important nocturnal sequences at the start of The Marquise of O.

    29 January 2015

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