Daily Archives: Saturday, June 25, 2016

  • The Selfish Giant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clio Barnard (2013)

    The writer-director Clio Barnard’s new film is ‘inspired by’ the Oscar Wilde story of the same name.  The ‘keep out’ sign on the premises of the scrap metal dealer Kitten, a key character in the film, recalls the ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ notice on the giant’s wall in the story.   That notice is designed primarily to warn off children – children who transform the giant’s life in the original and are the principals in Barnard’s take on it.  Otherwise, I can’t see that Oscar Wilde has supplied more than a fine title.  The Selfish Giant seems to owe substantially more to Kes, with its theme of bleak schoolboy lives in Yorkshire being transformed by a passion involving animals, and the inevitability of an unhappy ending to this.  If you’ve made a first feature as formally innovative as The Arbor, there’s naturally a risk that a more conventional drama will be disappointing in comparison.  I had increasing feelings of anti-climax as I watched The Selfish Giant but I’ll still look forward to what Clio Barnard does next.

    This film, like its predecessor, is set in a working-class area of Bradford.   Because the characters’ lives are impoverished and there’s naturalistic acting and lots of swear words and arguments, it’s bound to be praised as thoroughly truthful – although Barnard demonstrates that she’s not above resorting to the unlikely for effect:  for a start, the first name of one of her teenage protagonists – and the pivotal character – is, improbably, ‘Arbor’, emphasising that he’s the offspring of Barnard’s successful debut feature.   Skinny, tiny, blonde, cheeky Arbor and his antithetical sidekick Swifty – doughy, dark-haired, slow-witted – are excluded from school.   Swifty’s mother insists that, during the exclusion, he still turns up for school and her son sits each day, in his uniform, with the school secretary in the reception area – and without any teacher appearing to notice.  This is used simply as a set-up for Swifty to escape eyecatchingly when Arbor turns up at the school.  Clio Barnard is a fine image-maker, though.  It’s a cliché but she does create a glum poetry from the settings – punctuating the action with shots of horses or sheep in drab, humanless landscapes, power stations ghostly in the mist, electricity pylons against a beautiful sunset.

    Horses and electricity play a central part in The Selfish Giant.  The film is set in the present day and the use of horses to pull carts of scrap metal seems antique but I assume this must be accurate.  Kitten, for whom the two boys go to work, also has a horse, Diesel, which he puts, and bets on, in trotting races.  Swifty has some experience with horses from his family background; his sure and sympathetic touch means that he’s transformed when he comes into contact with the animals.  Along with the prospect of making money, by picking up or stealing metal for which Kitten will pay, the horses are the main attraction for Swifty in working for the dealer.   For Arbor, the money is pretty well all that counts – but you’re certainly struck, and held, by how the two boys, both with unstable, angry home lives and submerged in boredom at school, are energised by getting into this world of work.   Barnard succeeds too in imparting this energy to the frequent shots of bits and heaps and mountains of scrap metal, making these more than an obvious representation of the debris of lives.   Galvanism of a more literal kind is the cause of both a rift between Arbor and Swifty and, not long after their partnership resumes, of Swifty’s death:  the boys are electrocuted one evening and on this occasion there’s no sunset to beautify the pylons.   I didn’t understand why it took so long for Arbor, who turns out to be unharmed, to regain consciousness.  It seemed as if this was what suited the director best, so that she could show a moon in a black sky, Arbor’s coming to consciousness in the dawn of the following day to discover Swifty’s corpse, and so on.

    Some of the details of male adolescent behaviour are well observed – like the little, momentary scuffles between the boys on their way to school.  Other things are relatively pat and point-making – Arbor is fearlessly insolent with his teachers and the police but polite when Kitten’s wife, who hands out the cash the boys earn, is pleasant to him.  Conner Chapman has a strong screen presence as Arbor although he’s not always so convincing when he’s reading lines – I got the sense that Shaun Thomas as Swifty was the more natural actor.   The adults include Sean Gilder (Kitten), the reliably excellent Lorraine Ashbourne (Kitten’s wife), Steve Evets and Siobhan Finneran (Swifty’s parents), Rebecca Manley and Elliott Tittensor (Arbor’s mother and brother), and Ian Burfield and Ralph Ineson (two other men in the scrap metal world).

    3 November 2013

  • The Scapegoat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Hamer (1959)

    Alec Guinness plays John Barratt, a sad, self-effacing academic in a provincial English university, on his annual summer holiday in France (French is his subject).  In an opening voiceover, Barratt tells us that life has passed him by – he doesn’t expect anything much to happen to him now, so of course it does.  Guinness also plays Jacques De Gue – a French nobleman, who tracks Barratt to a bar and confronts him there.  After Barratt has recovered from the shock of meeting his physical double, they get into conversation, and De Gue gets Barratt drunk.   The Englishman wakes the next morning to find that De Gue has disappeared, taking Barratt’s clothes and passport with him, but leaving his identity – and the complications of his personal life – with his spitting image.  The Scapegoat, which Gore Vidal adapted from Daphne Du Maurier’s 1957 novel, wasn’t a success and didn’t deserve to be.  Guinness often makes it fascinating but his skill also exposes a fundamental weakness in the material on screen.

    Guinness’s surface anonymity – in combination with his more penetrating ability to suggest a man who’s empty and who knows it – pays some rich dividends.  As John Barratt pretends, by force of circumstances, to be Jacques De Gue, you become gradually more aware, as does Barratt, of the consequences of his uneventful life and subdued personality:  there’s nothing in his prior life that creates any friction with the new identity he assumes.  But the fact that Guinness makes the dead ringers subtly but decisively distinct is a problem.   Among Jacques De Gue’s household, it’s only his dog who realises the man who’s returned home is not his master, and who snarls at him.  Barratt isn’t, of course, in possession of all the facts of De Gue’s life.  He says things that puzzle his wife (Irene Worth), sister (Pamela Brown), daughter (Annabel Bartlett), factory manager (Peter Bull) and harridan, bedridden-but-imperious mother (Bette Davis) – they accuse John/Jacques of forgetfulness, but no more than that.   You can accept that no one thinks Jacques’s exact likeness isn’t him – but Guinness makes the voices and mannerisms of the two men so individual (Barratt speaks with euphonious melancholy, De Gue in maliciously witty tones that are slightly camp) that it’s incredible none of his family thinks he seems in any way changed.   Jacques’s mistress Bela (Nicole Maurey) pretty soon works out that she’s talking to a different man:   this is because she and Barratt are kindred spirits, made for each other (although, in a welcome moment of psychological complexity, Bela acknowledges there were things that attracted her to Jacques too).

    The climax to The Scapegoat follows Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘If you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you’.  Robert Hamer’s direction – alert in the early encounters between Barratt and De Gue – grows more and more listless and the two men’s final duel is almost perfunctory.   The ending might have had a bit of ambiguous snap if it was left unclear which of them survived (I wondered anyway what happened to the corpse of the other).  I suppose that, as we don’t hear Barratt’s voice at the close of proceedings, it could be said we are left in the dark – but the survivor’s final reunion with Bela is staged (and scored – the overdone music is by Bronislau Kaper) in a happy ending way that makes no sense if Barratt has been killed.  The relentlessly British (or, in one instance, American) casting of the mainly French characters is oddest in the case of Geoffrey Keen as Barratt/De Gue’s loyal chauffeur Gaston.  Keen, as usual, gives a creditable performance but, also as usual, seems like a reasonably high-ranking military chap.  When Gaston says things like ‘I am but a simple man, madame – I have no education’, the effect is bizarre.  Most of the cast (which also includes Noel Howlett, Peter Sallis and Alan Webb) are good; Annabel Bartlett, who appears never to have acted again, has a rather beguiling blend of eccentricity and solemnity as the young daughter Marie-Noel, and Irene Worth has considerable neurotic strength as her mother.  The one exception, sad to say, is Bette Davis who does a crude, stiffly theatrical turn as the nasty old mother – her timing seems way off, with the stresses sounding wrong in nearly every line.  Maybe it was because I wanted to suppress the memory of how bad Davis is that I’d forgotten I’d seen The Scapegoat before.  I realised this almost as soon as the film began.  Like John Barratt, it had left next to no trace.

    16 August 2011

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