Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Man in the White Suit

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Mackendrick (1951)

    What works so well is the ending – and just before the ending.  Like Whisky Galore!, the tale of Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness)  is told confidently by Alexander Mackendrick but the satire is far from subtle and the laughs, for me, are few and far between.  Sidney invents a fibre which is stainproof and indestructible, and terrifies bosses and workers alike.  The lampooning of capital and labour is vigorously obvious.  Because Sidney is unassuming, resourceful and eccentric, the Ealing ethos leads you to expect him to prevail and the clumsily defensive establishments that oppose him to get their comeuppance.  It’s not a surprise that the miraculous white fabric turns out to be unstable.  It’s visually and emotionally shocking, however, when the mob of union members and mill owners run Sidney to ground and, to their amused, astonished relief, start tearing pieces off his suit, and leave him standing in the street with no jacket or trousers.  The scene is disorienting:  a few screen seconds before the disintegration of Sidney’s suit and science, an elderly washerwoman rounds on him.  His invention will destroy her livelihood too:  ‘Why can’t you scientists leave well alone?’ she asks angrily.  With the humiliation of Sidney that follows, the maverick scientific spirit seems suddenly to have become the villain of the piece.  The film’s very last scene is as much a relief for the audience as the penultimate one was for the vested interests of the textile industry.   The voiceover of Sidney’s ex-employer, Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker), which also introduced the story, announces that the crisis is over and that ‘we’ve seen the last of Sidney Stratton’.  But Sidney leaves the factory with his lab notebook as well as his cards.  He looks at the notebook and smiles.  ‘I see!’, he exclaims and walks off jauntily en route to his next invention.  ‘At least I hope we’ve seen the last of him’, replies Birnley’s voice, now uncertain.

    Alec Guinness makes that closing smile a beatific one – and he makes The Man in the White Suit.  Although he has academic qualifications as a scientist, Sidney Stratton starts the film pushing a trolley round the factory.  His rise to wealth – first because the textile magnates want to market his product then, when they realise its implications, to pay to suppress its launch – is meteoric, to put it mildly.  Guinness’s looks and voice make Sidney a distinctly middle-class worker.  He doesn’t belong in a trade union but the story wouldn’t work as well if he did:  Sidney is a man apart.  Joan Greenwood is Birnley’s daughter Daphne, who takes a fancy to Sidney (it’s reciprocated but, as usual with Guinness when he’s kissing on screen, the phrase that comes to mind is lip service).  Although Greenwood is better than usual here, her mannered expressions and readings make all the characters she plays seem insincere.  It is painful when Daphne looks scornfully at Sidney as his suit falls to pieces but the effect is momentary because you already knew from Greenwood’s playing of her that Daphne was calculating, as eager to thwart her father and his henchmen as to find true love.   Cecil Parker’s characterisation of Birnley is familiar – a thin layer of pomposity over a core of anxious cowardice – but Parker is a very likeable actor.  As a more powerfully malignant magnate, Ernest Thesiger made me laugh when he laughed – that is, when he wheezed sepulchrally.  As a younger mill owner and Daphne’s intended until Sidney appears on the scene, Michael Gough is good, as usual.  The cast also includes Miles Malleson as a tailor.  The music by Benjamin Frankel seems rather overwrought for the subject and tone of what’s on screen – although that’s preferable to the sounds of bubbling lab chemicals etc which are meant to supply a comic complement. Mackendrick wrote the screenplay with John Dighton and Roger MacDougall.

    29 November 2012

  • 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

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