Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Spirit of ’45

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Loach (2013)

    Ken Loach’s documentary has a U certificate – ‘suitable for audiences aged 4 years and over’ – and there’s no doubt this is political history for those who’ve not learned much about it yet.  The public screening of British political propaganda in documentary form is unusual enough in itself to make watching The Spirit of ’45 an interesting experience, although its appearance in cinemas is doubly ironic.  First, because it wouldn’t be getting any release at all if Ken Loach wasn’t a celebrity of British film.  Second, because the audience of this paean and exhortation to working-class solidarity will be overwhelmingly middle class.  The Spirit of ’45 supplies a good description of what the Attlee government tried to do – and, to what now seems a very remarkable extent, succeeded in doing.  This part of the film culminates in shots of the Festival of Britain, the post-war Labour administration’s poignant swan song:  the rapid closure of the South Bank exhibition by the incoming Conservative government in late 1951 only enhanced the Festival’s power as a political symbol.  Loach cuts from these images straight to Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street in May 1979 and the words of St Francis of Assisi.  To hear the arch dismantler of the post-war consensus express the hope of bringing harmony never fails to amaze and infuriate but Ken Loach’s complete excision of the complicated time between 1951 and 1979 is annoying too.  He and most of the people he interviews in The Spirit of ’45 can’t possibly have approved of the Tory governments in power for more than half the twenty-eight years between the exit of Attlee and the entry of Thatcher.  Given the purity of their socialism, it’s hard to believe these witnesses thought much of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour administrations that held office the rest of the time.   But four-year-olds in the audience, and quite a few older people, will naturally assume from Loach’s storytelling that everything carried on fine until Margaret Thatcher spoiled it all.

    Ken Loach offers no explanation of how The People allowed the Attlee government’s overall majority to plummet from 146 seats in the 1945 general election to five seats in 1950, and Labour to lose power the following year.  The evasion is frustrating.  There were obviously good reasons for a country that had just been through six years of war to become impatient with continuing austerity in peacetime.   Loach appears to have little interest either in analysing the reasons for the Labour landslide that brought Clement Attlee to power, preferring to present the election outcome as an expression of a common will forged by the people of Britain working with and for each other during the war years.  But Loach does at least include a couple of instructive passing references to other important factors.  One of the very few right-wing contributors to The Spirit of ’45 is a Tory MP called Maurice Petherick (he died in 1985), who reads a letter from a constituent deploring the radical indoctrination of the British armed forces, warning that they’ll return from the war ‘pansy pinkos’.   There’s also mention of Tory election literature in 1945, quoting Friedrich Hayek’s belief that the roots of Nazism lay in socialism.  This hints at a theme more fully developed in a BBC television documentary of a few years ago, which suggested, convincingly, that Churchill’s attempt in the July 1945 election to characterise the Labour leadership as a totalitarian menace made no sense to an electorate that knew Attlee, Ernest Bevin et al as important and trusted players in Churchill’s wartime government.  In The Spirit of ’45 there’s just a brief clip of Churchill on the hustings, being heckled by a section of the crowd and looking rather nonplussed by the experience.

    Ken Loach has assembled a rich and fascinating collection of news footage – and he does well to set the political developments of the 1940s in the context of the enormous and terrible poverty of the inter-war decades.   You’re reminded too, by excerpts from public information films of the time, how much Britain sounded like a socialist country in the late 1940s as it never had before or has since:  the posh voice of the commentator on these films, which tells the audience what’s good for them, gives the instructions an establishment seal of approval.  But Loach distorts the material visually as well as intellectually.  The interviews are filmed in black and white, even though most of them seem to have been conducted recently.  That seems phony from the start – but you assume it’s to show the interviewees as still infused with the spirit of ’45, as consubstantial with the monochrome newsreel of the time.  The decision to stick with black and white beyond 1979 may be meant to express the grimness in the Thatcher years of the workers’ ongoing struggle but the contrived visual scheme is counterproductive.  It’s not just the fact that anyone who’s seen Margaret Thatcher’s St Francis moment thinks of it as happening in colour.  By not showing the Virgin Mary blue of the Blessed Margaret’s costume, Loach makes her misappropriation of Christianity less rebarbative than it actually was.  It’s the same with his shots of the city boom boys of the 1980s:  the monochrome drains their garish dynamism and reduces their offensiveness.

    Loach also detracts from the distinctive power of the black-and-white archive film by decolourising so much else.  At the very end, however, he does the opposite.  The film concludes with a replay in colour of newsreel sequences shown in black and white at the start of The Spirit of ’45.  (I’ve assumed from the closing credit for a colourist that black and white was their natural state.)   The final shot is of a young woman who’s part of a celebrating crowd in 1945.  The frame freezes on her smiling exultantly.  It’s a strongly real image:  you can’t help noticing on her blouse the darkness of sweat from the pit of her raised arm.  You can’t help noticing either that the image serves as an epitome of Loach’s approach to the material.  The young woman is surely celebrating VE Day rather than the coming of socialist government.  Ken Loach’s intentional blurring of the two things is objectionable – and I say this as someone who’s very tempted to see 1945 as a hallowed, golden time because Britain won and Labour won (and my parents got married).

    A larger proportion of the British population in 1945 was working class than it is now but Labour still had to get votes from elsewhere on the socio-economic spectrum to gain the huge victory that it won.   Loach’s thesis that we need to revive the spirit of ‘45’ to repeat the trick ignores the practical problem of how to do that when the class balance has shifted in the intervening decades.  He turns a blind eye too to the evolution of working-class values since 1945.  One of the men interviewed condemns the sale of council houses in the 1980s; Loach doesn’t go anywhere near acknowledging that one of the most pernicious legacies of the Thatcher era was to make narrow self-interest a standard attitude among many people, from various social classes, who advanced materially then.  Some of Loach’s witnesses – especially the doctors and nurses and a woman who now chairs a national pensioners association – are eloquent and admirable people but more than one of them echoes what seems to be Loach’s own naive belief:  that rekindling a sense of decent, common purpose is all that’s needed in order for socialism to return to Britain.

    One of the most infuriating things about supporting the Labour Party is that many of its members prefer powerlessness – it means their moral superiority is inviolable.  But Ken Loach goes further than that.  In an interview with The Big Issue coinciding with the release of The Spirit of ’45, he makes the case for a new political party to replace Labour, which he believes to be irredeemably ‘degraded’.  It’s no surprise that Tony Blair isn’t even mentioned in the film (he must be miles beneath Loach’s contempt since he’s not even a class traitor) but the omission of any reference to Harold Wilson’s governments is more striking, and more illustrative of this documentary’s blinkered point of view.  For Ken Loach and, I guess, most of the people who appear in the film, modest incremental moves to greater fairness count for nothing and the Wilson administrations’ handling of the economy is regarded as a failure by people of widely differing political persuasions.  During the Wilson governments of the 1960s, however, capital punishment was abolished and abortion and homosexuality were legalised.  As the Conservative journalist Alex Massie pointed out in response to Ken Loach’s Big Issue interview, you need to define your terms carefully – much more carefully than Loach does here – in urging a return to the Britain of 1945.

    23 March 2013

  • This Must Be the Place

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Sorrentino (2011)

    I was going to describe it as genuinely odd but perhaps genuinely isn’t the word.  Still, Paolo Sorrentino’s new film, based on a screenplay which he wrote with Umberto Contarello, is distinctive enough to be entertaining and often bracing – thanks to Sorrentino’s perspective on American geography, David Byrne’s disarming music, bits of comedy that take you by surprise, and Sean Penn as the protagonist, a retired rock star called Cheyenne.   The early stages describe his reclusive life in Ireland; an expat American, he then returns home when he learns that his father, from whom he’s been estranged for years, is at death’s door.  Cheyenne arrives too late but, after the funeral and a meeting with a Nazi hunter called Mordecai Midler (Judd Hirsch), he sets off on a journey to track down Aloise Lange, the SS guard who humiliated his father in Auschwitz.    Sorrentino exults in the foreignness of America – the endless roads, the wide-open spaces, the small motel rooms – and the director’s enthusiasm is infectious.  Photographed by Luca Bigazzi, This Must Be the Place is visually lively – in the whirling movement of the camera, the colouring of the images (sometimes luminously vivid and always rich, even in the darkish interior of a motel), and the compositions, especially of physically unusual individuals alone in a streetscape or landscape.   Cheyenne, who performed with a band called the Fellows, epitomises the visual extraordinariness of the people in the film.  Although he isn’t pining for his vanished stardom, he retains the sable wardrobe, hairdo and face paint of a gothic rocker.  (His name recalls Siouxsie, his appearance Robert Smith of The Cure.)

    Cheyenne’s been married to Jane (Frances McDormand) for over thirty years, and her drollness doesn’t disguise her absolute devotion to him.  She’s all-knowing too:  when he tells her he’s suffering from depression, she diagnoses boredom and she’s right.  Sorrentino cleverly uses the tempo and structure of the scenes in Ireland to impart Cheyenne’s state of mind:  these are individually short and inconsequential, cumulatively frustrating and blah.  The disorienting rhythm of the story once it crosses the Atlantic – Cheyenne is no longer sure where things are taking him – achieves something similar.  Yet Cheyenne’s American odyssey is, below the surface, a familiar one:  it makes a man of him and rights longstanding wrongs. Apart from Jane and their dog, the only person in Ireland whose company he enjoys is a teenage goth called Mary (Eve Hewson), whose mother (Olwen Fouéré) sits at her window all day, hoping for the return of her disappeared son Tony.   The mother and Cheyenne seem to go back a long way; she appears to blame Cheyenne for Tony’s disappearance.  Cheyenne is a non-smoker and Mary’s mother explains this is because he’s never grown up – ‘Only children don’t want to smoke’.  When, near the end of the film, Cheyenne is preparing to return to Ireland, mission accomplished, he accepts a cigarette that’s offered to him, and we understand the point of Mary’s mother’s unlikely theory.   He has grown up because he’s made peace with his dead father and avenged what was done to him in Auschwitz.

    Sean Penn is such a good actor that, even where his work on screen is disfigured by moral pomposity, he naturally creates an underlying character that keeps coming through.  (There are moments when this happens even in Mystic River – as when Jimmy Markum says goodbye to his daughter for what will turn out to be the last time or, in the film’s best sequence, when he and Dave Boyle are sitting talking together on the porch of Jimmy’s house.)  When critics talk about an actor drawing on himself to create a character, I’m never sure how they know that’s what’s happening and I’ve no idea how much Penn is doing that in his superb performances in Casualties of War, Dead Man Walking and Sweet and Lowdown.  I’m not sure either of the basis for media reports that Penn is homophobic but, even if you don’t buy these, it seems fair to suggest that the character of Harvey Milk was an imaginative stretch for him.  That stretch resulted in perhaps his greatest acting to date, and certainly one of the best screen performances of the last decade or more[1].

    What Penn does in This Must Be the Place isn’t in that class but here too the distance between his own personality and that of the man he’s playing may be part of the explanation of why he’s so remarkable.   The performance is mannered all right but, while not every mannerism works, it’s amazing what Penn does with most of them.  However often Cheyenne blows a stray wisp of hair out of his face, it never quite seems right but the high, mirthless giggle is something else.  Just when you think it’s just too false to be true, Penn will use the laugh with unexpected witty precision (when he does this at the climax of a ping-pong match in a bar, there was merited applause in the audience for this London Film Festival screening).  And the speaking voice he’s devised is an astonishing comic instrument.  Cheyenne’s words often emerge painfully slowly, as if the effort were too much.  You occasionally wonder if he’s too tired of life to get to the end of the sentence yet he does, usually with a weary but withering putdown.  At other times, you think Penn’s building up to some sort of a zinger; the kicker is that he then just stops.   His middle-aged skinniness in the tight black outfits is funny too.  Penn virtually reverses the effect he achieved as Harvey Milk, when what looked like an ordinary man’s physique was shot through with effeminacy.  Cheyenne’s effete gestures and delivery are an expression of his jadedness but not of his sexual personality.

    It’s the comedy of Penn’s portrait that’s to be cherished here, even though the dramatic layering of the character is impressive too.  Back in the 1980s, the morbidity of Cheyenne and the Fellows’ music caused two teenage Irish boys to commit suicide, and he regularly visits their grave.  Penn is powerful in an outburst which expresses Cheyenne’s remorse about these deaths and regret about his own childlessness (he laments this more than once).  It’s too designed to be a big moment but it is one, nevertheless – even though it’s also an indication of the script’s fundamental conventionality.  Penn doesn’t, however, connect very strongly with the other actors, and I don’t think Cheyenne’s egocentric isolation is a sufficient explanation of this – the lack of connection occurs almost regardless of Cheyenne’s feelings about the person he’s with.  The recipient of the my-blasted-life monologue is David Byrne, as himself.  We also see Byrne do a number with his band and the film takes its title from a Talking Heads song, which is performed by Penn (on guitar) and Grant Goodman (vocals), as the young son of Aloise Lange’s granddaughter Rachel.  Paolo Sorrentino’s admiration of David Byrne gets to be a bit much.

    Some of the people Cheyenne meets on his mission to find Lange are very engaging, especially Kerry Condon, who’s charming as Rachel, and Harry Dean Stanton, in a great cameo as one of Lange’s Utah neighbours and the soi-disant inventor of the wheeled suitcase.  (His real-life equivalent is, in my view, someone else who deserves to be hunted down.)  These encounters have a double impact:  they’re engaging both in themselves and because the people that Cheyenne is meeting don’t realise his ulterior motive.  Joyce van Patten also registers strongly as Lange’s wife (who claims she’s a widow); she has more of an inkling that there’s more to Cheyenne than meets the eye.  Judd Hirsch, who I’d not seen in years, gives an unsubtle but forceful performance as Mordecai Midler.  As Jane, Frances McDormand is stronger in the scenes she doesn’t share with Penn – either on the other end of a phone when Cheyenne’s in America or inviting a young Irishman, who fancies his chances in the music business and introduces himself as ‘the future’, to go into the house and see her husband (‘The past awaits you’).

    Sometimes Sorrentino’s off-the-wall detailing is unaccountably believable, sometimes it’s not.  Jane works as a firefighter; and the determined kookiness of this improbable idea is irritating.  On the other hand, she and Cheyenne regularly play hand pelota in the depths of an emptied swimming pool at their home; the swimming pool metaphor get overworked eventually (when Cheyenne meets up with Rachel and her son, who’s hydrophobic).  The pelota games, which Jane always wins unless she’s being kind to Cheyenne, ring truer.  The film’s final scenes are much more substantially bizarre.  Earlier on, Midler is showing a group of schoolkids – and Cheyenne – a slide show of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, photographs of dead bodies and living skeletons.  As you watch, you feel uncomfortable not just because of the undiminishing power of those images but because they jar with the prevailing stylish eccentricity of This Must Be the Place.  The images do and don’t prepare you for the climax.

    Aloise Lange lives alone and in hiding in a sort of portacabin in the middle of the Utah desert:  his modus vivendi both rhymes with and puts into perspective Cheyenne’s own life in his Irish mansion.  There’s a long close-up of Lange, giving his account of his relationship with Cheyenne’s father in Auschwitz, and the camera eventually pulls back to reveal Cheyenne listening, holding the gun he bought and which we’ve wondered if he’ll have the nerve to use once he tracks Lange down.  Cheyenne decides to shoot Lange in a different way; he moves close to the old man and takes his picture.  Sorrentino then cuts to Mordecai Midler outside, waiting for Cheyenne to return to the jeep they’ve travelled there in.  Midler exclaims ‘Holy shit!’ at what he sees emerging from the portacabin and so, in effect, does the audience:  it’s Aloise Lange, hands clutched over his genitals, as naked as the Jews in the photographs we saw earlier.  There’s no denying that Cheyenne’s revenge on his father’s tormentor is viscerally powerful but it’s powerful in the wrong way.  The effect of this coup de théâtre is achieved by the nakedness of the octogenarian actor playing the supposedly nonagenarian Aloise Lange.  The shock comes from finding the gaunt flesh repulsive and the realisation that it is the actor’s body which is appalling to behold – the camera seems gripped by his wrinkled paunch as he stands shivering in the wind.  Heinz Lieven is well known in Germany but not to me and this seemed to intensify his physical humiliation – he was a real old man rather than an actor I could put into a context of other roles.

    The very last scene, which also depends on the disappearance of costume, isn’t upsetting but it is confusing.  Back in Ireland, Mary’s mother is still waiting at the window, still hoping whenever the phone rings it will be her boy come back.  Like Midler in the previous sequence, she sees something that takes her breath away and makes her drop the phone.  It’s Cheyenne coming up the street, in an ordinary pair of jeans and a jacket, without his bouffant hair or make-up.   I suspect this ending is specious.  Having Cheyenne present himself to Mary’s mother is easier to bring off than having him return to his wife in civvies – she’d want to know why, whereas Mary’s mother reacts silently and as if Cheyenne were her long-lost son. Neither of them says a word:  I’m not sure Sorrentino and Penn know what sort of voice Cheyenne would have if he did.  But Penn’s tentative smile widens into a boyish, slightly sheepish grin and, because we don’t see the reunion with Jane, the effect is weirdly Oedipal.  It’s as if Cheyenne, his father dead and his own manhood proven, can come home to mother.

    26 October 2011

    [1] If you Google ‘Sean Penn – homophobe’, nearly all the first two pages of results refer to the accusations made by Mickey Rourke (backstage at a David Letterman show) in December 2008, when he and Penn were seen, correctly as it turned out, as the leading contenders for the Best Actor prize at the coming Academy Awards.  It seems hard to believe that Penn would have taken the trouble to include references to gay rights in his Oscar acceptance speech for Milk simply to contradict what Rourke had said.

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