Daily Archives: Friday, July 29, 2016

  • The Commune

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kollektivet

    Thomas Vinterberg (2016)

    The central characters of The Commune, set in Copenhagen in the 1970s, are Erik (Ulrich Thomsen), a university lecturer in architecture, and his wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm), a newsreader on Danish television.  The couple, who are in their forties, have one child, fourteen-year-old Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen).  Erik inherits a house from his late father, from whom he’d been estranged for years.   He, Anna and Freja look round the property, which Erik pronounces much too big for the three of them, claiming that research studies have shown that empty rooms aren’t conducive to happy families.  His and Anna’s financial situation isn’t great (it isn’t explained why) and Erik wants to instruct his lawyer (Jacob Højlev Jørgensen) to sell the house.  Anna has other ideas.  She suggests that small spaces can breed small minds:  she tells Erik she still loves him but she now feels whatever he has to say she’s heard before.  In spite of her presumably buzzy working environment, Anna craves the stimulus of other people in her life – exciting, ‘fantastic’ (her word) people.  She wants to set up a commune.  Erik rejects the idea but Anna goes ahead with contacting the couple’s life-and-soul-of-the-party friend Ole (Lars Ranthe) – the start of a process that results in a change of mind on Erik’s part and the commune taking shape.  As well as the humorous fainéant Ole, there’s another couple, Steffen (Magnus Millang) and Ditte (Anne Gry Henningsen), and their seven-year-old son Vilads (Sebastian Grønnegaard Milbrat); Mona (Julie Agnete Vang), who’s single but has boyfriends; and Allon (Fares Fares), a shy and impoverished immigrant.   Erik is won over to the new set-up to such an extent that he arranges with his lawyer for the other residents to become joint owners of the house.  All seems well in the commune until Erik starts an affair with one of his students, twenty-three-year-old Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann).

    The Commune has been adapted, by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm (writer-director of A Hijacking and A War), from Vinterberg’s stage play.  I would guess the play’s action is concentrated on the commune’s habitation; if so, the theatre piece may be dramatically tauter than this film is.   Vinterberg’s and Lindholm’s opening out of the material, to include sequences at the university where Erik teaches and the television studios where Anna works, not only dilutes the tension that a single-set drama is potentially well equipped to generate.  It also exposes the story as a conventional marital-crisis drama.  The domestic setting of the commune, although it’s distinctive, is essentially secondary.   The first fifteen minutes set things up economically and nimbly – the sequence of short scenes that introduce each prospective communard is particularly enjoyable.  But these people are then given virtually nothing to do.  In most cases, even what we’re told about them at the outset is asserted rather than illustrated.  We never get to see why the amusing rogue Ole might be good company for an evening but a pain to live with.  Allon’s sole characteristic is a propensity for tears that you’re meant not to expect in a tall, swarthy man.   Ditte is said to be controlling bitch but the evidence for this remains invisible – as do Mona’s men.  Unless she’s meant to be a working prostitute on commune premises, I was never sure that anyone in the household other than Erik and Anna had a job.  If all the others are unemployed, it’s not clear either how they spend their days or why their inactivity isn’t resented by their hard-working hosts.

    In other words, you expect Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm to create drama or mine comedy throughout the commune.  We occasionally watch them in committee:  there’s discussion and a show of hands on the question of Erik’s mistress moving in; the meeting then proceeds to the next and no less controversial agenda item, whether to acquire a dishwasher.  Except for these sequences and the heart condition of the little boy Vilads (see below), the film concentrates on the Anna-Erik-Emma triangle and Freja’s first sexual experiences, with a boy called Peter (Rasmus Lind Rubin).  In a lecture, Erik excoriates one of his students, Jesper (Mads Reuther), for wanting to do an architecture project on tepees.   During Erik’s tirade, Vinterberg cuts more than once to another student in the class; from the moment he does so, it’s obvious this beautiful girl is going to play a bigger role in the story.  Within a couple of screen minutes, Emma is in Erik’s office, initially protesting at the way he treated Jesper but very soon making a play for her tutor.  The more extensive scenes at the television studios are similarly clichéd.  As Erik’s affair with Emma develops, Anna starts to fall apart.  She gazes fearfully at her aging reflection in her dressing-room mirror.  She snaps out of her depression, like the professional she is, to present a smiling face to the TV audience as the news goes on air.  In due course, she’s in such a state of emotional collapse that the studio director, also at the last moment, has to pull the plug on transmission.   After a while, you know there’s bound to be a shot of Anna newsreading on an unwatched television in a room where two people are having sex.  (When the shot arrives, it turns out to be Freja and Peter rather than Emma and Erik.)

    The second half of The Commune is structured purely in order for Trine Dyrholm to give Anna’s misery the works.  She does it splendidly:  Dyrholm is a fine actress and it’s good to see her expressing a range of vulnerability beyond what’s possible with the character she plays so entertainingly in the excellent television drama The Legacy.  You’re always aware, though, of the mechanics at work in focusing attention on Anna – and it’s frustrating not to get more of the other actors, especially the vividly funny Lars Ranthe.  Even the character of Erik is underwritten.  What persuades him to change his mind so wholeheartedly about the commune that he’s prepared to relinquish sole ownership of the house?  Of course it’s essential, in terms of the plot, that he does this but Vinterberg and Lindholm don’t supply Erik with any convincing motivation.  Although we see that he resents having to raise his voice to get it heard above others in the commune, Erik doesn’t use this as an excuse for his developing a new relationship outside the group.  We never get an idea of how the others’ feelings about Erik and Anna, whom several of the commune members have known for years, influence their view of Erik’s affair with Emma.

    His congenital coronary condition has left the child Vilads with a limited life expectancy, or so he keeps telling those in the commune – Freja, Mona,Emma – whom he propositions.  Sebastian Grønnegaard Milbrat plays Vilads very well and naturally but the use of the boy in the story is queasy in more ways than one.  I guess we’re meant to think that asking teenage girls and young women if they want to have sex with him comes naturally to a kid raised in a free-love-oriented environment (though there’s no actual suggestion that his parents are anything but monogamous) – yet his doing so is based in a gratingly trite cuteness – the things kids come out with!  Vilads’ illness is also central to the most obviously melodramatic incidents:  he nearly dies as the commune is celebrating Christmas; his heart eventually gives out when Freja introduces Peter to the household.  The relationship between those two is lifeless:  I wasn’t sure if the lack of comment on fourteen-year-old Freja’s love life reflected the commune members’ sexually liberated views or her parents’ self-absorption or simply negligence on the part of the scriptwriters.  Freja is watchful but she keeps very quiet until a big scene near the end when she tearfully advises Anna to leave the commune.  (It should be noted that this is one of those movies that looks set to end about eight times before it eventually does.)  It’s meant to be a dramatic irony, in view of their respective positions at the start of the film, that Anna does indeed depart the scene while Erik remains in the commune.  The ironic effect is weak, however.  Anna’s exit is the result of her husband’s adultery rather than the consequences of communal living.  Erik, having traded his wife for a younger model, still doesn’t look very happy with his radical way of domestic life.

    24 July 2016

  • Thelma and Louise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (1991)

    Thelma (Geena Davis), a thirtyish Arkansas housewife, and Louise (Susan Sarandon), her fortyish fast-food waitress friend, drive out of town for a weekend in the mountains.  They stop off in a bar en route.  When a man they meet there tries to rape Thelma, Louise shoots him dead and the women have to change their travel plans – they head for a new life across the Mexican border.  This Ridley Scott film is dynamic and absorbing throughout but it gets progressively less enjoyable:  it’s not just the eponymous friends who are attempting to escape from the police and various male tyrannies.  The imaginative actresses playing Thelma and Louise are trying to free themselves from the clutches of the shrewdly despicable (Oscar-winning) script.  They fail, inevitably but heroically:  Susan Sarandon does well and Geena Davis is phenomenal but it’s the writer, Callie Khouri (also an executive co-producer of the film), who is in the driving seat all along.

    Thelma and Louise has been hailed as innovative in featuring a pair of female leads in extremis and taking the law into their own hands while the male characters are dimly, demeaningly stereotyped.  Callie Khouri’s achievement is rather in recognising that the road/buddy movie is pretty reliable at the box office – and that a ‘feminist’ version of the genre is likely to prove most commercial if (a) the men are presented as risibly incompetent and (b) the tough, funny, credible women remain underdogs, essentially and eventually victims of man’s inhumanity to woman.  (That Thelma and Louise are tough, funny and credible is thanks mainly to Davis and Sarandon although, to be fair to Khouri, she has supplied some sharp wisecracking dialogue.)  The heroines, in charge but under threat, hardly come into direct contact with the main institutional and individual exemplars of crass masculine society – respectively the police and Thelma’s petty tyrant of a husband (unfunnily played by Christopher McDonald).  But the treatment of the men with whom the two principals do interact exposes the film-makers’ intentions.  This is most striking in the case of the best male performance – from Brad Pitt, as JD, the amiable, insouciant cowboy thief with whom Thelma enjoys an exhilarating one-night stand.  It would be fine if this was as much as we got of JD but, since he’s an attractive man, he must, on the film’s terms, be up to no good.  Next morning he steals the life savings that Louise has (puzzlingly) entrusted to Thelma for safe keeping.   When JD reappears later in police custody, Brad Pitt’s naturalness has gone:  a charming but slender character is being milked dry in order to make a gender politics point.

    This doesn’t quite happen with the more ridiculous macho fools whose function is to illustrate the two women’s changing feelings but the scenes involving these men make you uncomfortable in a different way.  Thelma and Louise encounter a lone patrol cop (who is nothing to do with the main pack of pursuers).  He (Jason Beghe) is cool and sinister in black uniform and shades but the heroines reduce him to a terrified, humiliated cry baby.  They hijack a stupid, leering trucker (Marco St John) whom they’ve kept meeting on the road.  Once out of his driver’s cab, this man is played as such a gibbering idiot that you feel he’s hardly responsible for his sexually offensive behaviour or capable of outraging the women after they’ve seen what he’s really like.  Up to this point, they have been more or less forced to break the law.  The cretinous trucker isn’t worth the trouble of terrorising at gunpoint so you have to accept that Louise is now simply as trigger-happy as she claims to be (‘I’m getting to like this …’).  What’s especially unsettling is the film’s infallible knack of combining this kind of ‘character development’ with easy laughs – the more unfazed by lawbreaking the women become, the more easily is the viewer expected to sympathise with them.  By the last half-hour, Scott and Khouri are well into Butch-and-Sundance-ising Thelma and Louise.  (The details of the death-defying climax here are just about interchangeable with those in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – even if the literally over the top emotional uplift of Thelma and Louise’s final image is very different.)

    You expect a Ridley Scott movie to have visual éclat but less in the way of strong characters:  this one has both and the combination is often exhilarating, especially in the opening section, when Thelma and Louise are getting ready for their weekend trip.  (It’s too bad that it’s so briefly a trip before it turns into a political mission.)  Once the killing has happened, Scott’s direction never quite regains its initial friendly effervescence but the film is always interesting to look at.  Scott’s science-fiction background and British outsider’s viewpoint combine to help him present the scale and variety of the landscape as luminous and awesome:  wherever Thelma and Louise go seems impregnated with shimmering potential – it’s a vivid illustration of the physical and mental terra nova that they’re discovering.  (The cinematography is by Adrian Biddle.)  Hans Zimmer’s vibrant, slightly sinister score fits both the look of the film and the tone of the rock songs sounding out of the women’s car.

    But what makes Thelma and Louise a successful entertainment for so long are the two leads.  The contrasts between their characters correspond satisfyingly with the different styles of the actresses playing them, although there’s a connection between Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon too – they spark each other’s performance.  We soon see that, while Louise has a clenched determination to enjoy her weekend away, Thelma, as soon as she’s out of the house, is more exuberantly transported.   This difference is reinforced by the fact that Sarandon, although very likeable, is somewhat constricted compared with Davis.  This is particularly noticeable when Louise is experiencing moments of liberation:  in these, Sarandon’s hair may be windblown but her sense of abandon feels willed.  The crucial trauma in Louise’s past that’s eventually disclosed makes sense of Sarandon’s lack of freedom but that lack is still too persistent.  There’s a scene in which Louise wanders out into a hushed nightscape and Sarandon, with her beautifully exophthalmic eyes, looks into the sky with keen, hopeful apprehension.  The moment doesn’t quite work because Sarandon is working too hard to show that a new and surprising future is revealing itself in Louise’s surroundings.

    There’s nothing studied about Geena Davis’s acting:  long-limbed and radiantly zany, she goes beyond the eccentric, honest charm which won her an Oscar in The Accidental Tourist (1988).  There are so many highlights in what she does here:  the thrilled, resonant warmth and power of her laughter in the bar scenes; her convincing shock when Louise shoots Thelma’s attacker; her grinning, sauntering entry into breakfast at a motel after her night with the cowboy (it’s as if she’s simultaneously still experiencing sexual pleasure and laughing at the memory of it).  The love interlude with JD is obviously prepared for and you wonder how Davis will bring it off – it’s only twenty-four hours since the attempted rape.  But her look of anticipation – wary and avid – as Thelma opens her motel room door to JD is perfectly believable.  As they lie in bed together and he tells her about his stick-ups, her awed, tender curiosity about his inconceivable lifestyle (and body – which she also regards as beyond her wildest dreams) is magnetically humorous.

    Half-crying, half-laughing routines may be easy to make an impact with but Davis is amazing in a scene in which Thelma recollects how Louise killed the would-be rapist:  as she tries to be jokey, the horror of what happened keeps bursting through.  She repeatedly (as does Sarandon) redeems feeble gags through her taste and her timing.  Davis is credible even when, near the end of the film, Thelma tells Louise that she’s ‘crossed over’ (that is, she’s traversed a spiritual border – rather than the physical one into Mexico).   You believe from Geena Davis’s face that Thelma is transformed.  It’s great to watch and enjoy her relaxed, rangy movement and pure emotional expressiveness.  Perhaps what’s best of all about this wonderful performance is that, as you recollect it, it seems to transcend the major shortcomings of Thelma and Louise.

    Michael Madsen plays Jimmy, Louise’s moody, dissatisfied boyfriend.  Madsen seems a little unsure but this helps to make his characterisation less obvious than the ones from most of the other men in the cast – and Susan Sarandon is pleasantly, sadly relaxed and affecting in her scenes with him.  Harvey Keitel’s conscientious interpretation of a vaguely well-meaning police chief is so much wasted energy:  this dreary character makes little sense.  Timothy Carhart is nastily effective as the man who chats up Thelma before trying to assault her.

    [1990s]

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