Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Drowning by Numbers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Greenaway (1988)

    Three women (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson), representing different generations of the same family and all named Cissie Colpitts, drown their husbands (Bryan Pringle, Trevor Cooper and David Morrissey) and negotiate the consequences with the coroner (Bernard Hill), who desires all three women.  The story is set in a world in which men devise elaborate rules for ridiculous games that they don’t play well; when it comes to water – the realm of female sexuality – they’re way out of their depth.  The rules of the games are mostly described in voiceover by the adolescent Smut (Jason Edwards), who observes rituals for and keeps a statistical record of all the violent deaths (human and animal) that he witnesses.  As his sexual curiosity develops, he becomes part of his own bloody, morbid ceremony.  The first scene of Peter Greenaway’s film features a girl skipping from one to a hundred under a night sky; she names a star for each number she counts.  The numbers 1-100 appear in consecutive scenes for the next two hours and the nearer to 100 they get, the more welcome they are.

    It’s rich that Greenaway laughs at his characters’ games when his whole approach here, as in The Draughtsman’s Contract, indulges his own – and, it seems, a sizeable audience’s – taste for pointlessly ornate, ludic conundrums.  You feel that if Greenaway had to make a proper film he’d sink without trace.  His smug obscurity, in combination with the carefully composed images (photographed by Sacha Vierney), may of course disarm criticism:  if you don’t understand what Peter Greenaway is on about, how can you reject it – unless you’re a philistine?  (And the more cultural references that you get, the more a member of the elite Greenaway club you’re entitled to feel.)  This is a black comedy in a different way from The Draughtsman’s Contract:  there are dud deathly jokes – such as ‘I could never love a coroner – I’d never know if you’d washed your hands …’ and ‘Don’t try and revive him – his name’s Hardy, not Lazarus’.  You sit wondering if these one-liners are meant to be as lame as they are and/or if you’re missing something. The film creates a coherently unreal world of its own.  None of the people in it is remotely believable and the slick, jocose performances are completely synthetic but the actors are remarkably obliging to the writer-director, who keeps them denuded of character and, for much of the time, deprived of clothing.  The men in particular are required to strip naked to, in the case of the physically less trim ones, humiliating effect.  In the circumstances, Greenaway’s chivalry in exempting Lady Olivier from having to get undressed seems rather absurd sycophancy.

    The main suspense is in discovering if you can be bothered to keep watching – or, rather (since the effect of the film is stupefying), whether you can be bothered to stop watching.  So why is Drowning by Numbers admired and (more incredibly) enjoyed?  I suppose it’s possible that cutting the male members of the cast down to size (ho-ho) could appeal to a very primitive kind of feminism.  Perhaps those who lap it up are the cinema/TV/video audience whose pleasure in watching films is tempered by a nagging guilt that they ought really to be making the intelligent effort to walk round art galleries or go to classical concerts instead.  Drowning by Numbers is tailor-made for this kind of filmgoer:  its arty references preserve cultural self-respect; its porno ‘sense of humour’ indicates that it knows it’s meretricious.  (Michael Nyman’s music is a typical component:  arch classical pastiche with sequences of real Mozart worked in.)   Peter Greenaway’s work is too dandified to be taken seriously and too pleased with itself to be entertaining but he confirms here that, as an auteur wanker, he’s second to none.

    [1990s]

  • Citizens Band

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Demme (1977)

    A commercial flop on its release in 1977, this early Jonathan Demme film was re-released in an edited version as Handle with Care but the original title is more apt – and, for much of the movie, ironically apt.  The screenplay by Paul Brickman focuses on the dogged attempts of the hero, Blaine (Paul Le Mat), to operate a voluntary rescue service through CB radio – to use it, in other words, to be a good citizen of the small Nebraska town where he lives.  The weird and wonderful jumble of personae who bump into each other over the airwaves are mostly there to indulge their particular fantasies – they hardly communicate with each other in real life.   As Blaine tries to root out these irresponsible abusers of citizens band radio, you realise it’s a fine way of publicising a private obsession while keeping yourself to yourself.  But then Blaine (aka Spider: most of the characters are known by their CB handle) discovers that he does know the people behind some of the anonymous voices (they’re people very close to him).  In the joky, celebratory finale of Citizens Band, his dream is realised.  The motley CB crew becomes a community – they all literally come to the rescue of Papa Thermodyne, who is Blaine’s absconded father (Roberts Blossom).  This is a good-natured, relaxed movie that’s also very skilful – a piece of comic art-that-conceals-art.

    The casting is inspired:  few of the actors were big names when the film was made (and few are now) but they’re all easy, natural performers with a strong core of humour and humanity.  They register many different moods without hitting any false notes.  As Harry (Chrome Angel), an interstate trucker with two wives and a girlfriend, Charles Napier is obliviously, almost chivalrously amoral:  he’s sorry if the members of his harem get worked up about his generous amorous arrangements but he calmly accepts that’s just the way that high-strung women are.  As the two wives (Portland Angel and Dallas Angel respectively), Marcia Rodd and Ann Wedgeworth are a great chalk-and-cheese double act but both are funny and touching.  Rodd’s edgy, wisecracking deadpan is beautifully contrasted with the breathy, bubbly Wedgworth (who went on to play, in a more subtly expressive style, Patsy Cline’s mother in Sweet Dreams).  Alix Elias is scarcely less good as Harry’s plumply obliging bit-on-the-side Debbie, dispensing sex and hot drinks to the world from her mobile home.  (She advertises as Hot Coffee over CB, in a cooing voice which is an irresistible – but also sounds to be an unintentional – come-on.)  Interpreting these light, sunny types, the actors never lapse into caricature:  a native eccentricity enables them to play straight and still be amusing.  The playing of the depressed characters is similarly balanced.  As the teacher Dean (Blood), Blaine’s understandably envious brother, Bruce McGill is so extremely unappealing that he wins you over.  In the role of their schizophrenic father (who snaps out of his boozy self-pity once he joins CB), Roberts Blossom not only has crack comedy timing but also suggests the fears of an old, dislocated man.  The individuality of Candy Clark, as the brothers’ girlfriend Electra, is rather more studied but she’s a striking quiet presence.  At the centre of the picture, Paul Le Mat – skinnier here than he was in American Graffiti (1973) or would be in Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) – epitomises the charms of the cast:  he holds the story together with his unpredictable laughter, his shy tenacity and his magnetic friendliness.

    Citizens Band takes a collection of oddballs and makes them vividly, almost representatively human – even though it seems to falsify Jonathan Demme’s unpretentious approach to describe his achievement in those terms.  He chooses original, incidental details to build up a picture of the characters’ setting.  Once it’s over, the film doesn’t stay with you very strongly.  Its humour is fragile, especially when quoted out of context:  it’s hard to explain why, for example, the sequence in which Dean asks his PE class to line up and let him hear the elastic in their shorts is funny.  But while you’re watching, the director and his actors build up a great deal of goodwill without straining to be zany.  In the last twenty minutes, when Demme starts tying up the slender threads of the plot, the film loses little of its meandering charm and nothing of the strength of its characters.  They’re so impregnably alive that, in the last scene, it’s as if they’re playing along with the requirements of the medium that is presenting them – laughing at the absurd idea that their existence is coming to an end as a result of the technicality of the film’s doing so.  The photography is by Jordan Cronenweth and the music by Bill Conti.

    [1990s]

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