Monthly Archives: August 2016

  • Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Average Girls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón

    Pedro Almodóvar (1980)

    When Pepi (Carmen Maura) receives a visit from a menacing policeman (Félix Rotaeta), she offers him oral sex in the hope that’ll keep him quiet about the marijuana plants he spotted on the balcony of her Madrid apartment.  He declines the offer and rapes her instead.  This annoys Pepi, who was hoping to sell her virginity for a decent price when the right opportunity arose.  She decides to get her revenge with the help of her friend Bom (Olvido Gara, aka Alaska), who’s a punk singer, and the two boys in Bom’s band.  Late one evening, wearing operetta-ish costumes and singing a zarzuela, they confront and beat up a man.  He turns out to be not the policeman but his innocuous, identical twin brother.  Pepi then plans a different, more complex way of getting her own back.   She befriends the policeman’s submissive homebody wife, Luci (Eva Siva), on the pretext of wanting knitting lessons from her but actually with a view to corrupting Luci.  During the first knitting lesson, Bom turns up, needing a pee.  Pepi suggests that, since Luci is feeling hot, Bom should urinate on her.  The masochistic Luci finds the golden shower not just refreshing but exciting.  She and Bom become lesbian lovers.

    This is the start of Pepi, Luci, Bom …  It’s a foreshadowing not just of the rest of Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature but also of motifs and preoccupations in other films he’s made:  businesslike carnality; sexual abuse and ambiguity; song and dance; disguises and doppelgängers; the comedy of excretion.  That sequence in which Bom et al set upon the hapless twin brother in particular epitomises the surreally casual, one-thing-leads-to-another quality of early Almodóvar.  As the story continues, Pepi embarks on a screenplay called ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’; this gives the ‘outer’ film a light-hearted post-modernist flavour.  It’s clear from an interview with Almodóvar used for the BFI programme note[1] that this self-referential element and the spirit of improvisation had a very real meaning in the creation of Pepi, Luci, Bom …:

    ‘The first script was shorter than the film turned out to be.  I didn’t know at that time how to measure what was needed for a feature film.  So, seeing that it wouldn’t work in the marketplace, I converted it into a feature film.  To get to that point was a very tortuous, very long way because the money ran out before I’d even finished the first script.  People were giving us small contributions like 50,000 pesetas.  So from June 1979 until December 1979, we continued shooting whenever we had money – never straight through but over a weekend, two or three days consecutively.  During those months I was adapting the story to the people with whom I could continue filming. …’

    Almodóvar’s debut feature obviously introduces too his abiding preference for women principals (and for certain actresses, not least Carmen Maura).  It was sometimes said of dramatists like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan that, as homosexual men writing at a time when it was hard to be gay, they used female protagonists as a form of coded self-expression.  Perhaps there’s an element of that in Almodóvar too (he was born in 1949) but he conveys a more vigorous sympathy with women.  It’s the thwarted, suffering heroines in Coward and Rattigan – Laura in Brief Encounter, Hester in The Deep Blue Sea, and so on – who are usually mentioned as their gay proxies, whereas Pepi is the first in a line of strong, comic female avengers in Almodóvar.  He has, of course, been making art in a different place and time:  Pepi, Luci, Bom … is very definitely a product and an expression of the various, overlapping kinds of freedom – musical, sartorial, social, sexual – that were becoming available to Almodóvar’s generation in post-Franco Spain.  The exultant vivid colouring and eccentric combinations of clothes and décor, the dynamic pop and punk on the soundtrack, the bold, funny opening titles by the illustrator Cespe (the film is worth seeing just for these) – all combine to give euphoric texture to the slender movie, which is now recognised as part of ‘La Movida Madrileña’[2].  The strength of countercultural momentum in late 1970s Spain was such that Pepi, Luci, Bom … was already making fun of the conservative backlash against it.

    Much of the movie comes across as a succession of sketches – some work better than others.  Its structure is simple, not to say flimsy.  Yet these qualities and the happy, sophomoric vulgarity overlay insights that are often sharp and occasionally shocking.  A penis-measuring contest in a club – Almodóvar himself has a cameo as, appropriately, the master of ceremonies – is entitled ‘General Erections’:  the name is a neat fusion of Spain’s new-found political and sexual freedoms.   The vile policeman pretends to be his twin in order to sexually assault a woman (Concha Grégori) who is the brother’s admiring neighbour.  (The fumbling aggression in this episode anticipates the odd, upsetting scene in the showers at the start of What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Almodóvar’s fourth feature.)  By the end of the film, Luci is liberated to such an extent that she eventually returns to married life with the policeman.  Having spread her wings as a sexual masochist, she realises that Bom can never satisfy her gluttony for punishment in the way her physically abusive and tyrannical husband can.  The conclusion is all the more startling because Almodóvar maintains his light, antic tone.

    3 August 2016

    [1] The interview forms part of My First Movie (Faber and Faber, 2000), edited by Stephen Lowenstein.

    [2] Wikipedia defines this as the ‘countercultural movement that took place mainly in Madrid during the Spanish transition after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975’.

  • The BFG

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2016)

    At dead of night, a young girl called Sophie catches sight from a bedroom window of a huge figure in the street outside.  When the figure sees that she’s seen him, he abducts Sophie.  He tells her that she must spend the rest of her life with him – in Giant Country – so that she can’t reveal the existence of giants to others.  Capturing Sophie sounds like typical ogre behaviour but, as his name suggests, the Big Friendly Giant (BFG) is entirely benevolent.  He also catches dreams, which he bottles and blows into the bedrooms and minds of sleeping children.  (He was on his nocturnal rounds when Sophie saw him.)  Because, unlike other giants, he won’t eat human flesh, the BFG subsists on a diet of a vile-smelling vegetable called snozzcumber.  The ‘friendly’ part of BFG subverts gigantic stereotyping.  His nickname is Runt.  He’s a skinny, plucky underdog beside other gargantuan denizens of Giant Country.  It’s late in the day to ask this question – decades after Roald Dahl’s The BFG was first published and became a children’s favourite – but why isn’t he the Small Friendly Giant?

    When he deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Bridge of Spies earlier this year, Mark Rylance began his acceptance speech with the following:

    ‘I’ve always … just adored stories.  … So for me to have the chance to work with, I think, one of the greatest storytellers of our time, Steven Spielberg, has just been such an honour …’

    This description of Spielberg is fair enough; Roald Dahl is widely regarded as another great storyteller; the coming together of the two might seem a match made in heaven.  Yet the screen version of The BFG, with Rylance in the title role, is underwhelming.   There are some amazing visual effects – at least, I suppose they’re amazing but I take them for granted.  (Maybe I shouldn’t but that’s always been the way with movies able to perform how-did-they-do-that magic tricks.)  The film is a two-hander – Runt and Sophie – much of the time and the events in Giant Country are just not that interesting.  The big unfriendly giants – I’ll call them BUGs – are ugly and clumsy rather than scary.  (They got on my nerves rather as the velociraptors in Jurassic Park did.)  At the end of an early set-piece confrontation between Runt and the BUGs, John Williams’ score supplies a humorous flourish that echoes the comical anti-climax of cartoonish fights you’ve seen in plenty of other family movies.  The effect of the music here, though, is to underline the anti-climactic quality of the sequence as a whole.  It’s only when the Queen gets involved in the story that things liven up:  the BFG’s visit to Buckingham Palace enables his collision with the real world (strange as it sounds to describe palace life as the real world), including a literal collision with a Louis Quinze chandelier.  The menu for a breakfast fit for a Queen, a giant and a child with eyes bigger than her stomach is fun; so are the corgis, within their CGI limits.  Runt brings the monarch a gift of his favoured drink, frobscottle; it’s a vivid green, it has downward bubbles and it supplies The BFG’s comic highlight.  You get a sense – not least from the BUGs’ names:  the Fleshlumpeater, the Gizzardgulper, the Meatdripper, and so on – that Roald Dahl has more appetite for blood, guts and bodily functions than the man who made this film.   Spielberg is so polite that the pyrotechnical after-effects of fart-inducing frobscottle come as a relief – a letting off of steam in more ways than one.

    I wasn’t clear until late in the film when the story was taking place.  The opening shots suggest more or less modern London until the camera homes in on an orphanage – at the heart of the city, in a lamplit, cobbled street.  The place connotes not only London past but also Spielberg past.  (Orphanhood – or, at least, separation from parents – is a recurring condition of his child protagonists.)  The score also sounds like John Williams dredging up what he’s written before.  In much of what follows – even before Sophie’s taken to Giant Country – The BFG seems to be taking place in a movie-based once-upon-a-time rather than in an actual past, present or future.  (I recall getting a similar impression from the only Harry Potter film that I’ve seen.)  Once the Queen enters the fray, however, we’re jolted into a different environment – a capital city that is both picture-postcard London and the heart of an absolute monarchy.  When she learns that children have been mysteriously disappearing, Her Majesty gets on the phone – first to ‘Boris’ (or that’s what I heard), then to Nancy and Ronnie.  It’s the references to the Reagans – and memories of Margaret Thatcher’s special special relationship with them – that make the Queen’s hands-on leadership particularly weird.  I still can’t work out who ‘Boris’ is – the 1980s may be right for glasnost and perestroika but they’re too early for a hotline to Yeltsin, let alone to the now ex-Mayor of London.  Roald Dahl’s book was published in 1982 and the orphanage is the key location in that too.  Yet I came out of The BFG feeling the film had manipulated the story’s setting in a cheesy and confusing way.

    The one special effect that did register strongly with me was the CGI-isation of Mark Rylance’s Runt, which captures both the eccentric shape of the Quentin Blake illustrations for Dahl’s book and the blend of benignity and regret (and the laugh lines around the eyes) in Rylance’s truly beautiful face.  When he speaks, the BFG is a sort of onomatopoeic malapropist: his vernacular verges on the tiresome (as do the tellings off from Sophie when he gets words wrong) but Rylance’s line readings, delivered in a West Country accent, are consistently inventive and enjoyable.  He brings great warmth and a genuine sense of weariness to the character.  As Sophie, Ruby Barnhill’s ordinary looks are appealing and she’s a precociously competent actress.  (She was just eleven when the film was in production.)  That competence is a mixed blessing.  Much of what Barnhill does is very definitely acted – you don’t believe in the truth of some of the emotions she expresses.  It would have been very difficult to avoid this problem, though: the girl playing Sophie has a lot to do – the role could hardly have been safely entrusted to a kid whose artless appeal was expected to see them through.  Ruby Barnhill is likeable enough and she has some strong moments – as when Sophie insists she’s not scared but evidently is.  Penelope Wilton’s playing of the Queen is admirably well judged and successful.   As her butler, Rafe Spall struggles conscientiously to conceal the fact that he could do much more than he’s being asked to do.  This is all the more true of Rebecca Hall, bizarrely cast as Mary, the Queen’s fragrantly innocuous maid.   The BUGs are Jemaine Clement, Bill Hader, Michael David Adamthwaite, Daniel Bacon, Chris Gibbs, Adam Godley, Jonathan Holmes, Paul Moniz de Sa and Ólafur Ólafsson.  The names of these creatures are their most entertaining feature by some way.

    In the climax to the story, military effort and magic combine oddly to win the day.  The Queen dispatches soldiers to Giant Country; the BFG feeds a nightmare to the BUGs so that they’ll feel remorse; the Fleshlumpeater alone resists this; he’s airlifted away by an army helicopter.  The carnivorous giants are exiled to a life of snozzcumber on a remote island while Runt returns to Giant Country to cultiver son jardin of newly-discovered vegetables.  Sophie ends up living at Buckingham Palace and Mary appears to be her mother.  This made me wonder if what we’d seen had all been Sophie’s dream but this can’t be right:  she remains in communication with the BFG whenever she feels the need.  The ending feels, in short, a bit of a mess.  Early on, when Sophie starts her night watch at the orphanage (which is strangely underpopulated), she puts an eiderdown round her to keep warm; it forms a kind of train and the orphanage cat hitches a lift on it.  This charming visual detail is one of many but they’re not enough.  The action isn’t exciting; the catching and transmission of dreams doesn’t turn out to be the emotionally powerful theme it promises to be.  (The screenplay was by Melissa Mathison, who also wrote The Black Stallion and ET and who died late last year.)  The BFG‘s certificate warns of ‘mild threat’.  This is an overstatement.

    1 August 2016

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