Monthly Archives: June 2017

  • The Levelling

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hope Dickson Leach (2016)

    C S Lewis complained of the opening lines of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that ‘For twenty years I’ve stared my level best to see if evening – any evening – would suggest a patient etherised upon a table; in vain’.   The Levelling might not have opened Lewis’s eyes to the merits of T S Eliot’s simile but the Somerset skies in the writer-director Hope Dickson Leach’s first full-length film  have a paralysed look – an ironic consequence of the turbulent weather which brought floods to the Somerset Levels in early 2014.  The sense of paralysis reflects the hopeless economic plight of the Cattos, the local farming family at the centre of The Levelling; and the flooding that has ruined cow pasture isn’t the only threat to their livelihood.  The skyscape is also an expression of numbing bereavement – and the film’s title refers to death as well as geography.

    Clover Catto (Ellie Kendrick), a veterinary medicine student who now lives away from home, returns to the farm after receiving the shocking news of her brother Harry’s sudden death.  It seems that Clover and Harry’s mother died some time ago, and Clover gets on badly with their father Aubrey (David Troughton).  For most of the film, she calls him by his forename rather than dad.  (By coincidence, this also brings C S Lewis to mind:  Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Trader calls his parents Harold and Alberta, though this is less an indication of emotional estrangement than an example of pernicious (to Lewis) progressivism.)  Clover learns that Harry, who was in the process of taking over the running of the farm from Aubrey, shot himself – after getting drunk at a party at the farm and engaging, with other young men there, in some kind of firewalking ritual.  Her brother’s friend James (Jack Holden), who also participated, describes these events to Clover.  James also tells her that Harry was seen arguing heatedly with Aubrey shortly before he died.  The Levelling becomes a whydunnit, as well as an exploration of the hostility between Clover and her father.

    The film begins with shots of the nighttime firewalking.  (These are the audience’s only glimpses of Harry (Joe Blakemore).)  The combination of darkness, flickering lights and bellowing noise in this preface is in stark contrast to the look and sound of virtually all that follows.  Her limited budget hasn’t prevented Hope Dickson Leach, with the help of her cinematographer Nanu Segal and production designer Sarah Finlay, from creating sustained atmosphere.  The muddy dilapidation of the farm and the bleak landscape beyond it are eloquent.  It would be hard to argue that The Levelling doesn’t succeed in doing what it sets out to do.  Yet it’s determinedly monotonous and, even allowing for the Cattos’ unhappy situation, excessively miserable.  It’s a piece whose strength rests on a shaky assumption that plenty of people seem nevertheless prepared to accept:  that relentless gloom is tantamount to depth.

    here is one unpredictable element.  It seems increasingly likely that the father will follow his son’s example and shoot himself:  the audience shares Clover’s repeated, anxious alertness to this probability.  In the event, Aubrey survives but the final scene turns out predictable in other ways.  Hearing gunshot, Clover runs to a field to find Aubrey culling his cattle one by one.  There’s a sudden change in the weather, meteorological and emotional.  The lowering, static heavens open; the girl desperately cries out ‘Daddy, Daddy!’  She wrests the gun from Aubrey.  They embrace and sink together to the ground, muddying the best clothes they’d put on for Harry’s funeral.  The acting of Ellie Kendrick (so good in the title role in the BBC adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank back in 2009) reflects the limitations of the film as a whole.  Kendrick holds attention, though; what’s more, the camera doesn’t catch her doing anything false, however close it moves in on Clover.  David Troughton is excellent.  He’s not only remarkably nuanced but brings humour to the character of Aubrey.  That’s a quality otherwise absent from Hope Dickson Leach’s accomplished debut feature.

     

    7 June 2017

  • My Life as a Courgette

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ma vie de Courgette

    Claude Barras (2016)

    It takes a little time to get used to the combination of sight and sound in the Swiss director Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette.  In this stop-motion animation feature (though it runs only just over an hour), the dramatis personae have disproportionately large heads and extreme exophthalmia yet they’re voiced realistically.  On arrival at the orphanage to which he’s sent, the protagonist explains that he prefers to be called by the nickname Courgette.  Another kid, Simon, jokes ‘More like Potato, with that head’; in fact, Courgette’s bonce is more an egg couchant.  A remarkable thing about Barras’s award-winning film is how emotionally expressive the characters’ faces, dominated by their ping-pong-ball eyes, turn out to be.

    The young hero’s real name is Icare, the high-flying/plummeting connotations of which echo in various ways.  Courgette got his nickname from his mother who, after her husband left her for another woman, became a hopeless alcoholic.  One day, as she comes after him in a drunken fury, her son accidentally pushes her downstairs.  She dies in the fall.   Courgette’s mementos of his parents include one of his mother’s empty beer cans and the homemade kite that he flies, on which the boy depicts his absent father as a superhero.  The real superhero in Courgette’s life turns out to be the kindly policeman Raymond, who takes a deposition from him in the aftermath of his mother’s death, continues to visit him in the orphanage and eventually becomes a foster parent to both Courgette and his soulmate-girlfriend Camille.  At the end of the film, Courgette replaces the image on his kite with a group photograph of the other kids in the orphanage.

    One effect of the design is to make the children (eccentric) emblems of innocence and vulnerability even though their actual age is a significant element in the denouement.  Courgette and Simon become good friends.  The latter’s first reaction to the news that Courgette and Camille are going to live with Raymond is angry.  Simon recognises nevertheless that the pair must go with Raymond, pointing out to Courgette that kids as old as they are rarely get such an opportunity.  (Worth noting that the source material, the 2002 novel Autobiographie d’une Courgette by Gilles Paris, was previously adapted for the screen as a live-action French TV film in 2007, with the ambiguous title C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand.)  Plenty of what the kids do and say, however, makes it clear they’re far from infants.  The sharp, slangy dialogue by Céline Sciamma, the writer-director of Girlhood (2014), does an invaluable job of giving the film a more general pungency, which prevents Barras’s fable from drifting into delicate sentimentality.

    The main voices are supplied by Gaspard Schlatter (Courgette), Sixtine Murat (Camille), Paulin Jaccound (Simon) and Michel Vuillermoz (Raymond).  Vuillermoz’s excellent line readings and the shape of Raymond’s head combine to make him perhaps the most substantially individual character in the story.  The appealing music is by Sophie Hunger.

    6 June 2017

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