Monthly Archives: February 2018

  • The Banishment

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Izgnanie

    Andrey Zvyagintsev (2007)

    A pleasant country landscape – blue sky, no people; the only sound is birdsong.  Then a car comes into shot and soon becomes the centre of attention.  During its journey, the sonic and visual atmospheres darken.  Mechanical noise (the car engine, a passing train) is increasingly in evidence.  By the time the car reaches its destination, an apartment in an urban street, it’s nightfall and pouring with rain, and an ominous low throb dominates the soundtrack.  That noise calls to mind the opening of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first feature The Return (2003) and like Loveless, his latest, The Banishment turns out to be morally censorious, though Zvyagintsev’s attitude towards his characters is less hostile and dismissive in this earlier work.  The second of his five features to date, The Banishment is the only one with an adapted rather than an original screenplay:  the source material is a 1953 novel, The Laughing Matter, by the Armenian-American William Saroyan.  The screenplay is by Artyom Melkumian and Oleg Negin.

    The story, relocated to present-day Russia, centres on the marriage of Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko) and Vera (Maria Bonnevie).  While they and their two children are on holiday in the country, in the house that Alex grew up in, Vera tells her husband that she’s pregnant.  The couple’s relationship isn’t good and Alex assumes the baby isn’t his.  While driving to meet his elder brother Mark (Aleksandr Baluev), Alex decides, on the strength of a remark made by his son Kir (Maksim Shibayev), that Vera has been having an affair with, and made pregnant by, his friend Robert (Dmitri Ulyanov).   Alex insists to Vera that the only way their marriage can be saved is by her having an abortion.  With Mark’s help, he arranges for this to be carried out while Kir and his sister Eva (Katya Kulkina) are staying with the children of friends of Alex and Vera.   Shortly after the abortionist has left, Alex finds his wife unconscious.  Mark summons another doctor, Viktor (Igor Sergeev), but Vera dies shortly afterwards.  Viktor tells Mark that he suspects that, by taking all the pain relief medication the abortionist left with her, she has committed suicide.  Viktor also finds at Vera’s bedside, and shows to Mark, a copy of a form that confirms her pregnancy test results, with a note she has written on the back of the form.  Mark, who doesn’t disclose these things to Alex, takes charge of hurriedly organising Vera’s funeral but suffers a heart attack.  Insisting against Viktor’s advice on attending, Mark dies on the return from the funeral.  Alex drives back to the city (a virtual reprise of Mark’s journey, which began the film) to take revenge on Robert.  Just before doing so, he discovers in his car’s glove compartment, which also contains the gun he means to use, the pregnancy test form and Vera’s note.  This makes clear that Alex was the father of the child she was expecting.  An extended (awkward) flashback describes Robert’s visits to the family apartment, including the visit made in Alex’s absence, that Kir mentioned.  The flashback reveals that Vera attempted suicide with a drugs overdose; that Robert saved her life; and that she confided in him that she felt the child inside her wasn’t really hers and Alex’s because their relationship had become so limited.

    The slow-paced narrative and deliberate camera movement – especially the repeated fixation on natural world images – seem designed to convey the gravity of The Banishment’s moral discourse and to make clear that this is the tragedy of more than a single family.   Improbable bits of plotting – such as the timing of Alex’s discovery of Vera’s note – reinforce, whether intentionally or not, a sense that Zvyagintsev is interested more in metaphor than in realism.  So too do the characters’ sketchy backgrounds.  Mark and Alex appear to be professional criminals – at the start, Mark arrives at his brother’s apartment with a gunshot wound to his arm and instructs Alex to remove the bullet – but the nature of their criminal activities remains unclear.  In Zvyagintsev’s treatment of failure of communication within a marriage, the theme’s symbolic force eclipses realistic probability.  Alex admits to Vera at one point that he’s afraid to talk with her but feels nevertheless that they should talk.  It’s an opportunity for Vera to express her anxieties about how little they say to each other and why she can’t therefore bring herself to feel that the baby she’s carrying is theirs – but she stays silent.

    The Banishment is absorbing but opaque:  if it’s a critique of Putin’s Russia, it’s a good deal less explicit in this respect than Loveless (or Leviathan).   What the viewer is meant to make of the apparently positive elements in the film is among its puzzling aspects.  When Alex’s and Vera’s children go to stay with the other family, there’s a shot of the five kids, quietly absorbed and working together on what looks like a thousands-of-pieces jigsaw with a religious art subject.   (They’re very close to completing it too.)  At bedtime, one of the other couple’s children, guided by her mother, reads from 1 Corinthians 13 (‘If I … but do not have love, I am nothing …’).  In contrast, Mark, when Alex seeks his advice on what he should do if Vera is pregnant by another man, assures his brother that whatever he chooses to do, whether it’s accepting the situation or killing Vera, will be the right thing to do.  At the very end of the film, Alex – played powerfully but with fine control by Konstantin Lavronenko (also the father in The Return) – sits outdoors in the countryside, reflecting on what has happened.  The camera moves to the last of the cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s impressive painterly compositions – a field of reaping peasants, who deliver a traditional chant while they work.  There is religious choral music over the closing credits.  (The original music for the film is by Andrey Dergachyov but the soundtrack also includes some Arvo Pärt.)  Hard as it is to believe that Andrey Zvyagintsev’s point of view is so simplistic, the effect of all this is to suggest that Russian life was better in the old days.

    3 February 2018

  • Eyes of Laura Mars

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Irving Kershner (1978)

    After a morning in the ophthalmology clinic, I decided to spend the afternoon watching Eyes of Laura Mars on television – better than doing these things the other way round.  I’d seen Irving Kershner’s thriller, in which a serial killer stabs his victims through the eyes, once before (decades ago).  I don’t think it’s only because I remembered the murderer’s identity that I found the film feeble as a whodunit.  It was worth a return visit for other reasons, though.

    Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a high-profile New York fashion photographer.  Her provocative, kinky images – typically of young women undressed and posed as victims of violence – are increasingly notorious, and reviled by feminists.  (The work of Helmut Newton was the real-life inspiration for Laura’s work and Newton actually provided photographs used in the film.)   A collection of her work, ‘Eyes of Mars’, is being published and publicised as the killings of women close or known to Laura begin.  John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the detective leading the investigation into these crimes, shocks Laura when he shows her police photos of other recent murder victims, whose attitudes in death echo her own images.  Laura also experiences veridical visions of her friends’ and associates’ murders, though not of who is committing them.  Faye Dunaway’s trademarks – her mask-like beauty and high-strung, breathy neuroticism – serve her well, if repetitiously.  The bits of her performance I liked best were the fashion shoots, where Laura is in charge:  it’s unusual to see Dunaway in zippy control of a situation.  Her playing of Laura’s terrified reactions to her visions, which never amount to more than a spooky device, is less interesting.

    There’s a distinct shortage of suspects.  The culprit surely can’t be the weak character of Laura’s feckless ex-husband Michael (Raúl Juliá):  though Laura, for a while at least, seems unsure if she still ‘has feelings’ for Michael, it’s hard to believe she ever did.  It can’t be her scuzzy, ex-con driver Tommy (Brad Dourif), whose conspicuously furtive behaviour has to be a red herring.  It can’t be Laura’s agent, Donald Phelps (René Auberjonois), who’s openly gay and therefore (this is the 1970s) a figure of fun – until he joins the list of victims.   (Donald’s in drag at the time and we seem meant to think the killer takes him for a woman although René Auberjonois is as obviously en travesti as Dick Emery, doing ooh-you-are-awful Mandy, was walking away from camera.)  The killer must be John Neville.  Laura first meets him at an exhibition of her work, which Neville dismisses – to Laura, apparently unaware of who she is – as ‘sad’.  In Laura’s extra-sensory perception of the second murder, an Alsatian dog barks at the approaching killer on a staircase.  She and Neville visit the site of the crime after the fact; the Alsatian kicks up exactly the same fuss at seeing the detective.  Laura ignores this.  She and Neville fall in love and have an affair.

    The cop has to be the killer because the film, with a screenplay by John Carpenter and David Zelag Goodman, is all about Laura and John Neville is the wanted man in her life.    Besides, Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is the only one in the film, apart from Dunaway’s, worth attention.  With his irregular good looks and ability to be at once sinister and soulful, Jones makes John Neville intriguing and sense (almost) of the split personality that’s finally revealed to explain (1) his crimes and (2) how he’s got into a relationship with Laura.  The film’s themes are seeing and not seeing:  second sight, love-is-blindness, the gouging of the victims’ eyes, voyeurism.  If Laura Mars’s camera is voyeuristic so is that of Irvin Kershner and his cinematographer, Victor J Kemper.  If the people who look at Laura’s photographs are peeping Toms, so are the film’s viewers.  Making the audience aware of, and uncomfortable with, this complicity is a neat idea but somewhat diluted by the killer’s personality.  It’s as if only someone as crazed by childhood trauma and mental illness as John Neville turns out to be could seriously take exception to the eroticisation and/or glorification of violence reflected in Laura’s images.

    New York City has a mostly bleak and grungy look here – a world away from the cityscapes of nearly contemporary films as different as Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever.  There’s an exciting, well-edited chase sequence – on foot – through the streets.  (Michael Kahn cut the picture, shortly after his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg, on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The film was produced by (among others) Jon Peters, immediately after A Star Is Born.   With that abomination still in my head from the previous week’s viewing, it was good to hear Barbra Streisand make an enjoyably impassioned job of singing the power-ballad theme song – ‘Prisoner’ by Karen Lawrence and John DeSautels – over the opening and closing credits of Eyes of Laura Mars.

    2 February 2018

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