Monthly Archives: March 2018

  • Pink String and Sealing Wax

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Hamer (1945)

    The title is striking and ironically apt – a reference to the packaging of items dispensed by a chemist’s shop in Victorian Brighton.  The plot of Pink String and Sealing Wax hinges on something stolen from the shop and therefore not packaged in the usual way.  The something is strychnine.  The thief is the unhappy, adulterous Pearl Bond (Googie Withers), who uses it to kill her drunken, abusive husband Joe (Garry Marsh), the landlord of a local pub.  The chemist’s shop is run by Edward Sutton (Mervyn Johns), whose naïvely romantic son David (Gordon Jackson) has a crush on femme fatale-ish Pearl.  The feelings are unreciprocated but, after cutting her hand on glass following a clash with Joe, Pearl finds herself in the inner sanctum of the pharmacy:  David dresses the wound to guard against tetanus and, eager to impress, explains the contents of a row of jars on a shelf above.  He also remarks on the similarity between lockjaw and strychnine poisoning symptoms.   Pearl’s eyes light up.  While David is briefly out of the room, she gets the jar of strychnine crystals from the shelf and pours some into her handkerchief.

    Adapted by Diana Morgan from a stage play of the same name by Roland Pertwee, this was Robert Hamer’s first solo feature.  He was the uncredited co-director, with Charles Frend, of San Demetrio London (1943) and had also directed the ‘mirror’ segment of Dead of Night, released a few months before Pink String and Sealing Wax.  Googie Withers appeared in ‘The Haunted Mirror’ and she and Hamer went on to work successfully together in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) but this intervening collaboration, although it’s among the better-known Ealing Studios dramas (thanks to that title?), really isn’t very good.  Partly because the Pearl strand of the plot is skinny, the film devotes too much time to the conflicts within the Sutton family, headed by the tyrannical patriarch Edward.  He and his wife (Mary Merrall) have two daughters, Victoria (Jean Ireland) and Peggy (Sally Ann Howes).   Victoria wants to train as a professional singer.  Edward emphatically says no.  Thanks to the resourceful Peggy, Victoria’s singing comes to the attention of Adelina Patti (Margaret Ritchie), when the world-famous soprano is in Brighton for a concert performance.  David Sutton has already incurred his father’s wrath by writing love poems, to Victoria’s friend Mary Truscott, when he’s meant to be studying pharmacy.  It’s the dressing-down that he gets from Edward that drives David to the pub and into Pearl Bond’s dangerous orbit.

    Googie Withers, although occasionally mechanical, has some strong, wordless moments of crisis.  More important, her empathy with Pearl engages audience sympathy for a character who, as an evildoer, must come to a bad end.  Withers gets across the depths of Pearl’s frustration with her life.  Mervyn Johns’s intelligent underdog quality is wrong for the harsh paterfamilias Edward Sutton.  Mary Merrall looks old enough to be his mother, which rather confuses the father vs children scheme.  You’re in no doubt, though, that Johns and Merrall are able actors; Sally Ann Howes is competent too, even if she’s annoying with it.  There are others in the cast who, not unusually for British films of the period, have to be seen – and, especially, heard – to be believed.  You feel sorrier for Victoria when her father tells her she’ll never be a successful singer because it’s obvious that Jean Ireland, who plays her stiffly and uncertainly, could never be a successful actress.  Adelina Patti was born in Madrid of Italian parents and raised in New York yet Margaret Ritchie makes her sound like Joyce Carey’s trying-to-be-posh station buffet manageress in the same year’s Brief Encounter.  (Actually, both Madame Patti and Victoria sound just as gruesome when they’re coloratura singing but at least that’s not down to technical incompetence.)   John Carol is oddly cast as the spiv Dan Powell, supposedly irresistible to women.  This isn’t the finest hour of Garry Marsh, Catherine Lacey (an eccentric barfly) or Pauline Letts (Dan’s lady friend).

    The most nuanced acting comes from Gordon Jackson but the couple of times when he lapses into a Scottish accent are an example of Robert Hamer’s sometimes indifferent direction.  Several scenes just peter out, as if Hamer didn’t know how to shape their ending.  One of the minor puzzles of the plot is how David Sutton doesn’t twig to the coincidence of Joe Bond’s death, apparently from lockjaw, so soon after the conversation in the pharmacy with Pearl.  Threatened with the true cause of death emerging, Pearl tries to pin the crime on David; his father steps in to save the day and, in doing so, drives Pearl to the only way out for her – suicide.  Edward Sutton’s calm, clever intervention is a surprise to the extent that the story is set up to give him his comeuppance.   We’re clearly meant to conclude that his children did get the better of Edward – the final scene announces that David has married Mary Truscott and Victoria become a singing star – but we’re more likely to think pull the other one.  At the start of Pink String and Sealing Wax, Edward Sutton’s expert evidence to a murder trial sealed the fate of another female killer.  At the business end of the film, he shrewdly and nervelessly thwarts the black widow Pearl Bond.  It’s true that in his son’s wedding photograph Edward, like the rest of the family group, is, for a change, smiling – but is he a reformed character or feeling vindicated?  The moral of the story seems to be that father, although he may be an arch-Victorian nightmare, knows best.

    23 March 2018

  • Martyr

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Žrtva

    Mazen Khaled (2017)

    ‘Pushing the boundaries of what is conventionally understood as LGBTQ+ cinema, this is not a gay film in the traditional sense.  Instead, this hypnotic and beautifully filmed study of homosocial behaviours and societal ritual is a bold and quietly erotic meditation on the male body, shot with a distinctly queer gaze.’  [Note on Martyr by Michael Blyth, BFI Flare Festival 2018 brochure]

    My Days of Mercy, which I saw immediately after the Lebanese film Martyr at the Flare Festival, contains several sex scenes with the actresses who play the two main characters undressed.  No one is likely to object to the ‘objectification’ of Ellen Page and Kate Mara in these scenes because the film was made by a woman; that Tali Shalom Ezer is (Wikipedia implies) a gay woman is evidently beside the point.  As Michael Blyth’s programme note above suggests, exposed male bodies are central to the writer-director Mazen Khaled’s Martyr but the ‘distinctly queer gaze’ exempts his film from criticism as voyeuristic or exploitative – unlike other major gay-themed films of recent years like Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) and The Handmaiden (2016).  When is the contemplation of human bodies in cinema potentially (or even inevitably) offensive?   The answer seems to be when the film-maker is male and straight.  The self-righteous application of this double standard is vexing.

    The better news is that Martyr (unlike My Days of Mercy) is a fine piece of work.   The story, set in present-day Beirut, is, in plot terms, very simple.  Hassane (Hamza Mekdad) is a young man living at home with his parents (Carol Abboud and Rabi el Zaher).  The family isn’t well off, the parents are pushing their son to get a job but Hassane is oppressed by what he sees as the very limited prospects for work and his future.  He tells his mother he’ll look for employment tomorrow, preferring to spend today sunbathing and swimming with his friends – male contemporaries from the neighbourhood.  A high balustrade divides the rocky shore of the Beirut waterfront from the promenade above.  Diving from the balustrade is a popular pastime and spectator sport.  Hassane dives there and, in a freak accident, drowns.  His friends recover his body and take it back to his home.  As his mother and other women gather there to mourn, Hassane’s three friends (Mostafa Fahs, Hady Bou Ayash and Rachad Nassereddine) prepare his corpse for burial.  The ritual is dictated, and the film’s title explained, by Islamic law, according to which a person who dies by drowning is a martyr.

    The principal focus throughout is Hassane’s body and its interactions with water.  Mazen Khaled gives these undivided attention in sequences both imaginary and actual.  In a surrealistic prologue and postscript, Hassane’s naked body is viewed underwater from various angles.  When he takes a shower at home, his father’s voice interrupts, as well as Hassane’s masturbation, the camera’s concentration on it.  As his corpse is washed in the purification ritual before being placed in a white burial shroud, Khaled closes in, as he often did in the prologue, on particular areas of Hassane’s body but more discreetly now, as the dead man’s friends take care to keep his private parts covered.  The earlier scenes involving Hassane and one or more of these friends develop a leitmotif of physical proximity and easy intimacy, in which the homosocial verges on the homoerotic – when two of the young men are together on a motor cycle, in the group’s horseplay in the sea, as they sit talking in the sun together.  These contacts acquire a tragic resonance in the painfully strenuous efforts of his companions to retrieve Hassane’s body from the sea and carry it back up over the balustrade.

    Mazen Khaled and his cinematographers, Rachelle Noja and Talal Khoury, have created an impressive collection of images – imaginatively composed and textured, in some cases synergistic.  The moments in which bodies meet water, or are submerged in it, are, by turns, contemplative, ecstatic and explosive.  Although Khaled is working out of a different cultural tradition, the shots of Hassane being taken from the waterfront and, on his return home, embraced by his mother naturally suggest to European eyes paintings of Christ’s descent from the Cross and the pieta.  What makes Martyr more than a visual essay, and charges the film dramatically, is the sense that Hassane’s death, as well as being a shocking mishap, makes psychological sense.  Although it’s not definitely an act of suicide, Hassane can see no future for himself.  As Khaled explains in the ‘Director’s notes’ included in the BFI handout:

    ‘[On the waterfront balustrade in Beirut], two young men died performing trying to please a crowd.  … It hit me that the balustrade is the borderline of the city.  Those young divers are literally jumping out of society into their freedom.  From talking with some of them, I understood that they all come from underprivileged communities in poor neighbourhoods … It struck me that the sea is their liberty, their escape. …’

    Khaled gives this idea individual force in a speech, passionately delivered by Hamza Mekdad, in which Hassane laments – to Mhammad, the closest of his friends – his feelings of hopeless suffocation.   This is just before the fatal dive.

    Hassane drowns about halfway through the film (which runs only 84 minutes).   The startling complexity of his death overshadows most of what comes next.  This, in combination with the primacy of images in Martyr, tends to overshadow the other characters’ reactions to the accident – even though Mostafa Fahs does an excellent job of showing Mhammad’s earlier divided feelings coalescing into bereft guilt.   Khaled may go too far in  aestheticisation when, shortly after the drowning, he flashes on screen a montage of stills summarising what will follow in the narrative and in incorporating sequences that are like stage re-enactments of Hassane’s relationship with his mother and with Mhammad (although the latter – a virtual pas de deux – is particularly lovely).  Even so, Martyr is intriguing and persuasive – the best film I can remember seeing at recent Flare (or forerunner) festivals.

    22 March 2018

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