Monthly Archives: June 2018

  • Nothing Like a Dame

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roger Michell (2018)

    It was only after we’d watched Nothing Like a Dame on BBC2 that I discovered Roger Michell’s documentary had had a limited release in cinemas a few weeks previously.  Not sure why:  this formally unambitious piece – four talking heads plus a good collection of illustrative archive footage – seems perfectly designed for television.  A quartet of acting dames – Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith (alphabetical order) – chat and reminisce about their lives and work.  They express firm views on how to read and not to read Shakespearean verse.  They talk about their late or former husbands.  Michell filmed the interviews over the course of two days at Plowright’s West Sussex home:  the nostalgic texture is enriched by this being the place where she and Laurence Olivier lived for many years.   It makes both practical and a kind of emotional sense that Plowright hosts the event.  At eighty-eight, she’s the best part of five years older than the other three (all born in 1934) and nearly blind.  She also retains a strong, matriarchal quality.

    In other ways, Plowright is not – for this viewer anyway – the senior figure at the gathering.  She makes a light-hearted remark to the effect that her work opportunities these days are constrained by her visual disability and by whether Dench has already snapped up the cameo role in question (though the latter is also now struggling with failing eyesight).   How the audience rate the four actresses will likely depend on how much film, TV and theatre they’ve seen and in what proportions.  Because my primary interest has for so long been cinema, I find it hard to see Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins in the same league as Maggie Smith, let alone Judi Dench.  Atkins may be a naturally modest character or perhaps Michell left more of her on the cutting room floor:  whatever the reason(s), she comes across as a supporting player in this exclusive company.   When Dench and Smith are sitting on a two-seater sofa together, it reinforces the sense that they’re the leading ladies.

    As not just a Dench fan but a fellow York native (our families lived on opposite sides of the same street, Heworth Green, when I was a young child), I was fascinated by the archive film from the York Mystery Plays of 1951, the first of three appearances she made in these productions before the start of her professional career.  And her reaction to the ageist condescension of a paramedic who treated her recently for a hornet sting on the bum is more than a comic highlight of Michell’s film.  (The paramedic asked, ‘Now, how old are we … and do we have a carer?’  In reply, Dench fulminated, ‘Fuck off!  I’ve just done eight weeks at the Garrick Theatre!’)  The fury is bracing because Nothing Like a Dame, although it’s greatly entertaining, is decidedly melancholy too.  According to the last of a long list of admiring adjectives on the BBC iPlayer web page, the four dames are ‘unbelievably young’, which, in its way, sounds as patronising as did the well-intentioned paramedic.  It’s wide of the mark too.  Maggie Smith, amusing as she often is here, seems particularly oppressed by mortality.  Judi Dench’s expletive undeleted is a welcome instance of rage not against the dying of the light but at the blinkers that prevent people from seeing it shine in old age.

    2 June 2018

  • In the Fade

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aus dem Nichts

    Fatih Akin (2017)

    In Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007), the films that made his name internationally, Fatih Akin’s priority appeared to be to create complex, involving characters.  Particularly in The Edge of Heaven, one of the best films of the noughties, these characters developed from an ethnically charged socio-political context.  The Cut  (2014), which put historical genocide in the foreground, was a change of direction for Akin and a misstep.  Now In the Fade takes a present-day political problem – the growth of neo-Nazism – and tries unsuccessfully to blend it with a character study, as Katja Sekerci (Diane Kruger) reacts to the death of her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) and their five-year-old son Rocco (Rafael Santana) in a nail-bomb attack on Nuri’s business premises in central Hamburg.   The upfront political urgency seems to have impressed the 2017 Cannes Festival jury and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association:  hard otherwise to see why Diane Kruger won the Best Actress prize at Cannes and In the Fade the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.  The film’s crudeness may partly reflect a view on Akin’s part that the state of things is now so bad that nuanced drama must be sacrificed for the sake of taking a firm political stand.  But in artistic terms In the Fade represents a dismaying falling off from the films this writer-director was making a decade or so ago.

    In the Fade is divided into three ‘chapters’ – ‘The Family’, ‘Justice’ and ‘The Sea’.  (The German title translates literally as ‘from nothing’; ‘In the Fade’ is the name of a song by Queens of the Stone Age, whose lead singer, Josh Homme, wrote the score for the film.)   Signs of tension between the issue- and character-driven aspects of the material are evident from an early stage – and this isn’t an enriching tension, merely a failure to integrate the two things.  The harsh recriminations of Katja’s German mother (Karin Neuhäuser) and Turkish mother-in-law (uncredited) in the light of Nuri’s and Rocco’s deaths are perfunctory illustrations of family crisis magnified by racial prejudice.  The questions of the police detective investigating the killings (Hanning Peker) amount to a run-through of the usual suspects.  Could Nuri, a religious agnostic married to a German, have incited the anger of Islamists?  Nuri, who first met Katja when she was a student and he a drug dealer who supplied her with hashish, has served time in prison for drug offences:  could his murder be linked to his criminal past or with the ‘Turkish mafia’?  How about an Eastern European connection?  Katja, rejecting these theories scornfully, knows better:  she’s intuitively certain that ‘Nazis’ are to blame.  Fatih Akin takes a similar attitude, dismissing the other possible culprits as if they’re bogeymen invented by the authorities to deny an inconvenient truth.

    The heroine is in the process of attempting suicide – she’s slit her wrists and submerging in a bath – when her lawyer Danilo Fava (Denis Moschitto) phones to tell her, ‘You were right – it is the Nazis’.  The police have charged André and Edda Möller (Ulrich Brandoff and Hanna Hilsdorf), a young couple with neo-Nazi connections.  The quieter and businesslike elements of the ‘Justice’ section centred on the courtroom are good.  These include Ulrich Tukur’s cameo as André Möller’s father, a witness for the prosecution, and the professional neutrality of Hartmut Loth’s chief judge.  Diane Kruger too is at her most eloquent when Katja – a key witness (she saw Edda Möller with the bicycle that contained the nail bomb) as well as ‘co-plaintiff’ with the state – sits in court containing the violent emotion she’s feeling.  It’s less effective when she physically attacks Edda; weaker still are the histrionic interactions between Danilo, for the prosecution, and the defence lawyer Haberbeck.  Akin allows – perhaps encourages – Johannes Krisch to overdo Haberbeck’s nasty calculation to the extent that he comes over as politically sympathetic with the pair he’s defending:  wouldn’t the awfulness of the situation be conveyed more strongly if the Möllers’ lawyer, like the chief judge, were seen to be just doing his job?   As for the defendants, they sit pale, expressionless and almost zombified until they burst into euphoria when the court acquits them.  The chapter heading, needless to say, turns out to be ironic.

    One of the defence witnesses at the trial is Nikolas Makaris (Yannis Economides), who testifies that the Möllers were staying at his hotel in Greece at the time of the attack and produces names written in the hotel register to support his claim.  Danilo, in response, supplies YouTube evidence of Makaris’s own extreme right-wing political activities.  The chief judge, summing up why he and his colleagues haven’t found the case against the Möllers proved beyond reasonable doubt, doesn’t mention (and understandably so) Makaris’s testimony as a contributing factor.  It therefore doesn’t make much sense that, in the final part of the film, Katja drives to his coastal hotel in an attempt to get the justice that due process has denied her – not, that is, until it turns out the Möllers are hanging out  there too.  It seems that Makaris alone can offer the killers refuge:  this dramatic convenience counterproductively minimises the scale of the neo-Nazi network that Akin wants to expose.

    The film ends with Katja turning suicide bomber, blowing up herself and the Möllers.  A legend on the screen notes the several racist murders carried out in recent years in Germany by the National Socialist Underground party but doesn’t say whether or not those allegedly responsible for these crimes were tried and convicted.   If they were not found guilty and Fatih Akin means primarily to draw attention to a systemic failure of German justice, he makes a bad job of it by resorting to the upstaging melodrama of Katja’s revenge on those who destroyed her happiness.  If the real-life killers are behind bars, his film’s only insight seems to be that aggressive neo-Nazism is a bad thing.  Most of us can agree with that without needing In the Fade to show us the light.

    17 June 2018

Posts navigation