Monthly Archives: June 2018

  • The Piano

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jane Campion (1993)

    Jane Campion’s The Piano wears its art on its sleeve.   I saw this celebrated film, set in a New Zealand coastal frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century, on its original release and remember being impressed.  Ahead of seeing it a second time this month, on its twenty-fifth anniversary re-release, I could bring to mind barely a single image, let alone a single human interaction, in it:  watching The Piano again, I began to understand why.  This is an exceptionally accomplished piece of film-making, full of imaginative visual compositions in both outdoor and indoor sequences.  The New Zealand geography – sea, trees, vegetation, mud – is wonderfully photographed and lit by Stuart Dryburgh.  The physical attitudes of the heroine Ada (Holly Hunter) seated at the piano, the movement of the Victorian clothes, the contrasting tones and textures of the bodies of Ada and her lover George Baines (Harvey Keitel) during sex – all these are finely realised.  Yet Campion’s vision is so thoroughly preconceived that it prevents you from seeing anything more than she means you to see.  She limits your engagement with the film.

    The most dynamic of several scenes in which Ada’s ineffectual husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) tries and fails to assert what he considers his conjugal rights takes place in woodland:  as Ada struggles to escape, Stewart grasps at her dress, thereby exposing the metal structure beneath her hoop skirt.  These struts and the tangle of branches on the woodland floor impeding her progress combine to illustrate the severe constraints on Ada’s womanly freedom.  Message received and understood.  Later on, the nearly crazed Stewart takes an axe to the index finger of his wife’s right hand, a punishment for her breaking a promise to end contact with Baines.  The maimed Ada stumbles outside and almost faints:  she seems to be clinging on to consciousness in order to achieve a visually remarkable shape as her body eventually collapses onto boggy ground.  There are many moments like this in The Piano, thought-provoking only to the extent that you think, ‘Wow:  that took a lot of technique’.

    A Scot, apparently in her early thirties, Ada is sold by her father into marriage with Stewart, a frontiersman.   She makes the long sea voyage to New Zealand with her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and their possessions, most notably Ada’s relentlessly symbolic piano – her chief means of self-expression.  Ada has been mute since the age of six, although no one, including her, knows why.  She believed she could communicate without words with the man who fathered Flora; he ‘became frightened and stopped listening’, and disappeared.  Ada uses sign language and has taught it to her daughter, who acts as her interpreter.  The woman lacking a voice is a potent metaphor even if, in this case, it creates a distance between Ada and other women, as well as between her and men.  Jane Campion, who also wrote the screenplay of The Piano, treats the idea as seriously as Guillermo del Toro does shallowly in The Shape of Water.  She interweaves her feminist and colonial vs indigenous culture-clash themes resourcefully in a Christmas pageant sequence, where Maori audience members, uncomprehending and angered by what they’re seeing on the stage, interrupt a production of ‘Bluebeard’.

    For anyone who, like me, had enjoyed listening to as well as watching her in Raising Arizona and Broadcast News (both 1987), a silent Holly Hunter seemed to mean an inevitable deprivation.  There are positive and negative reasons why it turned out not to be so.   Hunter gives a display of formidable technical control.  In the brief voiceovers (Ada explains this is her ‘mind’s voice’) at the beginning and end of the film, her Scottish accent sounds a bit silly.   The ten-year-old Anna Paquin is increasingly powerful as Flora.   Both main men are excellent too, in spite of the film’s starkly contrasting attitude towards them.  George Baines, an ex-sailor turned forester, is exempt from chauvinist and colonialist criticism:  he’s what Ada desires and has adopted Maori customs, including tattooing his face.   Harvey Keitel, as emotionally needy as he’s physically imposing in the role, gives one of his most nuanced performances.  Alisdair Stewart is a desperately earnest figure of fun yet Sam Neill makes him sympathetically vulnerable, at least until Stewart and his axe do the indefensible.  The film won, among many other prizes, three Academy Awards – for Best Actress, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay.  Why Michael Nyman’s (now famous) score wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar is a mystery.  If it wasn’t for Nyman’s beautiful music, The Piano might put you off the piano for life.  The film is still widely regarded as Jane Campion’s masterpiece.  I prefer The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and, especially, Bright Star (2009).

    15 June 2018

  • The Hitch-Hiker

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ida Lupino (1953)

    Ida Lupino was the only woman director in 1950s Hollywood and her early features, according to their IMDB synopses, all have young female protagonists.  In Not Wanted (1949), on which Lupino’s work behind the camera wasn’t credited, ‘a beautiful but unsophisticated girl is seduced by a worldly piano player and gives up her out-of-wedlock baby… her guilt compels her to kidnap another child’.  Never Fear (1950) is the story of ‘A dancer who has just gotten engaged to her partner and choreographer and is about to embark on a major career is devastated to learn that she has contracted polio’.  The same year’s Outrage is about ‘A young woman who has just become engaged [and] has her life completely shattered when she is raped while on her way home from work’.  The heroine of Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) is ‘Tennis prodigy Florence Farley … torn between romance and her mother’s ambitions’.  The Hitch-Hiker is a very different matter.  Not only is there hardly a woman in sight (you scroll a long way down the IMDB cast list before you get to June Dinneen as ‘Waitress (uncredited)’).  Lupino also ventures into traditionally macho cinematic territory – film noir with, in terms of the geographical setting, a Western flavour.

    The plot of this 71-minute black-and-white thriller is straightforward.  A psychopathic ex-con, Emmett Myers (William Talman), has committed a series of murders as he hitches car rides on his way from Illinois to Mexico via California.  Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) are two friends en route to a fishing trip in San Felipe, on the Gulf of California.  They pick up Myers, who pulls a gun on them.  He orders Collins, the driver, and Bowen, the map-reader, to get him to the town of Santa Rosalia.  That’s where the men’s ordeal of several days and the film ends, as police capture and arrest Myers.   A legend on screen at the start of The Hitch-Hiker explains that this story of ‘a man and a gun and a car’ actually happened and warns it-could-happen-to-you.  The screenplay, by Lupino and her ex-husband Collier Young, is based on the killing spree of Billy Cook in California in 1950.  Lupino and Young supply little background on the three principals beyond basic information about Collins’s and Bowen’s jobs (garage boss and draughtsman respectively) and families (both are married, Bowen has children).  The lean storyline might seem to imply a determination to stick to the facts of the real-life matter though in fact the film doesn’t follow the Cook murders closely[1].  With thirty-seven-year-old William Talman in the role of Myers, Lupino’s killer is also considerably older than was Billy Cook, a drifter in his very early twenties.

    As a prologue, Lupino stages one of Myers’s earlier murders in a severely economical way reducing it to a woman’s screams, a couple of gunshots and a glimpse of the resulting corpses.  The removal of any sense of agency from the killing makes it brutally automatic:  it thus foreshadows Myers’s inhumanity even before we see his face, which first appears as a photograph in a newspaper.  The paucity of detail about him in what follows sustains this disturbing effect:  lack of explanation of his homicidal motives leaves Myers’s viciousness unqualified and William Talman’s off-centre right eye (the effect exaggerated by a false droopy eyelid) intensifies his bogeyman quality.  The sequences inside the hostages’ car are almost at their most claustrophobic when nothing particular is happening – this conveys particularly strongly the protracted horror of Collins’s and Brown’s predicament.  The Hitch-Hiker is less compelling when it’s a more conventional noir.   The crises during the journey to Santa Rosalia, although often tense and well staged, reduce the distinctiveness of the concentrated, unrelenting narrative.  So does Leith Stevens’s standard-issue accompanying music.  This is, almost inevitably for a film of this type and era, an insistent presence.

    The set-up places a heavy responsibility on the three main actors.  They all score high marks for sweating nervously though Talman (best remembered for his TV work as Hamilton Burger, the Los Angeles district attorney defeated every week by Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason) wins this particular contest by some way.   It’s all too believable when, after Myers has forced Collins to swap clothes with him to confuse the police, Collins tells his captor that ‘You stink, Myers – and your clothes stink’.  Edmond O’Brien was already the biggest name of the trio (he went on to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Barefoot Contessa just a year later).  Even allowing that Collins, much more than Bowen, is anxious to fight back against Myers, there are moments when you feel O’Brien’s impatience to break out of the film’s realistic straitjacket – into some proper histrionic action.  Lupino’s intentions are better served by Frank Lovejoy’s comparative ordinariness.

    When the two friends have stopped briefly in Mexicali just before picking up Myers, there’s a shot in which Bowen, in the passenger seat of the car, holds a cigarette in his right hand:  the movement of Frank Lovejoy’s fingers, although perfectly natural, draws your attention.  This resonates in the later scenes, when Bowen is forced by Myers to keep each of his arms in a particular and clearly visible position to ensure he doesn’t cause the gunman trouble.  Not everything takes place within the car:  the unyielding look of the Mexican desert landscape – the main element of the film’s Western tincture – does a good deal to reinforce the no-way-out atmosphere.  The occasional passages of untranslated Spanish, in conversations between Mexican characters, also increase suspense.   It’s a pity that the wooden acting of Jean Del Val as a Mexican police chief and Clark Howat as a US government agent have the opposite effect.  As the final showdown approaches, so does the ‘Ay, caramba!’ exclamation of Jose (Natividad Vacío), recognising Myers’s mug shot on a ‘WANTED’ poster.

    14 June 2018

    [1] According to Wikipedia, Billy Cook ‘murdered a family of five and a traveling salesman, then kidnapped Deputy Sheriff Homer Waldrip from  Blythe, California. Cook ordered his captive to drive into the desert, where he tied Deputy Waldrip up with blanket strips and took his police cruiser, leaving Waldrip to die. Waldrip got loose, however, walked to the main road, and got a ride back to Blythe. Cook was tried, convicted, and received the death penalty. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in California’.

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