Monthly Archives: July 2018

  • Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ol Parker (2018)

    From one film with an Italian mother title to another – in the space of twenty-four hours, across the million miles from Il sorriso di mia madre to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again …   The director Ol Parker also wrote the screenplay (with a hand from Richard Curtis and Catherine Johnson).  This time, there are two storylines, comprising events occurring before and after those of the first film.  Like The Godfather: Part II, and the points of connection with Coppola’s magnum opus don’t end there:  newcomers to the Mamma Mia! cast include Andy García, still best known for his role in Godfather III.  (The points of connection do end there.)   Mamma Mia! 2 describes (a) how the twenty-something version of the heroine Donna got to know her daughter Sophie’s father(s) and (b) Sophie’s grand re-opening of her mother’s taverna as the Hotel Bella Donna, named not for the poison but in memory of its late founder, who died a year ago.  Donna’s cause of death isn’t explained but plenty of viewers will know it’s that Meryl Streep (nearly) doesn’t do sequels.  For most of the film, Streep’s Donna is just a photograph on the wall.   Otherwise, the gang’s all here – Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård as the father figures, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as Donna’s best friends, Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, Dominic Cooper as her husband.

    In her first scene, Donna’s younger self (Lily James) arrives late for her Oxford University graduation ceremony, where she’s been chosen by her fellow students to give the valedictory address.  This suggests American high school rather than New College, Oxford (the legend on screen is specific about place and time – 1979) and so does the opening ABBA number into which Donna launches.  It’s ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’, which I’ve always found more disturbing, as well as much more vivid, than the Police’s similarly-themed, deadly serious ‘Don’t Stand Too Close to Me’.  The film’s reworking of the song makes it even more risqué (for 1979) by changing the sex of the kissed teacher.  It does so because the Oxford Vice-Chancellor presiding at the ceremony is female (Celia Imrie).  Lily James’s solo soon morphs into the public debut of Donna and the Dynamos, with the student-age versions of Rosie (Alexa Davis) and Tanya (Jessica Keenan-Wynn) joining in – along with, in due course, the VC.  The staging and costuming are almost breathtakingly tasteless.  Celia Imrie’s contribution is especially bizarre, not least (though not only) because an authority figure grooving with the best of them is what you expect at the end of a musical comedy.  It all makes you wonder how far OTT Mamma Mia! 2 is going to go.  In the event, it never again reaches this opening number’s level of loony abandon.

    As a piece of film-making, this follow-up is a good bit less chaotic than its forerunner; as a result, it’s less eccentrically colourful too.  In several cases, the junior versions of the first film’s principals are more accomplished singers and dancers than the originals but this isn’t simply a matter of damning with faint praise:  the younger performers are also less individual.  In the post-Donna part of the story, when Christine Baranski (Tanya) and Julie Walters (Rosie) do ‘Angeleyes’ (with Amanda Seyfried), it’s both funny and a reminder of the hammy zest that’s been missing since early on.  The newbies inevitably lack the richness of association with previous screen roles that their seniors have (and which was one of the main charms of the 2008 Mamma Mia!).  What associations the youngsters do have turn out to be confusing.  Jeremy Irvine – as Sam, the young Pierce Brosnan – not only looks more like a young Colin Firth:  he actually played the Firth character of thirty years ago in The Railway Man.  Sam’s first encounter with Donna involves his calming a frightened horse, which naturally brings to mind Irvine’s biggest role to date, in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.  Hugh Skinner, who does play the young Harry (Firth), is a different kind of problem.  Since Skinner is always and idiosyncratically the same, the idea of him developing into someone else is virtually nonsensical.

    At the graduation ceremony, the Vice-Chancellor tells Donna that she (Donna) is going to do great things – a line that, in a cheesy film, is bound to be an accurate prediction.  Getting to run a taverna on a Greek island can’t place Donna top of the list of high-achieving Oxford alumnae; more likely, the VC foresees that she’ll one day be Meryl Streep.  Lily James has terrific verve and energy, as well as a fine singing voice.  Without being in the least imitative, she anticipates Streep effectively – by suggesting that she too has bags more talent than Mamma Mia! needs.  It’s not James’s fault that the whole of young Donna’s story similarly feels surplus to requirements (even if it’s a model of narrative sophistication beside the hotel-opening part).  It’s not her fault either that, well though she performs all her numbers, she doesn’t get the opportunity that her predecessor in the role of Donna was given and seized, courtesy of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – the point at which Streep’s enthusiastic slumming it in the first film turned into something dramatically considerable.

    After Lily James, the standout young performer is Josh Dylan as Bill, the Stellan Skarsgård-to-be.  It was only when I saw and recognised Dylan’s name in the closing credits that I realised who I’d been watching.  In December 2016, Sally and I saw an enjoyable revival of Sheppey, a Somerset Maugham play, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.  John Ramm was excellent as the title character; several of the supporting cast played two or more parts.   Josh Dylan, who’d graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama only the previous year, had three roles.  I thought him OK in two of these, excellent in the third and, all in all, a young actor to keep an eye on.   Seeing him catapulted from the bijou performing space of the Orange Tree into a big-screen blockbuster, if not quite a Daniel Kaluuya moment (see Get Out), was a funny surprise and pleasure.  Proficient as they are, there’s a sense with Alexa Davis and Jessica Keenan-Wynn that they’re glancing over their shoulder at Julie Walters and Christine Baranski.  Dylan, like Lily James, is independent of his senior alter ego; at the same time, his remarkable relaxedness foreshadows Skarsgård’s presence.  Dylan’s accent is nicely ambiguous: failing to recognise him, I wondered if the young Bill was actually Swedish or British or American.  He moves well too, in his and Lily James’s duet ‘Why Did It Have to Be Me?’

    So how are the familiar faces?  Pierce Brosnan seems rather unhappy.   When the opportunity to reprise ‘SOS’ arises, he chants indecisively for just a few lines, as if nervous of getting the scornful reviews he got (I thought undeservedly) the first time around.  Of course, we realise that the half-heartedness is really broken-heartedness – the song makes Sam think of Donna – but you wonder too if Brosnan is missing Meryl Streep.  The highlight of Stellan Skarsgård’s performance is definitely his brief appearance in heavy prosthetic and padding as Bill’s twin brother.  I was fooled by this and momentarily appalled that Skarsgård had put on so much weight since I last saw him (only a few weeks ago, as a talking head in Filmworker).  I can’t really explain why I felt more warmly towards Colin Firth in this second film – a decade on, familiarity seems to have bred a mild affection.   Time hasn’t diminished Julie Walters’s comedic gusto and invention, or her native believability.  The last quality is almost jarring in the context of something like Mamma Mia!, as you occasionally register that Rosie resembles an actual person.  There’s no danger of that happening with Christine Baranski but her cartoon vamp Tanya is, as before, agreeably assured.  Amanda Seyfried and even Dominic Cooper are more likeable than they were in the first film.   During the last ten years, without hitting stratospheric heights, both have built solid screen careers.  That may partly explain why Seyfried in particular seems less anxious to impress than she was in 2008.  Sophie has several numbers but it’s a pity there aren’t more:  the clarity of Seyfried’s singing voice is lovely.

    The recruitment of Cher, making her first film appearance since Burlesque (2010), has been hailed as the casting coup of Mamma Mia 2.   As Sophie’s estranged grandmother Ruby, she arrives by helicopter from America for the Bella Donna party.  She certainly increases the camp factor but it’s a congealed camp that Cher, seemingly worn out by cosmetic surgeries, embodies.  The movie briefly grinds to a halt around her, the result not of showstopping star presence but of lines delivered slowly and dully.  Her singing of ‘Fernando’ (the name of the Andy García character, an old flame of Ruby’s) is all right but doesn’t have the I’ll-show-these-amateurs panache you might expect.  It was around this point that I was interrupted from peering at my watch by Sally’s urgent whisper, ‘You’ll miss Meryl!’    When I looked up, she’d gone; afterwards, Sally said she’d probably mistaken a distance shot of Lily James in Donna’s trademark dungarees for the missing woman but it was a worrying few minutes.  Eventually, Meryl appears, as the spirit of Donna, at the climactic christening of Sophie’s baby boy.  She and Amanda Seyfried sing ‘My Love, My Life’ together.  Their harmonies are sweet and charming, though Meryl Streep somehow looks more persuasively witchy than she did in Into the Woods.

    The issue of whether there are enough first-rate ABBA numbers to sustain a second film is settled happily and brazenly.  Although the inclusion of ‘Andante, Andante’ (new to me) raises temporary doubts, Ol Parker sensibly decides to reprise several songs from Mamma Mia! 1, including ‘Super Trouper’, a personal favourite.    I was pleased the film played out on this, with all the main characters – past and present – involved.  It might seem unfortunate to give Meryl Streep, as the late Donna, the line ‘The sight of you will prove to me I’m still alive’ but it doesn’t matter.  In this glitzy curtain call, the performers are no longer the people they were meant to be but this time … chiefly … themselves.  The reviews for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again have been much kinder than they were for the first movie.   In plenty of cases, that’s probably less a comment on the relative competence of Ol Parker’s direction and writing than an expression of if-you-can’t-beat-‘em resignation.  Critics in 2008 were able to rubbish Phyllida Lloyd’s picture before it became a huge box-office hit:  just because Mamma Mia! was already a smash on stage didn’t mean it would repeat the trick on screen.  Today, they’re wary of simply deriding a secure commercial phenomenon.  More than one review I’ve read commends the sequel for its greater self-awareness – ie  awareness of its fundamental naffness.  That’s a poor reason for a red tomato rather than a green one[1] but the film is well worth seeing.  The spectacle of an array of gifted people having a good time with enduringly terrific ABBA numbers is still infectious.

    23 July 2018

    [1] At the time of writing, the new film has an 80% ‘fresh’ rating from 177 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  The first Mamma Mia! is 54% fresh from 170 reviews.

  • My Mother’s Smile

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’ora di religione (Il sorriso di mia madre)

    Marco Bellocchio (2002)

    Henry K Miller’s profile in this month’s Sight & Sound stresses Marco Bellocchio’s abiding preoccupations during a film-making career that now spans half a century.  Bellocchio’s main themes, which Miller defines as ‘the performance of normality; the toll taken on those who can’t or won’t achieve it, and the bad faith of those who do’, are ‘all there in his first two films Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China is Near (1967)’.  The lack of change in Bellocchio’s concerns is ‘itself a critique of a culture in stasis’.  My Mother’s Smile supports Miller’s argument.   The hero of this satirical drama is Ernesto Picciafuocco (Sergio Castellito), an artist and a confirmed atheist, who learns with horror that the Vatican is considering his late mother for canonisation.  The persisting tyranny of the Catholic Church and the pathological handcuffs of family are as central to this film as they were to Bellocchio’s mid-1960s work.  The tone, though, is different – bleaker and more coldly angry – except for a couple of elements that suggest a further change of heart:  Bellocchio in his mid-sixties is more anxious than he was in his twenties to find consolations.

    The first and last scenes of My Mother’s Smile both feature Ernesto’s young son Leonardo (Alberto Mondini).   At the start, the boy (he’s perhaps nine or ten – I’m not a good judge of children’s ages) is in the garden at home, watched by his mother Irene (Jacqueline Lustig) through a window.  Leonardo is talking to himself and gesticulating vigorously, ordering an invisible interlocutor to leave him alone.  When Irene comes out to ask what he’s doing, the boy explains that he’s telling God to go away.  Leonardo has recently learned in a religious education class at school that God is everywhere and sees all.  Leonardo hates the knowledge that he’ll never be free of God.   The child’s outburst of anti-theism gets the film off to a strong start yet he never again seems anguished.  Although Leonardo’s parents are separated, he still sees plenty of his father.  In their several conversations about religion, it’s Ernesto who’s troubled by and hostile towards it.  Alberto Mondini plays Leonardo naturally and with a lot of charm and Bellocchio increasingly presents him as a delightful emblem of hope for the future.  In the closing sequence, Ernesto takes Leonardo to school and the boy runs off enthusiastically to join other kids.  His father, in the final shot of My Mother’s Smile, watches him lovingly.

    Leonardo is also responsible for setting in motion the other less pessimistic strand of Bellocchio’s story.  Angered by what his son is being told in religious education classes, Ernesto goes to the school to have words with the teacher concerned.  She is the beautiful Diana Sereni (Chiara Conti) and Ernesto is instantly infatuated with her, though when he mentions her good looks to Leonardo, the boy is amused:  the ugliness of his class’s RE teacher, he tells his father, is a standing joke.  It’s debatable whether there are two different teachers and Ernesto sees the one who doesn’t teach Leonardo, or whether Diana is Ernesto’s fantasy.  Some of his encounters with her certainly have the quality of hallucinations.  In either case, Diana, like Leonardo (and as her surname suggests), does Ernesto good – in sharp contrast to the rest of his family, the Vatican’s intervention in his life, and the synergy of the two.

    Bellocchio builds their malignant combination cleverly.  Ernesto first receives news of the Vatican’s deliberations from an emissary (Bruno Cariello) who is allowed to be sensitive and likeable.  The emissary represents Cardinal Piumini (Maurizio Donadoni):  in Ernesto’s subsequent interview with him Bellocchio gives the cardinal‘s cunning intelligence its due.  The furious antipathy to the Church that Bellocchio shares with his protagonist accumulates gradually, in illustrations of the Vatican’s rituals and exploitation of those who need to believe – or have needs of a different kind.  Ernesto’s mother’s piety was exceptional in the Picciafuocco clan which, like the family in Fists in the Pocket, have seen both economically better days and matricide.  In My Mother’s Smile, the title character has died at the hand of Ernesto’s mentally disturbed brother Egidio (Donato Placido).  The exact circumstances of the killing are as crucial as attestations of the mother’s post-mortem miracle-working in deciding whether canonisation is a possibility.  If she was killed while she was sleeping, she fails the ‘heroic virtue’ criterion and the process can go no further.  If, as other members of the family are suggesting, she died as the result of pleading with Egidio to stop blaspheming, she can be considered a martyr and as a candidate for sainthood.

    Bellocchio scornfully pinpoints the vested interests of Ernesto’s two other brothers (Gigio Alberti and Gianfelice Imparato), their cynically clear-sighted aunt (Piera Degli Esposti) and Leonardo’s mother, who thinks that a saint in the family will help the boy’s prospects in the longer term.  The aunt describes religious belief as an ‘insurance policy on the afterlife’; the family’s virtual cost-benefit analysis of canonisation has a distinctly this-worldly ring.  Ernesto is informed of the process a full three years after it’s begun.  I didn’t understand how the process had reached what the Church people call its second stage if the question of how the mother died hadn’t been resolved but that’s presumably inattention on my part rather than carelessness on Bellocchio’s:  if his plot didn’t stick to the letter of the Vatican law, it would dilute the satirical force of the film.   (I should say that I struggled to maintain the concentration Bellocchio demands of the viewer and to keep up with the dialectical flow – more specifically, the fast-moving subtitles.)

    Sergio Castellito stands out in a capable cast but theophobia and mother-phobia have the starring roles in My Mother’s Smile.  Ernesto remembers the potential saint as a woman lacking in affection, her ‘lethal, indifferent smile of being a mother’ insisting on the gratitude of the children to whom she gave life.  Bellocchio also summons an array of supporting bugbears, ranging from a cultural hangover like swordplay to the artist’s persecution by commercial imperatives.  The swords are innocuous in Leonardo’s fencing lesson, bizarrely dangerous in a dawn duel in which Ernesto gets involved.  He saves his skin thanks to incompetence so evident and despicable that his antiquated royalist opponent Conte Bulla (Toni Bertorelli) decides the younger man just isn’t worth harming.  Ernesto supplements the money he makes from his paintings by illustrating children’s books.   In an early scene, he receives an fax responding to his proposed drawings for an edition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  The publisher angrily demands ‘More children and lots more rats!’   Twice in My Mother’s Smile, at opposite ends of the film, Ernesto in his studio edits an image of a grand building on his computer screen.  I wasn’t sure if the building was specifically the Vatican but there’s no doubt that it stands on pillars of the establishment.  The second time Ernesto edits the image he erases the building entirely.

    22 July 2018

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