Monthly Archives: August 2018

  • Maurice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Ivory (1987)

    The recent success of Call Me by Your Name has given a fillip to the thirtieth anniversary re-release of James Ivory’s Maurice – or, at least, has influenced the publicity for it.  The trailer, which introduces Maurice as the work of ‘the award-winning screenwriter of Call Me by Your Name’, is accompanied by what sounds like the Sufjan Stevens music that featured in Luca Guadagnino’s film.   A similarity of these two gay love stories is that one young man is distraught when the other young man he adores decides to marry a woman.  A major difference is that, whereas in Call Me by Your Name the protagonist’s realisation of his sexual orientation is a bigger deal for him than for anyone else in the cultured 1980s world of the film, the events of Maurice take place in the years immediately before the Great War.  This is a time when the Dean of the Cambridge college where the two principals meet as students and enjoy a passionate platonic friendship, can’t call homosexuality by its name:  the Dean (Barry Foster) prefers to term it, during a classics seminar, ‘the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’.   Later in the story, the title character Maurice Hall (James Wilby) anxiously seeks the confidential advice of a medical doctor who is also an old family friend.  When Maurice tries to explain his ‘condition’, Dr Barry (Denholm Elliott) tells him in no uncertain terms to get the idea out of his head.  To Dr Barry, even the illusion of being homosexual is a filthy aberration.

    Regardless of its literary quality, Maurice is an important book by virtue of its non-appearance during the lifetime of the major novelist who wrote it:  E M Forster ‘resisted publication … because of public and legal attitudes to homosexuality’ (Wikipedia) and the novel first appeared in 1971, the year after his death.  James Ivory couldn’t be expected to transmit this significance on screen but that’s hardly an excuse for his film, from a screenplay Ivory wrote with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, being flaccid and overlong (140 minutes).  (Call Me by Your Name is also too long but at least its languor is essential to its atmosphere.)   Ivory is characteristically so preoccupied with the outward charms of the English middle- and upper-class lives being described that he veils the urgency of Maurice’s predicament in handsome buildings, sets and costumes – without creating any sustained disturbing contrast between these pleasing externals and the moral attitudes that charge the story.  Instead, people are forever giving ironic smiles and sidelong glances, narrowing their gaze, arching an eyebrow – to almost spoof-like effect.  The director, as much as his characters, seems to feel that anything more explicit would be bad manners.  (Dr Barry’s behind-locked-doors outburst is highly exceptional.)  When the main characters are playing in a village cricket match, they even exchange meaningful looks before deciding whether to take another run.  It’s no wonder they get run out.

    In the film’s opening sequence, a schoolmaster (Simon Callow) marches his charges down to a windswept seashore, where he breaks off from the rest of the party to give eleven-year-old, fatherless Maurice (Orlando Wells) an impromptu, supposedly semi-comical sex education lesson.  Simon Callow is fussily theatrical, obvious and dead unfunny.  Perhaps none of the acting in the rest of Maurice is quite as bad (except during Callow’s brief reappearance a couple of screen hours later) but the prologue is a taste of things to come.   The playing is mostly pat, by the book, predictable.  As Clive Durham, the object of Maurice’s affections, Hugh Grant avoids the over-deliberateness of most of the cast but is too much the other way – he tends to surf his lines.  At least, though, his shallowness foreshadows the trajectory of Clive’s post-Cambridge life, in which appearances are paramount (and Grant’s acting is better in the later stages).   The best supporting work comes from Phoebe Nicholls (Clive’s wife) and the two mothers, Judy Parfitt (Mrs Durham) and Billie Whitelaw (Mrs Hall).  The disappointing contributions include Ben Kingsley’s as Lasker-Jones, the hypnotist from whom Maurice seeks a cure for his ‘congenital homosexuality’.  Kingsley gives a visiting royalty performance.   He makes Lasker-Jones too absurdly charismatic, distracting from the hypnotist’s advice to Maurice to emigrate to France or Italy, where same-sex relationships are legal.  (‘England,’ warns Lasker-Jones, ‘has always been disinclined to accept human nature’.)

    Hugh Grant and James Wilby convey well the social difference between (upper-class) Clive and (middle-class) Maurice but I didn’t get from Wilby that Maurice was meant to be (according to Claire Tomalin’s Sight & Sound review in 1987) ‘robust, jolly, with a liking for … sport’.  After being sent down from Cambridge for insubordination to the Dean, Maurice starts work in London as a stockbroker.   I was surprised when he began spending weekends helping at a Christian mission’s boxing gym in the East End – I hadn’t taken him as a plausible hearty.  There’s an effective sequence in the gym changing rooms, as Maurice tactfully watches the working-class boys’ horseplay in the showers.  James Wilby’s more accustomed look, however, is one of staring anguish:  wearing his breaking heart on his sleeve makes Maurice too emotionally conspicuous, especially among the other actors’ coded expressions.  Wilby is better, as is the film as a whole, on the rare occasions when the action is too rapid for emotions to be prepared and telegraphed.  Clive embarks on the path to matrimony after Lord Risley (Mark Tandy), a sub-Wildean Cambridge contemporary, has been arrested and tried for homosexual soliciting.  The trauma of Risley’s trial and prison sentence seems to be at the root of Clive’s being taken ill while having dinner at the Halls’ home, with Maurice, his mother and two sisters (Kitty Aldridge and Helena Michell).  Clive suddenly faints, dragging the tablecloth and half the tableware with him to the floor.  Mrs Hall and Maurice immediately kneel to attend to him.  As Clive starts to come to, Maurice quickly and involuntarily kisses him on the lips.  This is one of the few naturally turbulent sequences in the film.

    In sharp contrast and more typical of Maurice is the first appearance of Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), under-gamekeeper on the Durham family’s country estate.  The camera should catch Scudder casually when he wanders into the frame and picks up something to eat from a table the nobs have just vacated.  Ivory elects to emphasise Scudder in the centre of the shot, announcing the arrival of a major character in the drama to follow.  Each time Maurice and Scudder spot each other subsequently (which is often), Ivory underlines the potential attraction between them.  It’s an age before they have sex:  the preparation has been so lengthy and laboured that it makes little sense when Maurice, fearing blackmail, talks about Scudder’s taking advantage of him on ‘my one night of weakness’.  (Richard Robbins’s ‘passionate’ score is at its most blatant at this point.)  It’s a relief nevertheless once the two men have finally made out and Scudder comes up to London, where their feelings for one another start to be expressed in more various ways.  Rupert Graves needs to work hard to convince as underling rough but the hard work gradually pays off.  (Scudder’s grins are increasingly expressive.)  James Wilby too takes his opportunity to strike new notes.

    E M Forster kept revising Maurice but held to his determination that the hero should have a happy ending.  Ivory follows suit but oversimplifies the moral conclusions.  He shows Clive, having chosen to repress the gay side of his nature, condemned to a life of suffocating misery.   As night falls, Clive closes the shutters on his and his wife’s bedroom window to confirm his marital imprisonment.  Alec (as Maurice now calls him) decides at the eleventh hour not to emigrate to Argentina; he stays in England to be with Maurice.   In the boathouse on Clive’s estate, they embrace, never more to be parted.  (The prolonged meet-me-at-the-boathouse build-up verges on the comical.)  Perhaps James Ivory means the viewer to think that Maurice takes Lasker-Jones’s advice and moves with Alec to the continent – but it’s not only the omission of an explanation of how they will make a life together that’s the problem here[1].  It’s also the facile feelgood tone of the lovers’ boathouse finale – a contradiction of the whole premise of the story that’s gone before.

    31 July 2018

    [1] Forster supplied only a tentative explanation, by way of an epilogue that he later discarded.  According to Wikipedia, ‘The epilogue contains a meeting between Maurice and his sister Kitty some years later.  Alec and Maurice have by now become woodcutters.  It dawns upon Kitty why her brother disappeared. … The epilogue ends with Maurice and Alec in each other’s arms at the end of the day discussing seeing Kitty and resolving that they must move on to avoid detection or a further meeting’.  Maurice’s family simply disappears from the film, some time before the end.

     

  • Apostasy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Kokotajlo (2017)

    Apostasy is formidably disciplined.  The writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo’s first feature is the story of crisis within a Lancashire family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The visual style of the film – the tight camera movement and cutting, the limited palette, shots that lock characters into the frame, lighting that places them in shadow – creates a claustrophobia analogous to the restrictive, rule-bound existence of single mother Ivanna Whitling (Siobhan Finneran) and her daughters, twentyish Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and Alex (Molly Wright), who’s just turned eighteen.  With the help of his cinematographer Adam Scarth and editor Napoleon Stratogiannakis, Kokotajlo pushes the viewer straight into what, to the people on the screen, is normal life and this is nearly the only life to which he allows access throughout.  The viewer’s sense of suffocation derives from the increasingly grim and aberrant religious culture in evidence but one of the fascinations of Apostasy is how close – after a while, how agonisingly close – the characters seem to normality.  Ivanna and her daughters don’t look in the least odd.   They use mobile phones. Ivanna has an office job and  Luisa drives a car.   Ivanna and Alex occasionally treat themselves to a visit to a nail salon.  The local Kingdom Hall, where several crucial scenes take place, is situated close to a motorway.   There are repeated shots of the Hall’s exterior with motorway traffic passing by – quotidian, oblivious.

    Both daughters cause the family crisis, in very different ways.  Although Kokotajlo shows next to nothing of it, Luisa already engages with another world.  She’s doing a further education course:  a scene involving her, two friends and Alex reveals that Luisa hasn’t told anyone at college that she’s a Jehovah’s Witness.  Even this sequence, shot close-up within the car the four are travelling in, is claustrophobic.  One of the passengers, Umar (Aqib Khan), is in fact Luisa’s boyfriend (and a Muslim).  A little while later, she reveals to Ivanna and Alex that she’s pregnant by him.  When her mother insists that Umar will ‘have to start coming to meetings’, Luisa tells her, ‘It’s not going to happen’.  Her transgression leads to Luisa’s expulsion and ostracisation, known within the faith as ‘disfellowshipping’.  Readmittance is possible if a sinner fully admits the error of their ways and convinces elders they genuinely want to return to the fold.  In the meantime, the Witnesses’ rulebook (a very singular interpretation of Christian scripture) more or less forbids contact with the lost sheep – a proscription that applies equally to members of their family.

    While Luisa’s behaviour seems fairly typical of someone rebelling against the constraints of a repressive religious upbringing, Alex’s predicament is very specific to the family’s denomination.  As a baby, she received a blood transfusion from hospital doctors before elders could stop them – a medical intervention that saved her present life and, according to the Jehovah’s Witness creed, imperilled her eternal one – that is, her prospects of physical resurrection in the ‘new system’ which the sect expects to follow imminent Armageddon.  (They don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, scorned by Ivanna as a tenet of ‘airy-fairy’ religions.)  Alex’s neo-natal treatment has left her with an appetite for atonement that feeds her righteous fervour.  Although permitted to take medication for the anaemia from which she still suffers, she feels compelled to let Steven (Robert Emms), a novice elder recently arrived in the community and keen to initiate a courtship with Alex, know about her impurity.   When her blood disorder suddenly worsens and she requires another transfusion, the fearlessly devout Alex refuses and dies.  By having this happen off-screen, Kokotajlo achieves a strong shock effect.

    After much debate, it’s agreed that Luisa may attend her sister’s funeral service.  (Luisa and Umar have split by now.)  Her return to the Kingdom Hall marks the start of a gripping battle of wills and struggle with consciences in Apostasy.   Urged on by Ivanna, Luisa agrees to seek readmission to the fellowship but her growing religious doubts, anger at Alex’s death and resistance to indoctrination are too great.  Once she’s displeased the elders a second time, they’re all the more hardline in discouraging contact between Luisa and her increasingly conflicted mother.  Ivanna’s dilemma continues throughout Luisa’s pregnancy and after the birth of her baby.   ‘They won’t have blood transfusions’ is one of the first things many people would say if asked to describe Jehovah’s Witnesses.  To that extent, Daniel Kokotajlo’s choice of dramatic catalyst may seem obvious but it’s surely right.  The context of his film is unusual, to say the least.  Taking the opportunity to make a drama out of a crucial part of the Witnesses’ dogma makes good sense.

    Kokotajlo, from Manchester, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness until he too became an apostate in his early twenties.  Personal experience no doubt helped him build up the documentary side of Apostasy.   Luisa and Alex have learned Urdu, as part of an initiative to widen the scope of the campaign for converts; ‘serving where the need is great,’ says Steven admiringly.   His relationship with Alex, of which Ivanna thoroughly approves, implies a system of quasi-arranged marriages operating within the community.   Alex and Steven combine their religious activities with part-time, lowly paid jobs – she gardens, he cleans windows – although Steven has ambitions to be a full-time senior elder whose salary will be enough to keep them both.   The procedural detail in the film is consistently interesting but would count for less than it does if Kokotajlo didn’t link it to convincing individual characters.  Although Alex and Steven are still courting when she falls ill, his enthusiasm seems to ebb as he absorbs the implications of her physical and consequent spiritual condition.  Yet Steven perhaps lacks the personal self-confidence, as well the clear moral justification, needed to reject Alex, even though, for a career-minded young elder, she is damaged goods.

    The integrity of the writing and direction is matched by the acting.  Apostasy is welcome and eloquent evidence that the words and deeds of objectionable or inhumane people in a film or play are more startling when the actor concerned resists censure of the character and inhabits it sympathetically.  The immobile face and stiff gait of Siobhan Finneran’s Ivanna dramatise the deadlock between the imperatives of motherhood and religious adherence that are eating at her.  (Ivanna is isolated and unsmiling even within the community of believers.  You want to know more about her backstory but come to accept that withholding that information is part of Kokotajlo’s strategy for placing the audience in the thick of the situation without being able to look outside it.)  Molly Wright’s Alex is pallid yet she has a radiance too:  that may well reflect her religious ardency but its effect is to put her within touching distance of a life beyond the sect and to make her death more tragic.  Sacha Parkinson’s role is relatively conventional but she’s entirely persuasive in it.  Robert Emms is truly excellent as Steven, in whom awkward eagerness, cowardice and a shrewd understanding of where his own best interests lie are intermixed.  His climactic sermon in the Kingdom Hall (‘Jesus stated that his work could cause conflict within the household’) is perhaps slightly overwritten by Kokotajlo, in order to persuade Ivanna that Stephen’s words are aimed at her personally.  But Emms’s delivery is perfect – he gives the words just the right weight.  It’s to the credit of the other actors playing elders that, in their smaller roles, they too resist the temptation to be obviously malignant.  As a result, they’re reliably enraging.

    Just when Ivanna looks to be on the verge of putting family before faith, as we want her to do,   Apostasy pulls the rug from under our feet.   Her last encounter with her daughter and new grandchild builds to a breach with Luisa that may never be healed.  On reflection, perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise.  If Ivanna were fully reconciled with her elder daughter and (thereby) apostasised, she couldn’t avoid recognising the consequences for her younger daughter of the creed that has ruled their lives.  The film’s closing shot is of Ivanna, alone in the street, handing (or least holding) out copies of The Watchtower.  Daniel Kokotajlo doesn’t just keep his nerve in avoiding a comforting resolution.  In doing so, he also keeps faith (as it were) with the unhappily conscientious Ivanna.   The score is credited to Matthew Wilcock:  if it features before the accompaniment to the closing credits, it’s so sparingly and subtly used that I didn’t notice it.  Wilcock’s music at the end appropriately combines a hymnal rhythm and a melancholy tone.  There have been a lot of supposedly ‘stunning’ feature debuts by British film-makers over the last couple of years – Beast, God’s Own Country, I Am Not a Witch, Lady Macbeth, The Levelling, Pin Cushion.  Apostasy, along with I Am Not a Witch, deserves the accolade.

    28 July 2018

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