Monthly Archives: August 2018

  • The Heiresses

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Las herederas

    Marcelo Martinessi (2018)

    This Paraguayan film, written as well as directed by Marcelo Martinessi, is a contemporary variation on the traditional late-bloomer story.  Chela (Ana Brun) is a woman in her fifties with a matronly figure, a pleasant, nearly pretty face but an overall dowdy appearance.  Socially timid, she has never married.   A couple of decades ago, she’d have seemed a ‘typical’ sexually repressed spinster.  Yet Chela has been in a settled lesbian relationship for thirty years.  It’s when her partner, suddenly and of necessity, is absent from the house in Asunción where Chela was born and which she and Chiquita (Margarita Irún) have shared for so long that Chela’s life takes an unexpected, relatively adventurous turn.

    These two are the title characters, both daughters of wealthy parents now deceased.  It seems Chela and Chiquita may never have had to work for a living but their financial situation has recently deteriorated.  The opening shots of The Heiresses display a roomful of the possessions – crystal, silverware, antiques – they are now in the process of selling off.  Chiquita’s bank tells her that her debts amount to fraud, for which she’s sent to jail.  Even in their straitened circumstances, the pair still employ a maid, Pati (Nilda Gonzalez).  One day, Pati announces that a neighbour is outside, asking to see Chela.  This is the elderly Pituca (María Martins), who asks Chela to drive her to a bridge game with friends.

    The dominant, vigorous Chiquita has usually done the couple’s driving – Chela no longer even has a licence.  But when Pituca asks about Chiquita’s whereabouts, she gives the impression that she knows she’s inside – hints, moreover, that, if Chela won’t provide transport, she’ll let others know too.  So Chela reluctantly gives her a lift – or, rather, ends up selling a lift:  when they reach their destination, Pituca insists on paying for the ride.  The pocket money is useful; very soon, Chela is running a virtual cab service for the ancient bridge players, to and from the home of whoever happens to be hosting the day’s card party.  This is how she meets Angy (Ana Ivanova), the daughter of one of the bridge set, to whom Chela is immediately and increasingly attracted.  Angy likes Chela too and asks if she’ll drive her and her ailing mother to the latter’s regular hospital appointments.  Chela initially says no – the trips will involve motorway travel, which she’s especially nervous of – but she soon thinks again and agrees.

    Marcelo Martinessi supplies the characters with minimal backstory and I found some aspects of their behaviour puzzling.  For someone so long used to home comforts and to getting her own way, Chiquita acclimatises remarkably quickly to life in a female prison.  Is this meant to show that she relishes physical proximity to a novel variety of women or to contrast her extrovert self-confidence with Chela’s fearful reticence or not be remarkable at all?   Pituca says she prefers Chela as a chauffeur because it’s safer than taking a taxi; one assumes the other bridge players feel the same way.  Plausible, I suppose, though I did wonder why some of these old women, most of them widows, wouldn’t prefer sitting in the passenger seat beside a man.  (It doesn’t seem to be a matter of economics:  Pituca tells her friends that Chela is ‘no more expensive than a taxi’ – so presumably no less expensive either.)   Personal safety concerns certainly don’t explain why the much younger and decidedly feisty Angy comes to Chela for transport.  I think the real explanation for Chela’s unaccustomed day job is that it’s necessary for the writer-director’s purposes.

    The climax to The Heiresses takes place immediately after a funeral to which Chela has driven Pituca et al.  Angy, who is also attending, gets fed up during the protracted social gathering that follows the service.  She suggests going back to Chela’s until the time the older women intend to leave the funeral party.  At Chela’s house, she and Angy drink wine and talk, closer than they’ve ever been before.  When Angy lies provocatively on the double bed, however, it’s too much for Chela, who locks herself in the bathroom.  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ asks Angy through the door.  Getting no reply, she leaves.  Later that night, Chela, bitterly regretting her loss of nerve, phones Angy and begs her to call back.  Early next day, the doorbell rings and Chela sends Pati to answer it.   To Chela’s consternation, it’s not Angy but Chiquita, released from prison. One of her first actions is to arrange to sell the couple’s car:  Chela looks to revert instantly to  acquiescent submission to her stronger-willed partner.   But, on the morning the vehicle is due to change hands, Chiquita gets up to find  that the car has gone and Chela with it.  This is the end of the film.

    I found these closing stages even harder to understand.  Angy, whose sexual relationships appear to have been only with men, is troubled at the funeral by meeting an old flame – fat, middle-aged, respectable, almost unrecognisable from the young man with whom she once had a passionate affair.  Angy tells Chela that the liaison developed into ‘my first threesome’ and that her two male and female lovers taught me ‘everything I know about my body’.  Mention of the threesome is the signal that Angy is prepared to sleep with Chela but why would crushing disappointment at how her ex has aged lead Angy to make a move on an even older woman?  Are we meant to assume, at the end of the film, that Chela has gone off to find Angy or a new life in a broader sense?  In either case, what hope of success is there for someone whose reserve (as her response to Angy’s overtures confirmed) is so deep-rooted?

    The Heiresses, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, won prizes there and has so far received unanimously excellent reviews.  Ana Brun, who won the Best Actress award at Berlin, is very fine.  A stage actress in Paraguay, Brun is making her film debut here:  her control and naturalness are a wonder.  The succession of minor, prettifying changes Chela makes to her appearance is another subtle strength of Marcelo Martinessi’s debut dramatic feature.  I enjoyed too his determination that this should be a virtually all-female film.  Not only are the men’s roles minor – a boyfriend of Angy’s, a fast-food vendor, the prospective buyer of the car – but Martinessi never shoots a male actor in close-up.  For the most part, though, the progress of the narrative struck me as typical of a particular kind of film festival favourite.   The Heiresses, for much of its (95-minute) running time, precisely observes its characters and is somewhat uneventful.  There’s then a comparatively dramatic climax that has immediate impact but which isn’t followed through in realistic terms (for example, we never get any reaction from the hitherto demanding Pituca and co to Chela’s failure to pick them up from the funeral).  Images in which a character stands within a dark interior, framed by a daylit outside world, are repeated throughout the film, including in the very last shot, as Chiquita realises that Chela has got out of prison too.  This is the concluding stage of the festival favourite – a low-key ‘happy ending’ that is metaphorically neat rather than literally believable. Reality is finally jettisoned, even though, for most of the film, a real-world context has been essential to the story.

    14 August 2018

  • The Last Tycoon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1976)

    At the time of his sudden death in December 1940, F Scott Fitzgerald had already exceeded the wordage he originally had in mind for The Last Tycoon but the novel was far from finished.  The manuscript stops during the sixth chapter; Fitzgerald left behind plenty of notes on the story to follow, the principal characters, and so on.  The novel, including these notes, was first published in 1941, with a foreword by Edmund Wilson, who had done some minor editing of the manuscript and collected the notes.  It’s not clear how the plot strands outlined by Fitzgerald might have fitted together or what the final form of narration would have been.  As it stands, The Last Tycoon alternates somewhat awkwardly between third-person and first-person narrative.  The latter voice is that of Cecilia Brady, the college student daughter of a Hollywood producer.  At one point, she has to explain that ‘This is Celia [sic] taking up the narrative in person’.  She introduces a key part of the description of Monroe Stahr, Cecilia’s father’s producing partner and the novel’s main character, as follows:

    ‘… I have determined to give you a glimpse of him functioning, which is my excuse for what follows.  It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on A Producer’s Day and partly from my imagination.’

    The convolutions of the storytelling actually add to the interest of reading the novel.  Cecilia is a character complex enough to make you wonder, for example, how much of the third-person narrative is shaped by her perspective even when she doesn’t acknowledge it.  Elia Kazan’s film of The Last Tycoon, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, could hardly be more different.  It doesn’t only eschew voiceover narration.  It lacks an authorial voice and narrative momentum of any kind.

    Cecilia’s ‘A Producer’s Day’ conveys Monroe Stahr’s colossal and wide-ranging workload, how remarkably and completely in charge of everything he seems to be.  When Stahr suddenly becomes obsessed with a young woman whom he’s seen by chance and fleetingly, his attempts to find her again are, at first, one more assignment undertaken during long office hours.  When he meets the young woman, Kathleen Moore, and pursues a relationship with her, the reader realises the magnitude of this disturbance to his usual life.  He first catches sight of her in the immediate aftermath to a minor earthquake in Hollywood – symbolically predictive, except that Kathleen’s world-shaking effect is much higher on the Richter scale.  Yet Stahr, even when preoccupied with her, keeps going tirelessly at the studios.  There’s nothing of this in the film.  Kazan seems so intent on rubbishing 1930s Hollywood that the place isn’t even a hive of crazy, corrupt activity, let alone artistic endeavour.  Stahr is less a creative workaholic, destroying what remains of his physical health, than the leading man in a more conventional drama, searching for love and happiness.  Kazan devotes a large part of The Last Tycoon to Stahr’s short-lived affair with Kathleen.  The director, like his protagonist, has a surprising amount of time on his hands.

    Supposedly based on the ‘boy wonder’ Irving Thalberg (who died in 1936, barely older than the century), Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr is the exemplar of a dying breed of Hollywood executive.  Producers like Stahr, combining first-rate business sense with artistic insight, are hopelessly outnumbered by the heartless philistine moneymen of the industry, represented by Pat Brady.  Perhaps Fitzgerald’s conception was Stahry-eyed but it seems futile to adapt his novel without respecting its point of view more than Kazan and Pinter do.  The meaning of the title itself is opaque until the last few minutes (pretty well the only part of the film that takes the plot beyond where Fitzgerald’s manuscript breaks off), when Brady and other studio board members move to oust Stahr.  Even then, it’s not obvious quite how he’s the end of a line because there haven’t been enough illustrations of how his approach is distinctive.  Watching rushes, Stahr is more alert and perceptive than Brady or the surrounding yes-men:  given how Kazan presents these others, that is damning with very faint praise.

    The film seems careless from the start – in the reactions of a group of young movie fans to the words of a guide (John Carradine) giving them a tour of the studios, in the shooting of a scene in a romantic drama currently in production there.  This black-and-white film-within-the-film doesn’t, in terms of lighting, look like thirties Hollywood product and Jeanne Moreau, as its diva star Didi, doesn’t act in period.  Her co-star is Rodriguez (Tony Curtis), an aging heartthrob who, away from the set, is desperately anxious about his impotence.  Rodriguez appears younger in the off-screen sequences than he does in rushes, which feels like the wrong way round.    When Stahr (Robert De Niro) first looks at Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting), he sees in her the image of his late wife, the actress Minna Davis.  This drives his search for Kathleen and reverberates throughout their relationship; Kazan gives hardly any weight to it.  As written by Fitzgerald, the affair between Stahr and Kathleen is inexorable yet continuously fragile.  The length of screen time given to their love scenes and Kazan’s predictable staging of them, reinforced by his persistent use of Maurice Jarre’s music, muffle both these qualities.  A liaison that is meant to be poignantly brief seriously outstays its welcome.

    Characters are reduced and the implications of reduction then ignored.  Theresa Russell is competent as Cecilia Brady but, since the person she’s playing is now little more than a sad spoilt child, it’s hard to care whether Cecilia has a sophomore crush on Stahr or loves him more complexly (a mystery of substance in Fitzgerald’s manuscript).  Although Robert Mitchum has natural, bull-necked authority as Brady, he reveals the man’s inner thug immediately.  That’s presumably what Kazan, despising the likes of Brady as he does, wants but the character, without a veneer of plausible, sentimental bonhomie to be penetrated, is merely repetitive – especially since life at the studios isn’t greatly eventful.  Pinter’s screenplay does retain the episode in which Brady’s daughter discovers a naked secretary hidden in a cupboard in her father’s office:  on screen, the discovery doesn’t come as a shock to Cecilia, let alone the viewer.  The pivotal meeting between Stahr and Brimmer (Jack Nicholson), a communist labour organiser based in New York but masterminding the setting up of a union in Hollywood, isn’t abbreviated – but you get the sense this is largely to make it worth Jack Nicholson’s while coming to the party.  Still, he livens things up considerably and his appearance gives The Last Tycoon the distinction of being the only film (to date) in which Nicholson and Robert De Niro have shared the screen.

    It’s in keeping with the low-key style (verging on inertia) that Stahr doesn’t get the build-up he’s given in the book.  At the start, De Niro sounds wrong.  His first lines are Stahr’s critical comments on rushes; De Niro delivers the lines as if trying them out – he lacks, as well as precise inflection, any suggestion of authority.  Very soon, though, he looks so right – hair, clothes, wiry alertness and strength of purpose – that watching his performance becomes increasingly frustrating:  you keep imagining how good he could be if Elia Kazan were handling the material differently.  De Niro soon gets to grips with the words too:  he’s funny in a later rushes bit, for the Didi-Rodriguez film, when Stahr pours scorn on the dialogue, especially Didi saying – in response to Rodriguez’s ‘I shall never forget you’ – ‘Nor I you’.  The trademark crooked grin appears rather too often and easily for the man he’s playing; when he shapes up for a fight with Brimmer, the movement is decidedly Travis Bickle-like.  Yet, in spite of Kazan’s worst efforts, De Niro gets tantalisingly close to the heart of Monroe Stahr.

    In a letter to his publisher, Fitzgerald wrote of his plans for The Last Tycoon:

    ‘If one book could ever be ‘like’ another, I should say it is more ‘like’ The Great Gatsby than any of my other books.’

    Stahr certainly stands comparison with Gatsby as a romantic man-who-has-everything-but-the-woman-he-longs-for: the idea is intriguingly complicated in The Last Tycoon because of the tension in Stahr’s mind between Kathleen as an evocation of his dead wife and as an object of desire in herself.  De Niro’s blend of self-possession and yearning gives Stahr a tragic aspect that briefly resonates with Fitzgerald’s character.  Although this derives more from the doomed love affair than from what’s happening at the studio, the closing scenes of the film do more than any previous ones to bind the two things together.  Kazan virtually reprises a sequence in which Stahr enacts for Boxley (Donald Pleasence), a culturally snobbish British writer he’s hired to write a picture, how to involve an audience through images rather than words.  This second time, Stahr’s demonstration is accompanied by images of Kathleen.  The sequence concludes with his saying, to camera, ‘I was only making pictures’.

    This feels like a good point to end The Last Tycoon.  Instead, Kazan cuts to Stahr going to a window, looking out at Brady getting into a car, Brady looking back … The effect is seriously anticlimactic though Kazan repairs the damage in the very last scene:  Stahr walks across a deserted back lot, into a sound stage, and disappears into the dark.  It’s an eloquent, elegiac moment – but a summation of Fitzgerald’s themes rather than of the preceding film’s take on them.  The cinematographer Victor J Kemper supplies several shots of vast, empty spaces in and around the studios.  The shots are individually impressive.  They fall short of being expressive because Kazan has disdained to show the hectic side of the dream factory by way of contrast.

    There’s only so much that De Niro can do in his scenes with Ingrid Boulting, whose Hollywood career began and ended with this film.  Boulting (the ‘face of Biba’ in the late 1960s) has a look, though it doesn’t change much.   In view of what draws Stahr to Kathleen in the first place, that unchanging look is a plausible idea; in the event, it merely suggests an unfortunately limited actress.  You sense intelligence behind Boulting’s line readings but she’s so vocally unvarying too that it becomes painful listening to her.  As well as Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum, the cast includes significant names from earlier Hollywood eras such as Dana Andrews, Jeff Corey and Ray Milland yet their presence doesn’t add any sort of texture to the film.  A rare enjoyable contribution is Seymour Cassel’s cameo as the trainer of a performing seal.  At this distance in time, The Last Tycoon has minor interest as a period piece to the extent that it reflects 1970s cynicism about Golden Age Hollywood.  It’s inadequate as a recreation of the latter period and as a representation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s final work.

    12 August 2018

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