Monthly Archives: December 2018

  • Disobedience

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sebastián Lelio (2017)

    A self-respecting actor with just a single scene will make the most of it and Disobedience opens with a fine example of the phenomenon.   As the elderly Rav Krushka, Anton Lesser delivers a sermon to a North London synagogue congregation.  He does so in high theatrical style before keeling over.  That’s the last we see and hear from the rabbi, who dies in hospital a few days later, but both Lesser and the character he’s playing leave their mark on the film.  The theme of Rav Krushka’s sermon is free will.  He distinguishes three orders of God’s creation – angels, beasts and humans – and stresses the unique capacity of the third group to choose to disobey.  (Not sure this quite takes account of Lucifer but let that pass.)

    The rabbi and his only child Ronit (Rachel Weisz) are estranged.  She now lives and works as a photographer in New York, where she receives a call informing her of her father’s death.  Ronit flies back to London and arrives at the home of childhood friend Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), her late father’s disciple and now expected to take on his role as the synagogue’s spiritual leader.  Ronit is astonished to learn that Dovid has married Esti (Rachel McAdams), who was more than a childhood friend to her.  It emerges that the close relationship between the two young women led to the rupture between Ronit and her father.  On the latter’s advice, Esti chose the path of religious obedience by marrying Dovid, who not only is a respected figure within the local Orthodox Jewish community but also loves Esti.  Although surprised by Ronit’s reappearance, Dovid insists that she stay at his and Esti’s Hendon home in the days leading up to the hesped ceremony that will conclude the funerary rites for Rav Krushka.  As might be expected, Dovid is asking for trouble.  Marital disobedience ensues in the form of a passionate sexual relationship between his wife and Ronit.

    My fault maybe but I didn’t understand several elements of the plot.  Who does Dovid think made contact with Ronit in New York?  In view of the previous relationship between her and Esti, which he seems to have been aware of, does he suspect his wife’s hand in this?  It transpires that Esti was responsible for the New York call although the caller was a man and it seems surprising, within the patriarchal community Sebastián Lelio describes, that Esti would have the authority to arrange this.  Rav Krushka has disinherited Ronit and bequeathed his estate to the synagogue; his daughter is allowed to go to his house to collect the few personal items of hers remaining there, and Esti accompanies her.  It’s there that their feelings for each other resurface, prompted tritely by a piece of evocative music that Ronit plays on a disc-player handily available in her father’s living room.  Soon afterwards, the two women (also asking for trouble) are spotted kissing in a public park.  A complaint is made to the headmistress of the local Jewish school where Esti teaches.  The headmistress summons Esti to her office but this isn’t a private interview:  it takes place in the presence of the couple who made the complaint.  Even though this seems extraordinary, Esti doesn’t mention it when she reports back to Ronit.  The headmistress then relays the complaint to Dovid, whether as Esti’s husband or as heir apparent to Rav Krushka is unclear.

    As things between the three main characters reach crisis point, Ronit makes the decision to return immediately to America and books an evening flight for the same day.  The following morning, she’s sleeping at the airport when Dovid phones to tell her that Esti has disappeared.  Was the original flight cancelled?  Did Ronit, who now hurries back to North London, drop off and miss her plane?  Esti also returns home, to tell Dovid that she’s pregnant but wants her freedom so that their child is able to choose in due course whether or not to live as an Orthodox Jew.   As might be expected in this increasingly melodramatic story, he accedes to Esti’s request in the most public way possible – midway through his eulogy for Rav Krushka at the latter’s hesped, where Dovid also picks up where his late mentor’s sermon left off and declines appointment as the Rav’s successor.  The concluding events seem designed to be as emotionally wrenching as possible but they undermine what have developed as central themes of Disobedience.  If Dovid is so shackled by the rules of his religion, how can he so rapidly assimilate and assent to Esti’s sexuality and her need for independence?  (It’s not suggested that he’s renouncing his fundamental beliefs.)  As Ronit sets off on a second trip to the airport, Esti runs after her cab, which stops so that the two women can have a last embrace and promise to keep in touch.  Given what Esti has gone through to affirm her love for Ronit, why are they so uncertain about a future together?

    Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman premiered at the Berlin festival in February 2017, this film at Toronto six months or so later.  Although both dramas explore LGBT issues, the look and mood of Disobedience are very different from those of its immediate predecessor and tend to the monotonous.  Danny Cohen’s cinematography swathes proceedings in a glum half-light almost regardless of a scene’s location.  Matthew Herbert’s decidedly melancholy score is less varied than the music he wrote for A Fantastic Woman.  As on that film, Lelio co-wrote the screenplay, this time with Rebecca Lenkiewicz (who also shared the writing credit on Ida, with Pawel Pawlikowski).  The source material is a 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman.  Lelio and his main actors make the sex scenes in Disobedience, whether gay or straight, frank and convincing.  The story these sequences are part of is less persuasive.

    Although her beauty and presence make Ronit magnetic, Rachel Weisz’s emotionality, not for the first time, is vague:  you see Ronit is worked up without getting a sense of what specifically she’s thinking or feeling.  Weisz is at something of a disadvantage beside her co-stars in that Lelio shows very little of Ronit’s life in New York.  There’s just a brief photo shoot (for the rest of the film, she might as well be, like Naomi Alderman’s Ronit, a financial analyst) and an even briefer bit of sex (which in retrospect suggests that Ronit is bisexual).  The scenes of Esti and Dovid teaching, respectively, secondary school and yeshiva students are more substantial, showing the couple outside their home but within the settled pattern of lives that Ronit’s return upsets.  (The choice of texts is obviously significant:  Esti’s pupils discuss a scene in Othello focusing on Desdemona’s alleged unfaithfulness, Dovid’s the curious fusion of sensual and spiritual rapture in the Song of Songs.)  Rachel McAdams portrays the pale, secretly intense Esti strongly but the best performance (and the best work I’ve seen from this actor since Junebug back in 2005) comes from Alessandro Nivola.  He realises very well Dovid’s security in his closed world and determination that his wife can be safely contained within it.  His later alternations between quiet reassurance and bursts of anger are startling.  It isn’t Nivola’s fault that Dovid’s conveniently speedy capitulation is so hard to accept.

    24 November 2018

  • Nine to Five

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Colin Higgins (1980)

    Three female office workers – Judy Bernly (Fonda), Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) and Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) – take revenge on their intolerable male boss Franklin M Hart Jr (Dabney Coleman), a ‘sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot’, by kidnapping him.  Whether or not the #MeToo movement is in part responsible for the recent re-release of Nine to Five, it’s no surprise that, nearly forty years after it first appeared, the film is being praised for its undiminished topicality.  More striking is the discovery of how seriously this workplace comedy (which I’d never seen before) took itself back in 1980.  The programme note for the BFI screening included an extract from Christopher Andersen’s 1990 biography of Jane Fonda (Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda).  In developing Nine to Five, Fonda interviewed ‘office workers around the country’,  She and the film’s producer Bruce Gilbert also hired Patricia Resnick ‘to work undercover as a clerical worker at an employment agency and a major insurance firm, gathering material for the final screenplay’, which Resnick co-wrote with the director Colin Higgins.  The script is full of bad jokes.  It’s an even worse joke that such serious-minded research resulted in this dim and shallow movie.

    Nine to Five’s established reputation as a feminist comedy blinds people to how insulting to womankind it often is.  The opening credits appear against a montage of women on their way to work – dropping their papers, spilling their coffee, generally showing how ditsy they are.  These commuters aren’t seen again; the sequence ends with the appearance of Fonda’s Judy, arriving for her first day at Consolidated Companies.  She’s been forced to return to work in light of her recent divorce but Judy’s outfit suggests she’s on her way to a wedding.  According to the Citizen Jane piece, this was Fonda’s idea:  ‘I asked our costume designer, Ann Roth, to overdress me’.  Roth certainly obliged.  The hat and ‘uptight suit’, along with the ‘fifties hairdo, oversized glasses and a “prim but frilly blouse”’ chosen by Fonda, echo her crudely conceived wardrobe in Coming Home (1978), in the scenes before the conventional housewife she plays is politically radicalised.  Jane Fonda’s comic talents (proved in Barefoot in the Park, for example) are invisible in Nine to Five.  It doesn’t help that her role is poorly written but Fonda keeps slipping in and out of character:  the only consistent element is her condescension towards Judy.  It’s a rare bad performance from her.

    It says a lot about Nine to Five that a sequence in which the inept Judy is humiliated by an out-of-control photocopier is as funny as anything in the film.  It’s a mixture of the basic visual comedy and contempt for the level at which Colin Higgins is operating that makes you laugh.  Franklin Hart’s many wrongdoings include spreading rumours (why would he?) that he’s having an affair with his secretary Doralee, whom he sexually harasses but who is loyal to her husband (Jeffrey Douglas Thomas).  The bitchy assumption within Hart’s office that Doralee is his mistress – a canard that snooty Judy is happy to believe at first – hardly reflects well on the other female staff.  The main trio’s co-workers include old lush Peggy (Margaret Foster) and the desperate-spinster office sneak Roz (Elizabeth Wilson).   Perhaps the film-makers would explain these caricatures as products of patriarchy but they’d be harder put to justify Doralee’s warning to Hart, when she realises the lies he’s been telling about their relationship.  She keeps a gun in her bag and, in one of the film’s best-known lines, tells the boss that if he doesn’t change his ways, ‘I’m gonna turn you from a rooster to a hen with one shot’.  This equation of female and castrated male sums up well the depth of Nine to Five‘s feminism.

    Once they’ve joined forces, but before the kidnap, Doralee, Violet and Judy drink and smoke a joint together and each tells the others how she’d take her revenge on Hart.  The three fantasy sequences that follow are no great shakes but lively enough to expose the weakness of what actually happens subsequently.  Violet’s accidental poisoning of Hart and the women’s theft from a hospital of a corpse they think is him, when he’s already discharged himself, are a taste of things to come.  The holding Hart hostage part of the story is protracted and uninventive but that’s nothing compared with the denouement.

    Office supervisor Violet, a widowed mother of four, is evidently good at her job; Lily Tomlin is likeable and comically resourceful in the role.  (A scene of Violet at home with her son (David Price), in which she fixes a garage door and briefly celebrates, is a rare pleasing interlude – and just about all we see of her domestic world.)  The combination makes Violet exceptional in the film and you root for her – a main reason why the ending is such a letdown.  Hart has made a habit of claiming as his own Violet’s ideas for working practices that make the office more efficient.  During his enforced absence, she and the others introduce equal pay for male and female employees, job shares, flexible working hours and a day nursery.  The changes result in increased productivity.  When he eventually escapes and returns to the office, Hart, true to form, takes credit for these innovations, which the company chairman (Sterling Hayden) commends – except for the equal pay.  To Hart’s horror, his reward is a posting to Brazil to develop Consolidated Companies operations there – but we’re denied the pleasure of seeing Violet properly recognised.  All we get is an on-screen legend at the end which tells us Violet was made a company vice-president ‘for keeping calm in a crisis’.  How did that happen, given the chairman’s obvious sexual discrimination?

    The legends summarising what Doralee and Judy did next, on the other hand, are all too convincing indications of the film’s ethos.  Doralee became a C&W singer:  quite right, because she’s always just been Dolly Parton pretending.  (Parton can act though within severe limits.  She also wrote, and sings, the film’s title song.  It’s zippy but the lyrics describe the lot of a put upon worker regardless of gender.)  Judy doesn’t learn much from her realisation during the story that her first husband (Lawrence Pressman), who left her for a younger woman, is a sexual hypocrite as well as an adulterer.  The closing text on screen tells us she fell in love with a Xerox representative, remarried and gave up work.

    The boss is a cardboard villain and a figure of fun much too soon:  his desk chair collapses in his very first scene (and keeps on doing so).  The conception might have more substance if Hart had plausible charm enough to deceive but Dabney Coleman makes him thoroughly unattractive.  And Hart is comprehensively contemptible:  an exploitative lech, who’s also useless at his job, an embezzler and not even much of a breadwinner (his infinitely trusting wife (Marian Mercer) is super-rich).  There’s a hint early on, in a conversation between him and a male colleague, that Hart is typical of a pernicious office culture but it’s the only hint.  As often happens in movies purporting to expose social or moral evils, the script locates them in a single character.

    Nine to Five was a huge box-office success on its original release and you can understand why.  It was a daft broad comedy that gave easy pleasure to many.  Its subject was reasonably distinctive in an era when job-sharing and workplace childcare, for example, were much less common than they’ve since become.  But that’s no reason to treat the film with respect thirty-eight years later.  Those closing legends also inform us that Franklin M Hart was abducted by Amazons in the Brazilian jungle and never heard of again:  problem solved, then.  Yet Nine to Five is still as ‘relevant today as it was when it was first released’ (BFI website).  Something doesn’t add up here.

    21 November 2018

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