Monthly Archives: December 2018

  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Joel and Ethan Coen (2018)

    This six-part tales-of-the-Old-West anthology was conceived by Joel and Ethan Coen as a television series but has ended up a 133-minute film on Netflix and theatrical [1].  If the brothers had fun making The Ballad of Buster Scruggs that’s more than they give the audience:  in Curzon Richmond at least, the anticipatory sniggers soon dried up.  The framing of the narrative is charming.   At the start, an animated book opens and each of the six stories is introduced by a captioned illustration in it.  As a story ends, the camera cuts to the closing paragraph of text on a page in the book.  That’s more or less where the charm of Buster Scruggs ends.  Although some of the images of wagon trails and sunlit landscapes have a burnished, nostalgic quality, the ironic purpose of this is to throw into relief the dominant themes of cruelty, absurdity and mortality.  All of these are, as usual in the Coens’ cinema, given a distinctly jocose edge.

    The six pieces vary in length and the first two are little more than sketches.  In the opener, which is also the title story, the cheerfully homicidal Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) shoots people dead then sings songs about them – until a black-clad young man (Willie Watson) shoots Buster dead.  They perform a philosophical duet as Buster’s spirit rises towards heaven on angel wings.  In ‘Near Algodones’ a young cowboy (James Franco) tries to rob a bank, is thwarted by the resourceful resistance of a teller (Stephen Root), avoids the gallows once thanks to a drover-rustler (Ralph Ineson) but ends up getting hanged.  The more extended ‘Meal Ticket’ is the tale of an aging travelling showman (Liam Neeson) and his sole artiste, a limbless young man (Harry Melling) who recites the Gettsyburg Address and various poetry (specialty ‘Ozymandias’).  Chancing upon a more commercially promising act (a chicken that does arithmetic), the small-time impresario disposes of his human companion.

    In ‘All Gold Valley’, a grizzled gold prospector (Tom Waits) digs for days in a deserted meadow.  Just as he locates the gold vein, a young man (Sam Dillon) appears from nowhere and puts a bullet through him.  After playing dead for a while, the older man takes a lethal revenge.  ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, the longest piece and somewhat richer than the others, is the story of Alice Longbaugh (Zoe Kazan), a young woman who swaps a sheltered life for the Oregon trail.  En route, her foolishly pompous brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) dies of cholera and Alice enjoys a gentle romance with one of the wagon-trail leaders (Bill Heck), which is cut short by her extraordinarily unlucky death.  This comes about through the well-intentioned advice of the other trail leader (Grainger Hines), who has saved Alice from an injun horde.  The other key character is Gilbert’s dog, President Pierce.  (Pets named for US commanders-in-chief are in vogue this year:  we’ve already had President Roosevelt, David Lynch’s tortoise, in Lucky.)  In ‘The Mortal Remains’, a stagecoach carries five passengers (Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Jonjo O’Neill, Chelcie Ross and Saul Rubinek) on a journey to a Colorado hotel of formidably grim appearance.  The passengers chatter and bicker but the fade-to-grey visuals make it clear, well before they reach their destination, that the hotel terminus is death.

    There are occasional moments of wit and images that stay with you – James Franco’s commiseration with the terrified man about to be hanged beside him (‘This your first time?’), the pool of blood spreading across the back of Tom Waits’s vest.  Zoe Kazan’s hard-working performance is appealing and eventually poignant.  Bill Heck (whom I’d not seen before) partners her gracefully.  These actors’ contributions aren’t typical, though:  arch, theatrical playing (especially in ‘The Mortal Remains’) is more the order of the day.  Overt violence occupies a decreasing proportion of the action but this means less than it might because the mayhem is slapstick from the start.  There’s no doubt, though, that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, whether intentionally or not, ends not with a bang but a whimper.  The film’s dramatis personae may include pioneers but the men who made it are covering ground that’s too familiar to them.  The book the Coens use as a device to frame their stories has a well-used look that turns out to be all too apt.

    20 November 2018

    [1] Afternote:  The Coens, in a Los Angeles Times interview, subsequently corrected and clarified this: ‘“Buster Scruggs” was never envisioned as a television series. The origin of the project was as simple as the brothers writing individual short films over several years and one day realizing they could be packaged together into an anthology film. …’

     

  • The Workshop

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’atelier

    Laurent Cantet (2017)

    In The Workshop, Laurent Cantet refashions the teacher-student dynamic he dramatised so successfully in The Class (2008).  Olivia Dejazet (Marina Foïs), a successful Paris-based novelist, comes to the seaside town of La Ciotat to run a creative writing workshop for a group of local youngsters.  One of the students is Antoine (Matthieu Lucci).  He soon becomes unpopular with the others:  his suggestions for the story the group develops are variously vicious and repeatedly racist.  Although Olivia doesn’t like Antoine, she’s increasingly interested in him.  The feelings are mutual.

    La Ciotat is a real place – a port in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France.  Its place in cinema history was secured more than a century ago:  the town’s railway station is the setting for the Lumière brothers’ famous fifty-second film of 1895, showing the arrival of a train.  The economy of both the real La Ciotat and The Workshop‘s version of it once depended on shipbuilding.  The naval dockyards closed in the 1980s.  But whereas La Ciotat today is typically described in online travel guides as ‘a hub of trade and tourism’, Cantet characterises it as a place fallen on hard economic times and, as a result, a breeding ground for resentful, internet-fuelled right-wing activism.  The Workshop was shot in and around the actual La Ciotat presumably during the summer of 2016 – in other words, about the same time as the Islamist terrorist attack on Nice and a few months before Marine Le Pen didn’t, as some feared she might, win the 2017 presidential election.  According to Wikipedia, the name ‘La Ciotat’ means ‘the city’; perhaps Cantet is exploiting that to present La Ciotat as a representative French municipality of today.

    The Workshop keeps moving into familiar territory then heading in another direction that’s unsurprising in itself but unexpected because of what went before.  (The screenplay is by the director and Robin Campillo, who, as usual, is also Cantet’s film editor.)  Some of the behaviour of Antoine’s right-wing acquaintances and the ethnic diversity of his fellow students, in combination with the plotting of the story being developed in the workshop, prepare the ground for a violent confrontation that doesn’t materialise.  Although Antoine is outstandingly hostile, others in the writing group are irritated by Olivia’s posh metropolitan lifestyle and that she has (as they see it) taken on the assignment in La Ciotat out of feelings of noblesse oblige.  The experience of the workshop and of Antoine in particular causes Olivia to question her own ability to write and her motivation for writing.   For a while, this seems to be the film’s main subject – then it turns into a creepy stalker thriller.  These changes of tack are immediately effective in disorienting the viewer but it’s not clear if this is what Cantet intends or if he just can’t decide what kind of story he’s telling.  Although The Workshop is consistently entertaining, it spends plenty of its running time in what turn out to be blind allies.

    Cantet retains his gift for ‘classroom’ drama on screen and the film is cinematic, thanks largely to the spectacular landscape surrounding La Ciotat and to the visualisation of Antoine’s sense of escape, whenever he’s in the sea, from the life he loathes on dry land.  Even so, you wonder if The Workshop might have been more compactly claustrophobic as a single-set stage play, with the developing threat contained within successive scenes at the workshop.  A theatre might also be a better place for Antoine’s farewell monologue to Olivia and the group.  (The students are a cross-section of, for Cantet, conveniently distinguishable types:  beyond that, I was never clear of the selection criteria for the workshop.)

    As the dislikeable Antoine, Matthieu Lucci does well in a challenging role, especially as the script forces him to play most of his cards early.   Lucci has a really good moment when a local television crew is filming a piece about the writing class:  as Antoine listens to what Olivia is saying to an interviewer, you get a sharp, sudden sense that he wants to be part of it – he then checks himself and normal, scowling service is resumed.  Cantet finally seems to decide that Antoine’s main problem is that he’s dangerously bored but, if so, why is he the only one in the group with this problem?  Does Cantet mean him to be a typical product of circumstances or an aberrant case study?  Either way, the extent to which the outcome downplays the threat of right-wing extremism seems, in view of the socio-economic context Cantet sets The Workshop in, complacent.

    19 November 2018

     

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