Monthly Archives: January 2019

  • Mary Queen of Scots

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josie Rourke (2018)

    ‘In my end is my beginning’ – fair enough that Mary Queen of Scots both opens and closes with the title character’s execution.  Just before the axe falls, she utters the famous words of the motto embroidered on her ‘cloth of estate’ during her imprisonment in England.  The main action of Josie Rourke’s film starts in 1561, when the recently widowed Mary (Saiorse Ronan) returns from France to Scotland.  It concludes with events leading up to her death in 1587.  Is Rourke’s film, with a screenplay by Beau Willimon (based on John Guy’s book Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart) historically accurate?  I don’t know but wouldn’t put money on it.  How comprehensible is the narrative if you don’t already have a detailed grasp of the events being described?  Not very:  I kept thinking I should have prepared by refreshing my memory of the 1971 film of the same name, when it was on television the other week.

    It’s become par for the course for an historical drama to raise-issues-that-are-no-less-relevant-today and Josie Rourke, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse and whose first cinema feature this is, evidently means to reinvigorate the Tudor-Stuart costume drama accordingly.  The script gives girl power and female solidarity their due, while suggesting their limits.  ‘Ruling side by side,’ Mary writes to her cousin Queen Elizabeth (Margot Robbie), ‘we must do so in harmony – not by a treaty drafted by men lesser than ourselves’.  Later, Mary tells her loyal French lady-in-waiting that, ‘A queen has no sisters – she has only her country’.  The sexual ambiguity of Mary’s confidant David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz- Córdova) isn’t such a novelty; as I recall, a gay relationship between him and Lord Darnley was implied even in the 1971 version of the story.  More startling is the sexual violence between Mary and Darnley (Jack Lowden) in the royal bedchamber, the heroine giving as good as she gets.

    Rourke has a lead actress and others in the cast capable of modernising the material in a substantial way but her revamp is half-hearted.  Mary Queen of Scots is, in several respects, royal history movie boilerplate.  There are God’s-eye-view shots of glorious landscape, full-frontal photographs of castles and palaces that look destined for a tourist’s British heritage holiday album.  There are many sideways glances on the part of courtiers – in Elizabeth’s court, at any rate:  it’s often harder to make out faces in the prevailing gloomy interiors north of the border.  There are lines that clunk information across and Max Richter’s music swells regally.  It may be intrinsically no less good than Hans Zimmer’s main theme for The Crown but the way it’s used makes all the difference.  Zimmer’s trademark pomposity renders The Crown’s introductory music all the more effective, reinforcing the disjunction between the supposedly august tradition of British monarchy and its operation in the second half of the twentieth century.   In spite of some of the novelties on screen, the Mary Queen of Scots soundtrack seems meant to impress without irony.

    The screenplay’s structure of alternating scenes in Scotland and England doesn’t do much for dramatic momentum.  The two principals meet just once and secretly, after Mary abdicates the Scottish throne and flees south.  Elizabeth sets up this encounter, which quickly turns into a sententious spat.  She stomps away from the meeting so emphatically that you expect her to deliver a sarcastic anachronism in the manner of The Favourite (‘That went well …’), though she doesn’t.  Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, with the help of the hair and make-up team, are both remarkable to look at.  Ronan, as usual, engages keenly with the character she’s playing; on this occasion, that leaves the viewer respecting the performer’s integrity but isn’t enough for us to believe in most of what Mary has to say and do.  Robbie’s emotionally brittle Elizabeth oddly suggests the heart and stomach, rather than the body, of a weak, feeble woman:  I wasn’t sure if this subversive interpretation was intentional.

    Robbie, who doesn’t have Ronan’s facility with accents, speaks her lines so carefully it’s as if her main objective is not to give away that she’s Australian.  Her compatriot Guy Pearce does something similar, and to ridiculous effect, as Elizabeth’s advisor William Cecil.  At one point, the Queen dismisses advice from her favourite Robert Dudley on the grounds that ‘that’s Cecil talking’.  She may well be right but it’s still a relief that Cecil’s not actually talking:  Joe Alwyn’s Dudley speaks naturally and well.  Jack Lowden, quite outstanding in the television drama The Long Song over Christmas, again impresses, at least in the early stages:  his nuanced courtship scenes with Saoirse Ronan provide the better moments in Mary Queen of Scots.  It’s not Lowden’s fault that Lord Darnley’s later behaviour is so increasingly bizarre that the character comes to seem absurd.   The ‘lesser’ men include some other good actors, including James McArdle and Martin Compston, though the latter, as Bothwell, is submerged in his beard.  The casting of David Tennant, however, works well.  When he plays relatively well-adjusted men, Tennant’s eyes and face can tend to be overly animated.  There’s no danger of that happening in the role of the Protestant zealot John Knox, inveighing repeatedly against the ‘harlot’ Catholic Mary.

    23 January 2019

  • L’avventura

    Old YorkerFilm review

    The Adventure

    Michelangelo Antonioni (1960)

    Fellini’s La dolce vita and Antonioni’s L’avventura are often considered a pair – both regarded as classics of post-war Italian cinema, both concerned with well-heeled characters whose glamour and appetites cloak anxiety and spiritual insufficiency, both released in the same year.  Watching L’avventura again, I found myself comparing it with another famous, apparently very different, 1960 release – Hitchcock’s Psycho.   In each case, the young woman who has been the main focus of the early action suddenly isn’t there any more, even though the effects of these removals, for the films’ first audiences, would have contrasted sharply.  Anna, who looks set to be the protagonist of L’avventura, is played by Lea Massari; unlike Janet Leigh, Massari wasn’t the best-known member of the cast.  Whereas Leigh’s Marion Crane is shockingly murdered, Massari’s Anna simply disappears.  Or, rather, not simply – which hints at something else that the films both have in common and places them poles apart.  Antonioni, like Hitchcock (and to quote him), plays ‘the audience like a piano’ – but does so by exploiting our expectations that a mystery will be solved.

    Those expectations don’t, of course, apply in the case of experienced Antonioni viewers – of whom I wasn’t one when I first watched L’avventura in 2004.  (I’d seen only The Passenger, around the time of its original release, and more or less forgotten it.)  Since then, I’ve seen four more of Antonioni’s sixteen features – Cronaca di un amore, La notte, L’eclisse and Blow-Up.  A viewer familiar with the last three of these wouldn’t expect a straightforward explanation of Anna’s vanishing.  The narrative of L’avventura (with a screenplay by the director, Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra) goes through the motions of investigating whether she has drowned, either accidentally or intentionally, in the sea off the Aeolian Islands, or been kidnapped by a group of smugglers.  But this is lip service to the conventions of a puzzling disappearance story.  Anna disappears primarily in order for Antonioni to explore the impact of her absence, what this says about the moral character of those who knew her and, in particular, how much and for how long she continues to matter to her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), a lothario architect, and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).  Sandro is ready before Claudia to have a sexual relationship but the mutual attraction between them is soon obvious.  Claudia’s feelings of loyalty to Anna and of guilt about betraying her are only temporary.

    An audience’s view that Sandro and Claudia have a moral responsibility to (and to try to find) Anna may persist for longer but is always shadowed by the impression she has made.  Anna seems drawn to Sandro largely because her unpleasant father (Renzo Ricci) is hostile to the match, and indifferent when she and Sandro make love in their hotel room before setting off with Claudia for their Mediterranean holiday, on a wealthy couple’s yacht.  On the first morning of the holiday, Anna dives impulsively into the sea.  After swimming for a while, she cries out that she’s seen a shark.  Sandro swims out to her rescue.  Back on the boat, Anna confides to Claudia that the shark was an invention.  Sandro isn’t wide of the mark when, in conversation with Claudia shortly after Anna’s disappearance, he says that she ‘seemed to feel that our love for her – mine, yours, even her father’s, in a certain sense – weren’t enough for her, or didn’t mean much to her’.  Even while those she left behind and the viewer are missing Anna’s presence, the disaffection she has shown precludes any deeper sense of loss or tragedy.  It anticipates and almost vindicates how quickly she’s forgotten.

    The first part of L’avventura is absorbing, especially the sequences on the yacht, the persistent low throb of the craft’s motor contributing strongly to the ominous mood.  The film was notorious in 1960 for its repeated uneventful passages; Antonioni also received praise for creating a cinematic equivalent of the nouveau roman (a year before Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leading exponents of that literary form, collaborated with Alain Resnais on Last Year at Marienbad).  There’s no doubt that L’avventura proved influential, though that’s something of a backhanded compliment.  Pauline Kael, who was much impressed at the time, wrote retrospectively (and judged fairly) that ‘There had been nothing like it before, and it isn’t fair to blame this movie for all the elegant sleepwalking and desolation that followed’.  That sleepwalking and desolation still meant, though, that L’avventura, on this repeat viewing, paid gradually diminishing returns.  This wasn’t only because I knew what was (not) going to happen but also because the look and feel of the piece – the gazing (as if spellbound) camera, the stylish languor and underlying futility, the characters’ lack of commitment – are less distinctive once subsequent Antonioni films have lodged in your memory.

    Even so, this is still an unusually imposing film – thanks chiefly to its sustained visual authority (the black-and-white cinematography is by Aldo Scavarda).  Antonioni expresses a remarkable sensitivity to physical scale (and the moral and psychological dimensions implied in such scale) – from the narrow corridors of a villa to clusters of buildings to sea and sky.  There are imaginative, unaccountable moments – as when Sandro and Claudia go onto a church roof, she accidentally tugs on a rope that sounds the bells, and these are answered by the connected bells of another church.  While Lea Massari leaves the strongest impression, Gabriele Ferzetti is thoroughly convincing as the congenitally inconstant Sandro.   Monica Vitti is a fabulous camera subject and magnetic except in moments when she’s evidently trying to act.   Two uncredited actors[1] are striking in cameos as a shopkeeper and his wife, who may or may not have seen Anna after she disappeared.

    22 January 2019

    [1] I’d guess from the IMDB cast listing (but it is only a guess) that they may be Giovanni Danesi and Rita Molè.

Posts navigation