Monthly Archives: March 2019

  • Everybody Knows

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todos lo saben

    Asghar Farhadi (2018)

    With the help of his DP José Luis Alcaine and editor Hayedeh Safiyari, Asghar Farhadi draws us in from the start of Everybody Knows.  The opening sequence takes place inside a church clock tower, where pigeons flap and the ancient clock machinery creaks, both to unnerving effect.  We then watch someone – or, at least, the right hand and forearm of someone – cutting out newspaper articles about a girl’s kidnapping.  This introduction, suggesting that a traditional thriller-mystery is on the cards, gives way to a longer, more subtly unsettling episode.  Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so, Farhadi introduces the guests arriving for a wedding in a small town outside Madrid (it takes all that time and more to work out exactly who’s who).  During the wedding and its immediate aftermath, the camera seems to be peering at the action, as if trying to penetrate the surface social whirl and celebration.  The sometimes unexpectedly angled shots and the cutting help increase our sense of disquiet, even though nothing at this stage – except for one scene – is overtly ominous.

    For the grown-ups, the partying goes on into the night, when a power cut in the town deepens the darkness.  Shortly after the lights return, the intoxicated wedding guests are shocked back to their senses by the discovery that one of them, the teenager Irene (Carla Campra), has disappeared.  Newspaper cuttings left in the bedroom where she had been sleeping are familiar to us and so, alas, is much of what follows.  The very first sequences were, after all, a taste of things to come – though Everybody Knows turns out not to be a conventional thriller-mystery:  it doesn’t have enough incident or plot convolutions to qualify as that.  It is, rather, a predictable account of how a crisis gives new prominence to old secrets within a family and brings to light things that everybody knows (the phrase occurs repeatedly) but nobody says.

    There’s a hefty clue this is the direction in which Farhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, is heading in the above-mentioned exceptional scene, which occurs midway through what’s otherwise the strongest section of the film.   This takes the form of a return visit to the clock tower.  While the wedding service is taking place in the church below, Irene goes up there, accompanied by a young man called Felipe (Sergio Castellanos).  Irene is the daughter of Laura (Penélope Cruz), one of the older sisters of the bride Ana (Inma Cuesta).  Laura, Irene and the latter’s younger brother Diego (Iván Chavero) have travelled from their home in Buenos Aires for the wedding.  Felipe is the nephew of family friend Paco (Javier Bardem), who, with his wife Bea (Bárbara Lennie), runs a successful vineyard in the area:  they too are wedding guests.  In the clock tower, Irene tries to flirt with Felipe, who tells her that Laura and Paco, years ago, were lovers:  the evidence is there in their initials carved on the walls of the tower, which is also a belfry.  The bells were due to peal at the end of the wedding service but Irene and Felipe set them off prematurely, taking the bride, her groom Joan (Roger Casamajor) and the rest of the congregation by surprise.  It’s a resoundingly significant moment:  Asghar Farhadi drops a clangour.

    Reviews describing Everybody Knows as a ‘channelling’ of Agatha Christie et al are understandable, even though Farhadi stints on the entertainments of an orthodox whodunnit.  Laura’s and Ana’s elder sister Mariana (Elvira Mínguez) and her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández) run a hotel in the town.  It’s not doing great business so is easily able to accommodate the other dramatis personae for the duration:  the hotel becomes the equivalent of a country house mystery setting.  Attempts to save the girl whose abduction story is told in the newspaper cuttings ended badly because her family, against the kidnappers’ instructions, involved the police.  The need for the principals to keep Irene’s disappearance to themselves and to rely on their own resources to get her back works as a reasonably credible plotline and as a means of reinforcing the story’s central theme of family secrets.  When these are exposed, however, they’re a letdown.

    Laura’s husband Alejandro is conspicuous by his absence from the wedding.  As soon as we hear that work commitments have kept him away, we know this is a cover for something else.  Once Irene has vanished, Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) comes over to Spain:  it’s soon revealed that he’s unemployed and has a history of depression.  We gather that Laura broke Paco’s heart by forsaking him and Spain for Alejandro and Argentina but what she saw in the (much older) man she married is a puzzle – she appears to feel little for Alejandro now.   It turns out that Laura’s father Antonio (Ramón Barea) once owned the land that is the site of Paco’s vineyard;  he bought it for a song – something the family have silently and increasingly resented with the passage of time.  Their own financial circumstances have worsened while Paco’s and Bea’s business has thrived.  The most important, and least surprising, revelation is that Irene’s biological father is Paco, not Alejandro – a fact, it emerges, always known by the latter but not known to the former until now.  I wasn’t clear if Irene’s paternity was something other members of Laura’s family were already aware of.  Even if they weren’t, I didn’t get why, in view of their resentment of Paco’s profiting from land they once owned, he’d been invited to the wedding.

    This isn’t the first Farhadi piece to centre on a sudden disappearance but it’s very different from its predecessor About Elly (2009).  There’s never much mystery about what’s happened to Irene or, thanks to a series of guilty looks from Mariana’s and Fernando’s daughter Rocío (Sara Sálamo), who within the family enabled it to happen.  What’s more, Irene, unlike Elly, reappears – delivered to Paco after he pays the ransom money, before Laura and Alejandro arrive on the scene to take over from him.  Irene is asthmatic and has been without medication during the time she’s been held prisoner.  She’s not in good shape, there’s talk of getting her to a hospital without delay and we wonder how her condition will be explained to a doctor.  Not only does Farhadi ignore that last point; he also gives Irene nothing to say subsequently about her ordeal, identifying her kidnappers, etc.  All she does is to ask Alejandro why it was Paco, rather than he, who came to find her.  If she gets an answer from the man she’s always assumed to be her biological father, she gets it off-screen.  By now, Farhadi, though continuing to ram home the same point, is exasperatingly evasive.  In the closing scene, Mariana, who’s sussed out Rocío, sits Fernando down and says they need to talk.  We don’t get to hear the conversation about their daughter but it’s fair to assume this will remain a well-kept secret between them.

    Asghar Farhadi’s next film after his international breakthrough with A Separation (2011) was, like Everybody Knows, located in Europe.  The Past (2013), set in Paris, featured a few Iranian but mostly French actors.  This new movie is inferior to The Past but Farhadi once again impresses with his handling of a cast speaking in a language that he doesn’t himself speak.  The way he allows or encourages the telegraphing of Rocío’s feelings is a rare lapse:  otherwise, the high quality acting not only holds your interest but often has the effect of distracting you from the script’s manifold weaknesses.  Everybody Knows is disappointing – but disappointing in large part because Farhadi’s previous work has set our expectations high.  And although this is finally a poor film, it features, especially in the narrative that precedes Irene’s kidnap, some very good filmmaking.

    21 March 2019

  • Sorry, Wrong Number

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anatole Litvak (1948)

    At eighty-nine minutes, Sorry, Wrong Number isn’t a long feature film but it’s four times the length of its source material, a radio play of the same name, first broadcast in 1943 – a ‘famous radio play’; according to the opening credits, written by Lucille Fletcher, who also did the screenplay for Anatole Litvak’s picture.  Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), a highly-strung, bedridden heiress, is trying to make telephone contact with her husband Henry, who, unexpectedly, hasn’t yet returned home.   The servants have the night off and Leona is alone in her house in Manhattan.  She gets a crossed line and listens to two male voices discussing the murder of a woman that will be carried out in a few hours’ time.  A series of subsequent phone conversations with other callers convince Leona that she is the intended victim of the murder plot.  Neurotic she may be but she’s eventually proved right.

    Except for the last few seconds, Lucille Fletcher’s original (available on YouTube) consists entirely of Mrs Stevenson’s phone conversations.  With the New York Police Department, to report what she’s heard on the crossed line and how it’s upset her; with Western Union, who transmit a telegram from her absent husband; with a hospital from whom she tries and fails to get an emergency nurse for the night.  And especially with telephone operators:  the tension of the piece depends largely on the contrast between the nagging, increasingly hysterical tones of the protagonist (played by Agnes Moorehead) and the operators’ unnerving robotic calm.  At the very end of the play, Mrs Stevenson’s killer is heard answering a call to her phone from the police.  He delivers the ‘Sorry, wrong number’ punchline and confirms that everything’s fine.   No other voices feature and there’s no background to speak of on the Stevensons’ marriage etc.  The filmmakers clearly are keen to preserve the compressed timeframe and claustrophobia of the radio play and they succeed to a limited extent.  For example, even though the ominous quality of the phone operators is diluted by their not being faceless in the movie, their relentless chirpy competence still imparts to their voices an increasingly mocking quality.  But by adding numerous other characters and a ton of backstory, Anatole Litvak and Lucille Fletcher sacrifice a lot – including, for a fair amount of the time, Barbara Stanwyck.

    Sorry, Wrong Number (with cinematography by Sol Polito and music by Franz Waxman) announces its noir credentials immediately.  The first sequences, focusing exclusively on Stanwyck’s overbearing, entitled Leona, are atmospheric.  The director and his star build a sense of Leona’s irritable agitation and of stifling New York heat, even with the bedroom windows open to the darkening Manhattan skyline.  The narrative shape and rhythm start to change when Leona makes contact with Henry’s secretary Miss Jennings (Dorothy Neumann), who says that Mr Stevenson took an attractive young woman out to lunch and didn’t return to work.  This news comes complete with flashback to the office earlier in the day, and Henry (Burt Lancaster)’s reaction to the appearance there of said young woman (Ann Richards), whose name is Sally and who is revealed to be Henry’s ex-girlfriend, from whom Leona stole him.

    It’s not long before Sally phones Leona with a lengthy description of how the lawyer to whom she’s now married has been carrying out an investigation that somehow involves Henry.  Sally describes how she followed her husband and his associates in the district attorney’s office to a deserted house on Staten Island belonging to a man called Waldo Evans, a chemist who works for Leona’s rich industrialist father James Cotterell.  In due course, Evans (Harold Vermilyea) is also calling Leona, with an even longer account of Henry’s (and, at Henry’s instigation, Evans’s own) wrongdoings.  The backstory is cumbersome and clumsy.

    As a phone interlocutor, Leona is reliably impatient and unwilling to let the voice on the other end have its say – so the sequences showing Sally and Waldo Evans speaking into the mouthpiece without a sound of interruption are unconvincing, as well as unexciting  to watch.  For both these reasons presumably, Litvak sticks to the pattern established by Miss Jennings’s recollection:  events and conversations recounted to Leona over the phone are largely shown on screen.  But this inevitably robs the film of the radio play’s formal distinctiveness – without there being anything to replace it.  Besides, whether the description of events leading up to the murder plot is purely verbal or in the form of dramatised flashback, it nearly always removes Barbara Stanwyck from the action.  Her impact has been so strong that, when Leona is invisible and silent for any length of time, it feels that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the telling of the story.

    The ‘nearly always’ above is because Stanwyck does feature in flashbacks illustrating the state of the Stevensons’ marriage, in which Leona is domineering and Henry virtually powerless.  James Cotterell (Ed Begley) didn’t want his daughter to marry drugstore-employee Henry.  Used to getting her own way, Leona ignored her father’s wishes but, once married, has continued to see those wishes as more important than anyone else’s except her own.  Henry, for his part, wed Leona without knowing about her chronic ill health (serious heart condition) or realising how humiliating he would find his sinecure in Cotterell’s company.  The combination of Burt Lancaster’s potent physical presence and the weakness of Henry’s position is one of the more effective elements of the film.  So is Ed Begley:  in spite of being Stanwyck’s senior by only six years (and Lancaster’s by twelve), he’s credibly a generation older.  The flashbacks to earlier in the couple’s relationship, although they present the marital dynamic crudely, register too – simply because they give Barbara Stanwyck the opportunity fully to interact with another actor.   This is an essential part of her artistry and seeing it in action underlines what you’re missing in the scenes where Leona is alone on the screen, wholeheartedly though Stanwyck plays these.

    This was probably the third time I’d seen Sorry, Wrong Number.  The first was on television, several decades ago; the second, like this latest viewing, was at BFI, around twelve years back.   All I remember of the first time is the scary shock of the ending but that’s a clue to how powerful an experience the film can be as an unknown quantity.  Leona Stevenson is a highly unsympathetic character – monotonously self-centred, humourless, a doubly faint-hearted bully.  She’s consistently the centre of the audience’s attention, though; at some level you expect her to be successfully extricated from a situation that is unarguably suspenseful.  As a contrite Henry calls Leona long-distance, shortly before the shadow of her killer makes its way up the staircase in Manhattan, police officers stand by the phone booth, apparently ready to make an arrest.  On this occasion, however, the bringing to justice of a guilty party doesn’t help a prospective victim.  If you’re a newcomer to the movie, the finale is likely to be startling:  you suddenly realise Leona isn’t going to be saved, really is going to die.  The fact that you don’t forget this weakens the film when you go back to it, though.  When you’re no longer anxiously preoccupied with how things will turn out, you see Sorry, Wrong Number for what it is, which is no great shakes.

    19 March 2019

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