Monthly Archives: May 2019

  • Maborosi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maboroshi no Hikari

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (1995)

    Between Nobody Knows and Maborosi in the BFI’s Hirokazu Kore-eda season, I saw a swiftly arranged extra screening of Still Walking, followed by a Q&A with Kore-eda.  Senior programmer Julie Pearce, introducing the evening, explained how it had come about.  She’d been trying for some time to persuade Kore-eda to talk at the BFI.  Currently in Paris editing his next film, he’d made contact to confirm that he felt he needed a break and would come over to London but it would have be ‘next Tuesday’.  Pearce and her colleagues, in partnership with the Japan Foundation, moved commendably quickly to make things happen.  It was a very enjoyable evening in several ways.

    NFT1 was close to packed out (according to Julie Pearce, they could have filled it three or four times over).   Just about the only empty seats in view were immediately in front of me and the young boy sitting with his mother immediately to my right.  He can only have been about nine years old.  I guess he just dropped very lucky not to be behind an obscuring grown-up.  The boy’s presence reminded me that Still Walking was released with a U certificate but it is chiefly concerned with family strife and bereavement – and subtitled.  There were plenty of Japanese at the screening but this kid wasn’t one of them.   It was amazing to me that he watched the film so quietly and attentively.

    It was a treat to see Still Walking again – a bonus that the Q&A was as well organised as it was informative and entertaining.  I’m sorry not to have got the name of the chair, who asked a good combination of questions – some prepared, others spontaneously following up things that Kore-eda said in conversation.  The latter spoke in Japanese with Bethan Jones his interpreter.  She supplied consecutive rather than simultaneous translation, which made for a satisfyingly fluent session even if did also eat up the time.  None of the four questions from the audience was up to much yet Kore-eda’s answers somehow managed to make them all seem worth asking.

    His charm and humour in the Q&A reinforced my feelings of gratitude towards him.  If it hadn’t been for Still Walking, which remains my favourite of Kore-eda’s films, I might never have started trying to get a handle on East Asian cinema.  He’s still the only Japanese director whose body of work I know well but he’s helped me to get more from the Yasujiro Ozu films I’ve seen in recent years.  Kore-eda no doubt sees Korean cinema as an entirely different tradition but the fact is that his work is responsible too for getting me to excellent films from South Korea like Park Chan-wook‘s The Handmaiden and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.

    The full Japanese title of Maborosi – Kore-eda’s first dramatic feature, following three documentaries – translates as ‘phantasmic light’ or ‘a trick of the light’.  That’s very close to the name of Louis Malle’s Le feu follet (1963):  although the latter was released in America as The Fire Within, the French means ‘will o’ the wisp’.  The two films are thematically connected too:  an impending suicide is central to Malle’s and an apparent suicide pivotal in Kore-eda’s.  After watching Still Walking again, I reread my note on it from 2010.  Seeing Maborosi a couple of weeks later called to mind how the note ended:  ‘It shows how much there is to be gained by surviving and moving forward, how much you can be held in the past even as you do’.

    The heroine of Maborosi is Yumiko (Makiko Esumi).  She marries Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano) and they set up home in Osaka.  Shortly after the birth of their first baby, Ikuo dies – hit by a train while he walks along railway tracks one evening.  As far as his widow knows, he had no motive for ending it all; but there’s no other obvious explanation for putting his life in peril in the way that he did.  Several years later, Yumiko agrees to an arranged marriage with Tamio (Takashi Naito), a widower who lives in a coastal village on the Sea of Japan’s Noto peninsula.  Yumiko and her now five-year-old son Yuichi (Gohki Kashiyama) become part of a household that also includes Tomoko (Naomi Watanabe), Tamio’s daughter from his first marriage, and his elderly father Yoshihiro (Akira Emoto), a former sailor.

    Relations within her new family are apparently harmonious and Yumiko seems to have ‘moved on’ from Ikuo’s death – until she returns briefly to Osaka for her brother’s wedding.  There’s no crucial incident that changes everything suddenly but in places that strongly evoke Ikuo’s presence – and therefore his absence – Yumiko can’t suppress her continuing grief.  Kore-eda and his lead actress convey this very persuasively:  Makiko Esumi consistently implies that Yumiko, while able to construct a new life, is still preoccupied with a death she can’t make sense of.  Back at Tamio’s, an alcohol-fuelled row between the couple reveals that he too is still mourning his former, greater love.  Yumiko is drawn to a funeral procession which she follows along the beach and on to a crematorium.  Tamio arrives there in his car to take her back home.  She tells him she needs to know why Ikuo killed himself.  Tamio suggests, by way of a story told to him by Yoshihiro, a possible explanation:

    ‘He said the sea calls you … He says when he was out alone, he used to see a beautiful light shimmering in the distance, calling him … I think it can happen to anyone …’

    Vanishing and loss are an essential and a recurring theme of Maborosi.   In the early scenes, Kore-eda shows the child Yumiko (Sayaka Yoshino), whose grandmother (Kikuko Hashimoto) sets off walking (aruitemo … aruitemo) towards Shikoku where, she tells Yumiko, she wants to die.   She is never seen again and her granddaughter continues to be haunted by not doing enough to prevent the departure.  While Yumiko’s remorse can obviously be seen as anticipating her feelings about what Ikuo lets happen decades later, his disappearance has more than one aspect.  On a brutal physical level, the police officer who informs her of Ikuo’s death tells Yumiko that she’ll ‘never recognise him’.   She’s also lost Ikuo – he’s gone away from her – in the sense of not understanding his reasons for deciding to die.  Tamio’s own loss, although it isn’t dramatised to the same extent, registers strongly too.  When Tomeno (Mutsuko Sakura), an intrepid old seafaring woman from the village, goes missing overnight, we fear the worst – in spite of Yoshihiro’s confidence that Tomeno will ‘swim back if she has to – nobody knows the sea better than she does’.  When he’s proved right, Tomeno’s reappearance feels like a gift.

    Sympathy for virtually everyone in the story, quietly incisive revelation of character, naturalistic dialogue with occasional poetic touches – these elements of Maborosi are ones with which viewers of more recent Kore-eda will be familiar.  In other respects, this early film, made when the director was in his early thirties, is remarkably different from what has followed.  The visuals have a primacy unusual in his work.  For much of the time, the camera is at some distance from the characters.  Even when it’s nearer, their faces, in natural light, are often partly shadowed.  Kore-eda and his cinematographer Masao Nakabori (who haven’t worked again together since) create some extraordinary images, especially the long shot of the seashore funeral procession under huge louring clouds.  This great sequence is the culmination of the film’s prevailing slowness and silence, qualities that never become self-conscious.  Also unlike all his subsequent dramas, Kore-eda doesn’t have a screenplay credit:  Maborosi was adapted by Yoshihisa Ogita from a short story by Teru Miyamoto.  The dialogue is spare.  What isn’t said is eloquent.

    30 April 2019

  • All About Eve (theatre)

    Old YorkerTheatre on screen review

    Ivo van Hove (2019)

    At nearly seventy years of age, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) has been adapted for the stage, which could be considered its natural home.   Its people are theatre people whose characters are developed and expressed in action but more noticeably in talk – lots of it:  Mankiewicz’s script is one of the most self-confidently voluble in Hollywood history.   All About Eve was the basis for the stage musical Applause half a century ago but that inevitably meant paring away dialogue to make way for songs.  Ivo van Hove’s new adaptation, which opened at the Noel Coward Theatre in early February for a three-month run, might be expected to restore the primacy of the spoken word in the material – and so it does, technically.  Yet it comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with van Hove as a theatre director that the verbal doesn’t dominate the visual in his interpretation of Mankiewicz’s story.

    All About Eve was broadcast live from the West End in cinemas on 11 April.  (The ‘National Theatre Live’ programme of live broadcasts includes plays staged at other theatres, as well as NT fare.)  Curzon Richmond screened a recording of the broadcast later in the month and it was this that Sally and I saw, though we hadn’t planned to.  We’d seen van Hove’s production of A View from the Bridge at Wyndham’s Theatre in 2015, mainly to take the opportunity of seeing on stage two screen actors whom we both like, Mark Strong and Nicola Walker.  Both were very good (and true to their screen selves) but the experience didn’t make us eager for more of van Hove’s work.  Besides, All About Eve is a favourite film; however ‘theatrical’, it may be, a version of it in another medium is surplus to (my) requirements.  It was only when I found out that another favourite, Monica Dolan, was in the cast that I changed my mind.

    The broadcast preamble included a few, fascinating minutes of Ivo van Hove describing how he got into theatre while at boarding school in his native Belgium and what drives him as a director.  He pointed out that he was keen to work on All About Eve as a result not of seeing the film but of reading Mankiewicz’s screenplay (as part of van Hove’s preparations for adapting another film for the stage – John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, which itself draws upon All About Eve).  Van Hove described its theme as an ‘existential’ one – the subject is ‘growing old’.  He drew attention to features of his production like the repeated use of video.  Although it would be an overstatement to praise his introduction as more engrossing than what it introduced, van Hove’s combination of quiet charisma and clarity was impressive.  What he had to say also provided a foretaste of what is unsatisfactory in the play that followed.

    As was evident from A View from the Bridge, van Hove has a conceptual sense that can overwhelm a production.  In All About Eve, this has both a limiting and a tautologous effect.   The specially commissioned music by P J Harvey reinforces the prevailing bleak mood.  The set designed by van Hove’s longstanding professional (and life) partner Jan Versweyveld and the director’s preferred placing of the actors within it give the impression of people adrift in a space too big for them and which they can’t control.  Van Hove may see that as existentially right but it’s dramatically monotonous.  We can infer the ageing theme without the assistance of the technology van Hove deploys:  as Margo Channing (Gillian Anderson) sits at her dressing-room mirror, her face appears on a large screen above the stage and turns gradually into that of a wizened crone.

    Video can certainly be used fruitfully in the theatre to reveal something not taking place on stage.  In Robert Icke’s production of Hamlet, which we saw in June 2017, Gertrude and Claudius sat in the front row of the stalls of the Harold Pinter Theatre to watch ‘The Murder of Gonzago’; CCTV revealed, to gripping effect, their facial reactions.  All About Eve gets closest to this kind of impact when it presents on screen only the confrontation between Eve Harrington (Lily James) and Karen Richards (Monica Dolan) in the ladies’ at the Cub Room, while Margo, Bill Sampson (Julian Ovenden) and Lloyd Richards (Rhashan Stone) remain on stage, at their table in the adjoining restaurant.  The effect is very different when van Hove uses the screen to show greatly magnified images of what a performer is doing before our eyes, though at a distance away from us.  This strikes me as an admission of the limitations of what actors in the theatre can achieve – or, at least, of how a camera can help them achieve more.

    There’s a particular significance to this when the play is an adaptation of a classic movie.  When a theatre director uses big-screen close-ups – or, in the extreme case of the time-lapse withering of Margo’s face, close-ups plus special visual effects – it’s hard to avoid wondering what’s been gained by adapting the source material for the stage.  When he shows Margo grow old in a matter of seconds, it’s tantamount to Ivo van Hove’s saying:  ‘I’m doing this because I think it’s crucial to the play and it’s physically impossible for Gillian Anderson to achieve the same effect’.

    I’m probably in a small minority in thinking stage acting a less evolved form of the art than screen acting.  I know very many actors think ‘real’ acting happens in the theatre.  That’s not surprising:  it’s hard work learning lines and repeating a performance that needs to be right first time every time.   But the effort involved in delivering that performance is often very evident.  Because voice training isn’t what it was, lack of vocal colour and agility is an increasing issue – even with the also increasing use of mics for actors.  These concerns also register especially strongly when you’re watching about All About Eve as theatre.  It’s an obvious, unfortunate irony that a brilliantly talky motion picture has become a play much of whose dialogue isn’t delivered with the dexterity and variety needed to do it justice.

    Although I’ve not seen enough of his work to be sure, I wonder too if van Hove’s preoccupation with conceiving a production in strong visual terms doesn’t tend to be at the expense of attention to detailed characterisation through line readings.  As Margo, Gillian Anderson is a vibrant image of vulnerable beauty and authority but seems to be interpreting an idea rather than portraying a woman or, at least, acting at one remove – as if playing an actress playing an actress.  Anderson overdoes the inebriated rants – this Margo doesn’t hold her alcohol at all well – although she does bring off one spectacular dead-drunk plummet from vertical to horizontal.  She’s vocally too relentless, though, and, to be honest, rather humourless.  I laughed at her only a couple of times – and only because, after she’d spoken the line, I then heard Bette Davis saying it in my head.  I’m afraid I preferred the later stages of the play because Margo featured less in them.

    Anne Baxter’s Eve isn’t a hard act to follow to anything like the same degree as Bette Davis’s Margo and Lily James, whom I’ve enjoyed on stage-via­-screen before (in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet), gives an original and, for a while, plausible account of the character.  When Karen first brings her to Margo’s dressing-room and she gushes gratitude and praise for the star and for Lloyd, James makes Eve surprisingly appealing.  She and van Hove interestingly suggest that Eve is so thoroughly egotistical that even she can’t see her campaign to depose Margo for what it is.  Eve here is less a transparently calculating fraud than someone compelled to get what she wants.  Things go wrong, though, with her hardening into an overtly self-serving bitch.  In this case too, it’s partly a voice problem:  James’s vocal transition is almost comically abrupt.  And she’s weak – prematurely vanquished – in the scene in which Addison DeWitt (Stanley Townsend) cuts Eve mercilessly down to size.

    Except for Addison, you think of All About Eve as a piece with great roles for women rather than for men:  I found myself surprised that Bill and Lloyd featured in van Hove’s version as much as they do.  Neither character is a success, though – partly because they look wrong.  The costume designer An D’Huys has cleverly dressed the women in clothes that, if not timeless, succeed in blurring the issue of when the story is meant to be taking place.  In contrast, Bill and Lloyd’s outfits, facial hair (designer stubble and beard respectively), and gym-toned look make them more obstinately de nos jours.  (As a result, the script’s retention of references to Broadway and Hollywood names of a bygone era – Jeanne Eagels, Helen Hayes, Zanuck, DeMille – are puzzling in a way they needn’t be.)  It’s hard to accept Rhashan Stone’s Lloyd and Monica Dolan’s Karen as a married couple and that Lloyd is used to calling the shots in their relationship. Van Hove has allowed or encouraged Julian Ovenden to try to make Bill dramatically forceful.   Ovenden lacks the weight and dynamism to succeed but this reading of the character wouldn’t make much sense if the actor brought it off.   In Mankiewicz’s film, Bill is exercised more by precious conceptions of ‘Theatuh’ than in exchanges with Margo, whose demands and insecurities exasperate him but whom he loves.  There are plenty of times in van Hove’s production when you wish Bill would deliver a rejoinder to her other than by shouting back.

    The same is true, though for different reasons, of Stanley Townsend’s Addison DeWitt.  Along with Gillian Anderson, Townsend has the hardest job in the production for anyone who knows the film, in which George Sanders, a limited actor, triumphed as the sharp-eyed and-tongued, conscienceless theatre critic.   The heavily-built Townsend is naturally very different from the tall, slim figure of the film.  He also takes understandable steps to distance himself vocally from Sanders’s dry-as-a-bone delivery but you miss the verbal coups de grâce that Sanders made so calmly devastating.  Townsend creates a more brutish figure, which probably links to van Hove’s description of Addison, in the interview at the start of the broadcast, as a sexual predator.   It’s become unacceptable to present a man who exploits his position of power as this one does as outrageously entertaining.  Like Bill and Lloyd at a more superficial level, the production’s Addison DeWitt is updated.  Stanley Townsend is physically more substantial than George Sanders but the character has shrunk.

    That’s more literally the case too with the casting of the role of producer Max Fabian:  Ian Drysdale is a shadow of the comically grotesque figure that Gregory Ratoff cut on screen.   In the smaller female parts, Jessie Mei Li, as the young actress Marilyn Monroe played in the movie, and Tsion Habte, as Eve’s uninvited wannabe guest in the final scene, are both OK.  As Margo’s dresser Birdie, little Sheila Reid makes sense of the character’s nickname but doesn’t get much of the ornery, plain-speaking loyalty that Thelma Ritter conveyed so strongly.  In the film, Birdie, the Fool to Margo’s Lear, disappears from the action as suddenly and completely as her Shakespearean forebear.  Van Hove’s attempt to keep her involved in the story is commendable but, in the event, perfunctory:  Birdie reappears a couple of times but with nothing more to say.

    My reason for wanting to see All About Eve turns out to be the best reason any theatregoer has to buy a ticket for it.  On television, Monica Dolan is such a reliably great character actress that I was apprehensive about seeing her in a stage play:  would she be anywhere near as good?  I was uneasy at the start, when Karen Richards came downstage to take over narrator duties from Addison DeWitt:  it took a while to get used to the artificiality of what Dolan was required to do.   Once she has the chance to interact with other people on stage, however, she’s marvellous.  Karen (the Celeste Holm role in the original) does plenty of listening, as well as talking; and Dolan builds a personality through both.  Her unobtrusive but telling gestures and facial expressions suggest a continuous emotional life to a degree that no one else in this production comes close to matching.  Karen’s tearful remorse after tricking Margo into missing the show that gives Eve her big chance is a particular highlight; an even brighter one is Karen’s outburst of laughter – barely suppressed hysteria – in the Cub Room restaurant, after the showdown with Eve in the ladies’.  Monica Dolan has recently won the Olivier for Best Supporting Actress for this performance.  I didn’t see any of the other nominated work but I’d be surprised if the award wasn’t very well deserved.

    28 April 2019

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