Monthly Archives: June 2020

  • Cast a Dark Shadow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lewis Gilbert (1955)

    This crime thriller is adapted from a stage play, and it shows.  The play, Murder Mistaken, was by Janet Green, whose screenwriting credits included The Clouded Yellow, Sapphire and Victim, but who didn’t work on Cast a Dark Shadow:  the adaptation is credited to John Cresswell alone.  Cresswell did a good job on Yield to the Night, released the following year, but not here.  Lewis Gilbert’s unimaginative direction doesn’t help.  Except for the opening sequence (see below), all the scenes that take place outside the room that was presumably the stage set, lack atmosphere.  The main characters’ entrances and exits, especially in the film’s climax, are decidedly stagy.  But the fundamental problems are the screenplay’s construction and the filmmakers’ failure to grasp the implications of opening out the material.

    Edward Bare (Dirk Bogarde) has married Monica (Mona Washbourne), a much older woman, for her money, the fruits of a successful family business.  He’s under the impression she hasn’t made a will and that, if Monica dies intestate, he’ll inherit her fortune as next of kin.  When he learns that her lawyer, Philip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), has drawn up a will, now ready to be signed and sealed, Edward anxiously speeds up plans to bring about his wife’s death.  He doesn’t realise she’d already made a will.  She was on the point of amending this to Edward’s advantage, so that he inherited everything immediately.  Since she dies before signing off the revised will,  Edward inherits Monica’s big house and smaller second home but no cash.  The remainder of her estate will be held in trust for the lifetime of her sister Dora, who now lives in Jamaica.  Only on Dora’s death will it pass to Edward.  Jamaica’s a long way away so he sets his sights on another well-off older woman, the widowed Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood).   It’s not long before she becomes the second Mrs Bare.

    The film starts with the end of a holiday that Monica and Edward have been taking in Brighton, as she recuperates from a bout of flu.  The couple then return home, where Philip has turned up with the draft will for Monica’s approval.  The marital relationship appears to consist of mutual infantilising – Monica affectionately calls her toyboy husband Teddy (Bear) – and Mona Washbourne plays this very well:  you feel how much Monica enjoys both indulging her Teddy and being indulged by him.  (The interactions are reminiscent of those between Dan and Mrs Bramson in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall.)  This can only be speculation but it’s easy to imagine that Janet Green’s stage play is structured so as to show the Bares at first as odd-couple sweethearts – and shock the audience when Edward is revealed in his true uxoricidal colours.

    That’s not what happens in Cast a Dark Shadow.  The theatrical release poster shown on the film’s Wikipedia entry features, along with remarkably garish colouring, the question ‘What was in his heart – love, greed or murder?’  (Actually, there’s no question mark and four ellipses.)  Lewis Gilbert answers this immediately.  In the opening sequence, Monica screams in terror.  We then realise she and Edward are in a funfair ghost train.  The camera moves from her face to his, highlighting Edward’s eyes in the darkness.  If looks could kill … The moment has terrific instant impact – it’s perhaps Dirk Bogarde’s best in the whole film – but it gives too much away.   Once the Bares are back home, Edward keeps plying Monica with spirits, even in her cups of tea.   You don’t wonder if he’s trying to inebriate her; you know he is, because Gilbert repeatedly shows Bogarde’s face signalling malice aforethought.  Edward offers to go to the public library to change Monica’s book; it’s 7.30pm, the library closes in half an hour but he assures her he can easily get there in time.  He tells Monica’s loyal, simple-minded maid Emmie (Kathleen Harrison) where he’s going and leaves the house by the front door.  He reappears at the French windows and re-enters the drawing room to set up his wife’s death, staged to suggest that she tried and, blind drunk, failed to light a gas fire, and asphyxiated.

    From-the-get-go exposure of Edward’s murderous intentions needn’t have been a weakness if Cast a Dark Shadow had developed into a character/case study but that doesn’t happen either.  Once an inquest into Monica’s death has confirmed it as accidental, his malignant personality goes on the back burner until the melodramatic business end of the film.  Instead, there’s just underpowered plot.  Edward meets and seduces Freda; once they’re married, she rules the domestic roost and frustrates his plans.  Another woman, Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh), appears in the locality, wanting to buy a house.  Edward worked in an estate agent’s office before he married Monica, and he shows Charlotte round properties, which raises Freda’s suspicions that they’re having an affair.  Edward does have designs on Charlotte but of an unromantic kind.  He discovers that she’s really Monica’s sister Dora, who smelt a rat even from the West Indies and has come to England incognito to pursue her suspicions of her brother-in-law.  Edward lures Dora to the house while Freda and Emmie are elsewhere.  Only when they unexpectedly return, along with Philip Mortimer – in other words, when all the main dramatis personae are gathered on stage together – is it time to bring Edward’s villainy back into the spotlight, and give him his comeuppance.

    Cast a Dark Shadow is moderately entertaining but next to nothing rings true.   Edward should be devastated, rather than mildly exasperated, by his impatient miscalculation in getting rid of Monica just before she makes a will that would have left him the lot.   Instead, he puts an affectionate hand on what used to be Monica’s favoured chair and confides in his late wife that he’s made things tricky for himself.   He talks to her several times after her death.  This might make blackly comic sense if his behaviour towards her in life had been different – if he’d seemed to have a soft spot for Monica at the same time as knowing he’d have to kill her.   His many ominous looks make clear, however, what a tiresome effort it is for Edward to be nice to his wife:  so the post-mortem chumminess is wholly artificial.  Although he can attract a soft-hearted, needy woman like Monica and, as he says, a woman of his own class like Freda, Edward thinks his ladykilling potential is circumscribed by his social position.  In the climactic showdown, reference is made to his past life in Acton and Romford, the choice of place names meant to announce the wrong side of the tracks.   Yet the supposedly significant class distinctions are muffled in a way that’s familiar in British films of this vintage:  except for Kathleen Harrison, the downmarket characters sound too upmarket.

    This is especially true of Dirk Bogarde – and puzzling, when you bear in mind his work in The Blue Lamp (as opposed to his work in The Sleeping Tiger).   In the opening sequence in Brighton, Edward has a London accent.  It returns occasionally but he mostly speaks RP.  The inconsistency isn’t explained by Edward’s putting on an act (in which case he’d drop the posh accent at times other than the times that he actually does).  It is, rather, part and parcel of Bogarde’s oddly indifferent performance.  He’s magnetic but overdoes Edward’s telltale shadow movements as if unable to come up with anything more.  Margaret Lockwood was box-office poison by the time she made this picture (which didn’t help the cause:  she won some critical praise but the film failed at the box office and Lockwood didn’t appear in another picture for twenty-one years).  Although she still seems a bit too classy for a barmaid who married the landlord and inherited his pub, Lockwood gives Cast a Dark Shadow what energy it has.  She’s quite a coarse actress but does well to transmute that coarseness into Freda’s brassy, no-nonsense bossiness.  Though you don’t believe it when Freda admits that, for all his faults (and she doesn’t know the half of them at this stage), she’s in love with Edward.

    The ending is crazy.  His crimes exposed, Edward dashes out of the house and drives off.  Having disabled the brakes on Charlotte/Dora’s car, he seems to think that, if he can make good his escape, he’ll inherit the money held in trust once Dora drives to her inevitable death – confident that Freda won’t testify against him (as his wife, she can’t be forced to).  He finds both Dora’s car and Philip’s blocking his getaway, and switches from his own car to Dora’s.   Even a motor-ignoramus like me recognised the number plate from an earlier scene; assuming Edward couldn’t fail to identify Dora’s vehicle, I thought I’d misunderstood his state of mind.  As he speeds off, I took his cackling glee to be you’ll-never-catch-me-alive bravado.  Not a bit of it – he’s just got the wrong car and realises too late … (It’s possible that, like the beginning of the film, this might work a bit better in the theatre, ie with another character simply reporting what happened to Edward.  I wouldn’t put money on that, though.)   Lewis Gilbert certainly gives the protagonist a big exit:  you’d be forgiven for thinking he made the film purely in order to show the car plunging from a cliff edge, smashing to smithereens, bursting into flames.  It’s a pity Gilbert didn’t devote more of his energies to animating the rest of Cast a Dark Shadow.

    22 June 2020

  • Only the Animals

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Seules les bêtes (2019)

    (Dominik Moll)

    SPOILER ALERT:  It’s only fair in this instance to give a plot spoiler warning additional to the general one on my home page …

    Animals are well represented but don’t fare well in Dominik Moll’s film.  It begins in the streets of Abidjan, where a cycle carries an unusual cargo – a live goat, sitting nearly upright and strapped to the cyclist’s back.  They’re heading to the den of a local shaman.  From what we see of the latter’s rituals later in Only the Animals, we can infer the passenger wasn’t a live goat much longer.  Moll’s narrative moves between the Ivory Coast’s economic capital and southern France, predominantly isolated farmsteads in Lozère, near the Massif Central.  There we meet a few dogs, plenty more sheep and cows.  One dog, stuck inside a car, witnesses its owner being strangled; another is shot dead by its owner – a farmer who then takes his own life.  As all this suggests, the human animals in the story don’t tend to prosper either.  But the film, adapted by the director and Gilles Marchand from Colin Niel’s 2017 novel of the same name, is so smartly plotted and constructed, and some of its characters are so engrossing, that Only the Animals isn’t a lowering experience.   You could even call it a feelgood movie.  It lifts the spirits because it’s so splendidly done.

    The film comprises four sections, each bearing the name of a character:  Alice, Joseph, Marion, Amandine.  The sections are overlapping:  they partly consist of the same events, presented from different points of view.  Each section also has an element unique to itself.  Until the climax to the fourth of the sections, their unrepeated parts represent a movement backwards in time which often elucidates things unresolved or hard to fathom in earlier parts.  The four chapters’ common plot strand – or, rather, the most salient common plot strand:  a clever thing about Only the Animals is how much its several strands eventually interlock – is the disappearance of Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), an affluent married woman whose home is in Lozère.  Evelyne goes missing after a night of heavy snowfall there.  This isn’t good weather for white subtitles.  Fortunately, it’s cold enough for people outdoors to be well wrapped up in dark clothing (cf The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).

    Alice (Laure Calamy) is an insurance agent, though her manner on a visit to an elderly woman client suggests, rather, a social worker.  Alice gives a similar impression when she’s talking with another client, the reclusive farmer Joseph (Damien Bonnard), in his kitchen – until she suddenly mounts him.  The sex doesn’t go on long before he tells her he wants to be alone.  Alice lives with her husband Michel (Denis Ménochet) on the farm that he manages and her father (Fred Ulysse) owns.  She and Michel share a bed but not much domestic time together.  She brings his meals to the office where Michel works long hours at the farm accounts or, at least, fixated on a computer screen.  Evelyne barely appears in the ‘Alice’ story, except as a photograph on a TV news report of her disappearance.  In the ‘Joseph’ story, she’s revealed to be the corpse the title character drags into a hay barn.  He makes Evelyne at home there.  In his fantasies, she offers a sympathetic ear as Joseph recalls his mother’s death and its aftermath.  He didn’t let anyone know and left his mother’s corpse to rot in her bed.

    These first two episodes, although bleakly compelling, occasionally verge on parody of rural solitude and benightedness drama – the second episode especially, despite Damien Bonnard’s convincing playing of Joseph.  The third episode is different.  Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is a waitress in a Sète hotel where Evelyne is staying while on business in the city.  The two women, in spite of an age difference of some thirty years, are soon revealed to be lovers.  It’s a passionate affair but it’s soon clear too that their feelings for one another are different.  Marion is in love with Evelyne, who wants only a physical relationship.   It’s an inconvenience for her when, after her return to Lozère, Marion turns up at her home – albeit that Evelyne’s husband Guillaume (Roland Plantin) isn’t currently around.  (As he explains in a TV interview soon after his wife’s disappearance, the couple lead rather separate lives.  It was only after Evelyne hadn’t been seen or in touch for a day or two that Guillaume reported her missing.)  Evelyne nevertheless doesn’t want Marion staying with her and gives her money for a hotel room.  Marion angrily rejects it and ends up on a cheap camping site.  Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s straightforward emotional energy gives proceedings a lift but the best is yet to come.

    Amandine isn’t a real person as such.  She is, to use Adam Mars-Jones’s phrase (in his TLS review), the ‘nom de phish’ of Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), a young Ivorian.  He and his mates in Abidjan are looking to get rich quick through online impersonation of young women whom men in France are ready to pay to be cyber-excited by.  The youngsters dream of emulating the self-styled ‘Rolex the Bourgeois’ (Cheick Diakité), a local celebrity after making it big in this line of work.  Once he’s bought a photograph and spicy video clips of the girl he’s going to be, and named her Amandine, Armand starts phishing.  The bait is taken hook, line and sinker by Alice’s husband Michel.  Text exchanges are, unsurprisingly, an increasingly familiar narrative device in films but those between Michel and Amandine are the most dramatic that I’ve so far seen.  You follow their online conversations as avidly as do Armand’s friends, huddled around him, peering over his shoulder at the laptop screen.

    Only the Animals travels a large cultural distance both between the Massif Central and the Ivory Coast, and within each locale.  In France, the de nos jours form of Michel’s obsession contrasts sharply with a black-and-white photograph on display in the deranged farmer’s house.  The photo, of the child Joseph with his mother, seems to belong to a distant past.  The coexistence of online scamming, witchcraft and conspicuous wealth in Abidjan is especially striking.  It’s Armand who, on his visit to the shaman Papa Sanou (Christian Ezan), is obliged as part of the procedure to drink from a bowl of what may well be goat’s blood and other caprine body parts.  When his alter ego starts earning, Armand publicly flaunts his wad, Loadsamoney-style.  He even throws bank notes into an excited nightclub crowd.  It’s not that he becomes wealthy in absolute terms – even getting into debt, Michel hasn’t the wherewithal to make that happen.  But at least Armand can perform as a rich man.  He styles himself, in Rolex the Bourgeois tradition, ‘NMW’ – which stands for ‘No Money Worries’.  (The English – or American – sobriquet may be a status symbol in itself.)

    Dominik Moll avoids blunt characterisation of Armand and Michel as, respectively, heartless trickster and pathetically easy prey.  Armand is revealed to be emotionally needy too.  It turns out he’s a father.  His infant daughter and her mother, Armand’s ex-girlfriend Monique (Perline Eyombwan), live in truly affluent style, in the Abidjan residence of a European businessman whose kept woman Monique is, and who’s rarely at home.  Armand is still in love with Monique and insists he can give her an even better lifestyle than she already enjoys.  (Monique clearly has feelings for her ex too but knows better.)  Armand ups the financial ante by having Amandine tell her online admirer she needs money to escape her present life.  Michel pays, thinking he’ll actually get to see her in France.  Both men, each in his singular way, demonstrate the truth of Papa Sanou’s gnomic spiritual pronouncement that ‘Love is giving what you don’t have’.

    In a generally strong cast, Denis Ménochet and Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin are outstanding.  The latter, making his screen acting debut, is a real talent.  The animation in his face – especially the determination in his eyes when Armand is engaging in text exchanges and having to think quickly what to write next, in order to get the reaction he wants – is an exciting complement to ‘Bibisse’’s naturally easy movement.  Denis Ménochet has acted before, many times and often impressively, but his performance in Only the Animals is, even so, a revelation.  For a large part of the film, Michel is virtually immobile – at his PC, in his car, lying in bed beside Alice.  Ménochet’s bulk and the misery he’s able, without histrionics, to exude, powerfully convey his character’s trapped despair.

    Ménochet’s greatest achievement is to make believable what might seem to be the implausible coincidence on which the whole plot depends (although that echoes another of Papa Sanou’s insights:  he tells Armand he’s a fool if he doesn’t realise that chance is stronger than he is).  When she arrives in Lozère to seek out Evelyne, Michel is convinced that Marion is Amandine.  Their first, momentary encounter comes when she’s trying to hitch a lift.  Alice, in the passenger seat, suggests they oblige and Michel slows the car down.  When he catches sight of the girl, he changes his mind and, to Alice’s bewilderment, drives off quickly.   Ménochet expresses the force of desire that makes Michel see Amandine and the weight of guilt that makes him ignore her.  (It has to be said that Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s looks help too with this – she’s more attractive than she is distinctive.)   Once Michel is on his own again, the desire wins out and he tracks Amandine down to Marion’s campsite hutch.  She’s not there when he first calls so he leaves money in the door.  Marion is infuriated when she finds the money, assuming it to be payment for services from her female lover.  When Evelyne does come to the campsite, there’s a noisy argument between the two women.  Michel, sitting in his car nearby, hears the tail end of this as Evelyne exits.  When he then introduces himself to Amandine, Marion angrily sends him packing.

    ‘Amandine’ is by far the best, as well as the longest, of the four sections.  That it starts to eclipse interest in what exactly happened to Evelyne isn’t a criticism of Only the Animals, merely an acknowledgement that the human interest of the Armand-Michel story overrides the film’s mystery thriller aspect.  The local gendarme (Bastien Bouillon) does investigate Evelyne’s  disappearance and finally works out what’s happened but his doing so doesn’t carry the weight it normally would in a piece with this kind of storyline.  The great merit of the plot is that the disappearance and the human interest drama prove to be inextricably linked.  Evelyne leaves the campsite only just before Michel, whose hurt incomprehension now knows no bounds.  His car follows hers into the mountains.  He forces it to stop and Evelyne to get out.  He then strangles her.  Soon afterwards, Michel, who brusquely ignored an earlier call from an Ivorian scam-detection unit, is forced to realise what’s been going on and his terrible series of errors.  He takes a flight to Abidjan, where he runs Armand to earth.   If this sequence of events sounds melodramatic I can only say it doesn’t play out that way.  Michel accosts Armand and pushes him up against a wall (the physical contrasts between the two actors, noticeable throughout, are emphatically confirmed here).   But this is as far as Michel’s aggression goes.  The last we see of him he’s looking at a laptop screen and even smiles ruefully at the latest text he receives.  Armand, by now, is lovelorn too, having lost Monique, who leaves Abidjan with their daughter.  In a startling postscript, we see the two of them arriving in the snows of Lozère, in the company of an older man who carries their luggage.  He is Guillaume Ducat.

    The film’s French and English titles are a good example of what can get lost in translation.  Only the Animals is a fair literal rendering of Seules les bêtes but the French can mean so much more.  For a start, it can mean ‘Only Animals’, without the definite article and with the (partly ironic) implication that animals is all that people are.  A bête can be a stupid person as well as a beast of the field; seul can mean alone.  A thread running through the story suggests that a stable human relationship is hard to achieve.  Most of the main characters are involved in some kind of extra-marital affair.  Alice and Michel keep their distance from each other, ditto Evelyne and Guillaume.  Evelyne wants to engage with another body, regardless of the personality that goes with it.  Joseph’s solitude is relieved by one corpse, then another.  (He kills himself by throwing himself into the deep pit that already holds his mother and Evelyne.)  The most sustained dynamic interaction in the film comes between two virtual identities.

    Only the Animals is that rare combination, satisfying as a piece of ingenious, jigsaw-puzzle plotting and as a dramatically rich exploration of people and culture.  One odd thing:  while you get to understand all you need to understand about the humans in the story, there are a few unanswered questions concerning the non-humans.  Take Evelyne’s dog, who has the suggestive name Fantômas (a masked master of disguise in a series of popular French crime fiction novels of yesteryear).  Still inside his owner’s car when she’s been dragged outside it, why doesn’t Fantômas bark and snarl at Michel until after he’s killed Evelyne?  And, since I’m always vexed when movies forget about the animals they’ve introduced:  who’s going to feed Joseph’s cows, left to fend for themselves?  Seules les bêtes.  Perhaps the title means that only the behaviour and fate of quadrupeds won’t be satisfactorily dealt with in Dominik Moll’s fine film.

    19 June 2020

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