Monthly Archives: May 2021

  • Tulip Fever

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Justin Chadwick (2017)

    Filming took place in mid-2014.  Over three years later, after (presumably) a lot of re-cutting and serial changes of release date, Tulip Fever opened in the US to dire reviews.  Fifteen more months went by before it limped into British cinemas.  I failed to act on a vague intention to see the film then and hadn’t been looking out since for its appearance in television listings.  I don’t know if the screening on BBC2 this May Bank Holiday was the TV premiere but the time slot was striking – immediately after transmission of the World Snooker Championship final.  Setting an end time for that is a well-proven inexact science.  Was the reasoning behind the scheduling ‘This movie is a dud – if the snooker goes down to the wire and we have to pull it no one will mind (and we’ll stick it on iPlayer anyway)’?    At 10pm, when the film was due to start, the snooker was still going on.  Half an hour or so later, the admirable Mark Selby had won his fourth world title and Tulip Fever, plagued by postponements throughout its life, could start without too much delay.  Even so, I decided to watch it on iPlayer next day out of a mixture of curiosity and pity.  The curiosity never disappeared – you always wonder how things went so wrong – though the pity soon turned to irritation.

    Adapted from a 1999 novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach, Justin Chadwick’s romantic drama is set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam during the time of tulpenmanie (tulip mania) – when ‘contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed … [This] is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history’ (Wikipedia).  Plonked into this historically specific context is a tangle of largely familiar plot lines.  The beautiful Sophia (Alicia Vikander), raised in an orphanage, is married off to Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy widower who wants a child.  He’s a bit past it and she fails to conceive.  Things look up when Cornelis commissions a portrait to be painted and Sophia starts an affair with the artist, Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan).  Below stairs, housemaid Maria (Holliday Grainger) is having it off with Willem (Jack O’Connell), the local fishmonger.  He makes a killing in the tulip market before being robbed of it and press-ganged into the bargain.  When Maria discovers that (a) she’s with child, (b) Willem has disappeared and (c) her mistress is adulterous, the two women devise a daring plan.  Sophia will pretend to be pregnant and, when the time comes, to die in childbirth.  Once her body has been removed from her husband’s house, she’ll come back to life and run away with Jan, who, in the meantime, will have made his fortune in tulip bulbs.  Unmarried mother Maria will thus be able to keep her job with Cornelis and – since a nurse will be needed – her baby too.

    That’s not the half of it but it’s more than enough for this note – the load of plot is a main reason why Tulip Fever is both hectic and tiresome.  It whizzes along but is so thinly textured that the effect is sometimes cartoonish.  I’d guess Justin Chadwick shot much too much and couldn’t shape it.  He may have been happy with what he saw in rushes but there are so many scenes and they’re mostly so short that there’s no kind of rhythm, either within individual sequences or in the narrative as a whole.  The film is like a 107-minute trailer.  Just occasionally, Chadwick manages to find a couple of bits of footage to stitch together agreeably.  One morning Cornelis, the blithely unaware cuckold, leaves his house humming a merry tune.  Cut to Sorgh (Tom Hollander), the unscrupulous, venal doctor who’s overseeing the fake pregnancy etc; he’s walking along, also humming contentedly.  It’s a shame there isn’t a third leg to the humming relay.

    There’s a lot of talent involved, behind and in front of the camera, which makes the resulting fiasco rather remarkable, as well as regrettable.  It’s no surprise that the film’s visual scheme tries to evoke art of the Dutch Golden Age but the lighting, by the Danish cinematographer Eigild Bryld, is impressive, especially in the outdoor sequences.  There are some fine interior compositions too but reliance on natural light sometimes makes indoors hard to make out, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the people on screen may be characters who hardly had time to register even when they were fully visible.  Deborah Moggach (who also wrote, inter alia, the screenplay for the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice and the novel Ol Parker turned into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) did the screenplay with, believe it or not, Tom Stoppard.  Who knows how it compares with Moggach’s novel – or even how what ended up on screen compares with the script Moggach and Stoppard wrote.  Explanations of tulpenmanie may have worked better in print; in the film, they’re  don’t amount to much more than repeated eruptions of noisy, hand-held-camera frenzy in the dealing centre.  As in the novel, there’s a first-person narrator but it’s Maria instead of Sophia.  You can’t help wondering if Holliday Grainger’s voiceover was added during part of the lengthy editing process, as a futile attempt to give the narrative some coherence.

    It will be clear from the names above that the film has quite a cast, and I’ve not yet mentioned the likes of Zach Galifianakis, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan – and Judi Dench.  As the pragmatic, wily abbess of the convent orphanage where Sophia grew up, Dench shows how hard it is for her not to give a good performance – even when the odds are stacked against it.  In the small role of a dressmaker, Joanna Scanlan does the same.  Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger both blend humour with single-mindedness.  You miss Willem when he’s carted off into the navy.  It’s good to see him finally return to make an honest woman of Maria; there’s a flash forward to them and their brood a few years into the future.  (It’s rather as if Cinderella lived happily ever after with Buttons and they had kids.)  Except for the uncharismatic Dane DeHaan, none of the actors is weak but you feel with most of them – Alicia Vikander especially – that you’re watching extracts from a performance.  Tulip Fever seems to have been a thoroughly ill-starred film.  Even the place it has in Hollywood history is unenviable.  This was the last movie to be theatrically released by the Weinstein Company.

    4 May 2021

  • My Octopus Teacher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (2020)

    Nature documentaries, however ecologically-minded, are inclined to anthropomorphism.  The music and voiceover in the 1950s Disney ‘True-Life Adventures’ series were often derided for this.  David Attenborough is understandably revered for his enduring environmentalism yet his television programmes, in this respect, don’t seem to me that different from the old Disneys.  Sacrilegious to say but I prefer the work of cameraman and conservationist Gordon Buchanan to Attenborough’s.  As their names suggest (The Bear Family and Me, etc), Buchanan’s TV films strike an honest balance between wildlife observation and personal involvement.  The recently Oscar-winning Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher similarly earns points for a title that lays its anthropomorphic cards on the table.

    The first person in this story is Craig Foster, a South African naturalist and documentary film-maker.   Every day for a year, Foster went diving in the kelp forests off False Bay, near Cape Town, where he found and started to film an octopus.  Not only does Foster become increasingly fascinated with the creature, a young female.  He also gains her trust – she lets him observe her habits at close quarters and even engages in play.  It’s impossible to avoid humanising language in a sentence like that last one – which more makes you sympathetic to the anthropomorphism you’ve just been hearing on the soundtrack.   Besides, there’s no denying the octopus justifies the treatment to a remarkable degree, especially in her resourceful self-defence against a pyjama shark.  One of its kind has already dismembered the octopus, who retreats to her den, allowing the arm gradually to regenerate.  She thwarts the next attack by attaching herself to the shark’s back, eventually sliding off to safety.  This episode makes a real heroine of the octopus, as smart as she is plucky.

    A female octopus’s biological design makes her a paradigm of maternal self-sacrifice, as well as of the natural order whereby the individual ends but the species lives on.  Once the octopus has been impregnated, she starts to die.  In nourishing her eggs, she gives up her own strength.  Her last act is to give birth; thoroughly depleted, she then expires.  When he sees ‘his’ octopus mating with a male, Foster knows it’s the beginning of the end.  A shark has the last word, making off with her remains.  Foster’s feelings of loss – even in longish retrospect (his year with the octopus was a decade ago) – crystallised the low spirits that nature documentaries, in spite of their manifold beauties, tend to leave me in (‘Birth, and copulation, and death.  That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks’).  My Octopus Teacher, it has to be said, is certainly not short of beauties.  A film of this kind is bound to be lauded for cinematography that’s amazing and breathtaking; here’s one that really merits those adjectives.  The world under the sea is hardly a new screen location but the images of Roger Horrocks and Foster, both of whom shot submarine sequences, have an exhilarating lucidity.

    Whereas you can’t get enough of the cephalopod teacher or the flora and fauna of which she’s part, I could have done with rather less of the human pupil.  Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed share the directing credit but Craig Foster produced and seems to have been the prime mover, in more ways than one, in the making of the film.  As well as doing the voiceover narrative, he also speaks regularly to camera, and he does go on a bit – in the regional accent that’s my least favourite.  (I realise this amounts to racial prejudice of a kind but I also know my dislike of the sound of white South African voices derives from first hearing them emerge from guardians of apartheid.)  This isn’t Foster’s fault, of course, but the same can’t be said for some of his clichéd remarks.  He explains, for example, how, before the events described, he’d been ‘through two years of hell’.  This turns out to mean little more than that he was overworked, jaded and seems to have felt the need to revitalise his relationship with his teenage son Tom.

    The octopus experience gave Foster a new lease of life on all fronts.  The closing legends explain that he still goes deep-sea swimming but now in the company of others – not only Tom but also colleagues in the Sea Change project, which Craig Foster co-founded in 2012, to help protect life in the kelp forests.  What exactly did Foster learn from the octopus?  The chief lesson, he says in the film’s closing lines, was ‘to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor:  that’s a huge difference’.  Fair enough, though why should the two things be mutually exclusive?  Foster also says the octopus educated him to ‘care for all life, even the smallest fish’.  I’m not sure if that all includes the pyjama sharks.

    2 May 2021

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