Monthly Archives: October 2021

  • Citizen Ashe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rex Miller and Sam Pollard (2021)

    Sam Pollard is well known for cinema and television documentaries about major Black figures in American public life, most recently MLK/FBI (2020).  Rex Miller, the less famous co-director of Citizen Ashe, was there (in Pollard’s absence) to introduce this London Film Festival screening.  It was clear from the little Miller said beforehand (I didn’t stay for the post-screening Q&A) that he’s a tennis fan; the film’s account of Arthur Ashe is a pretty good balance between sport-star biography and portrait of a social and political activist.  Citizen Ashe isn’t formally inventive or imaginative but it’s an intelligently admiring commemoration of a true hero.

    I remember first becoming aware of Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon in 1968 – the first Wimbledon of the Open Era – where he reached the semi-finals, losing in straight sets to the top seed and eventual champion, Rod Laver.  (The match is briefly dealt with in Citizen Ashe.)  I was only twelve but recall being struck by how different Ashe was, and not just in skin colour.  In television interviews – fewer in those days but they still happened – he was super-articulate:  he sounded brainier than sportsmen usually did.  This wasn’t a mistaken impression.  Miller and Pollard are greatly helped by an abundance of interview footage, during and after Ashe’s playing career, on which to draw.  His verbal fluency and command, not least the effortless avoidance of sporting cliché, is even more striking now.

    Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1943, Ashe, with his brother Johnnie (whom Miller and Pollard also interview), was raised by their widowed father, a park-keeper whose duties included looking after the tennis courts.  Arthur’s talent was spotted early:  in the late 1950s, he became the first African American to compete in the Maryland boys’ championship; by the time he was awarded a tennis scholarship to UCLA in 1963, he’d become the first Black winner of the National Junior Indoor tennis title.  After graduating with a degree in business administration, he joined the US Army in 1966 and became a commissioned officer, based at West Point.  He was still an army lieutenant when he won the inaugural US Open in 1968; he was discharged from service in early 1969 to pursue a full-time professional tennis career.  The clips of Ashe interviews – a mixture of contemporary and retrospective – convey well the gradual growth of his political consciousness over the course of his military service, at the dawn of Open tennis.

    For those of us who followed the sport closely in the late 1960s and the 1970s, there are niggles in Citizen Ashe.  A good amount of screen time is devoted to the Wimbledon final of 1975, in which Ashe’s tactical astuteness undid the power game of defending champion and hot favourite Jimmy Connors.   To the astonishment of nearly everyone (Connors included), Ashe won the first two sets 6-1 6-1.  It seemed too good to be true and it was.  As a voiceover in Citizen Ashe says, ‘Then Connors began to fight back’.  But the rally used to illustrate this initial turning of the tide took place – as the Wimbledon scoreboard makes clear – when Connors had already taken the third set 7-5 and was a break of serve up in the fourth.  (Ashe quickly broke back, broke again two service games later, and served out to win the fourth set 6-4 and the championship, so becoming the first Black winner of the Wimbledon Men’s Singles.)

    Viewers who don’t care about sporting historical accuracy to this level of detail will see this as hair-splitting.  I admit they’re not entirely wrong but another instance of the film-makers’ occasional tendency to sacrifice chronological correctness in favour of visual rhythm or instant impact (or both) is more significant.  In a clip in which Ashe talks about preparing for the US Open in 1968, he says, ‘There was a lot going on’.  An understatement:  there’s coverage of and comment on, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the first half of the year.  But Miller and Pollard’s montage of what was ‘going on’ includes shots of the Black Power salute on the Olympic medal podium in Mexico City.  The Olympics were held in October 1968, a month after the US Open that Ashe won.  Given his acute political awareness and the intense media interest, in the build-up to the US Open, in his colour as well as his tennis prowess, what Tommie Smith and John Carlos did in the Olympic stadium would have been for Ashe an unignorable issue if it really had happened in advance of Forest Hills.  It can’t be argued that these inaccuracies matter more than the film’s account of his exceptionally difficult later life.  Citizen Ashe would be better without them, even so.

    The heart disease that Ashe developed in his mid-thirties not only abruptly ended his life on the tennis court but also led to the illness that killed him.  It’s believed he contracted the AIDS virus from blood transfusions received during heart surgery in 1983:  he died ten years later, a few months before his fiftieth birthday.  As a high-profile sportsman, Ashe spoke out against social and racial inequality within and beyond the tennis world.  Following his second heart bypass operation, he became a notably active campaign chair for the American Heart Association.  He was reluctant to go public on his AIDS diagnosis:  after eventually doing so, he set up the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of Aids, and addressed the UN General Assembly on the need for increased AIDS awareness and research funding.

    Citizen Ashe includes an excerpt from an interview late in his tragically short life in which Ashe depreciates the importance of his sporting achievements.  That view is very understandable:  he hadn’t played tennis for more than a decade and had taken on greater challenges in the meantime.  But he’s so extraordinary a figure in the history of his sport that I wish Citizen Ashe had taken a bit more time to describe his career.  It’s fair enough for Miller and Pollard to major on Ashe’s US Open and Wimbledon wins but there’s not even a mention of his intervening third Grand Slam, the Australian in 1970.  Half a century on, he remains the only Black male to have won any of those three championships (the only other Black winner of a men’s Grand Slam is Yannick Noah, the French champion in 1983).

    The film unsurprisingly links the public positions that Ashe took with the ‘speaking out’ of more recent tennis champions of colour, on the women’s side of the game.  It seems relatively easy, though, for Serena Williams to assert that ‘The day I stop fighting for equality is the day I’ll die’ or for Naomi Osaka to wear a T-shirt bearing the names of Black American victims of white American police violence – compared with what Ashe dared to do when, for example, he played in apartheid-era South Africa.   There’s a brief appearance late in Citizen Ashe by Barack Obama, who singles out Muhammad Ali and Ashe as the two African-American men who most impressed him in his politically formative years.  Seeing Obama naturally makes you wonder if Ashe’s intellect and articulacy might have taken him into a successful political career if he’d chosen to go in that direction.

    As it was, he showed himself a skilled politician within his own sporting sphere, as well as a player whose conduct on the court was exemplary.  As non-playing captain of the US Davis Cup team, Ashe did a remarkable job of handling John McEnroe.  The latter is one of Miller and Pollard’s talking heads:  despite his admiration for Ashe, it’s vexing to listen to McEnroe – even more vexing to hear people in the audience for this screening chuckle at clips of his you-cannot-be-serious routine at Wimbledon, and so on.  It’s poignantly instructive, however, when Arthur Ashe talks about McEnroe.  Ashe admits that the deplorable court conduct both annoyed him and made him envious of a young white man’s ‘emotional freedom’ to misbehave.  This incisive candour at least stopped the laughter in NFT2.

    11 October 2021

  • Last Night in Soho

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edgar Wright (2021)

    If this is the psychological horror film that Wikipedia claims then it’s fair to say Edgar Wright majors on the horror at the expense of the psychology.  Last Night in Soho, showing at the London Film Festival, runs close on two hours.  The first hour keeps you interested and entertained; the second is increasingly, and garishly, monotonous.

    Teenager Eloise (Ellie) Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) lives in Redruth, Cornwall with her grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) – Ellie’s mother is dead and there’s no mention of who or where her father is.  It’s the present day but the girl’s heart is in the 1960s.  She’s obsessed with the decade’s pop music, and its clothes.  She dreams of becoming a successful fashion designer and Wright’s story gets underway with the arrival of the letter Ellie’s been longing to receive – the offer of a place to study at the London College of Fashion.  In her youth, Peggy spent time in London and she warns Ellie to take care in the big city.  This is a bit more than standard grandmotherly advice at the outset of a fairy tale:  Peggy reminds Ellie that her own mother, who was also in London for a time, allowed things to ‘get too much’ for her, and eventually took her own life.  Peggy is already concerned about her granddaughter’s mental health, well aware that Ellie sometimes has visions of her late mother (Aimee Cassettari).  We know this, too, from the film’s opening sequence in Ellie’s bedroom.

    In London, Ellie is soon, and reasonably, looking to move out of her student accommodation in Kings Cross – so as to escape from a coven of metro-hedonists who look down their noses at a country mouse and whose ringleader is her roommate, the domineering, pleased-with-herself Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen).  Ellie rents a Fitzrovia bedsit – at 8 Goodge Place (a real London W1 address) – where her landlady, and the house’s only other occupant, is the elderly Miss Collins (Diana Rigg).  At night, Ellie’s sixth sense transports her to mid-sixties Soho and its environs.  Thunderball is showing at the Odeon Leicester Square; in the Café de Paris, where Cilla Black (Beth Singh) is onstage, a blonde girl called Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is determined to follow in Cilla’s footsteps and attracts the attention of spivvy Jack (Matt Smith).  The vaguely threatening atmosphere and lack of other stars in evidence ensure that Ellie’s nocturnal journeys, even the early ones, aren’t quite to Midnight in Paris territory but Edgar Wright sets things up intriguingly.  Ellie is and isn’t reincarnated as Sandie:  the one turns into the other and back as she dances with Jack but Ellie is also sometimes shown on screen observing Sandie.  The time travel occurs only when Ellie’s in her bed chez Miss Collins.  Are her dreams (soon to be nightmares) generated by the girl’s own 1960s-mania?  Or by a kind of ‘platzgeist’ – is Sandie somehow linked to the rented room?

    Ellie inclines to the latter view, and she’s right – though she also gets the wrong end of the stick.  At first, Sandie inspires her to dye her own hair blonde and come up with 1960s fashion ideas that impress her tutor (Elizabeth Berrington).  But when Sandie discovers that vocal talent isn’t enough to advance her singing career and becomes a sex worker, with Jack morphing into her vicious pimp, Ellie is possessed of the conviction that Sandie came to a bad end – murdered, in the place where Ellie now lives.  She gets bar work to help pay the rent on the bedsit and becomes increasingly suspicious of a sinister, elderly barfly (Terence Stamp), nicknamed ‘Handsy’, who gives Ellie funny looks and claims, once she is blonde, to recognise her.  By the time he’s acknowledged he once knew a prostitute by the name of Sandie who lived in Goodge Place, Ellie has decided that Handsy was responsible for her avatar’s death.  She’s mistaken on both counts.  The climax to the film reveals that Sandie and Miss (Alexandra) Collins are the same person.  Murders did occur in the house where she has lived for over half a century but Sandie was the killer.  The murderees were men who used her for sex.

    Ellie’s limits as a visionary are designed to allow Wright to put on the screen his heroine’s mistaken impression of what happened, as well as, eventually, what really did happen.  Both are rendered in flamboyantly macabre, flickering images (many of them optically punishing) – which may gladden the hearts of giallo fans but don’t cut it with viewers looking for a convincingly worked-out story into the bargain.  Last Night in Soho has the potential to lull the audience – especially those of us who remember the 1960s or at least the sixties pop songs that Wright makes good use of – into thinking we’re on a nostalgia trip – which then turns into a bad trip, a means of exposing a noisome underside to Swinging London.  In the event, though, the narrative and even the music are smothered in nearly relentless, consequently weightless horror mayhem.

    Even allowing that Ellie’s misapprehension of what happened to Sandie is fed by present-day fears around what women are liable to suffer at the hands of men, the film’s sexual politics are a head-scratcher.  On arrival in London, Ellie gets into a black cab and is quickly spooked by the cabbie’s off-colour remarks and manner.  That’s why she rejects the offer of a young man, sitting on the steps at the entrance to her student residence, to give her a hand with her luggage.  This is John (Michael Ajao), the lone male student in Ellie’s group, who soon becomes her only ally; in contrast, Jocasta and her friends are an Ugly Sisterhood for the Cinderella heroine to best.  The revelation that Sandie avenged her sexual exploitation by knifing clients and hiding their bodies under the floorboards – 8 Goodge Place as a kind of gender-reversed 10 Rillington Place – has subversive impact.  Wright dilutes this by making Miss Collins a homicidal monster:  fearing her secret is about to be revealed, she tries to do away with Ellie by poisoning her cup of tea, and John, whom she stabs.  (He recovers from his injuries.  I didn’t understand how Ellie was able to ignore the poison she’d swallowed.)

    Being ‘different’ from their peers draws Ellie and John together.  He is certainly that – a rare non-white face in the film’s central London of either the 1960s or the 2020s.  He’s shy, loyal, witty – nicer than nice.  Michael Ajao is charming and, when required, funny but it’s a demeaning role – and, thanks to John’s racial distinctiveness, a troubling one.  In the Cinderella analogy, he’s Buttons rather than Prince Charming.  He and Ellie do briefly go to bed together – her idea – but John essentially belongs to the screen tradition of gay men who are a girl’s best friend:  he’s given credit for being sexually innocuous.  It’s a problem of a different kind that so is Matt Smith.  As Jack, he has the dodgy hustler voice and gestures off pat but it’s a cartoon.  There’s no threat either in his eyes or under the surface.

    Smith’s inadequacy was what first made me think, when Terence Stamp appeared on the scene, how much more compelling a Jack he’d have been in his youth.  There’s rather more irony than Wright intends when, later on, we’re encouraged to suspect that Jack aged into Handsy.  This is a red herring: it transpires that the Stamp character was well acquainted with local prostitutes through being a member of the Met vice squad.  |That hardly makes him squeaky clean, which may or may not be Wright’s excuse for having Stamp play the character menacingly.  But the menace is effective:  it has a real charge and comes across as a humorous put-on.  Eighty-three-year-old Terence Stamp – skinny and shambling but still charismatic – is virtually sending up, even censuring, his own ladykiller persona of yesteryear.

    Stamp is one of several 1960s screen icons in the film but, by some way, the most successful piece of senior casting.  Rita Tushingham’s trademark weirdness is used to obscure the fact that the character of Peggy doesn’t amount to anything much.  It’s one of the several disappointments of Wright’s screenplay, which he wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), that no substantial connection emerges between Ellie’s experiences in London and those of her mother and grandmother.  Diana Rigg looks remarkable – perhaps partly, and unhappily, because of her own state of health when the film was made (though shooting was completed, Wikipedia says, before Rigg’s terminal illness was diagnosed).  But she always seems a bit grand for the role.  The climactic unmasking of Miss Collins might have worked better if the landlady had seemed hard-bitten yet anonymous in the early stages of the story.  With Diana Rigg playing her, she’s a somebody only lightly disguised as a nobody.

    Wright’s casting of his young leads is just right, however.  Thomasin MacKenzie is a naturally truthful, as well an appealing, actress:  you keep faith emotionally with Ellie even when you’ve lost belief in the story she’s in.   Anya Taylor-Joy’s anime glamour easily supplies the externals essential to the conception of Sandie.  Unlike Matt Smith, Taylor-Joy gives these some depth:  Sandie’s retreat from bold self-confidence to doing men’s bidding is startling.  The choice of name is curious for a would-be pop star of the era, though:  you keep waiting for someone to tell her it’s already taken, even before a burlesque performance of ‘Puppet on a String’ in a sleazy club and ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’ on the soundtrack.  In the small role of a police officer who listens sympathetically to Ellie’s fantastic claims about a murder that may have happened more than five decades ago, Lisa McGrillis is characteristically excellent.  As the LCF tutor, Elizabeth Berrington similarly gives proceedings a shot of refreshing normality during her few minutes on screen.

    Last Night in Soho is pathetically vague about what attracts Ellie to another time.  It can’t be anything to do with her mother, who wouldn’t have been born before the 1970s; her grandmother embodies the 1960s only through the person playing her.  Ellie says she is ‘just drawn to’ this bygone age, and that’s as much as her creators come up with.  The film’s chief surprise – eclipsing its revelation of who Miss Collins really is – arrives in the closing scene.  It’s the end-of-year show at the London College of Fashion and Ellie’s frocks are going down a storm.  Granny Peggy and John are in the audience applauding.  Jocasta et al are seething.  Big-time fashion houses have stuck their cards on Ellie’s rack of costumes.  The designs are all, as they were when she first entered Sandie’s world, sixties-inspired.  You’d have thought the traumatic events she’s gone through in the meantime might have taken the shine off the era for Ellie but no, she’s still celebrating it, and without a hint of unease in the air.  Thomasin McKenzie makes Ellie likeably decent, and it’s nice to see virtue rewarded, but this finale kills the film as a coming-of-age-rites-of-passage number.  The effect, oddly enough, is a little like seeing Travis Bickle back out in his yellow cab at the end of Taxi Driver.  In case Edgar Wright feels flattered by that comparison, it’s important to stress the ‘little’.

    10 October 2021

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