Monthly Archives: February 2022

  • The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Will Sharpe (2021)

    Despite the current queue of higher-profile films to see, I felt I had to catch The Electrical Life of Louis Wain:  over the years, I’ve sent and received a fair few greetings cards featuring the title character’s mad-eyed, anthropomorphised cats.  Louis Wain (1860-1939) was, from a young age, an oddball.  In later life, he suffered serious mental illness and spent his last fifteen years in hospitals.  Will Sharpe’s biopic is nothing if not whimsical, as if to suggest it’s on the same wavelength as its curious subject.  The longer the film goes on, though, the more tonally wrong it feels.  Sharpe does little to explore Wain’s psychological condition, which may have been schizophrenia, although ‘the diagnosis is in dispute’ (Wikipedia); whatever it was, there seems little doubt that an accumulation of deaths of people close to him triggered Wain’s succession of nervous breakdowns.  Although Sharpe doesn’t omit these deaths, he spends too much time treating (Benedict Cumberbatch) as an engaging eccentric, dropping in dollops of mawkishness along the way.  The result verges on tasteless.

    Sharpe, who wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson, takes his strange title from Louis Wain’s persisting belief in electricity as ‘A mysterious and elemental force that occasionally he could feel shimmering in the ether and that explained all of life’s most profound and alarming secrets’.  Those are the words of the film’s narrator, voiced, unmistakably, by Olivia Colman but with no other identity; she isn’t, for example, someone claiming to have known Wain or who is telling his story to a particular listener or kind of listener.  The narration has occasional moments of brutal candour – there’s a reference to Victorian England’s ‘bizarre social prejudices and the fact that everything stank of shit’ – but Colman’s voice is, for the most part, jolly and amused.  This is surprising, in view of what befalls Wain, yet it chimes with Sharpe’s visual and musical choices.  Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22) review, presumably quoting Sharpe, notes that the film was shot in 4:3 ratio ‘for its “storybook, fairy-tale quality”’.  The art that Wain continued to produce during his last years, although still cat-centric, was ‘marked by bright colours, flowers, and intricate and abstract patterns’ (Wikipedia again).  You might need to know that in advance to make sense of the kaleidoscopic effects and the often prettified look that Sharpe and his cinematographer, Erik Wilson, contrive.  The score, by Arthur Sharpe (the director’s brother), is of a piece with the queasy quaintness.

    For purposes of historical accuracy, Benedict Cumberbatch is given a cleft lip and beaky nose.  The lip is understandable – you accept it as contributing to the younger Louis’s self-conscious shyness – but why the nose?  The real Louis Wain wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac and it’s not as if his face is famous enough for many viewers to know how closely or otherwise the actor playing him resembles the original.  Although the results are patchy, Cumberbatch makes a valiant attempt to blend quirkiness with emotional depth, and he has some strong support.  Claire Foy is Emily Richardson, Wain’s sisters’ governess and subsequently his wife.  Their time together was tragically short:  Emily developed breast cancer and died three years after they married.  You don’t get any sense of the true age difference between Louis and Emily, who was ten years his senior (which placed the couple on the receiving end of one of the era’s ‘bizarre social prejudices’).  Foy is convincing, even so; there’s relatively little strain in the balance of serious and humorous in her performance.  At first, Andrea Riseborough seems to be overdoing humourless, scolding Caroline, the eldest of Wain’s four younger sisters; it’s a narrow role but Riseborough’s unrelieved neurotic intensity somehow validates it.  No surprise that there’s good work from Toby Jones as Sir William Ingram, editor of the Illustrated London News (which kept Wain going as an artist of subjects other than cats in the early stages of his career) or, in a smaller role, from Adheel Akhtar.  Phoebe Nicholls has a melancholy grace as Louis’s mother but there’s also some ropy acting – from Asif Chaudhry, Sharon Rooney and Nick (Bad Seeds) Cave, an inexplicable choice to play H G Wells.

    Wells was both an admirer and a supporter of Louis Wain.  Sharpe includes a bit from a radio broadcast in which Wells praises Wain’s creation of a ‘whole cat world’; Wells also helps draw attention to the artist’s plight when his desperate sisters have him committed to a pauper ward at a mental hospital in Tooting.  The resulting public appeal led to an intervention by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and Wain was transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and latterly to the more agreeable surroundings of Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire.   According to Wells, the popularity of Louis Wain’s feline art transformed the domestic status of cats in Britain from creatures tolerated because of their practical usefulness as mousers, to pets in their own right.  Will Sharpe commendably uses real rather than CGI cats throughout but it’s disappointing that – except for Peter, the stray kitten who set the cat pictures ball rolling after Louis and Emily adopted him – they function in the film largely as décor.

    19 January 2022

  • Memoria

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2021)

    In a Bogotá hotel room, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is woken from sleep one night by a bang and gets up from her bed.  It takes an age for her to do so.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is slow cinema all right, and this kind of contrived retardation is more exasperating than the other aspect of the film’s slowness:  numerous, long-held shots of rooms or landscapes undisturbed by people or movement – except, in some outdoor sequences, the effects of a breeze.  These shots can be compelling, even mysterious.  The longer they go on, the more they begin to suggest – somehow – a point of view beyond that of the camera.

    An expatriate Scot and a widow, Jessica lives in Colombia’s second-biggest city, Medellín, where she grows and sells orchids.  She’s in the capital visiting her sister (Agnes Brekke), who, in an early scene, is receiving hospital treatment for an unspecified respiratory complaint.  Jessica starts to hear repeatedly the sudden noise that broke her sleep and, once it’s clear the sound is originating inside her head rather than in the world outside it, tries to find out more.   Her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho) puts her in touch with Hernán Bedoya (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound expert based in a university.  Hernán asks Jessica to describe what she hears so that he can use technical means to reproduce it.  He also offers to drive her to an orchid market, and lightly flirts with her.  When she returns to Hernán’s sound lab for the next stage in their collaboration, he’s nowhere to be seen.  She makes enquiries of other staff, who have never heard of Hernán.  This is the first of several dislocations experienced by Jessica.  Although these aren’t definitely signalled by the boom in her head, that noise does come to seem like a symptom of the faltering reality of her world.

    Jessica becomes insomniac and depressed.  When she seeks help from a psychologist (Constanza Gutiérrez), she receives surprising therapeutic advice:  turn to Jesus Christ.  Instead, she drives from Bogotá into rural parts.  During a stop en route, she meets an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) who shows Jessica the recently excavated skull of a young woman, who lived six thousand years ago and underwent trepanation.  Jessica’s last and seemingly most crucial encounter is with another Hernán Bedoya, an older man (Elkin Díaz) who claims to be unable to forget anything that has happened to him.  (This includes the end of a previous existence; Jessica asks what dying was like and Hernán senior replies, ‘It was OK.  I just stopped’.)  His gift or curse of infallible memory is realised in the physical objects he owns, which emit ‘recordings’ of his experiences.  In conversation with the younger Hernán, Jessica spoke Spanish haltingly; talking with his older namesake, she’s fluent in the language.  The film ends with her starting herself to ‘feel’ Hernán’s memories – and, it seems, to feel healed by doing so.

    If you read even a little about Memoria, chances are you’ll see it described as surreal, dreamlike, moving from rational to irrational perspectives, a spiritual odyssey, and so on.  Recounting the detail of your dreams to someone else is a byword for boring them:  dreamers tend to give merely a blow-by-blow description of what happened.  A gifted film-maker can do better, using technique and imagination to enable the audience to partake of an on-screen dreamer’s psychic experience – of what ‘seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much’, as Sylvia Plath puts it in ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’.  As I recall, Apichatpong did achieve something of this in the oneiric disjunctures and imagery of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the only piece of his work I’d seen previously.  A main problem I had with Memoria was in finding it too sluggish and insufficiently arbitrary to be dreamlike.  By moving along like a patient psychological thriller, it encourages, before dashing, hopes for a ‘solution’ – even if such hopes reflect what the viewer has come to look for in a particular genre.  Watching Memoria certainly makes you aware of what you naturally expect (or are conditioned to expect) from a film, and that the man who made this one isn’t interested in satisfying such expectations.  You may wonder, even so, if the bangs in Jessica’s head aren’t strategically placed to ensure – a bit like the fortissimo chord in Haydn’s Surprise’ Symphony – that drowsy members of the audience don’t drop off completely, and thereby experience narrative discontinuity beyond what Apichatpong intends.

    He creates some exceptional images.  Close to the end of the film, there’s a prolonged shot dominated by an object that could be either an extra-terrestrial spacecraft or a whale – which leaves you unsure if it’s situated in the Colombian jungle or if the film has suddenly moved to the ocean floor.  (The object finally takes off to underline its UFO credentials.)  There’s even the occasional moment of eccentric humour.  After the opening bang and Jessica’s slow-motion rise to investigate, the camera journeys out of her hotel room into a small car park nearby.  One car alarm goes off, others join in; the symphony-cacophony rises to a crescendo until, one by one, the alarms stop and silence eventually reigns once more in the darkness.  The sequence suggests a sonic counterpart to the one in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) where car lights wink at each other.  Apichatpong and his lead actress, whose versatility is endless and seems effortless, agreed it was important to set Memoria in a country where neither would feel at home.  It’s often absorbing to witness the expression, from behind the camera, of being in a strange place.  Apichatpong manages to do this not only in observing Colombia’s distinctive landscape but also in presenting impersonal office settings in Bogotá that might be thought pretty standard the world over.

    Jessica’s odd auditory experiences were inspired by the writer-director’s own:  he has suffered from the little understood condition that is sometimes termed ‘exploding head syndrome’.  Although ‘suffered’ is hardly the word:  according to Tony Rayns’s Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22) review, Apichatpong ‘came to regard the “bang” as a “strange pleasure” and even regretted the loss when it stopped happening’.  It’s been interesting to read about this film after seeing it – Rayns in S&S and, despite its digressions, Hilton Als’s New Yorker profile of Apitchatpong.  Memoria makes for a testing two hours-plus in the cinema, though.  I was relieved when it was over.

    18 January 2022

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