Monthly Archives: May 2022

  • Navalny

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Roher (2022)

    The Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August 2020.  The young Canadian documentarian Daniel Roher started to film Navalny soon after he regained consciousness, following transfer from a hospital in Omsk to one in Berlin, and began his remarkable recovery.  Filming continued throughout his convalescence in Germany and right up to Navalny’s arrest the moment he set foot back in Russia, in January 2021.  At both the beginning and the end of his film, Roher asks Navalny what message he wants to leave his supporters if this turns out to be his last chance of doing so.  The first time this question is asked, Navalny brushes it aside, along with the prospect of being murdered.  He urges Roher to make not a ‘boring film of memory’ but ‘a thriller’.

    Roher takes that instruction on board – not in a crass way, except that the film’s music, by Marius De Vries and Matt Robertson, tends to give superfluous ‘dramatic’ emphasis to what’s happening on the screen.  A good deal of the narrative is naturally suspenseful:  Roher realises that, in order to tell a compelling story, he need do no more than present it.  If he doesn’t avoid making a ‘film of memory’ it’s because events since January 2021 have made that impossible.  Within weeks of his arrest, Navalny was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.  In March 2022, the sentence was increased by a further nine years.  Navalny’s detention until who knows when can’t fail to give Roher’s documentary a strongly elegiac flavour.  The result is anything but boring.

    The film comprises four main elements.  There are interviews with Navalny and those close to him, including his wife and daughter; numerous examples of his YouTube and other social media activity; news film at various stages of his public career and of the events of August 2020; and the ‘action sequences’ filmed by Roher over the course of the next few months.  Once he was well enough, Navalny resumed his vigorous anti-corruption activism online.  He also worked with the Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator for the Netherlands-based Bellingcat investigative journalism group.  Their collaboration supplies Navalny with its highlight sequence, one that authors of fictional thrillers (and black comedies) must envy.  Shortly before the Bellingcat website published details of the eight Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who allegedly poisoned him, Navalny, posing as a government aide, started phoning each of the officers with an invitation to discuss the incident, supposedly for a report he’d been assigned to prepare.  With the second operative that he contacts, Navalny strikes gold:  Konstantin Kudryavtsev, swallowing the aide story, confirms that he and colleagues applied Novichok to the ‘inner seams’ of Navalny’s boxer shorts while they were in the laundry of the Tomsk hotel where he stayed.  (Kudryavtsev‘s gullibility is much more surprising than the news that, since this notorious phone conversation in December 2020, no more has been seen or heard of him.)  You listen to this sequence open-mouthed, until the point where you want to join in with the incredulous celebrations of Navalny, Grozev and their colleague Maria Pevchikh.

    As Roher demonstrates, Vladimir Putin can’t bring himself to speak Navalny’s name and habitually refers to him as ‘this person’, with a view to minimising Navalny’s importance.  With plenty of evidence to suggest that Putin is as vain as he’s thuggish – the footage of his judo moves, the photos of him bare-chested astride on a horse, and so on – it must grieve Russia’s aging poster boy that his highest-profile adversary is a dynamic communicator with a handsome face and amazingly blue eyes.  In terms of screen time in Navalny, the Russian leader has a sizeable supporting role but the identity of the film’s star, and his star screen presence, seem bound to infuriate this person in the Kremlin.  Navalny himself is neither short of self-esteem nor a political progressive.  At least he didn’t seem that way until his public image crystallised into Putin’s bête noire.  Christo Grozev recalls that he once despaired of a Russian opposition whose leader kept company with neo-Nazis on freedom marches.  Roher raises this with Navalny, who insists, irritably though none too convincingly, that as broad a coalition as possible is needed to defeat Putin.

    Alexei Navalny gives the impression of a colossal ego but there’s no doubt that he has, as well as charisma, courage to match.  So does his wife, Yulia; the couple’s relationship, as shown here, is increasingly affecting.  The big question that Daniel Roher doesn’t ask Navalny is why he has decided to return home rather than continue his campaigning work, in relative safety, outside Russia.  Roher has subsequently said in interview[1] that he thinks Navalny would have answered that question with one of his own:  ‘How am I supposed to, as the leader of the opposition, ask people to take to the streets, ask people to protest, ask people to put their lives and their careers and their families on the line, if I’m sitting comfortably in the West?’

    At the end, Roher somewhat rephrases what he asked at the beginning.  What would Navalny’s message now be in the event of his being ‘killed or detained (my italics)’?  This time, the hero – that is the right word for him – is less dismissive.  Anticipating what he must be expecting to happen as soon as his plane touches down in Moscow, Navalny says, ‘Don’t do nothing.  …  If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilise this power, to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad guys’.  Navalny premiered (and won prizes) at this year’s Sundance festival in January.  Well before the documentary’s mid-April release in British cinemas and television screening in the BBC’s Storyville’s slot, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had enlarged the scale of his tyranny to an extent that might have threatened to reduce Navalny’s treatment at its hands to a seeming drop in the ocean.  On the other hand, Roher’s film might also have served as a timely reminder that the many voices with something to say about events in Ukraine could no longer include Navalny’s.  Yet he hasn’t, even behind bars, been silenced on social media.  He has called on Google and Meta to (quoting the Forbes piece) ‘use their ad-tech to do an end-run around Putin’s iron control’ on the Russian media.  He has tweeted regret for the killing by Russian soldiers in Ukraine of someone who shares his surname.  He encouraged French voters to support Emmanuel Macron in this month’s presidential election run-off.  As an inmate of ‘Penal Colony 2’ in Pokrov, east of Moscow, Alexei Navalny is still not doing nothing, and is no doubt still paying the price.

    26 April 2022

    [1] With Andy Meek on the Forbes website (https://www.forbes.com/)

  • Georgy Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Silvio Narizzano (1966)

    I’ve always liked the title song – by Tom Springfield and Jim Dale, performed by The Seekers – but had never seen the film until now.  It turns out that, for more than half a century, I’ve had the wrong idea about Georgy Girl, assuming, from the song lyrics, that this was an ugly duckling romantic comedy.   It turns out to be a gruesome example of 1960s British ‘New Wave’ cinema at its most hyperactively zany (Richard Lester has a lot to answer for) – and bleak into the bargain.  The film’s only depth is in the depth of its cynicism.

    Almost needless to say, I don’t know the source material – a Margaret Forster novel of the same name, first published in 1965.  Even though Forster did the screenplay, with no less a co-writer than Peter Nichols, it’s hard to think that Georgy Girl, as directed by Silvio Narizzano, is a tonally faithful adaptation of the book, at least if Wikipedia’s summary of the latter is to be believed.  According to this, the novel ‘describes the choices open to a young working-class woman in London in the Swinging Sixties’.  The time and place are the same in the film, and the parents of Georgina ‘Georgy’ Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) in service, but Georgy’s circumstances are so extraordinary that she’s not a remotely representative girl of slender means.   Her parents, Ted (Bill Owen) and Doris (Clare Kelly), are the live-in employees of wealthy businessman James Leamington (James Mason), who’s in a loveless marriage, has no children of his own and has treated Georgy as the daughter he never had.  She speaks with a posh accent because James paid for her education at a Swiss finishing school.  She teaches music and movement to young kids in a studio of his vast house, in another room of which James’s ill-tempered, hypochondriac wife, Ellen (Rachel Kempson), languishes in bed all day.

    Twenty-two-year-old Georgy, ungainly and a bit overweight, lives in a nearby flat, which she shares with beautiful, hedonistic Meredith (Charlotte Rampling), an orchestra violinist.  Meredith gives her ever-compliant flatmate doormat treatment; her boyfriend Jos (Alan Bates) doesn’t fare much better.  Georgy, who has never had a bloke, is happy, when Meredith can’t be bothered to see him, to cook for Jos and play Scrabble with him.  ‘Why do all the boys just pass you by?/Is it that you just don’t try or is it the clothes you wear?’ sings Judith Durham at the start.  Naïve Georgy, with an apparent crush on Jos, doesn’t seem to know the answer to the first question even though she goes out of her way to stay dowdy.  In the course of the opening titles sequence, Georgy ventures into a hairdresser’s, gets a new (ridiculous) look, sees her reflection, dashes to the nearest public lavatory, fills a wash-basin and washes the offending lacquered hairdo away to restore her normal, less than soignée appearance.

    Two main developments drive the storyline.  First, James Leamington, whose feelings for Georgy are no longer purely paternal (if they ever were), offers her a written contract:  in exchange for his practically unlimited financial support, Georgy will be his mistress.  She manages to put off giving him an answer.  Even before he proposes the contract, James has made his attitude towards her pretty clear in a startlingly nasty exchange with Georgy’s father:

    James:   If I were you, Ted, I’d take her across my knee, pull down her knickers and give her a good tanning.

    Ted:      She’s too big for that … she’s like some enormous lorry driver …

    James:  She ought to be made to feel what she owes me.

    Second, Meredith gets pregnant by Jos.  She’s had abortions before but this time decides to have the child and to marry Jos because she’s ‘bored’.  She’s soon bored with pregnancy, too, and Jos announces that he’s in love with Georgy instead.  It’s typical of the film that, when he does so, Georgy flees the apartment in terror and Jos pursues her through the streets of London, declaring ‘I love you’ over and over again, and threatening to strip naked on the spot if Georgy doesn’t come back home with him.  They return to the apartment and go to bed, only to be interrupted by Peg (Denise Coffey), an improbable ‘friend’ of Meredith, making her first appearance in the film to convey the news that Meredith has gone into labour.

    When the baby’s born, it’s hate at first sight as far as her mother is concerned.  Meredith tells Jos she’ll have the child adopted, and divorce him.  Instead, he and Georgy live together, caring for baby Sara, but Jos soon tires of the ménage a trois:  he’s not a natural father and it’s clear that Georgy is interested only in looking after Sara.  Jos disappears from the scene, as does Ellen Leamington, proving she wasn’t such a hypochondriac after all.  The suddenly widowed James proposes marriage to Georgy.  She accepts, in order to dissuade social services from taking Sara into care.  The film ends with the wedding and the couple leaving the church.  Just before their chauffeured car pulls away, their adopted daughter is passed through the window to Georgy.  She devotes her attention to the baby, ignoring James entirely.

    These closing moments, like the film’s opening, are accompanied by The Seekers song but with lyrics (and lots of them!) that didn’t feature in the hit single version:

    ‘Hey there, Georgy girl, pretty as a picture, told you so,

    Can it be the Georgy we all know or somebody new,

    I wonder?

    Hey there, Georgy girl, hurrying away to celebrate,

    Got yourself a man but wait –

    There’s somebody else for you.

    Who needs a perfect lover when you’re a mother at heart?

    That’s all you wanted right from the start.

    Well, didn’t you?

    Hey there, Georgy girl, now that you’re no longer on the shelf,

    Better try to smile and tell yourself that you got your way

    You’ve made it.

    Now you’ve got a future planned for you,

    Though he’s not a dream come true at least he’s a millionaire,

    So don’t despair,

    You’re rich, Georgy girl!’

    This isn’t the only music in the film – there’s also Alexander Faris’s score.  It keeps assuring you that what’s happening on the screen is wacky and somehow fun, but it’s really grim.  Trying to give Georgy Girl a feminist spin is a fruitless exercise.  Georgy uses a man in order to fulfil her ambition to be a mother but, since she ends up shackled to James (who’s unlikely not to insist on his idea of conjugal rights), it seems a pyrrhic victory.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she were sexually more experienced and eventually came to the view that she didn’t need a man, only a child.  But Georgy’s social and sexual awkwardness more often than not suggests arrested development rather than unconventionality or single-mindedness.  The only consolation is that the heroine – ditto the unspeakable Meredith, for that matter – is such a bizarre conception that the film never seems to be trying to say something about young women of the 1960s more generally.

    On the evidence of Georgy Girl, it’s as well that Silvio Narizzano moved increasingly away from cinema, though not before making the quickly unwatchable screen version of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970).  (Narizzano’s subsequent work for Granada Television included the excellent ‘The Little Farm’ in the Country Matters series (1973) and the pre-Jewel in the Crown dramatisation of Paul Scott’s Staying On (1980).)  The governing principle of Narizzano’s terrible direction here is:  make everything over-emphatic and thereby ‘dynamic’.  Things are never put down, always thrown:  Ellen petulantly rejecting the bottled medication her husband delivers to her bedside, Jos handing over flowers and chocolates to Meredith in the maternity ward (and he’s not even annoyed).  There are endless swift exits – sometimes angry, sometimes panicked but always door-slamming.

    As a result, there’s no impact to things that seem meant to be distinctive.  Georgy is so repeatedly eccentric that her bits of crazy invention around her music-and-movement classes seem merely to be her doing her usual thing.  The effect is different only when, very occasionally, her off-the-wall behaviour lasts for more than a few seconds of screen time, as it does at a grand party for James’s birthday (his forty-ninth).  Her vile father demands of Georgy why she can’t ‘behave like a lady just for once’.  In response, she dashes up to the studio, grabs a few props from the dressing-up box, and sashays down the staircase delivering a mock-vampish number – to James’s delight, his guests’ stunned silence followed by perfunctory applause, and this viewer’s embarrassment for Lynn Redgrave.

    I was more often embarrassed, though, for Alan Bates, while also admiring his sheer stamina in keeping up the unrelenting stream of jocose chatter and physical clowning required of him.  Some of the antics call to mind David Warner’s carrying on in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (released a few months before Georgy Girl) but Jos is, if anything, a more advanced case.  The character makes no sense:  Bates’s acting energy is all that holds together the manic, mannered jesting.  Lynn Redgrave was less beautiful than her elder sister (Warner’s co-star in Morgan) but hardly a plain Jane so it’s remarkable what a physically convincing klutz she makes of Georgy.  What Redgrave gets across in her more natural moments makes you frustrated there aren’t more of them.  Though hardly at his best, James Mason still gets inside his character, so that James Leamington is almost unbearably creepy.  There’s some coarse overplaying of smaller parts:  Bill Owen is the worst.  Charlotte Rampling was a successful model before she got into acting; as Meredith, she still hasn’t got into acting.  It’s a small mercy but one benefit of watching Georgy Girl fifty-odd years on is the relief of knowing that Rampling eventually learned to do more than look good on screen.

    25 April 2022

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