Monthly Archives: July 2023

  • La syndicaliste

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Pierre Salomé (2022)

    This dramatisation of the real-life ordeals of the Irish trade unionist Maureen Kearney is absorbing, thanks to its star, and exasperating, thanks to the script and direction.  Born in County Mayo in the mid-1950s, Kearney married a Frenchman and has lived in France since the mid-1980s.  Early sequences in La syndicaliste – adapted by Jean-Pierre Salomé and Fadette Drouard from a 2019 book of the same name by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre – illustrate Kearney’s work as senior union representative at Areva, a French nuclear power company.  She chances upon information about a hush-hush deal between Electricité De France (EDF) and a Chinese power company.  Realising this may result in a major transfer of nuclear technology from Areva to China and the loss of thousands of French jobs, Kearney turns whistleblower and soon finds herself on the receiving end of anonymous threats and harassment.  (For example, a stone is chucked through the window of her car, while she’s sitting in it, by a smash-and-run assailant.)  These scenes comprise an extended flashback from a prologue that has made clear where they are heading.

    On 17th December 2012 – the day Kearney is due to meet with President François Hollande to discuss the EDF-China deal and its implications – a cleaner arrives at Kearney’s home to find her gagged and bound to a chair in the basement.  The letter ‘A’ has been scratched with a knife onto her stomach, a knife handle inserted in her vagina with the blade protruding.  Kearney tells the police she was overpowered, while at her bathroom mirror, by masked intruders (she thinks there were two), who then attacked and raped her.  What happens in the months and years ahead is differently traumatising.  An increasingly sceptical police investigation finds no forensic evidence to substantiate Kearney’s claims of intruders in her home or sexual assault.  The police accuse her of staging the incident and self-harming.  Under heavy pressure to do so, she withdraws her complaint but then changes her mind.  In 2013 she’s charged with ‘dénonciation mensongère à une autorité judiciaire ou administrative entraînant des recherches inutiles’ – the French legal equivalent of ‘wasting police time’.  In 2017 she’s convicted of the charge, resulting in a five-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine.  The following year, she appeals successfully against the conviction and is cleared of charges of fabricating evidence.  Text at the end of La syndicaliste notes there has been no subsequent investigation of Kearney’s allegations and that her initial fears for the future of the workforce she represented were thoroughly vindicated.  Out of 50,000 Areva jobs, around seventy per cent have disappeared.

    From the start, Jean-Pierre Salomé’s approach is to supply incidental detail – the exact dates on which events took place – but next to no context.  It’s possible he neglects the latter because he thinks French viewers don’t need it although La syndicaliste is a French-German co-production that’s surely aiming for international audiences.  (The film’s title seems to be proving a headache on its worldwide release.  In some countries, it’s The Sitting Duck, which isn’t apt or appealing.  ‘The Trade Unionist’, a literal translation, doesn’t get pulses racing either.  Since both of those fail to convey that the title character is female, it’s not surprising La syndicaliste has been released in the UK and elsewhere under its original French name but this still feels like an admission of defeat.)  At the start, Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) learns that Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs) is to be removed as Areva CEO and replaced by Luc Oursel (Yvan Attal) – by order of the French President (still Nicolas Sarkozy at this point).  It was only after seeing the film that I learned Areva was part-owned by the French state and that the hiring and firing of the company boss was a presidential matter.  After Maureen backtracks on withdrawing her complaint, the narrative jumps forward to ‘Four years later’.  That legend on the screen is followed, superfluously, by another, ‘May 2017’.  Salomé gives no indication, however, of why it took so long for the wasting-police-time case to come to court, or what anyone in the story was doing in the intervening years.

    The longer the film goes on, the longer the list of questions you want answering gets – and the more certain you become they won’t be answered.  At the 2018 appeal hearing that is the film’s climax, Kearney’s advocate, Hervé Témime (Gilles Cohen), produces compelling evidence to refute the police case that she staged her own assault, including tying herself up.  Shortly before the attack took place, she had injured her right shoulder in a fall at work (Salomé has shown this fall and Maureen’s subsequent treatment for it).  Doctors’ reports now confirm that damage to her shoulder would have made it impossible for her to bind herself as the police contend.  How come this medical evidence wasn’t produced until more than five years after she incurred the injury?  It’s true that Kearney’s previous lawyer (François Perache) is presented as weak and, in relation to the police, compliant – but why, then, didn’t she and her husband, Gilles (Grégory Gadebois), get a different lawyer while Maureen was still up for the fight (before, that is, the police had broken her resistance, albeit temporarily)?  When she’s told there’s no DNA evidence, Maureen’s incredulous but the matter seems not to be pursued – until Témime also discovers that test results mysteriously went missing on their journey back from the lab to the police.

    Whenever his script asks a question, Salomé reliably cuts before a reply is forthcoming.  For instance, Maureen is a fan of crime fiction – especially Ian Rankin novels.  She underlines passages in them with marker pens, just as she highlights documents at work.  The audience has probably wondered why, before Captain Brémont (Pierre Deladonchamps), leading police inquiries, does so.  When Brémont broaches the matter with Maureen, implying that she’s storing up handy hints on how to fake a crime, Salomé and his editors (Valérie Deseine and Aïn Varet) promptly intervene.  In retrospect, the unexplained Rankin detail seems nothing more than a tactic to make us wonder if Maureen might have invented the attack.  It’s one of several such tactics.  Maureen is shown to be an unreadably accomplished poker player.  The means of assaulting and binding her – the knife and gaffer tape – were taken from her own kitchen.  The family’s elderly Alsatian is a dog that didn’t bark when intruders entered the house.  It emerges that Maureen made a previous allegation of rape when she was twenty and still living in Ireland.

    These elements are designed to up the suspense in La syndicaliste – ditto Bruno Coulais’s conventional, overused score – but hardly serve their purpose since few viewers will believe a mainstream movie of the 2020s is going to reveal a protagonist like Maureen Kearney to be a liar.  You don’t need to know what actually happened in this case in order to take that view:  the protagonist’s gender is enough.  A film such as André Téchiné’s The Girl on the Train (2009) – also inspired by real-life events, in which a young woman falsely claimed, with self-inflicted injuries to support the claim, that a gang had attacked her on an RER train – is unlikely to get made today.  Besides, Salomé takes nearly every opportunity to present women and men in positions of power and/or responsibility in respectively positive and negative lights.  Anne Lauvergeon is chic, self-possessed and ousted by a reputedly chauvinist president; her hectic male successor has serious anger management issues.  Maureen does her job brilliantly; her right-hand man in Areva union work (François-Xavier Demaison) is pretty ineffectual.  Brémont brusquely disregards Chambard (Aloïse Sauvage), the only female officer on his team, when she draws attention to an attack on a woman several years previously with striking similarities to the alleged attack on Kearney.  Apart from game-changer Hervé Témime, the only exceptions to this tendentious scheme are the presiding judges at Maureen’s trial in 2017 (Andréa Bescond, smiley but deadly) and appeal hearing the following year (Sébastien Corona, neutral and reasonable).

    The film’s atmosphere of generalised misogyny has the effect of blurring Maureen Kearney’s particular political significance but this doesn’t seem to matter much to Jean-Pierre Salomé.  La syndicaliste features representations of real, powerful, living people and the crimes at the heart of the story remain unsolved.  Although that may explain Salomé’s muffled approach to the material, a more imaginative film-maker would have found a way of expressing a clear point of view without getting into legal hot water.  As it is, we never know whether the dishonest police investigation of Maureen’s claims is dictated by pressure from France’s political-economic establishment or sloppy, misogynist thinking on the part of the officers concerned.  The earlier attack that involved the same MO as the attack on Maureen returns with renewed importance in the closing stages.  The victim was the wife of a whistleblower.  The female cop gives Maureen a copy of the police file on the case (without there being any suggestion that Captain Chambard, as she now is, must be risking her career in doing so).  Maureen visits Véronique (Geno Lechner), the woman concerned, to hear her account of what happened; Véronique turns up outside the appeal court to cheer Maureen on; but I was none the wiser about the outcome of the police investigation in Véronique’s case.  Characters like Anne Lauvergeon are dropped from the story without explanation.  Arnaud Montebourg (Christophe Paou), Minister of Industrial Renewal in the Hollande administration in 2012 and 2013, appears still to be a minister in 2018, a year after the start of the Macron presidency (and four years after Montebourg actually left the Hollande government).

    The narrative’s undoubted momentum is created and sustained almost single-handedly by Isabelle Huppert, whose performance is a triumph of acting authority over nonsensical casting.  According to her Wikipedia profile, Maureen Kearney first became involved in French trade union activities after being hired by a subsidiary of what would later become Areva to teach English to technicians destined for work in Anglophone countries:  ‘Outraged at having seen young engineers fired without compensation, she joined the CFDT [Confédération française démocratique du travail], becoming its “figurehead” at Areva’.  After being cleared of criminal charges in 2018, Maureen doesn’t, in Salomé’s film anyway, resume her CFDT work but does return to teaching English as a foreign language.  The classroom sequence near the end of La syndicaliste is more conspicuous, though, for showing Isabelle Huppert speaking English as a foreign language:  even she can’t convince you it’s her native tongue.  Although her miscasting is epitomised in this moment at the blackboard, it goes deeper and wider.  Considering how many verbal insults are flung at Kearney in the course of La syndicaliste, it’s remarkable that none accuses her of being a trouble-maker who’s not even French.  But how could they?  Huppert’s screen presence is unarguably French:  Maureen Kearney’s effortlessly classy outfits, designed by Marité Coutard, emphasise it all the more.

    Yet Huppert compels attention superbly.  Her acting motor – a precision instrument, which operates at speed – carries you along, despite the fuzzy screenplay.  In the immediate aftermath to the terrifying attack, Maureen’s priority is to finish putting on her make-up:  Huppert’s application of her red lipstick immediately suggests the heroine’s determination to hold her nerve and the effort of will required to do so.  She’s an unbeatable choice to portray Maureen’s impatient intelligence and businesslike brio at work – as well as her poker face.  She dramatises Maureen’s increasing vulnerability without recourse to conventional emotional breakdown.  There’s some good work in supporting roles, even when these are written one-dimensionally (as they usually are).  Pierre Deladonchamps and Christophe Paou, a famous partnership in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), never share the screen in La syndicaliste but I liked both their characterisations.  Without making him crudely malign or stupid, Deladonchamps manages to suggest that the police captain Brémont is somehow out of his depth.  Paou’s complex plausibility ensures that Arnaud Montebourg is more than a standard-issue crooked politician.  Maureen Kearney’s relationships with her daughter (Alexandra Maria Lara) and even her husband are underwritten.  (Is he an orchestra musician – or conductor?)   But Grégory Gadebois gives Gilles an agreeable humour.  He brings about the few smiles the audience is likely to get out of Jean-Pierre Salomé’s grim story.

    5 July 2023

  • The Wicker Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robin Hardy (1973)

    British Lion Films was in big financial trouble at the time it made The Wicker Man.  The studio was soon afterwards bought by EMI and several scenes had been cut from Robin Hardy’s film by the time it went on general release, as a supporting feature to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.  That was how I first saw them both, at the York Odeon in early 1974, when I was eighteen.  I was quite taken with The Wicker Man, felt Roeg’s psychological thriller wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and didn’t like to admit either of those things.  Half a century on, Don’t Look Now is still overrated, hovering on the fringes of the top hundred in Sight & Sound’s latest decennial greatest-films poll, but its fiftieth anniversary isn’t being marked like The Wicker Man’s.  Last month saw not just its return to cinemas, after restoration and re-mastering, but also a live performance at the Barbican Centre of ‘Musics [sic] from Summerisle’ to celebrate the film’s half-century.  Robin Hardy died in 2016 but his sons are now developing a documentary (working title ‘Wickermania!’) about the evolution of their father’s ‘folk horror’ story into a cult classic.  The Wicker Man, too, has come to be overrated.  In 2004 Total Film reckoned it the sixth-greatest British film of all time; it placed fourth in the Guardian’s 2010 list of best-ever horror films internationally.  Returning to it forty-nine years on, I still like the picture, though.  The Wicker Man is a discombobulating mixture of naff and powerful.

    In late April 1973, Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) pilots a police seaplane from the Scottish mainland to the remote (fictional) Hebridean island of Summerisle.  He’s responding to an anonymous letter, addressed to him by name at his police station, which reports a missing person – Rowan Morrison, a Summerisle teenager – and encloses her photograph.  Howie isn’t even on dry land before he’s confronted by the locals’ distinctive insularity.  The harbour master (Russell Waters) politely explains that the police sergeant needs the permission of the community’s head honcho, Lord Summerisle, to come ashore; Howie, rather less politely, begs to differ and gets his way.  When Howie shows Rowan’s photo to the locals, no one recognises her – not even May Morrison (Irene Sunters), who, according to the anonymous letter, is Rowan’s mother, and who has a significant forename.  On a wall of the Green Man inn where Howie books bed and board is a row of framed photographs, showing the year-by-year succession of May Queens at the island’s May Day festival.  The photograph for 1972 is conspicuously missing:  the weird, unwelcoming landlord, Alder MacGregor (Lindsay Kemp), tells Howie the picture frame was broken.  At the local school next morning, the teacher, Miss Rose (Diane Cilento), and her pupils deny all knowledge of the missing girl until Howie finds Rowan Morrison’s name in the register.  From this point, the people of Summerisle change their tune and acknowledge that Rowan is dead.  Howie is soon convinced this is another lie.  Miss Rose directs him to the churchyard where the girl’s grave can be found.  Rowan’s coffin, when opened, contains only the carcass of a hare.

    Howie, as well as thwarted professionally, is offended morally by his early experiences on the island.  He’s a proud practising Christian:  a prologue to the film sees him in a church congregation beside a young woman (Alison Hughes) who, we later learn, is his fiancée.  He sings ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ enthusiastically before reading from the Bible and taking communion.  The last two are conflated in what seems like poetic licence designed to stress his piety:  it’s Howie, rather than the priest taking communion, who speaks Christ’s words to the disciples at the Last Supper (‘This do in remembrance of me’, etc).  Summerisle, however, is a pagan and decidedly carnal society.  The men drinking in the Green Man sing a ribald song, ‘The Landlord’s Daughter’; the actual landlord’s daughter, Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland), delights them as she joins in, vindicating the lyrics and their leers.  Willow is also blatantly flirty with Howie from the moment she serves him his lousy evening meal. (He’s revolted by the tinned vegetables and fruit – puzzled, too, since the island is known for its orchards and apple crops.)  On his first night at the inn, he’s distracted by the sound of banging, in more ways than one, coming through the wall of Willow’s adjoining room.  Miss Rose drills her pupils in the origins of the May Day rituals they’ll be celebrating the following day, including the phallic symbolism of the maypole.  Howie sternly reprimands her.  When he eventually pays a call on Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), Howie looks out of a window to see young women dancing nude.  That night, Willow does the same on the other side of his bedroom wall.  Her rhythmic thuds on the wall and Howie’s own imagination torment him.

    The screenplay, written by Anthony Shaffer, was inspired by David Pinner’s novel Ritual, published in 1967.  The Wicker Man‘s opposition of Christianity and paganism, though very different from the roguish stage comedy-thrillers for which Shaffer became best known, is strongly reminiscent of his twin brother’s favoured form of theatrical contest – in which directive, rational intelligence tries and fails to get the better of unbridled, subversive genius.  Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was first staged in the 1960s; Equus opened at the National Theatre in the same year The Wicker Man was made; Amadeus followed six years later.  Sergeant Howie’s unequal struggle also brings to mind the plight of another would-be controlling outsider whose sexual inexperience proves an Achilles heel in their new environment:  Miss Giddens, the governess in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).

    The latter is certainly superior to The Wicker Man but Robin Hardy’s film, like The Innocents, does well as a piece of storytelling.  Hardy and Anthony Shaffer understand the dramatic benefits of building things gradually.  That may not sound remarkable but it has become unfashionable.  Highly-rated horror shows of recent years such as Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) do next to nothing to lull or deceive the audience in their early stages.  In The Wicker Man, by contrast, the seed of human sacrifice is planted in the prologue – the shot of Howie taking communion, as his voiceover speaks of the blood and body of Christ – but the film-makers are patient in letting the seed grow.  Sinister details are there from an early stage:  the look of the confectionery on sale in the post office; the frog that May Morrison pops in and out of the mouth of her younger daughter, Myrtle (Jennifer Martin), as a sore throat remedy.  (The two details are combined when her mother rewards Myrtle with a sweet ‘for being a brave girl’.)  But these details are amusing as much as creepy and the islanders’ reticence that frustrates pompous Neil Howie is, at first, humorous – it’s reminiscent of the travails of Basil Radford’s Home Guard captain, up against wily, cussed locals on a different Hebridean island, in Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! (1949).

    It must be said that the film generates some of its humour inadvertently.  The starkers dance troupe that scandalises Howie is evidently wearing bodystockings.  Elsewhere, Robin Hardy is ludicrously determined to show naked female flesh even when there’s no connection with time-honoured ritual:  on May Day morning, Howie, conducting a desperate house-to-house search for Rowan, opens a door in the home of the village librarian (Ingrid Pitt) to find her taking a bath (he’s far more disturbed by this, of course, than she is).  This approach tends to place The Wicker Man in the company of contemporary British film sex comedies rather than in the canon of horror classics.  The casting of the chief supporting roles, although it reinforces the bizarreness of proceedings, also has its daft side.  According to Vic Pratt’s piece in Sight & Sound (October 2013) on the film’s fortieth anniversary, Christopher Lee declared that ‘he gave his greatest performance’ in The Wicker Man.  Lee played an important part in getting the film made but, in front of the camera, he cuts a laughable figure.  In his check suit, yellow polo neck sweater and carefully coiffed wig, Lord Summerisle has the look not of a man steeped in ancient tradition but of someone who got rich quick in the 1960s and decided to buy himself a Scottish island.  Lee’s self-regard as an ack-taw makes matters worse:  his sonorous delivery adds to the phoniness of this dilettante pagan.

    Hardy’s international line-up of actresses enjoy different levels of success in managing a Scottish accent:  if Britt Ekland fares better than Diane Cilento it’s only because the former voice was actually dubbed by Annie Ross.  All in all, it seems Ekland benefited from plenty of assistance:  Wikipedia reports that two body doubles contributed to her naked dance solo.  The choices to play queasy menfolk on Summerisle range from predictable (Aubrey Morris doing his usual thing, as a grinning gravedigger) to bewildering – in the person of Lindsay Kemp.  He’s genuinely funny as camp, lavishly seedy MacGregor but you keep wondering when Kemp will get a chance to dance.  As the events of May Day approach their climax, Howie knocks the landlord out, steals his costume for the parade and leaves MacGregor tied to his bed.  So Lindsay Kemp ends up just about the only performer not on the move.

    While some bigger names on the screen dissipate the story’s tension, the look of Hardy’s lesser-known actors and/or extras playing the islanders is something else.  A few, like the well-named Oak (Ian Campbell), are brutishly menacing.  Others are lank and pasty enough to get you believing in a crucial part of the plot – that last year’s Summerisle harvest failed and urgent action is needed to compensate in 1973.  Howie learns from Lord Summerisle how his grandfather – ‘A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, free thinker’ – acquired and transformed the fortunes of the island.  He developed particular strains of fruit that would flourish in the local climate and encouraged the revival of pagan worship:  the natives came to see their bountiful harvests as inextricably linked to their worship.  Visiting the library, Howie consults an impressively large book and reads aloud from it:

    ‘Primitive man lived and died by his harvest.  The purpose of his spring ceremonies was to ensure a plentiful autumn.  Relics of these fertility dramas are to be found all over Europe.  In Great Britain, for example, one can still see harmless versions of them danced in obscure villages on May Day.  Their cast includes many alarming characters: a man-animal, or hobbyhorse, who canters at the head of the procession charging at the girls; a man-woman, the sinister teaser, played by the community leader or priest; and a man-fool, Punch, most complex of all the symbolic figures – the privileged simpleton and king for a day …  They were frenzied rites ending in a sacrifice …’

    This text (of which Howie reads plenty more) sounds authentic enough, at least to lay ears, which include mine.  Vic Pratt’s S&S piece notes that better informed viewers have taken a dim view of the film’s interpretation of J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough.  Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy aren’t too scrupulous about implications of Howie’s religious commitment that might impede the narrative.  The film is specific that the church service at the start is taking place on Sunday 29th April 1973.  Summerisle’s May Day festival is obviously two days later and Howie spends two nights on the island.  Would this formidably devout Christian get up from his pew and straight into his seaplane on the Sabbath?  (And it can’t be that he received the anonymous letter, posted from Summerisle, on that Sunday morning.)  It would be no surprise if the film-makers had a selective approach to accuracy in the much larger chunk of folk-custom ritual that The Wicker Man describes.  In any case, though, Howie’s reading in the library is doubly effective as a dramatic device.  It informs him what will happen on the May Day parade.  It forewarns Howie, though to no avail, what will eventually happen to him.

    Wikipedia notes that pre-release cuts to the film included, to Christopher Lee’s chagrin, material from Lord Summerisle’s first meeting with Howie.  Most of this has presumably since been reinstated (the 2023 version runs 95 minutes, compared with the 87 minutes of the original release) but the EMI butchers weren’t wholly wrong:  Lord Summerisle’s history lecture is the one point at which there’s a loss of momentum.  Otherwise, The Wicker Man compels attention throughout.  (That makes it very different from a latter-day film that it surely influenced, Ari Aster’s longueur-ridden Midsommar (2019).)  Robin Hardy, himself a former art director, wasn’t working with a large budget – which seems to have made for greater creativity in some respects.  The islanders’ May Day masks look both homemade and convincingly grotesque.  This is especially true of MacGregor’s Punch head which, along with his costume, becomes Howie’s disguise on the parade.

    After finding the missing May Queen photograph, which shows Rowan standing among empty crates, Howie realises the previous year’s harvest failed.  He learns from the library tome that a human sacrifice is offered to the gods in the event of crop failure.  He’s sure Rowan is alive and about to be sacrificed.  Mayday, mayday …  Planning to enlist the help of police colleagues on the mainland, Howie tries to leave Summerisle but the seaplane won’t start and his frantic solo attempts to save Rowan begin.  When she appears, apparently as the islanders’ captive, Howie sets her free and they escape together into a hillside cave.  Emerging from it, they come face to face with Lord Summerisle et al.  ‘Did I do it right?’ asks Rowan (Geraldine Cowper).   His lordship assures her she ‘did it beautifully’.

    What’s liable to be underrated in The Wicker Man is the excellence of Edward Woodward.  He imbues Howie with a rather ridiculous rectitude – evident not just in what he says but in his forthright gait.  Woodward complements the policeman’s usual self-righteous manner with an almost endearing sheepishness:  Howie has a habit of asserting so robustly that he seems to startle even himself and retreats into semi-retraction.  He’s staunchly opposed to sex before marriage; his maturity (Woodward was in his early forties at the time) gives Howie’s virginity an extra edge.  Sexually aroused by Willow in the room next door, he’s in real agony.  This sequence epitomises the film’s split personality:  Willow’s routine is silly albeit striking; Howie’s lead-us-not-into-temptation anguish is real.  Edward Woodward is very securely in character:  when Willow, Miss Rose and the librarian strip Howie of his Punch costume, then his police uniform, and anoint his chest in readiness for sacrifice, his face expresses, as well as great fear, shame that the women have finally breached his defences.

    Inside the gigantic wicker man in which he’ll burn to death, Howie reprises ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ with passionate defiance.  The increasingly steep decline of Christianity in Western Europe in the half-century since The Wicker Man was made might seem to threaten the film’s impact – for many, Howie’s beliefs will now be as arcane as the ‘old’ religion the story pits him against – but the duel is still a potent one.   And, at least until his climactic vanquishing, some part of your brain clings to the hope that you’re watching a police procedural rather than a horror movie – that the forces of law and order might prevail.  When Lord Summerisle tells Howie that the islanders ‘found you and brought you here and controlled your every thought and action since you arrived’, the audience must acknowledge that we too have been tricked.  (Although Hardy cheats a bit with this.  For example, if the whole community was in on the cunning plan, why does Alder MacGregor, imprisoned in his bedroom, look dumbfounded by what’s happened to him?  It’s not as if Howie is still there for MacGregor to pretend to.)  The ‘Musics from Summerisle’  are deservedly plural.  As well as traditional pieces – like ‘Summer Is Icumen In’, with which the islanders celebrate their concluding victory – there are numerous original pieces written for The Wicker Man by Paul Giovanni:  at times, we seem to be watching a folk horror musical.  The famous construction that gives the film its name emerges only in the last few minutes:  it’s the culminating illustration of Robin Hardy’s patience in playing his strongest cards.  The final images, in which the wicker man’s flaming head falls and DP Harry Waxman’s camera moves from the hillside to an ardent setting sun, are terrific.

    4 July 2023

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