Monthly Archives: November 2023

  • I Know Where I’m Going!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1945)

    I’d seen it before but that must have been pre-2008 (otherwise there would already be an Old Yorker note on it) – probably in a Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger season at BFI.   They’re now running a new Archers retrospective, through to the end of 2023:  it was good to kick off by renewing acquaintance with I Know Where I’m Going!  The film sits between A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the Powell-Pressburger filmography; it might be considered formally and thematically conventional beside both those pictures.  Yet this must be one of the most imaginative and satisfying romantic comedies ever made in Britain.  Unusually in the genre, I Know Where I’m Going! is visually exciting as well as emotionally engaging.

    The title expresses the confident (self-)belief of the film’s protagonist, Joan Webster.  A prologue, complete with arch commentary by a male voiceover, summarises Joan’s strong-willed progress from infancy (she even crawls with a purpose) through schooldays (she gets a lift home while other girls wait for the bus) to young womanhood (she calls the tune with boys dating her).  In her mid-twenties, Joan (Wendy Hiller) is a middle-class working girl but not for much longer.  In a restaurant-bar, where she and her preferred drink (gin and Dubonnet) are well known to the staff, she meets her anxiously staid bank-manager father (George Carney) to inform him she’s about to be married.  When he asks to whom, Joan hands him her works pass from ‘CCI’ (Consolidated Chemical Industries):  the pass shows just her name and that of Sir Robert Bellinger, head of CCI and, as the baffled Mr Webster reminds her, ‘one of the wealthiest men in England’.  He is nevertheless Joan’s intended; the wedding will take place on the island that Bellinger owns, Kiloran (based on Colonsay) in the Hebrides.  Her astounded but attentive father sees Joan off on an overnight train.  As soon as she’s in her sleeper cabin, she carefully removes from her luggage a wedding dress that she hangs beside her bed.

    From the start, Wendy Hiller achieves a miraculous balance:  she vividly conveys her character’s often infuriating egocentrism but makes you root for her.  The screenplay by Powell and Pressburger achieves a fine balance, too.  It’s very clear from the opening scenes that Joan Webster needs to be taken down a peg or two:  she is and she isn’t in the course of what follows.  Soon after Joan’s train sets off north, the Scottish folk ballad ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ plays on the soundtrack.  The song is sparingly used, not returning until the film’s closing credits, but its lines ‘I know who I love/The dear knows who I’ll marry[1]’ are significant throughout.  Joan is in quite the reverse position:  she knows who she’ll marry, for huge financial advantage, but not who she loves – the story consists essentially of her finding that out.  Bad weather postpones the last leg of Joan’s journey, a boat crossing to Kiloran from the Isle of Mull.  She has no option but to wait on Mull for the high winds to subside.  She stays at ‘the big house’, in the company of its owner, Catriona Potts (Pamela Brown), and two of Catriona’s friends – Colonel Barnstaple (Captain C W R Knight), a fanatical falconer, and naval officer Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), back in Scotland on a few days’ shore leave and also Kiloran-bound.

    Soon after arriving on Mull, Joan is told by a local about nearby Moy Castle (ancestral home of ‘the MacLaines of Erraig’, from whom Catriona is descended) and the ‘terrible strong curse’ attached to it, which forbids the lairds of Kiloran ever to cross the castle’s threshold.  Next day, Joan, escorted by Torquil, sets out for Tobermory in search of a telephone.  En route they come upon the ruins of Moy Castle; she’s keen to go inside but he refuses to do so.  When she points out that the curse applies only to the laird of Kiloran, Joan discovers that’s just who Torquil is – and that Robert Bellinger doesn’t own the island but has leased it from him.  In Tobermory, Joan is able to phone her fiancé from the post office.  With a gale imminent and a sea crossing still out of the question, Bellinger advises Joan to stay with a business associate called Robinson and his wife – ‘the only people worth knowing’ in the area – but Joan opts instead for a night in the Western Isles Hotel, where Torquil also stays.  The weather’s no better the following day so, without telling Torquil, she checks out of the hotel and moves on to the Robinsons (Valentine Dyall and Catherine Lacey).  She accompanies them on a visit to Achnacroish, the home of Mrs Crozier (Nancy Price); to Joan’s surprise, the house guests include Torquil.  At the hotel, he and Joan not only stayed in separate rooms but lunched at separate tables – at her request:  when Mrs Crozier introduces them, Torquil tactfully affects never to have met Joan.  Whereas Sir Robert Bellinger is never anything more than a braying, bumptious voice (supplied by Norman Shelley) at the end of a phone connection, it seems everywhere that Joan goes on Mull, she sees Torquil.  That night, Achnacroish hosts a ceilidh to celebrate the diamond wedding of Mrs Crozier’s head gardener and his wife.  Torquil and Joan spend much of the evening together.

    As a set piece and an emotional centrepiece, the ceilidh in I Know Where I’m Going! may well have inspired the ceilidh in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983).  It’s worth comparing the two films in other ways.  Like Joan Webster, Peter Riegert’s ‘Mac’ MacIntyre in Local Hero comes to Scotland on a money-making mission; the place and the people encountered by these cultural outsiders cause them to think again.  While the locals both in Forsyth’s Ferness and on Mull include some wily characters, Powell and Pressburger’s Hebrideans represent a different set of values from Forsyth’s villagers – most of whom are as keen to get a piece of the action as the energy conglomerate that sends Mac to Scotland.  Although money and privilege are frequently discussed in I Know Where I’m Going!, the local consensus seems to be that the first doesn’t matter and the second encourages foolish behaviour.  On the bus ride to Tobermory with Joan, Torquil is recognised and warmly greeted by other passengers, to whom he’s known as ‘Kiloran’.  Unaware who Joan is, they disparage what Robert Bellinger is up to:  getting a swimming ‘pond’ installed even though he’s living near the sea; ordering supplies of salmon that he could catch himself.  Telephone calls at the post office cost ninepence each; when Joan tries to pay with a note, the postmistress (Jean Cadell) can’t change it; Torquil hands over in coins the shilling and sixpence owing.  As they leave, he explains to Joan that the postmistress ‘wouldn’t see a pound note from one pensions day to another’:

    Joan:      People around here are very poor, I suppose.

    Torquil:  Not poor.  They just haven’t got money.

    Joan:      It’s the same thing.

    Torquil:  Oh, no, something quite different.

    These islanders aren’t immune to financial temptation, though.  Joan continues to try and fail to persuade the local boatman Ruairidh Mhór (Finlay Currie) to take her to Kiloran, despite the appalling weather; she has better luck in bribing Kenny (Murdo Morrison), his young assistant and sweetheart of Ruairidh’s daughter, Bridie (Margot Fitzsimons), to do the job:  Joan’s offer of twenty pounds is enough, Kenny reckons, for him to marry Bridie and buy a half-share in her father’s boat.

    The two films’ visual schemes are also very different and, as you’d expect in an Archers picture, more daring here, wonderful as Chris Menges’s cinematography for Local Hero is.  The beauty of Highland landscapes and the Ferness seascape, not to mention the night sky, cast their spell on Mac.  Erwin Hillier’s black-and-white images in I Know Where I’m Going! create something no less mysterious but increasingly threatening, too.  The climax is the sea voyage to Kiloran that Joan insists on making without further delay.  As she already knows from Torquil, this means negotiating the perilous Corryvreckan whirlpool, north-east of Kiloran.  There’s a legend attached to this also: it’s more involved than the Moy Castle curse so I’ll forego the details here.  But I will quote generously from Wikipedia’s astonishing description of how this episode, a combination of location shooting and studio footage, was filmed:

    ‘There are some long-distance shots looking down over the area, shot from one of the [Hebridean] islands. … There are some middle-distance and close-up shots that were made from a small boat with a hand-held camera. … There were some model shots, done in the tank at [Denham Studios].  These had gelatin added to the water, so that it would hold its shape better and would look better when scaled up. … The close-up shots of the people in the boat were all done in the studio, with a boat on gimbals being rocked in all directions by some hefty studio hands while others threw buckets of water at them. These were filmed with the shots made from the boat with the hand-held camera projected behind them.  … Further trickery joined some of the long- and middle-distance shots together with those made in the tank into a single frame. …’

    Torquil angrily tries to dissuade Joan from embarking on the sea trip but she’s adamant so he joins her and Kenny in the boat – and yet:

    ‘[Roger] Livesey was not able to travel to Scotland because he was performing in a West End play …at the time of filming.  Thus all his scenes were shot in the studio at Denham, and a double (coached by Livesey in London) was used in all of his scenes shot in Scotland. These were then mixed so that the same scene would often have a middle-distance shot of the double and then a close-up of Livesey, or a shot of the double’s back followed by a shot showing Livesey’s face.’

    Quite some ‘trickery’ (and ‘coaching’) …

    Joan’s reckless determination to reach Kiloran, risking others’ lives as well as her own, is enraging and would be intolerable if we didn’t realise that, by this stage, her resolve isn’t simply a matter of sticking to her original plan of action:  as Catriona perceives, Joan now needs not only to get to her destination but to get away from Torquil, with whom she’s falling in love.  The boat’s engine is flooded but, as they enter the whirlpool, Torquil manages in the nick of time to restart the boat’s engine, and gets them safely back to Mull.  In the crisis at Corryvreckan, Torquil yells at Joan to keep bailing and to pray.  We know from earlier scenes that she prays regularly, and selfishly.  ‘Your credit must be good in heaven,’ Torquil tells her as the boat’s motor starts.  Her exultant, pleased-with-herself reply is ‘They know a good prayer when they hear one!’  It’s one of the most satisfying aspects of I Know Where I’m Going! that the heroine isn’t in the end thoroughly transformed – but she does want for herself someone and something different from before.  Because Torquil and his values are so much more likeable than Bellinger’s, they make Joan more likeable, too.

    Next morning – in fine, benign weather – Joan and Torquil say goodbye and go their separate ways.  He ventures into Moy Castle, where the origins and full implications of the curse are revealed.  Any laird of Kiloran who enters the castle ‘never shall he leave it a free man:  he shall be chained to a woman till the end of his days’.  Torquil/Kiloran hears the sounds of pipes:  in the road below the castle, the bagpipers due to perform at Joan’s wedding to Bellinger and whom we’ve already seen in action at the ceilidh, are proceeding towards Moy, with Joan marching behind them.  She runs to meet Torquil, they embrace and express their true feelings, and walk off down the road together, Torquil duly and contentedly enchained.

    Roger Livesey’s gentleness and witty restraint are beautifully complementary to Wendy Hiller’s assertive, insistent charm.  Hiller is splendid in Joan’s final, loving outburst; Livesey emanates authentic goodness.  These are marvellous performances.  The leads are well supported by Pamela Brown as the intuitive, melancholy Catriona.  The comedy business around Colonel Barnstaple’s golden eagle – also called Torquil because the bird reminds Barnstaple of the man – is pretty broad; ditto the acting of C W R Knight, a real-life falconry expert.  Still, the Colonel’s obliviousness to the perilous boat trip via Corryvreckan is funny: when the exhausted Torquil returns to Catriona’s house, Barnstaple wants only to tell him about the exploits of his avian namesake (played by Captain Knight’s own golden eagle, Mr Ramshaw).  Petula Clark, twelve years old at the time, is excellent in the small role of the Robinsons’ daughter, Cheril, who doesn’t miss a trick.  There are a few dodgy and/or effortful Scottish accents in evidence but John Laurie, as the son of the diamond wedding couple, is the real thing.  Laurie has lovely animation in the ceilidh sequence, which he also choreographed.

    I Know Where I’m Going! was released in Britain in November 1945; within the film, the war is still very much ongoing.  Torquil’s first appearance is in his naval uniform.  When Joan meets her father at the start, there’s a crowd of soldiers at the bar; she enthuses about the remoteness of Kiloran, from which the war is ‘a million miles away’.  A correspondent with this website last year drew my attention to an imminent  online showing of a recently restored version of the film by Martin Scorsese’s foundation; Scorsese gave a recorded introduction to this BFI screening, in which he talked about the restoration and his love of the work.  As a rule, exclamation marks in movie titles are a bad sign (Boom!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Mother!, to name a few), though not invariably so (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Dear Comrades!).  In the roll-call of distinguished exceptions to the rule, I Know Where I’m Going! ranks as one of the very best.   

    24 October 2023

    [1]  The word ‘dear’ seems to be a kind of abbreviated euphemism here – replacing ‘devil’, short for ‘dear Lord’.

  • Monster

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kaibatsu

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2023)

    Hirokazu Kore-eda treats his characters kindly.  That made his last film, Broker (2022) – like his television series, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (2023) – often charming but finally bland.  With Monster, Kore-eda, although never unkind, almost over-compensates.   For anyone who, like me, found Broker too gently humane for its subject matter, much of this new film is bracingly different – and grim.

    The last of the ten films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, Monster begins with an urban fire, the flames in the night sky eclipsing the street lights below.  The conflagration is watched by ten-year-old Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa) and his widowed mother Saori (Sakura Ando) from the balcony of their flat, on a high floor of a nearby apartment block.  The fire, which begins in a ‘hostess club’, destroys the building of which the club is part.  How and where the blaze started are the talk of the neighbourhood next morning.  There’s disapproving mention of a local schoolteacher who patronised the club.  His name is Michitoshi Hori and Saori’s son is one of his pupils.  Soon afterwards, Minato is clearly troubled by something that happened at school: his mother prises out of him that Mr Hori said Minato’s brain had been ‘switched with a pig’s brain’ and had struck him.  Saori promptly turns up at the office of the school principal, Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), to demand an explanation.  Although she immediately arranges a meeting with Hori (Eita Nagayama) and other staff, Mrs Fushimi insists on speaking in formal platitudes that explain nothing and madden Saori all the more.  The principal’s male colleagues seem to take a cue from their boss until Hori, feeling the pressure of the situation, blurts out that Minato has been bullying another boy in his class,

    Kore-eda himself is more informative:  we soon learn, for example, that Mrs Fushimi has only recently returned to work following the death, in shocking circumstances, of the grandson whose photograph is on her office desk.  It’s uncertain what has happened to Minato in the typhoon that ends the first part of Monster but once Kore-eda returns to the blaze in the hostess club and starts showing the fire, then other incidents already featured, from a different point of view – Mr Hori’s – we twig what the film’s overall shape is going to be.  Re-setting and re-telling a story in this way isn’t typical of Kore-eda and Monster is the first film he has made working with a script that he hasn’t written.  The screenplay is credited to Yuji Sakamoto alone but a narrative structure that shows how different individual perspectives make for varying interpretations of the same events, can hardly fail to evoke another famous Japanese screen drama, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950).  Each of Monster’s three ‘acts’ begins with the fire and climaxes in the typhoon though the third act also describes the storm’s aftermath.  The longer the film goes on (it runs a few minutes over two hours), the more Kore-eda’s characteristic human sympathy registers in the narrative.  But not his usual clear storytelling:  although Monster’s main concerns emerge clearly enough, I didn’t know what to make of its conclusion.

    The film’s last third, although it also reveals Mrs Fushimi’s unhappy secret, focuses chiefly on the relationship of Minato and Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), the slight, gently eccentric classmate he’s alleged to have bullied.  Other boys make fun of Yori because he’s fey and rather feminine.  He and Minato are friends but the latter is increasingly anxious and touchy both about what the friendship signifies and what it may lead others to think of Minato himself.  (A similar theme propelled Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022).)  At the end of the second part of Monster, while the typhoon is still raging, Hori joins forces with Saori, who’s desperate to find her son; they struggle through an area of wilderness to the abandoned railway carriage that is Minato’s and Yori’s secret hiding place.  The carriage has been overturned by the storm; Hori manages to force open a door and, after peering inside, gives Saori a look that is deliberately tantalising:  we can’t be sure whether or not what he has seen confirms her worst fears.  In the last part of the film, however, we see Minato and Yori emerge unscathed from the carriage in the benign, sunlit morning after the typhoon, into green meadows beyond the wilderness.  I didn’t get if this was meant to indicate what had actually happened or that the children had died and been reunited in some kind of paradise – stupidly vague as that sounds and hard as it is to believe from a film-maker as imaginative about the next world as Kore-eda showed himself to be in After Life (1998).  Neither alternative satisfies.

    Even so, Monster mostly feels like a return to form for Kore-eda.  While the narrative structure might seem excessively complicated, the delaying and drip-feed of revelations are less mechanical than is often the case because lying and obfuscation are essential to the texture.  Kore-eda explores in different ways what it means to be a ‘monster’ or to do monstrous things.  (The title also links to a game that Minato and Yori play – that game where the name of someone or something is written on a post-it stuck to your forehead and you have to ask questions to try and work out your identity.  It seems in Japan this game is called ‘Who’s the Monster’?)  The film is dedicated to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who wrote the score and who died earlier this year.  Sakamoto’s music is different from what we’re used to hearing in a Kore-eda picture – they hadn’t worked together previously – but it’s both expressive and effectively used.  Peter Bradshaw put it well in his Guardian review of Monster from this year’s Cannes festival (where the film won the screenplay award and the Queer Palm):  ‘plangent, sad piano chords will often counterintuitively be added to a scene of apparent drama or tension, implying that the meaning of this scene has not yet been disclosed’.

    As usual, Kore-eda gets lovely performances from his child actors.  The adults are excellent, too, especially Eita Nagayama, whom I don’t remember seeing before.   My favourite parts of the film were the descriptions of Hori’s private life and relationship with his hostess girlfriend (Mitsuki Takahata).  Hori’s attention to text eventually yields important insights that help unravel some of the mystery of what’s been going on in Minato’s mind.  There’s also a  minor, funny example of the importance Hori attaches to the written word.  As his girlfriend reminds him, he’s so fastidious about correct expression that he replies to phishing emails by telling their authors about the typos they’ve made.

    14 October 2023

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