Monthly Archives: August 2025

  • Central Station

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Central do Brasil

    Walter Salles (1998)

    Walter Salles’ latest film, I’m Still Here (2024), featured superb acting from Fernanda Torres in the main role and an exceptional cameo from her nonagenarian mother, Fernanda Montenegro.  In March this year, I’m Still Here became the first Brazilian entry ever to win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film (what used to be Best Foreign Language Film) – perhaps that’s why Central Station, which gave Salles his international breakthrough, has now been re-released.  Whatever the reason, it was very good to catch up with this film at long last – and, especially, with Fernanda Montenegro’s lead performance, which is as marvellous as its reputation suggests.  Montenegro’s portrait of Dora Teixeira – a jaded, crabby retired schoolteacher who belatedly discovers she has a heart – isn’t at all sentimental.  The same can’t be said for Central Station as a whole, although it does include other fine things.

    The film opens in the title location, Rio de Janeiro’s main railway station, with a montage – a succession of people delivering to camera the words of a letter they want to send but are unable to write.  (I’m guessing these are a mixture of real people and actors.)  Dora  Teixeira is their scribe; she charges a small fee for each letter, extra for postage.  The sequence might suggest she’s socially responsible and, in a low-key way, altruistic.  Once she has left the station for the day, returning home on a packed commuter train to her unlovely apartment, that impression is quickly dispelled.  It emerges that Dora needs the modest letter-writing income to help make ends meet.  She takes pleasure, in the company of her neighbour Irene (Marília Pêra), in deriding her illiterate clients or discerning an unattractive subtext to their letter.  What’s more, the letters often aren’t sent:  Dora throws some straight in the bin, keeps others in a drawer for the time being.   One of the latest letters is in the second category, only thanks to Irene’s persuading Dora not to bin it immediately.  It’s from a woman called Ana Fontenele (Sôia Lira) who, in the company of her nine-year-old son Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira), dictated to Dora an angry missive to the boy’s father, Jesus, from whom Ana is estranged and whom Josué has never met.  Dora tells Irene she thinks Ana, despite her professed anger, is using the boy as a bargaining chip to get the man back.

    When she receives a second visit at the station from the mother and son, it seems Dora was right – Ana now wants to send a more conciliatory message.  A few minutes later, she is fatally injured in a traffic accident just outside the station; Josué returns to Dora’s pitch alone, his face stained with tears, and she’s strikingly unsympathetic.  (I thought improbably unsympathetic, never mind her ingrained asperity.)  In the days ahead, though, with the boy still hanging around the station, Dora’s attitude changes.  She asks Josué how he’s doing.  She offers him a sandwich.  She takes him back to her apartment though it’s not long before she delivers him to an adoption broker, assured the boy will be sent to a ‘good family’ in the United States and pleased with the fee the broker pays her.  She buys a new television and shows it off to Irene, who’s horrified:  she tells Dora no one will adopt a nine-year-old, that Josué will be killed and his organs sold on the open market.  In an action-packed sequence unlike anything that’s gone before, Dora returns to the broker and contrives to abduct the boy.  She decides to escort him to the town in north-eastern Brazil where, according to the address that Ana supplied, his father Jesus is now living.

    The years ahead would confirm Walter Salles’ appetite for road movies:  he went on to direct The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and On the Road (2012).  As in The Motorcycle Diaries, the journey in Central Station is absorbing because it’s through territory unfamiliar to many viewers (including this one) – in terms of culture as well as geography.  From start to finish, Salles describes remarkably rituals both religious and secular.  These range from the choreography of young men on Rio public transport literally jumping the huge queue for a train by vaulting in through its windows, to the intensity of Catholic feast day celebrations in rural Brazil.  The sense of two emotionally rootless travellers – wary of, often arguing with, each other – is reinforced by the succession of bus journeys, of small bars, bodegas and roadside cafés in vast, dusty landscapes.  Even so, Central Station (with a screenplay by João Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein from an idea by Salles) conforms to a formula that it’s hard not to think of as a Hollywood formula.  An unexpected, accidental, often gruelling series of events enables a self-absorbed, world-weary protagonist to come to care for someone other than themselves, and to discover new meaning in life.  In Central Station that someone is a child, which increases the story’s sentimental heft.

    Vinícius de Oliveira, who had no previous acting experience, is terrifically effective as Josué.  He switches between angelic and petulant at speed.  He’s excellent whenever the boy is sparky and resourceful – when, for example, he and Dora are completely out of funds, and Josué sees and seizes an opportunity for her to make pocket money as she used to:  he noisily advertises an on-the-spot letter-writing service to a group of villagers.  Oliveira is less convincing when Josué is downhearted, as he’s several times required to be.  When he hangs his head, he just looks like a kid pretending to feel what Walter Salles has asked him to feel.  (Vinícius de Oliveira, whose actual age was twelve when he appeared in Central Station, has gone on to a successful adult career in Brazilian television and cinema, including a leading role in Salles’ 2008 drama Linha da Passe.)  In the supporting cast, the standout performance comes from Otávio Augusto as Pedrão, a kindly truck driver who gives Dora and Josué a lift.  An evangelical Christian who describes himself as ‘married to the road’, Pedrão stays with the pair until Dora, encouraging him to enjoy a beer and her company, scares him away.

    Dora and the boy locate his father’s address but he’s no longer there.  The house’s current owner directs them to another area; there’s no sign of Jesus there either but Josué has two half-brothers and one of them, Isaías (Matheus Nachtergaele), a building worker, happens to overhear Dora’s questions to another local.  Isaías invites them back to the home he shares with his brother Moisés (Caio Junqueira) and they explain the family history:  when their own mother died, their father married a woman called Ana who disappeared to Rio when she was pregnant (they don’t yet realise Josué is the child she was carrying).  Isaías and Moisés, both illiterate, ask Dora to read out the letter their father wrote to Ana before he too disappeared, a few months ago – a letter for Ana to see in case she returned.  Jesus’s letter, according to Dora’s reading, looks forward to a happy family reunion, including Josué ‘whom I can’t wait to meet’.  While Jesus’s three sons are asleep that night, Dora quietly leaves to catch a bus back to Rio de Janeiro.  The sound of the front door closing wakes Josué who runs towards the bus stop but too late to prevent her departure.

    Two composers share the music credit:  maybe Antônio Pinto and Jaques Morelenbaum collaborated but distinct differences between parts of their score make you wonder.  As Dora and Josué move through terra incognita, the music is aptly, attractively mysterious; a more lusciously poignant aspect exposes the film’s tear-jerking side.  What’s certain is that there’s too much music – less would have been more – which could be a symptom of Salles’ still limited film-making experience at the time (ditto some slack cutting).  He nevertheless builds the story to a potent climax.  Dora heads back to Rio wearing the blue dress Josué insisted on her getting with money from her renewed letter writing.  (The boy, who hadn’t minced words about her ‘ugly’ appearance, tells Dora she looks a lot better when she tries to look pretty.)   On her bus journey home, she writes to Josué, assuring him he’ll be happy living with Isaías and Moisés.  When she first wore the blue dress, she and Josué posed for two photographs together.  Each now has one of these photos to keep and to remember from.

    The film ends, in other words, with hope of a more stable future for Josué, hope too perhaps of Dora liking herself, as well as other people, more now that she has experienced a kind of mother love.  At the start of the film, Dora is virtually a parasite on the emotional lives of others, lacking an emotional life of her own.  As this chilly, often dislikeable woman starts to warm up, the woman playing her makes clear that warming up also means accessing regrets that it was easier for Dora to keep buried.  Fernanda Montenegro’s acting throughout is a display of extraordinarily truthful command.

    21 August 2025

     

  • A Place to Go

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1963)

    Film vehicles for British pop chart-toppers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were often designed to reinforce the new star’s musical credentials as much as to further a film acting career.  An extreme example is The Tommy Steele Story (1957), which reached cinemas less than a year after Steele’s breakthrough hit, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, entered the charts.  The film dramatises Tommy-as-himself’s meteoric rise to teen idol, as well as featuring plenty of his singing.  What a Crazy World (1963) may be more typical.  The cast includes a few recently successful pop acts, including Marty Wilde and Susan Maughan, but the lead is Joe Brown, whose ‘A Picture of You’ was a number one single the previous summer.  Brown plays an unemployed working-class Londoner, Alf Hitchens, eager to break into the music business as a songwriter; even so, he sings the composition that he hopes will make his name (the film’s title song), and other numbers.  Shaky storytelling leaves it unclear quite how much Alf has achieved his ambition by the film’s end, but he has landed a job in the office of a Denmark Street music agent, so we take it he’s going the right way.

    In 1961 Michael Scheuer graduated with a BA from London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.  A year later, as Mike Sarne, he was top of the British singles charts (just before Joe Brown) with ‘Come Outside’, memorably accompanied by ‘Little Doll’ Wendy Richard.  By early 1963, during the infamous winter of that year, he was doing location filming in Bethnal Green for A Place to Go[1], in which he played the lead.  Was Mike Sarne part of the current fashion for promoting pop stars as potential film stars?   Not really – and not only because he’d already done a fair bit of cinema and television acting (some of it seemingly while still a SSEES student) albeit the roles were uncredited or minor.  In A Place to Go, Sarne’s Ricky Flint is a young Cockney desperate for something more than a box room in his family’s cramped terraced house and work in a cigarette factory.  The film starts in a pub with Ricky singing the title song, to an appreciative audience that already knows him.  ‘A Place to Go’ is briefly reprised in the closing sequence and Sarne has sung a second number, ‘Out and About’, in the meantime.  But Ricky Flint’s dreams of a better life are less focused than Alf Hitchens’ and don’t depend on belief in his musical talents.  Ricky just wants out of Bethnal Green and turns to crime for the instant payday that can be his passport to more exciting places.

    Basil Dearden had already directed several films strongly dependent on their London settings – The Blue Lamp (1950), Pool of London (1951), Sapphire (1959), even The League of Gentlemen (1960).  The last three all involved his long-time producing partner, Michael Relph, as did A Place to Go, for which Relph also wrote the screenplay (with ‘additional dialogue’ by Clive Exton), adapted from Michael Fisher’s 1961 novel Bethnal Green.  Locale matters perhaps more in A Place to Go than in any of those other Dearden pictures.  A contemporary New York Times review[2] of the source novel thought ‘The best thing in the book – and this is a very good thing indeed – is Bethnal Green itself.  Mr Fisher moves through the streets of his district with such knowing assurance, observes its changes of light and season and weather with such precision, that in the end it is the feel of the place that remains in the mind’.  The same goes for A Place to Go, shot in black and white by Reginald H Wyer.  Dearden and Relph clearly set out to emulate the visual realism of British New Wave hits like Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961).

    This, alas, heightens the mismatch between visual design and the performances in A Place to Go – more specifically, a lack of orchestration of the acting.  I’ve seen enough Dearden films by now to realise how erratic he was in this department.  A director can’t alchemise a cast but a good one will show the actors to best advantage.  Among the four earlier films mentioned, Dearden signally fails to do that with some of the lesser-known players in Sapphire.  A Place to Go is different in that the cast members, well known or not, are mostly capable yet they seem to be performing in isolation from one another.  It doesn’t help that the best actor in the film, Bernard Lee, is miscast as paterfamilias Matt Flint, who shocks his family by suddenly leaving his job at the docks and trying his hand as a street entertainer – an escapologist – with ignominious results.  The miscasting isn’t a matter of Lee’s physical size and solidity, which makes Matt’s sweating and straining to break free of his chains (!) on the street the more gruelling to watch.  It’s rather that the character needs an emotional volatility that doesn’t come naturally to Lee, who therefore overacts to achieve this quality.  As Matt’s wife Lil, Doris Hare is fine when the dramatic stakes aren’t high but that’s increasingly less often as the story progresses.  Her husband dies suddenly; the Flints’ street is part of a slum clearance programme; the aftermath to a botched robbery involving Ricky lands him in hospital and, almost as soon as he’s discharged, up in court.  Doris Hare is the prime example here of a performer in a virtual vacuum.  Indomitable East End matriarch as she is, Lil Flint is worn down by the run of family misfortunes:  Doris Hare suffers not just nobly but slowly, too – to the disadvantage of whoever happens to be sharing the screen with her.

    The story’s central relationship is Ricky’s on-off romance with a feisty, flighty local girl called Cat Donovan, played by Rita Tushingham, in just her second film role after A Taste of Honey.  As usual, Tushingham is better when not speaking.  Ricky buys Cat a canary in a cage, from a market trader (an uncredited George Sewell, who appears for all of thirty seconds but still makes a good impression).  According to one of cinema’s golden rules, the caged bird has symbolic significance.  Cat wants to set it free; things don’t look good when the canary makes its way to a flat roof where a different cat is waiting but the bird manages to fly away:  as it does so, Rita Tushingham’s face is beautifully expressive.  Whenever Cat has a chunk of dialogue, Tushingham is much less natural but there is a connection – a welcome rarity in this film – between her and Mike Sarne.  The younger actors in smaller but significant roles – Barbara Ferris, David Andrews and William Marlowe – all do creditably.  Ferris is Ricky’s sister, Betsy, who’s living at her parents’, along with her lorry-driver husband Jim (Andrews) and their new baby.  Charlie Batey (Marlowe) – Cat’s in an on-off relationship with him, too – is a sidekick of Jack Ellerman (John Slater), the local Mr Big who recruits Ricky and Jim for the robbery at Ricky’s workplace.

    Neither Ricky nor Jim has been in trouble with the law before; both, for different reasons, need money.  Decent Jim, whose lorry will be the getaway vehicle, drops out on the eve of the robbery so Ricky decides to drive the lorry himself.  He creeps into the bedroom where Betsy, Jim and the baby are sleeping, and nicks the ignition keys from Jim’s trousers pocket.  During the robbery, Ellerman asks Ricky to stand guard and gives him a cosh to use if necessary; a bobby on the beat stops just outside the factory entrance where Ricky lurks in the shadows.  Ricky had no qualms about thieving but can’t go through with GBH or worse.  He makes a panicky escape in Jim’s lorry, which Charlie later that night sets on fire.  As Ricky tries to quench the flames, the tank blows up; the next we see of Ricky, he’s just a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth emerging through bandages.  When he leaves hospital, his face scarred from burns, he calls on his mother in her new council flat before going to the pub and getting into a knife fight with Charlie Batey.  Up before a magistrate (Norman Shelley), both men claim that Cat is their girl; Ricky goes further by lying that he and Cat are engaged.  Cat is conveniently on hand to give testimony.  She looks at her two suitors in the dock and lies to save Ricky’s bacon.  The magistrate lets him off lightly; he’s bound over to keep the peace for a year and charged three pounds costs.

    Dearden and Relph were remarkably productive around this time, releasing two films in each of 1960 (The League of Gentlemen, Man in the Moon), 1961 (Victim, The Secret Partner) and 1962 (All Night Long, Life for Ruth).  They’d completed The Mind Benders just before making A Place to Go.  (In a sequence where Ricky and Cat go to the pictures, you can spot an in-joke poster for The Mind Benders.)  You can’t help thinking the pair were spreading themselves too thin, though:  A Place to Go is careless, in various ways.  Although the robbery goes wrong, there is a break-in at the factory and Charlie uses the cosh as Ricky couldn’t, though the policeman survives the attack:  there’s no follow-up to either crime.  Jim Ellerman once carried a torch for Lil Flint and says he’s always had a soft spot for Ricky:  the film seems to be preparing to reveal (as Michael Fisher’s novel does, according to Wikipedia) that Ricky is the crime boss’s son, but it doesn’t, and Jim Ellerman (well played by John Slater) just disappears from the story.  It’s clear that escapology is taking its toll on Matt Flint’s health.  He’s breathless on the street; when he and Lil return home to find Ellerman in conversation with Ricky, Matt gets angry, clutches his chest and keels over unconscious.  Bernard Lee collapses impressively but Dearden seems not to have pointed out to him that Matt isn’t meant to be suffering a heart attack.  (The hospital doctor who breaks the bad news to Ricky explains that Matt died of ‘a stroke and a brain haemorrhage’.)

    Dearden fares better with the relatively action-packed sequences – the factory break-in, Ricky’s fight with Charlie (which is particularly well done:  you can believe that other people in the pub join in, for the hell of it).  A scene at a dog track (Clapton Stadium) moves in ways few other scenes in the film do.  ‘It’s not the same as having your own front door’, laments Lil, when Ricky admires her new flat, way up in a tower block.  Jim and Betsy manage to get their own place with the insurance money for the lorry; Betsy says it’s nice ‘but a bit lonely’.  The message here is clear enough – hard-scrabble community making way for mod-cons anonymity – but another aspect of A Place to Go as social comment is harder to get a handle on:  this may be part of the film’s slackness but the effect is interesting.  The lenient magistrate expresses the hope that Ricky will ‘get married … settle down’, and that’s what he and Cat decide to do.  In the final sequence they run hand in hand towards Ricky’s old street, which they find being demolished.  On paper, the story’s resolution sounds thoroughly socially conservative – Ricky was wrong to dream big, is right to stay on his own modest patch.  But the closing shots, as he and Cat, hand in hand, pick their way through the rubble of the old street and head towards a high-rise block beyond – towards their future – is more ambiguous.   There’s a snatch of the lyrics from ‘A Place to Go’, and they now sound ironic.

    The film is such a weird concoction of styles and moods that you can only admire Charles Blackwell’s resourceful music – comically jaunty one moment, crime-thrillerish the next.  Blackwell, who worked with Joe Meek before becoming a highly successful music arranger and producer in his own right, had written ‘Come Outside’ the previous year and he wrote the two songs for A Place to Go ‘in collaboration with Mike Sarne’.  The film confirms Sarne as a likeable, not very brilliant singer and an engaging, unremarkable actor.  He didn’t carry on with the music for long.  He has continued to act over the decades but no more big roles.  Compared with Ricky Flint, though, Mike Sarne certainly went places.  By 1970, he was in Hollywood, directing Mae West and Raquel Welch in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.

    19 August 2025

    [1] Although dated 1963 on IMDb and by BFI, the film was released in Britain in early 1964.

    [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1961/08/27/archives/how-does-a-man-fit-into-the-brave-new-world-bethnal-green-by.html

     

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