Old Yorker

  • Brideshead Revisited

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julian Jarrold (2008)

    It’s no surprise that admirers of the book and the television adaptation deplore this film but I was prejudiced in its favour, largely because it lasts 133 minutes compared with the 659 of the Granada serialisation and the more than four hundred pages of the Evelyn Waugh original.  The screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock simplifies and coarsens the texture of the novel.  It concentrates on falling in love and religion and alcoholism at the expense of social and spiritual nuances.  In the movie’s latter stages especially, Davies and Brock’s reductions make some things hard to understand:  Charles Ryder’s marriage to Celia becomes so marginal that it barely registers at all – you get no sense of how it could have occurred in the first place.  It’s not clear how Charles finds Sebastian Flyte in a hospital in Morocco.  Charles’s conversation with Lord Marchmain, who returns to die at Brideshead, suggests they’re close friends when, as far as the viewer knows from the movie, they’ve met only once before.   The climax is clumsy: the dying Lord Marchmain’s sign of the cross is stagy and his daughters, looking on, anticipate it.  The ending in the Brideshead chapel is weakly ambiguous.  Adrian Johnson’s music is rather obvious.  But some of what the scriptwriters jettison is welcome – including nearly all the stuff in Oxford – and Julian Jarrold doesn’t simply luxuriate in the beauty of physical worlds in which the story happens.  The tensions and corrosions of human behaviour and parental influence are a strong counterpoint.

    I don’t know much about the nature of Evelyn Waugh’s religious belief but the novel Brideshead Revisited was certainly too Roman Catholic for some contemporary critics’ liking.  Edmund Wilson described the finale as ‘extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not – painful to say – meant quite seriously …’  The film-makers are uneasy with this too;  there’s not much more than recognition of the unarguable power of the Catholic faith for members of the Marchmain family.   Jarrold, Davies and Brock are more comfortable with showing the pernicious effects of Lady Marchmain’s personality on her children and these are in effect blurred with the pernicious effects of religion. The poster for the film which appears in the Wikipedia article on it is eloquent about this Brideshead Revisited.   Emma Thompson, who plays Lady Marchmain may be the largest figure on the poster simply because she’s the biggest name in the cast but Lady Marchmain dominates proceedings in a way that’s not quite right.  Thompson is technically very impressive but she is immediately formidable:   Lady Marchmain is more disturbing, and dramatically effective, if her exterior is softer.  Emma Thompson is a shade over-eager.  Her understanding of the character of Lady Marchmain may have led her to pre-interpret it.

    Of the three principals in the story, I rate only one of the performances in the Granada TV adaptation whereas all three are good in this version.  Ben Whishaw as Sebastian is way ahead of Anthony Andrews, especially in the early stages.  Sebastian’s fawn-like vulnerability when things aren’t going badly is touching, because of what you know is to come; Whishaw’s physical delicacy is matched by an emotional gracefulness and acuity.   The intimacy between Charles and Sebastian (I don’t mean the kiss) is sharp and convincing:  it’s as if the strength of the bond between them is what causes them to treat it as a secret – even though the bond as such doesn’t require secrecy.   Whishaw’s Sebastian and Matthew Goode’s Charles take pleasure as much in concealing their sense of superiority as in their outbursts of sniggers.  Although the bonds are not the same, Sebastian’s sister Julia is part of this secret society too.   Hayley Atwell’s Julia is poised and shrewd; she’ll never be the woman her mother is, which is just as well.  Atwell is much superior to the emotionally sluggish Diana Quick, who played the role on television.  I wondered if Matthew Goode, a naturally entertaining actor, might be suppressed in the role of Charles; there are some signs of strain in the closing stages but Goode is mostly excellent.  Jeremy Irons’s portrait of Charles in the Granada version was impressive.  He read the extracts from the novel in a way that captured what you accept as the feelings in and behind Waugh’s narrative.  Irons was very good too at listening to, and developing an understanding of, other characters; this quality and the narration combined to create a link between Charles Ryder and the viewer.  Without anything like as much voiceover, Matthew Goode has to make Charles more readable and likeable, and he does.

    Julian Jarrold has strengthened his impressive television curriculum vitae since 2008 – this picture didn’t help his career as a cinema director although he handles the material and the actors well.  Some of the supporting roles were memorably played on television.  The actors here don’t displace those performances but in some cases the characterisations are different enough not to be simply inferior.  Ed Stoppard’s Bridey is not the huntin-shootin-fishin character that Simon Jones created but this actually makes the character more interestingly odd.  In contrast, Felicity Jones’s Cordelia is only mildly eccentric compared with Phoebe Nicholls.  The Marchmain siblings here are more out of the same mould than their television counterparts; this makes sense, given the implied primacy of the maternal-Catholic influence, and works well within the timeframe of the movie.  (It might not work so well in a more extended adaptation.)  As Lord Marchmain, Michael Gambon is superior to Laurence Olivier in the Venice episode so that the family interactions there are much more vividly real.  He’s less good on his deathbed, where Olivier’s enduring physicality was powerful.  Greta Scacchi’s Carla compares favourably with Stéphane Audran’s.  Patrick Malahide wisely doesn’t attempt to compete with John Gielgud’s fathomless sarcasm as Ryder père.  Malahide moves from being mildly cantankerous to something more benign, and it’s good enough.  Joseph Beattie doesn’t, however, get near Nickolas Grace’s lavishly extraordinary Anthony Blanche and Jonathan Cake, in comparison to the insidiously imposing Charles Keating, provides only a thin caricature of Rex Mottram.

    24 May 2013

  • Breathless

    Old YorkerFilm review

    A bout de souffle

    Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

    In the English-speaking world, its name is an inseparable part of the film’s cachet but it’s actually a thin reduction of the richness of the French title.  There’s no obvious way of rendering neatly in English the ‘end of’ element of ‘à bout’ but ‘Out of Breath’ would be more expressive.  The principal characters are Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a petty crook who – before the film is ten minutes old – has become a killer on the run in Paris; and Patricia (Jean Seberg), his shallowly cultured American journalist girlfriend.  They are ‘living in the moment’.  Godard takes that to mean living superficially and irresponsibly but living too with a degree of existential awareness.  Michel says that he thinks about death all the time and, although the young man has a penchant for striking, thoughtless statements, we don’t get the sense that this is a lie.  A bout de souffle reflects, with almost amused detachment, a strong sense of the proximity of death to life, of how death is always only a breath or a heedless action away.   We register this in the death of a man in a street accident as much as in the end of the policeman whom Michel kills.

    Michel’s own death – the film’s penultimate sequence – is extended, a bravura piece of camerawork and of acting.  I knew that Breathless was innovative in terms of its visual style (hand-held camera, jump cuts etc) and treatment of characters – but I was knocked out by Belmondo.  I’ve seen very few of his films and he was fixed in my mind as an established, fortyish French film star of a particular type – a cool man of action.   He was in his mid-twenties when he made Breathless (this was his breakthrough role) and I was unprepared for his raw originality.  Belmondo is perfectly at ease in front of the camera; he’s completely relaxed and completely alert.  He gives you the fun of theatricality through an art that conceals art – in the way he makes faces, smokes cigarettes, repeats the gesture of rubbing his upper lip (reprised by Jean Seberg in the final shot of Patricia after Michel’s death).   Belmondo does seem the essence of a French tradition of macho-on-the-edge-of-the-law.  He evokes a tradition of charming gangsters and the melancholy of Bogart; at the same time he’s fresh and individual.  It’s great screen acting:  as Michel, Belmondo fully and, it seems, effortlessly inhabits the body of the character and expresses his thoughts.  Compared with him, Jean Seberg is more evidently acting but she’s an amazing camera subject:  she gives Patricia an impacted, intransigent quality – the girl seems dissociated in a way that complements Michel’s ultimate inaccessibility.  And because the magnetism of Belmondo and Seberg draws you towards them, there’s a powerful tension between this and the emotional distance their characters maintain.

    Breathless may also be a trailblazing film in that it features protagonists who are charming but amoral.  Michel and Patricia are impelled by personal desire and without any sense of responsibility to others or any sense of proportion.  Their relationship is romantic and erotic because of the actors but subversive in relation to the sentiments of a conventional love story on screen.  When Michel says to Patricia, ‘I can’t live without you’, she replies, ‘Of course you can’.  To which he responds, ‘Yes, but I don’t want to.’  I loved the way the film moved from quick, jolting sequences to the long, fascinating scene in the couple’s cramped bedroom:  the exchanges between them there develop the physical and moral texture of their relationship in a grippingly enjoyable way.

    Godard famously dedicated Breathless to Monogram pictures, who churned out cheap gangster films, but he goes way beyond the lineaments of a genre picture.  In addition to its technical originality, Breathless gets at essential aspects of cinema’s power and allure.   A number of famous directors, including Godard himself, have walk-on parts or cameos.  The most expansive of these is provided by Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco, a famous novelist who’s being interviewed by journalists, including Patricia.   Much of this funny scene plays as a satire of (a particularly French?) tradition of celebrity artists making lapidary pronouncements on the universe but one of Parvulesco’s bons mots – in answer to a question about what he most wants to achieve – has a resonance that, nearly half a century after Breathless was made, overpowers its sarcastic wit.   ‘I want to become immortal then die’.  It’s a joke but it expresses a truth about the everlasting life of great screen performers and film-makers.

    I can’t begin to do justice to this film.

    28 April 2009

     

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