Old Yorker

  • Tales from the Golden Age

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Amintiri din epoca de aur

    Hanno Höfer, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru, Razvan Marculescu (2009)

    Five short film stories, written by Cristian Mungiu and set in the later years of the Communist era in Romania.  Each has a different director and is based on an urban myth of the period. (There appears to have been a sixth segment – ‘The Legend of the Zealous Activist’ – which isn’t included in the version of the film now being shown over here.)   I spent an unusually long time asleep – don’t know why:  I wasn’t bored by what was on screen – and missed virtually the whole of ‘The Legend of the Chicken Driver’, the third piece.  I feel sorry as well as guilty about that.  It’s the one that Mungiu directed – and the one which, judging from the conversation between Julian Barnes and his companion which I heard on the way out of the Renoir and from an online review on the Channel 4 website, seems to be particularly admired.  The chicken driver is played by Vlad Ivanov, memorable as the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.  In that film, Mungiu set his story in this same historical context – he brought off an impressive balancing act so that the characters never seemed dramatically subordinate to the political message.  I’m not sure the same can be said for the first, second and fourth tales in Golden Age but the last one – ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ – is a half-hour masterpiece.

    In ‘The Legend of the Official Visit’ a senior party member, on the eve of the titular visit, tells the organising party to get hold of some pigeons for use in a rehearsal for the next day.    The man who takes the phone call passes on the instruction to a uniformed colleague, who’s supposedly keeping an eye on a group of workmen.  The man in uniform takes his leave of them to locate pigeons. ‘I’ll be gone half an hour’, he tells the workmen, ‘but I’ll be watching you’.  He wilts from officiousness into limp cluelessness as soon as he’s out of their sight and left by himself with the problem of finding the birds.   The ‘Official Visit’ ends with the organisers, the mayor et al on an all-night spin on a dizzying (in the mayor’s case nauseating) fairground ride.  Its operator is also along for the ride:  he’s just refuelled the mechanism and tells his companions it and they will keep on going until the tank is empty.  The story is neat and witty and the monotonously circling ride is a splendid image – but it’s too tidy a representation of the absurd, entropic political system – which the characters can’t get off until it finally runs out of steam – to be more than neat and witty.   ‘The Legend of the Party Photographer’ is about increasingly frantic efforts to manipulate a photograph of Nicolae Ceaușescu so that he doesn’t look ridiculous standing next to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who’s on a state visit to Romania.   Needless to say, the efforts fail. (Giscard D’Estaing – in a hat – is so much taller than the bare-headed Ceaușescu that the French president looks daft too.)  In ‘The Legend of the Greedy Policeman’ the title character takes illicit delivery of a pig just before the festive season (a relative term in Communist Romania – although this segment is a reminder that it was on 25 December 1989 that Ceaușescu and his wife were executed).  The family expected their Christmas feast to arrive as dead meat rather than alive and kicking – how do they reduce it to pork?  (I wasn’t convinced that no animals were harmed, or at least distressed, in the making of this section.)  I know next to nothing about Eastern European political satire during the Communist period but all three of these stories, with their broad, sarcastic humour, feel circumscribed and unsurprising.

    Like the ‘Greedy Policeman’, ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ illustrates the madly resourceful lengths to which Romanians were driven by their economic system.  In other respects, it has a suppleness that’s lacking in the clever but predetermined stories that have gone before it.  Crina, a teenager, arrives home from school one afternoon before either of her parents and opens the door to a young man from the Ministry of Chemistry, who tells her he’s in the apartment block in response to complaints from the tenants about their cloudy drinking water.  He shows an ID and although Crina won’t admit him because she’s alone in the flat she fills a bottle from the tap for him to take away for testing.  When her parents get home, she falls out with her father about money for a school trip (being organised, she says, by the students themselves and not, she insists, a ‘holiday camp’).  Her caring, cautious father and mother have been saving for ages to buy a car.  That evening, a girlfriend invites Crina over to her apartment, in a different block.  On the way over, the girlfriend talks about her new boyfriend, who’s got a video player – a group of them are going to watch a film.  The boyfriend, Bughi, turns out to be the young man from the Ministry of Chemistry and the video is Bonnie and Clyde.  When, later on, Crina and Bughi chat outside the apartment building, he tells her that he makes a living from the water-testing scam:  it’s a way of collecting considerable supplies of glass bottles, which he then sells off.   He invites Crina to join him in doing this.  They’re obviously attracted to each other, although her motives are probably more mixed than his:  since possession of any kind of video player is a mark of material privilege in the neighbourhood and Crina is desperate for cash so as not to depend on her father for the outing from school, she readily accepts the invitation.

    In ‘Air Sellers’ you’re interested in the characters in themselves, not just as vehicles to illustrate the ludicrous state of the nation.  The relationship between Crina and Bughi really develops.  Once the scam becomes a double act, she shows a flair for it and occasionally upstages her mentor.  She’s pretty, articulate, thinks on her feet to come up with fluent, plausible lies in answer to tricky questions (she’s driven by a desire both for independence and to impress Bughi).  The pair-from-the-ministry routines are very funny.  Of course people are willing to accept the basic premise:  their water is grotty (everyone is pretty sure it’s thanks to a local chemical plant).  The tale takes its title from the point at which Bughi and Crina vary their usual spiel to say they’ve come to take air rather than water samples.  This is the absurdist high point of the film.  Crina ask for two types of bottle to fill with air, which she captures with scientific concentration.  These have to be different bottles, she and Bughi explain to the elderly man in the flat, so that air quality in different parts of the block can be more finely compared.  When the man asks what they do in three- rather than two-room apartments, Bughi says they use a champagne bottle for the third room:  anyone with a three-room apartment must be rich enough to drink it.  ‘You kids think of everything,’ says the satisfied citizen.

    When they start going out together – he in his suit, she in the skirt and top she’s changed into from her school uniform – Bughi and Crina steal a car (his work isn’t so lucrative that he can afford one of those yet).  In the depressed surroundings, the couple do seem relatively glamorous but the Bonnie and Clyde connection isn’t pushed too far.   The group crowded round the small screen to watch a grotty black-and-white pirated recording of the picture in the apartment also hits home as a suggestion of how an adolescent cinema addict like Cristian Mungiu, born in 1968, might have had to access recent ‘decadent’ American cinema in the 1980s.  And the whole atmosphere of this gathering – youngsters drinking, smoking, dancing – gives the sequence a sense of sensual, sexual possibility that’s unusual in Tales from the Golden Age.  It’s as if once night falls there are ways of blotting out the glum monochrome of the daylight world which these people inhabit.   The young actors in the main roles – Diana Cavallioti as Crina, Radu Iacoban as Bughi – are great, especially in how they express the couple’s different mental and emotional speeds.   (Crina thinks faster than Bughi but, at the climax to the story, it’s her panic which causes the get-rich-quick scheme to unravel.)  As soon as these two get together, political parable and human interest story are perfectly combined.

    11 November 2009

  • Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alejandro González Iñárritu (2014)

    Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films to date haven’t been notable for their humour.  Birdman is a (black) comedy but its subtitle predicts self-importance (and the irritating placing of ‘or’ before the opening bracket hints at calculated eccentricity).  Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is a washed-up Hollywood star.  He once played the superhero Birdman.  He turned his back on this commercially colossal movie franchise and saw his career plummet.  Twenty years later, Riggan is trying to relaunch himself – this time, as a serious artist:  he’s adapted Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the stage.  The play, which Riggan stars in and is also directing, is about to open on Broadway.  Birdman is remarkable chiefly for a piece of technical ingenuity:  nearly the whole film appears to be one continuous long take – even though the camera moves between interiors and exteriors and the story extends over several days.  This device is more than clever trompe l’oeil on the part of Iñárritu, his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and his editors, Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione.  Once you realise what the film-makers are about, the effect of the long take is increasingly claustrophobic, and causes one to share something of the protagonist’s feelings of imprisonment.  Riggan is still publicly and inescapably regarded as Birdman.  He repeatedly hears the superhero’s voice, usually deriding Riggan’s attempts to establish a new artistic identity, in his head.  An acidly contemptuous theatre critic, Tabitha Dickinson, reminds him that he’s ‘a celebrity, not an actor’.  The essential inseparability of the world inside the theatre and the one outside it on the streets of New York is realised most strongly in a sequence in which Riggan, taking a cigarette break and getting a breath of fresh air between scenes at a preview performance of the play, finds himself locked outside a stage door that’s banged shut.  He has to remove his robe, jammed in the door, and walk in his underpants through Times Square in order to get back inside in the theatre.  He arrives on cue to deliver his next line, his appearance amusing and delighting the front stalls just as it did the passers-by and autograph hunters outside.

    Another, presumably less intended, effect of the single take is an increasing sense of the contrivance of Birdman; the acting in it, expert and almost entirely unsurprising, reinforces this effect.  Richard Brody’s critique[1] is mostly right about what’s wrong with the film.  The typography of the opening titles brought to my mind, like Brody’s, the words on the screen at the start of Pierrot le fou:  this pinch didn’t make me (unlike him) feel that Iñárritu was getting ‘in the ring’ with Jean-Luc Godard but Brody is right that, by casting Michael Keaton in the lead in Birdman, Iñárritu  ‘fuses the viewer’s knowledge of the performer’s previous roles (and, for that matter, life) with the character that the actor plays’.  Keaton’s movie career has never – until now – recovered from his decision not to play Batman a third time.  His combination of barely suppressed mania and dry wit made his characterisation of Bruce Wayne unusually interesting.  The same qualities are evident in his portrait of Riggan Thomson:  Keaton’s controlled interior power is often expressive; he makes Riggan more likeable than virtually all the other main characters in Birdman put together; but I don’t believe he would be receiving the prizes that are now coming his way if he hadn’t played Batman.  The cast also includes Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Zach Galifianakis and Lindsay Duncan:  on the rare occasions when the script supplies these actors with the opportunity to show a different side they take it (this is particularly so in the closing stages of a scene in which the Norton and Stone characters play a game of truth or dare, and in a dressing-room conversation that Ryan, as his ex-wife, has with Riggan).  But the performances, accomplished as they are, are mostly one-note – reflecting the relentlessly snippy dialogue that the main players in Riggan’s life and production exchange.

    This technically sophisticated film, complete with ear-catching soundtrack (a selection of emotive classical tracks and a complementary drum-roll accompaniment by Antonio Sanchez), seems state of the art but its people and satirical targets are very familiar.  There’s the faded star identified with a role from which he yearns to break free.  There’s the lethal collision between this character’s onstage and offstage predicaments (shades of Ronald Colman in A Double Life).  There’s the brilliant, impossible method actor (Norton), whose determination to deliver a performance that’s ‘truthful’ makes him, for example, insist on drinking gin rather than water when his character in the play is meant to be drinking gin, and on trying to persuade his real-life girlfriend Lesley (Watts) to have real sex when the people they’re playing are making love onstage.  Actors are caricatured as desperately promiscuous and insecure egotists:  as the preview audiences applaud them, the players on stage bow and smile and abuse each other sotto voce.  ‘Why have I no self-esteem?’ moans Lesley.  ‘But you’re an actress, darling’, replies her co-star Laura (Riseborough).  There’s the critic (Duncan), who can single-handedly make or break a Broadway play and is destructively determined to kill this one.

    In the event, Riggan, whose Carver character shoots himself at the end of the play, fires a real bullet into his own head on the production’s first night and Tabitha Dickinson writes a review (with the headline ‘The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance’), which hails Riggan’s achievement of a new ‘super-realism’ in American theatre.  I don’t agree with Richard Brody that the players in Birdman fail to distinguish the style of their acting in the play-within-the-film vs their characterisations of the actors performing the play but Brody is right that Birdman seeks to confirm the superiority of stage acting to movie acting (it’s an irony that the differentiated playing of Keaton, Norton, Watts and Riseborough in Riggan’s play suggests otherwise) – and the corrupting effect of Hollywood.  When Riggan is looking for a replacement actor, he suggests Woody Harrelson, then Michael Fassbender, then Robert Downey Jr and is told by his friend and producer (Galifianakis) that they’re otherwise engaged on the next in the series of Hunger Games, X-Men and Iron Man respectively.  (As Anthony Lane points out, also in the New Yorker, it’s another in-joke that Mike Shiner, the actor whom Riggan does recruit, is played by Edward Norton, who played, just the once, the Incredible Hulk.)  Riggan’s attempt at suicide succeeds only in blowing off his nose.  The doctors soon surgically replace it.  A nose job – it’s a confirmation that Riggan Thomson is a creature of the movies.

    There’s no reason why these durable clichés can’t be entertaining once again but there’s no indication either that Iñárritu and his co-writers on the screenplay (Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Armando Bo) recognise them as clichés:  they’re presented rather as if fresh and searing insights.   The whole film is percolated by obviousness:  as soon as Riggan is shown to possess some of the supernatural talents of his erstwhile big screen alter ego (levitation, telekinesis), it’s clear that he will, in due course, be airborne too.  What appears to be his maiden flight is revealed to be fantasy. (This sequence is emotionally effective – both in providing, albeit within the continuous long take, a sense of release and in bringing the viewer down to earth with the realisation of the fantasy.)  But the unqualified implication of the film’s last scene is that the hero really has reverted to being a superhero.  Alejandro González Iñárritu does plenty of smart things in Birdman but they’re seldom enjoyable.  Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Stone), shows him an exercise she was taught as part of a recent spell in rehab:  you indicate by a single mark, on sheet after sheet of a roll of tissue, every ten thousand years the universe has existed; a single sheet represents the totality of human life on Earth.  Sam passes the sheet to her father, who, a little later in their conversation, inadvertently wipes his nose on it and, as his daughter says, wipes out human history.  A couple of scenes on, a desperate, drunken Riggan shows Tabitha Dickinson the cherished scrap of paper which decided him, as a teenager, on an acting career and explains his choice of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as the project that will establish him as a creative artist.  Raymond Carver happened to be in the audience for a school production in which Riggan appeared and sent him a note of thanks for ‘an honest performance’.   Riggan leaves the bar, after getting nowhere with the unyielding Tabitha.  He also leaves the Carver note there, with the scrunched up notes for a review which Riggan tore from Tabitha’s pad.  This moment chimes with the life-on-Earth toilet paper; you recognise Iñárritu’s cleverness (and may even congratulate yourself on picking this up).  Yet the discarding of the Carver note doesn’t chime with Riggan’s character so the resonance rings hollow.  For all its surface dynamism and modernity, Birdman is mouldy.  It’s a doubly lowering experience – thanks both to its pessimism and to its being lauded as one of the films of the year.

    29 December 2014

    [1]  http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/birdman-never-achieves-flight

     

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