Old Yorker

  • The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Richardson (1962)

    Alan Sillitoe wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his short story of the same name but the film’s characterisation of its protagonist, Colin Smith, is confused.  Tony Richardson and Sillitoe keep changing their mind – for the sake of instant dramatic impact – about whether Colin is typical of his generation and social group or is different from his working-class contemporaries (and hence ‘lonely’).   Colin arrives at Ruxton Towers, a borstal.  The narrative describes his life there, his aptitude for running and the preparations for a five-mile race, in which the borstal lads take on the boys from Ranley, a nearby public school.  Interspersed with this story is a series of flashbacks to Colin’s earlier life in Nottingham, leading up to his robbing a bakery with his friend, Mike – it’s this that lands Colin in Ruxton Towers.  Earlier in the backstory, he and Mike take a couple of girls, Audrey and Gladys, on a trip to Skegness.  On the beach there, Colin recalls a family visit to Skegness when he was a boy.  He tells Audrey that ‘when I was a kid I kept trying to get lost – then I realised I couldn’t get lost’.  This suggests precocious existential or, at least, social consciousness on Colin’s part and, although he and Mike are partners in petty crime, we can see how unalike they are – how dissatisfied with his life Colin is, compared to his friend.  But his feelings about the impending race against the Ranley boys are kept under wraps until the last few yards of the five-mile run.  Colin is well ahead and assured of victory.  Visited by a stream of consciousness montage of key remarks and images from earlier in the film, he appears to realise only in the nick of time that, if he wins, he’ll gratify the borstal governor and be collaborating with the establishment enemy.  He stops and throws the race.

    Thanks to his slight physique, Tom Courtenay, twenty-five at the time, is convincingly younger as Colin.  (In contrast, John Thaw, although he was only twenty, looks anomalously mature in the group of borstal boys.)   From the start – in interviews with the governor and a foolish would be-psychoanalyst among the borstal staff – Courtenay suggests that Colin Smith’s cocky rebelliousness is the expression of something deeper-rooted.  He’s by far the best reason for watching the film even though his superior acting also marks him out and, in effect, magnifies the sense you get of Colin’s specialness.   (As the governor, Michael Redgrave manages to nuance somewhat a cartoon figure; as his colleague, Alec McCowen doesn’t.)  The arty bleakness of the beach at Skegness and the wintry trees in the countryside around Ruxton Towers (photographed by Walter Lassally) are par for the course in a politically serious British film of the early 1960s.  Some of the best sequences in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are ones in which we watch Colin Smith simply running on his own, enjoying both being solitary and the relative freedom of training outside the borstal precincts – as the governor, determined that one of his boys will win the race against the public school, has allowed Colin to do.

    There’s a nice balance in the alternation between Tom Courtenay’s running naturalistically and in a manner designed to express Colin’s feelings but the final race, and especially its climax, are badly constructed and staged.  James Fox, as Gunthorpe, the best athlete in the Ranley team, runs in an exaggeratedly uncoordinated way that wouldn’t allow him to compete successfully at any level.  When Colin passes Gunthorpe at what seems to be a still early stage of the race, both Fox and Courtenay are lunging as if for the finishing tape.  The watching crowd is too excited too soon, especially as there are other athletic events going on at the same time as the five-mile run.  When Colin slows to a halt, he looks exhausted – as if to keep you in suspense as to what’s causing him to give up.  This makes no sense once he’s had the revelatory flashback.  And the very idea of a contest between Ruxton Towers and Ranley is questionable:  you can accept the public school might, for PR reasons, condescend to compete against the borstal but, when the governor tells the headmaster that he likes ‘the idea of winning that trophy off you’, it suggests that the competition is an established event.

    The flashbacks to Colin’s life prior to borstal are good enough in terms of social detail.  He bitterly resents how his dying father (Peter Madden) was treated by the firm for which he worked many years as a labourer.  Colin is no less angry that his mother (Avis Bunnage, who’s too energetic in the role) is carrying on with her ‘fancy man’ (Joe Robinson) even before the father has died.  This confusion of Colin’s political and personal anger works well as a trigger for the bakery robbery:  Colin has just had a falling out with his mother and is desperate for cash as a result.  But the script and especially the direction repeatedly make things either obvious or baffling.  Mrs Smith gets insurance money from her late husband’s firm and immediately splashes out on a fur coat, a three-piece suite and a television:  you cringe when the family first turn the television on, anticipating the moment when it will break down, as it duly does.

    Tony Richardson also spoils the end of the Skegness episode.  You’ve already got the point that Colin, Mike and their girls, sitting glumly in a cafe, are depressed that the trip’s over and they have to go back to Nottingham.  Richardson, to underline the point, focuses emphatically on the debris of a full ashtray and messy crockery on the cafe table.  (James Bolam is good as Mike – not least in suggesting his lack of ambition for better – but the girls aren’t so effective.  Topsy Jane looks right as Audrey but she’s a limited actress.  Julia Foster is vivid in the smaller role of Gladys but seems frustrated that she’s got so little to do – she’s straining to make an impression.)   Colin and Mike sit on Mrs Smith’s new settee, deriding the pompous platitudes of a quintessential Tory politician (Robert Percival) on television.  Tom Courtenay and James Bolam make this amusing but here too Richardson’s satirical touch is heavy-handed.  After the political broadcast is interrupted for the row between Colin and his mother, the volume on the television is turned back up for us to hear the punchline:  the never-had-it-so-good politician proclaims ‘a new Elizabethan age’.

    The aftermath to the robbery, in which Colin and Mike steal a cashbox containing seventy pounds, is unconvincing.  It isn’t plausible that Colin (as opposed to Mike) would be so daft as to hide the notes in a drainpipe (heavy rain flushes them out) or the cashbox in the soil under a potted plant of his mother’s.  Nor is it clear why the police either focus their inquiries immediately on Colin (he can’t be that notorious a lawbreaker if he’s not been in a reformatory before) or don’t take his fingerprints (which must be all over the office from which the cashbox was taken).  One of the film’s worst features is the music, composed and arranged by John Addison.  Images of life in the borstal are persistently accompanied by ‘Jerusalem’ on the soundtrack:  even without the words, the juxtaposition is crudely ironic.  When the assembled boys actually sing ‘Jerusalem’, all do so enthusiastically and as if they positively subscribe to Blake’s words:  here and elsewhere, Tony Richardson elides the difference between being, for good reason, fed up with your circumstances and being thoughtful about how to change them through political action.  For the robbery episode, John Addison has written quasi-comical music:  it’s strongly reminiscent of the accompaniment, also by Addison, to the youngsters expressing themselves in Richardson’s previous film, A Taste of Honey.  In the sociopolitical context of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, this larky music is offensively patronising.

    27 October 2014

     

  • Melancholia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lars von Trier (2011)

    Lars von Trier must now be the best-known Scandinavian film-maker since Ingmar Bergman.   Late in life, Bergman admitted to a youthful enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler and von Trier got in hot water by acknowledging in a Cannes press conference, when Melancholia was shown at this year’s festival, a degree of sympathy for the Nazi leader.  The grim existentialism of Melancholia might suggest further common ground between the two film-makers; in fact, the best thing about von Trier’s latest is that it reminds you what a master Bergman was.  In films like Through a Glass Darkly and Persona, he sets up situations where the characters are isolated in ways that draw you into their world and keep you within its severe limits; their obsessive self-preoccupation is compelling and convincing; the settings are appropriate for thinking and feeling in extremis, for reflecting on and wrestling with matters of life and death.  Of course, Bergman uses other, very different contexts just as successfully to dramatise his existential themes – especially the medieval universe of great films like The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.   In Winter Light, it’s people in the real world who intensify the pastor’s self-absorption and callousness; a mixture of present realities, memories and fantasies enriches the exploration of Professor Borg’s psyche in Wild Strawberries.  Creating worlds in which we believe – or in which we’re able to suspend disbelief – is what in Melancholia Lars von Trier signally fails to do.

    The film is divided into two parts, ‘Justine’ and ‘Claire’, named for the two sisters who are the film’s principal characters.  The first part tells of Justine’s wedding night – a lavish and highly populous occasion taking place at the vast home of Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her wealthy husband John (Kiefer Sutherland).  Justine herself (Kirsten Dunst) has a highly successful career in advertising; she’s wonderful looking and has just married Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, charming young man who evidently adores her.  How could she be other than blissfully happy?   Kirsten Dunst is well equipped to play a dazzling bride but von Trier gives her very little opportunity to use her characteristic radiance:  Justine has suffered from depression and von Trier can’t wait to show her shadow side.  The presence of hundreds of wedding guests is a severe impediment throughout the first half of Melancholia:  you never accept this wedding because Justine’s psychological brittleness and social unpredictability are so immediately dominant.  It’s hard to credit she agreed to a huge public occasion like this one, and impossible to believe that, if she did, anyone believed she’d survive it – not Michael or Claire or John, not her bitterly perceptive mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) or even Gaby’s indulgent ex-husband (John Hurt).  The evening goes from bad to worse and the marriage is over before the night is.  When Michael departs, Justine asks, ‘What did you expect?’ and it’s a reasonable question.

    In the ‘Claire’ part, the isolation of the family – Claire, John, their young son Leo (the appealing Cameron Skurr) and Justine – is contrived and as unconvincing as the wedding throng.  They’re still in the same place but the rest of the world, the nearest part of which is ‘the village’, mentioned but never seen, might be a million miles away.  The family has a computer, which Claire, who has seemed sane and reasonably self-possessed in the first half, uses to Google information about a rogue planet that has emerged from behind the Sun and is about to pass by – or, Claire fears, collide with – Earth.  Otherwise, there’s no contact with the outside world.  We’re given no idea, except through the main characters, of what the media are saying about the planet, which is called Melancholia.  We know only that ‘scientists’ are assuring everyone that everything will be all right.

    The film audience knows from the outset of Melancholia that everything will be all wrong, thanks to an overture of key images from what’s to follow, culminating in a planetary collision.  (These images also include a shot of the eighteen-hole golf course of which John is so proud, with a flag fluttering over … the nineteenth hole!)  This intro is scored by Richard Wagner – on whom von Trier relies heavily throughout for emotional effect (in the light of his remarks at Cannes, the use of Wagner has an unfortunate resonance).  It turns out not that the scientists were wrong about Melancholia but that they were concealing the truth (which makes it all the more improbable they’d have given the encroaching planet such a discouraging name).  The idea of scientists being essentially and irredeemably sinister/too clever by half is an antique cliché – so too is the idea that someone mentally disturbed can ‘see’ and ‘know’ things others don’t, as Justine turns out to be able to do.  As she and her new husband arrive belatedly for their wedding party, Justine spots a red star in the night sky and asks what it is.  John, who seems at this stage to have a moderately informed amateur interest in astronomy (later on, he knows what the scientists know and commits suicide before the planet arrives to end his life), explains that it’s Antares, which, in the second half of the film, Melancholia has emerged to obscure.  Justine registers a flicker of apprehension.  It’s she who’s the clairvoyant; sister Claire, in spite of her name and increasing anxiety about Melancholia, is in the dark virtually throughout.  The implication seems to be that either you understand the human condition and are like Justine or you’re benighted about how terrible things are:  von Trier doesn’t admit the possibility of understanding lacrimae rerum but making the best of a bad job.

    He’s nothing if not thorough in his heavy-handed determinism.  Each guest at the nuptial celebrations is asked by the autocratic wedding planner (Udo Kier) to guess the number of beans in a jar – there’s a prize for the winner.  At the end of a disastrous evening, the wedding planner returns to the subject of the beans with the understandably harassed Claire.  He tells her how many there were and she replies, losing patience, ‘How incredible … how incredibly trivial’.  When the planner insists, ‘But that is the result – and the guests want to know the result’, you think, ‘No, they don’t – most of them wouldn’t give the bloody beans a second thought once they’d got into the party’.  The planner is proved right, though, because the beans matter to von Trier.  When the groom arrives at the reception, he makes a guess but doesn’t presume to make it on behalf of his wife.  He doesn’t need to:  in the fullness of time, Justine explains to Claire that she knew exactly how many beans there were.  It’s another example of her deeply penetrating because deeply depressed mind.

    Lars von Trier wants to show the hopeless Justine as serene in the face of imminent apocalypse.  According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film originated in:

    ‘… a therapy session [von Trier] attended during treatments for his depression. A therapist had told Trier [sic] that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under heavy pressure, because they already expect bad things to happen.’

    What an insight!  Maybe for his next film von Trier will show us a person preparing for suicide in a calmly organised way, as if this too was unheard of.  In Melancholia he lays on the depressive elements so thick that he sacrifices any dramatic possibilities in the story.  We don’t really get a sense of any shift in the balance between the sisters because, for much of the second half, when Claire starts falling to pieces, Justine stays as unhappily messed up as she was in the first half.  She sees death in everything:  Claire makes her sister meatloaf and Justine cheers up momentarily:  we assume this is comfort food because it’s something remembered from secure childhood days.   But one mouthful and Justine is complaining it tastes of ashes.  If Claire never gave any suggestion of fear of the planet until late in the day, it might have more impact as a symbol of the death coming for us all no matter how much we ignore it but she’s scared for too long, as if in a crackpot sibling rivalry.  Gloom hangs over the family home like a pall so there isn’t any kind of happy life for the impending disaster, or terror of it, to destroy.   I wasn’t sure at the end whether the little boy Leo was meant to be frightened or not – by this stage, he just seems long-suffering.  Lars von Trier’s self-indulgence means that he has to have the big finish (as well as the big opening, of course) although it struck me that Melancholia might have been more powerful and frightening if the planet hadn’t hit but there’d been an individual death in the family while life on Earth survived.   You know what you’re in for from the title:  ‘Behind the Sun’ would have been at least somewhat allusive but von Trier wants portentous metaphysics at every turn.

    Except for the abominable Udo Kier, Melancholia is well enough acted and the film, photographed by Manuel Alberto Claro, is often very beautiful – the lantern balloons floating into the night sky at the wedding party, the deadly but pacific blue planet itself (as someone says, it ‘looks friendly’). But the images are sometimes overdone:  in a library, Justine looks at a succession of art history books and leaves them open at paintings connoting different kinds of death.  They include ‘Hunters in the Snow’:  after seeing that, we don’t need falling leaves superimposed on the screen to make the point.  The skittering, often hand-held camera movements and disorienting editing rhythms create suspense – but the script creates none.  Like The Tree of Life, this film is impoverished by the writer-director’s conviction that the creation of wondrous moving pictures is sufficient to animate his big themes.  Von Trier seems not to realise that, for example, he skewers the world of advertising in which Justine (improbably) thrives in a pathetically obvious way, through the character of her boss (Stellan Skarsgård) and the dim young man (Brady Corbet) he gets to keep an eye on Justine through her wedding night.  The young man gets to have sex with her briefly, which is more than can be said for the hapless, well-mannered bridegroom.   The word groom reminds me I’ve not mentioned the horses in Melancholia but I can’t be bothered to go there.

    2 October 2011

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