Old Yorker

  • An American in Paris

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1951)

    It now seems a very odd collision of American popular art and a Hollywood idea of French art.  At the start – when their voiceovers introduce us to the expatriate Americans Jerry Mulligan and Adam Cook – the filmmakers seem at pains to reassure the audience that the pair are regular guys.  Although Jerry is a painter and Adam a would-be concert pianist, they’re wise-cracking, self-deprecating, not remotely arty.  The film’s climax, by contrast, is a ‘dream ballet’ – an element of American musicals which always feels like an essentially anxious attempt to underline the artistic credentials of the genre and which suppresses its dynamic glories.  Jerry is woken from his reverie by a car horn, looks down from the balcony of a building to the Paris street below and sees Lise Bouvier, the young French girl he loves and thought he’d lost, returning to him; he races down a long flight of steps as she runs up them.  The moment is elating and much more expressive than the whole of the seventeen minutes of ballet – based on visual compositions inspired by French art history – that have preceded it.   There’s a similar irony in Gene Kelly’s choreography and Vincente Minnelli’s staging of the musical numbers:  Jerry’s rival in love, the French theatre singer Henri Baurel, deplores ‘I Got Rhythm’ as crude and rowdy yet it’s Henri’s rousing rendition of ‘I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise’ – given a glitzy production with a very Hollywood-looking chorus of Parisian dancing girls – that’s the high point of the show.

    In spite of the pleasures of hearing the George and Ira Gershwin numbers and the awesome combination of other American musical talents involved – Minnelli, Kelly, Alan Jay Lerner (who did the script) – An American in Paris is mostly stodgy going.  The chronology of the piece is another awkward concoction:  the Gershwin music and songs are mostly from the 1920s but Lerner’s screenplay includes heavy-handed references to the recently-ended Second World War, presumably to make it seem ‘modern’.  Viewed from this distance in time, the most inalienably 1950s quality of the picture is its harsh colours – electric blues and oranges, fuchsias, crimsons all as shocking as the shocking pinks.  On the rare occasions when a character appears wearing clothes of a more subtly pleasing colour – or at a masked ball with everyone in black-and-white costumes – the impact of the contrast with the prevailing exaggerated brightness is terrific.

    I liked Gene Kelly’s first scene – a semi-danced routine of his waking up and preparing for a new Parisian day – but a little of his grinning exuberance and extravert athleticism goes quite a long way with me.  I’m afraid I began to look forward to Jerry’s occasional low points, when Kelly is more restful.  Leslie Caron was only twenty when she made this film, her first.  She’s more physically solid than I expected – her face can look quite heavy – but she’s strong and likeable, both as an actress and a dancer.  Oscar Levant is agreeably droll as Jerry’s pal Adam, although he isn’t remotely convincing as the classical musician he longs to be (Kelly, on the other hand, is good at miming being a painter).   It’s not the fault of Levant or Vincente Minnelli that the sequence in which Adam plays all the musical  parts in a fantasy performance of Gershwin’s concerto in F for piano and orchestra reminded me of the terrible TV comedy ‘classic’ of Charlie Drake doing the same with the 1812 Overture.  Georges Guétary sings very well as Henri Baurel, although the character is dreary.  Nina Foch gives a stiffly proficient, gesturally antique performance as a lonely American socialite who takes a shine to Jerry.  There are lots of busy but fairly jolly cartoons of Gallic locals in the minor roles.

    Academy Awards for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Cinematography, Costume Design, Musical Score – and, incredibly, Best Picture (the other nominations included A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire) and Screenplay-Story.

    28 December 2009

  • Rage

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sally Potter (2009)

    I’m glad it was after seeing the film that I read the interview with Sally Potter in the BFI programme note.  Rage is a highly unusual viewing experience – fourteen characters, variously involved in a New York fashion show, are filmed by the unseen maker of the film, Michelangelo, on his mobile phone over a period of seven days.  Until the closing moments, the entire picture comprises these interviews (and includes little camera movement); they are interspersed with the bits of text that Michelangelo composes to introduce each day’s footage.  (We know from what we hear that he is young – we might assume this is some kind of student project.)  The images (photographed by Steven Fierberg) are beautifully defined.  The design is excellent – the changing colour of the backgrounds behind the talking heads (and their upper bodies), the costumes (by Marina Draghici), the make-up.  (According to the credits, several of the actors had their own individual make-up artist.)  Overall, the style of performance is highly effective – it’s definitely theatrical but the cast are strong enough to distil and express the essence of the people they’re playing – even though a fair number of the characters are written according to type (the flamboyant, up-himself designer, the anxiously affable PR man, the drily excoriating critic et al).  But the inherent improbability of the set-up is an increasing problem and the film – which at 98 minutes is much too long – gets less and less interesting.   The fashion show is overwhelmed by a sequence of horrific offscreen events, on and around the catwalk.  From an early stage, we hear the sounds of protesters outside the building where the show is taking place and some of the dramatis personae are critical of the inhuman, exploitative ethos of the world of high fashion.  As they reflect on the grim happenings, several turn increasingly penitent and politically correct.  It’s evident from the BFI note that, in doing so, they become mouthpieces of the writer-director.

    From the point at which the first death occurs (on day two), some of Michelangelo’s interviewees start getting jumpy about his filming them.   Understandably so – although if  Potter didn’t introduce this element you might be more likely to suspend disbelief and accept continuation of the filming as a comment on the characters’ need to be taken notice of, or to confide in someone, or both.  Injecting a drop of realism into the situation, Potter draws attention to its unreality.  By the time it emerges that Michelangelo is posting the interviews online and the combined forces of the show’s publicity people and the detective called in to investigate the deaths of two models aren’t happy about that, it’s ludicrous that Michelangelo is being allowed to carry on.   There’s another fundamental problem with the script:  once the fatalities begin, it seems clear where Rage is headed.  Potter does nothing from this point on to surprise; nor do the horrors multiply in a way that might have turned the proceedings into black comedy.  Potter puts the lid on them until the necessary top-of-the-bill carnage on the seventh day.

    Watching Michelangelo’s composition of his introductory text is amusing (the title starts as ‘All the Rage’ and we hear his mind working in the pause before the first two words are deleted).  And Potter has given her cast plenty of witty lines, although quite a few are too obviously sarcastic to be satisfying.   Those who make a living in and on the periphery of the international fashion industry seem a rather easy target – so much so that Potter doesn’t need to elaborate on why people are protesting about the show.  The audience can supply plenty of reasons:  the distortion of beauty, the deification of image, the exploitation of cheap labour – all for the sake of profit.  But reason not the need:  Potter puts plenty of words in her characters’ mouths to explain where she’s coming from.  I don’t have a problem with her inveighing against the mores of the creatures of the world of high fashion.   I do think it’s a bit much when she says that ‘the issues could apply to people working in any high-pressure industry’ – without acknowledging that not many  high-pressure industries would be capable of supplying stock characters as easily entertaining as these.

    The satire is rarely thoughtful or imaginative but that makes you grateful for the rarities.  Early on in the film, Miss Edith Roth (is the name a nod to Edith Head and Ann Roth?), whose firm makes the clothes on display in the show and who’s lived all her life in this world, tartly reminds us that what’s now known as the ‘fashion industry’ used to be called the ‘garment trade’ (a more honest description in her view).  When things turn darker and we’re told that the celebrity designer Merlin, whose latest work is being launched at the show, is presenting ‘shrouds’, I took and liked this as a comment on his ability to turn anything to his self-promoting advantage (I may have misunderstood:  it may be meant metaphorically rather than literally).  But even though the politics of Rage are objectionably crude, Potter gets something much finer from her cast.  Not all the performances are equally successful but every one is intelligent and skilful.

    Simon Abkarian makes Merlin’s egotism enjoyably theatrical.   Patrick J Adams is a callow blue-eyed-blond-haired adman, whose ideas are as obvious as his career advancement during the turbulent week is rapid.  Bob Balaban gets demoted – the wages of relative sensitivity.  Riz Ahmed is both likeable and disturbing as a young pizza delivery man eager for an even better job and whose motor bike plays a key role in the story.  It was great seeing Adriana Barraza (marvellous in Babel) again:   her emotional transparency allows Barraza to rise above the condescension implicit in her role as a Latina seamstress.  Although the casting is a bit obvious, Steve Buscemi is as witty as ever as a photographer whose professional heartlessness doesn’t quite conceal his professional desperation.  It’s clear that the Swedish actor Jakob Cedergren has a lot more to him than the weak part of the edgy PR man allows him to show; Eddie Izzard’s role as a financier is likewise too thin for him to be able to do much with.  As Lettuce Leaf, a model, Lily Cole looks extraordinary (her face is being used to sell the film) and she acts well too.   In her first appearances, Lettuce Leaf, with her doll-like face and hair, seems artificially constructed – so it’s particularly effective when Cole (she has the quality of a sexualised version of one of those children you see on Victorian scraps) starts showing emotion – when she’s crying, with smudged mascara, she begins to suggest a human being trapped in a body which can only be used for its commercial possibilities.

    As Mona Carvell, the acerbic fashion journalist, Judi Dench is an absorbing camera subject although it’s a bit distracting that she sounds to be in two minds whether to bother trying an American accent:  the critic’s eventual access of humanistic grief is such a dreary idea that it needs a Judi Dench to redeem it (which she just about does).   As Minx, a transsexual model, Jude Law has one of the weaker roles – Potter loads the character with an explanation of the kind of personal backstory which belongs in a more conventional film. Law does well to be more convincing when he speaks in Minx’s real (American) voice than when he’s using her professionally faked Eastern European one – but the performance doesn’t quite work:  there are effective moments but you keep catching looks at the camera which you can see are the actor’s.   John Leguizamo has an underwritten role as the financier’s security man but David Oyelowo does very well as the detective, whose enthusiasm for Shakespeare (and propensity for quoting him) is one of the few surprises in Potter’s writing of the characters.  Last but best of all is Dianne Wiest as Miss Roth.  From the moment she appears, her squinched smiliness is accompanied by minute but unmissable intimations of terrible unease.   When Miss Roth tells us she really wanted to be a lawyer or an academic but couldn’t desert her garment trader parents, Sally Potter is laying the ground for her finally joining the protest against her own company.  But she doesn’t prepare us for how brilliantly Dianne Wiest conveys Miss Roth’s guilty delight at this act of rebellion.

    14 October 2009

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