Old Yorker

  • Chéri

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (2009)

    According to Wikipedia, this is the second cinema film of the Colette novel (or, more precisely, novel(la)s – Chéri and The Last of Chéri).  There have also been two TV adaptations and I dimly remember the 1973 BBC version.  Chéri is the love story of a couple for whom having sex is a way of life – a man in his mid-twenties and a woman old enough to be his mother (and who is a longstanding acquaintance of his actual mother). Chéri, as Frédéric Peloux is known, is youthful but dissipated; Léa de Lonval has loved professionally and largely dispassionately.   The affair between them is sparked by physical attraction; it becomes more complicated and difficult when they fall in love.  The picture begins with a scene-setting voiceover, which explains the status of the leading courtesans of fin de siècle and belle époque Paris, as the camera moves around framed photographs of some of the best known of them – Liane de Pougy et al.   It settles eventually on the face of Léa – the face, that is, of Michelle Pfeiffer.  The sepia photograph fools no one:  her look doesn’t fit with the examples of the real thing – it’s too modern.  But once she appears on the screen, Pfeiffer, in physical terms, carries all before her.

    She has a head start in this role:  we knew her as a glorious young actress but she’s been largely absent from the screen in recent years (except for the small part in Hairspray).  Back in a starring role, she’s still beautiful but undeniably older (although she doesn’t look her 51 years).  It’s not just that she’s marvellous to watch, shot by shot.  Pfeiffer has a strong presence:  she knows how to make an entrance and she wears Consolata Boyle’s gowns superbly (it must be very rewarding to design the costumes and see them brought to life like this).  When she stands against an Alma-Tadema balcony and sky in Biarritz, when she races upstairs in reaction to good news, when – in the film’s final shot – the frame freezes on her beautifully defeated face, Pfeiffer is all you could want and more.   Vocally, she’s less persuasive.  At the start, I found her relatively bland voice an interesting idea in itself.  You could believe that a courtesan as lovely and sensually alert as this wouldn’t need to rely on how she spoke as a means of seduction.   But, as the film goes on, a breathy hush settles over too many of Pfeiffer’s lines; except when she’s snappish or in emotional extremity, the rhythm of her readings is monotonous – and she rarely suggests a tension between what Léa says and what she’s actually feeling.

    This is the first time I’ve seen Kathy Bates playing a non-American (she’s Charlotte, Chéri’s mother) and the first time, apart from Titanic, I’ve seen her in period costume earlier than the 1950s.  It’s also the first time I’ve been disappointed by her.  She seems constrained – by the clothes and the dialogue. (It may be no coincidence that the only times she rings true are when she laughs and there are no words to contend with – although she made me laugh with the line, ‘I always thought he was one of the duller kings’.)  Bates is ‘doing a character’ here, effortfully and uncomfortably.  She doesn’t do enough, though, to suggest, for example, Charlotte’s schadenfreude that Léa, who has kept her figure in a way Charlotte hasn’t, still gets to suffer as a result of getting older.   The lack of spark between Bates and Pfeiffer is a real letdown.    We’re given to understand that Léa and Charlotte have met regularly for years without liking each other.  The situation seems to present easy opportunities for being smilingly sociable in a vibrantly insincere way but their exchanges are stiff and colourless.  There’s a risk with this story that Chéri will be vacuously beautiful – a reflection of what Léa sees in him and without much independent life.   This isn’t true of Rupert Friend’s pretty but prematurely debauched Chéri, who occasionally seems stunned by – yet trapped in – his selfish superficiality.  It’s an intelligent performance – if Chéri never becomes the main focus of interest, that’s probably intrinsic to the material rather than a reflection on Friend.   As Chéri’s pure young bride Edmée, Felicity Jones has a strong moment when incredulous laughter turns to convulsive weeping.

    None of the playing is bad but I was surprised that such an accomplished director of actors didn’t orchestrate it more confidently.  If memory serves, Stephen Frears handled the cast expertly in Dangerous Liaisons, his previous collaboration with Pfeiffer (and Christopher Hampton, who has written the screenplay for Chéri).  Perhaps in that film, the Americans were more comfortable in continental European roles because there weren’t any British actors in sizeable parts to confuse the issue and the barbed dialogue was more formally reassuring.  Hampton’s dialogue here, although it seems mostly proficient, is trickier – ‘period’ speech but clearly more casual than the stylised wit of Dangerous Liaisons.   Some of the cast sound careful and self-conscious speaking their lines (Rupert Friend handles the dialogue the most easily).    There are decent actors – like Nicola McAuliffe as a fortune teller, Anita Pallenberg and Harriet Walter as a couple of other sexual pillars of society – whose playing betrays the uncertainty of how to pitch a performance when you’ve only one or two short scenes in which to make an impression.  Frances Tomelty, with a little more screen time as Léa’s maid Rose, is more relaxed and convincing.  Frears himself provides the voiceover narration:  his delivery works well at first – fruity without being actorish – although the unprofessional phrasing makes it gradually less effective.

    All in all, Chéri is dramatically and emotionally underwhelming.  Much of the pleasure to be had is in the technical details of the belle époque – the costumes, the bowls of flowers, the bits of china that we see.  (And the music by Alexandre Desplat is skilful:  it sounds like pastiche to begin with but it turns into something gracefully incisive.)   The film is, in more ways than one, both good looking and lacking in animation – the cinematographer Darius Khondji lights the naked flesh on display in a way that suggests art of the period but not always living bodies.  At one point, Léa wistfully compares her aging arms with the handles of an antique vase and this made me think that Stephen Frears’s whole approach here was rather like that of a man entrusted with a valuable, breakable object.  There are times when it doesn’t pay to be so cautious:  Frears keeps control of his precious goods but the quality that made them precious to start with still somehow slips through his hands.

    17 May 2009

  • The Small World of Sammy Lee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Hughes (1963)

    In March 1958, the BBC screened a forty-minute play called Sammy.  The Radio Times listing described it as follows:

    ‘A television play for one character
    Written and produced by KEN HUGHES
    Designer  Norman James
    Alone in his room, Sammy has three hours in which to raise the £200 that will save him from disaster. As the minutes pass he grows more desperate in his race against time, and in his attempt to forestall that fateful knock on the door …’

    A few years later, Ken Hughes expanded this piece for cinema.  The Small World of Sammy Lee runs 107 minutes; the timeframe for Sammy to repay his gambling debts became five hours; the amount of the debt was increased, to take account of either inflation or the big screen, to £300.  Anthony Newley again played the title role – now supported by Robert Stephens and a cast of character actors already well known, or who would become well known, especially on television:  the likes of Lynda Baron, Wilfrid Brambell, Alfred Burke, Julia Foster, Miriam Karlin, Roy Kinnear, Warren Mitchell, Derek Nimmo, Cyril Shaps and (an uncredited) Rita Webb.

    The Small World of Sammy Lee has recently been shown by BFI as part of its ‘London on Film’ season.  The screening was preceded by Nice Time, the 1957 documentary short by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, which describes a night in Piccadilly Circus from the early evening into the small hours.  It’s a mark of how effectively Ken Hughes puts London on screen that the opening titles prologue to Sammy Lee – the camera moves through Soho as the place is waking up to the morning after the night before – followed the Goretta-Tanner film without coming off badly.  From the start, the texture of Hughes’s locale is dynamic – this is true of the cafe, bar and club interiors as well as the streets outside.  The film never looks like a piece that’s been adapted mechanically from a different medium.  It does, however, sometimes look like a piece that began life in a shorter form and has been stretched a little thin:  midway through, the sequences of Sammy running through streets in his quest for cash start to feel like padding.

    Off-course betting was legalised in Britain in 1961 (we see a ‘licensed betting shop’ sign in one of the streets) but the bookmaker to whom Sammy owes money has methods of debt collection that are far from legitimate.  Sammy knows that another client, who owes less than he does, needed twenty stitches in his head after a visit from the ‘razor men’ sent by the bookie (who is never seen).  Sammy has a job, as compere at the Peep Show Club, a Soho strip joint, but it doesn’t pay well (£15 a week); in economic terms, it’s a sideline to his main occupations of spiv and gambler.   His real surname is Leeman; his hard-working older brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) runs a Jewish deli in the East End.   Sammy tries to borrow from Lou the £300 he needs but Lou’s wife Milly (Miriam Karlin) returns to the shop just at the wrong moment and puts the kibosh on that.  Instead, a frenetic series of phone calls, appeals to other acquaintances and, for the last £50, the sale of a piece of furniture of sentimental value to Sammy, bring up the required total.   Sammy’s dresser at the club, Harry (Wilfrid Brambell), rushes round collecting the money that’s due to be handed over to the bookie’s men (Kenneth J Warren and Clive Colin Bowler) by 7pm.  Throughout the afternoon, Sammy returns to the Peep Show to do his MC routine – the strip show runs on an hourly cycle – and have a barney with the club’s owner Gerry Sullivan (Robert Stephens).   Sullivan has taken on a new artiste that day – Patsy (Julia Foster), just arrived in London from Bradford.   She’s a girl Sammy had a one-night stand with a few months ago, while he was out of town.  He told her where he worked and to look him up any time she was in London, and that’s what she’s done.

    A tension soon develops in The World of Sammy Lee between the formulaic surface and something harsher underneath.  Sammy is on the brink of winning at poker then of backing a long-priced winner at Newmarket.  Both times, his hopes are dashed at the last moment – as hopes of gambling success usually are dashed on screen.   (The fact that they’re usually dashed in real life too is beside the point:  the sequences are done here in a way to make you feel Ken Hughes knows he’s going through the motions.)  It’s the same, much later on, when loyal, clueless Harry hands over the money to settle the debt – only for Sammy to find that half of it’s in the form of a cheque and even though he ordered Harry to accept cash only at his various ports of call.  Before receiving this body blow, Sammy has told Patsy, after sleeping with her again, there’s no future for them together.  He’s given her money to get a coach back to Bradford that evening.  When he discovers he can’t settle the debt, Sammy makes a run for it:  he jumps in a cab to join Patsy at Victoria coach station, the bookie’s heavies pursuing him in their car.  Sammy is about to leave with Patsy when he’s told he can’t buy a ticket on the coach and must get one at the ticket office before boarding.  The so-near-and-yet-so-far moment is, at least if you want Sammy and Patsy to end up together, emotionally effective but it too is par for the course in a story of this kind.

    The eventual sale of the chair in Sammy’s bedsit, the chair in which he says his mother died, comes as no surprise either.   As soon as Sammy, on the phone to a wholesale dealer who asks what price the chair, tells him it’s not for sale, you know that it will be sold.  But this is rather different from the clichés above – selling the chair comes to seem inevitable rather than predictable, and we can see how the sale makes Sammy’s already low opinion of himself go lower still.   Ken Hughes’s screenplay and direction are certainly erratic but details like the mother’s chair make it hard to tell whether he’s merely depending on overused plot twists in order to flesh out his short TV play or if he’s playing off conventions – and audience expectations – to try and create something more penetrating.   That he succeeds in doing that is thanks largely to Anthony Newley; perhaps Hughes, having worked with Newley on the television Sammy, realised his lead actor had the potential to go deeper with the character.

    Newley is an instinctive performer, who also exudes an anxiety to be noticed.  He’s well cast as a line-shooter – a man considered shiftless by his brother and sister-in-law but who works hard at keeping up his bravado.  Ken Hughes has written a good spiel for Sammy to deliver, with minor variations, at the start of each performance at the strip club:  ‘Welcome to the Peep Show Club – and you’re welcome to it …’ is particularly effective because it’s so lame.  (It’s impossible to deliver the line in a way that makes the second ‘welcome’ count the way it should.)  Newley is very good at conveying Sammy’s weary contempt for his material, his job and, although he looks to be promiscuous, most of the women in his world.  (Sammy seems to despise the strippers and clearly sees it as a point of honour that he shouldn’t accept a contribution towards payment of his debts from his neighbour Joan (Toni Palmer), because she’s a tart.)  By the time he does the last Peep Show intro, Sammy has been fired.  His nothing-left-to-lose outburst at the punters in the club may be another dramatic cliché but Newley vindicates it and his face at the coach station, when Sammy goes back to buy his ticket and is confronted by the sight of the debt-collectors, is extraordinary.   Sammy has run out of places to run to; Anthony Newley seems to have stopped performing too.  The coalescence of exposed character and unmasked actor is a compelling moment.  Newley dominates the film but, in fact, there’s penetration and truthfulness from much of the supporting cast too – not just from good people like Julia Foster but also from relatively limited, over-insistent players like Wilfrid Brambell and Miriam Karlin.

    The film’s title is curious.  It may have been intended as an echo of the singular television comedy The Strange World of Gurney Slade, in which Newley starred in 1960.  The ‘small’ immediately implies condescension towards Sammy Lee but turns out to mean more:  the narrowness of the Soho streets that Ken Hughes emphasises in the opening titles sequence stays in your mind and starts to merge with Sammy’s feelings of being increasingly hemmed in.   Hughes also stresses a row of dustbins in the prologue; this too has an editorial tinge but resonates when the dustbins reappear in the final sequence, in which Sammy is beaten up by the bookie’s men.  The grimness of this finale makes it uncomfortable to watch but it’s right because Anthony Newley has consistently suggested the underside of Sammy’s quick wit and quasi-comic resourcefulness, as he does his urgent deals.  The World of Sammy Lee is an odd film but I really liked it.  The vital cinematography is by Wolfgang Suschitzky and the score, tenaciously supportive of the story’s shifting moods, by Kenny Graham.

    29 July 2015

     

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