Old Yorker

  • Maestro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bradley Cooper (2023)

    First, let’s get the schnozz out of the way – which Bradley Cooper proves able to do.  It’s common knowledge that he wears a prosthetic nose to play Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.  Cooper’s own nose is not small.  Bernstein’s was considerably larger but he wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac.  Cooper’s use of the prosthetic is, as well as unnecessary, regrettable:  it gives ammunition to the ‘identity-based’ casting lobby – in this case, the only-Jewish-actors-should-play-Jewish-characters school of thought.  When you watch the two-minute trailer for the film it’s hard to take your eyes off the enlarged hooter.  When you see the whole thing (129 minutes), it’s a different matter.  This isn’t just because you get used to the way Cooper looks.  His portrait of Bernstein is so compelling in other ways that his face soon fits entirely.  By getting inside his character’s head, Cooper somehow absorbs his false nose.

    It’s not unusual for a biopic nowadays to focus on a short part of the protagonist’s life, seemingly in the belief that this, in combination with a few flashbacks, is enough to disclose all the essential truths of their personality.  (A few recent examples:  Judy (2019), Mank (2020), Tove (2020), Spencer (2021).)  Maestro’s screenplay, by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, takes a somewhat different approach.  Cooper portrays Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) in his twenties through to his sixties, with a fair amount of screen time given to each decade.  The film starts and ends with the elderly Bernstein, at his piano, being interviewed by a television crew.  Between these bookends, the narrative is more or less linear.  How much Cooper assumes prior knowledge of his subject’s biography – as composer, conductor, educator and more – is hard to tell but information overload clearly isn’t among his priorities:  there are no on-screen signposts of dates and places, for example.  The action is scored to Bernstein’s own music but according to its tonal relevance to a sequence rather than in a name-that-tune way.  When Bernstein and his wife appear on Ed Murrow’s Person to Person programme on CBS, there’s mention of the ongoing gestation of West Side Story but this is subsidiary to our interest in what the Bernsteins’ on-camera words and attitudes reveal or conceal about their lives off-camera.  It’s significant that, in the prologue, the elder statesman Bernstein expresses to his interviewer sadness at the recent loss of his wife because Maestro is centrally a portrait of a marriage.

    The likes of Aaron Copeland, Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Jerome Robbins come and go quickly in the film.  These (and other) celebrities of mid-twentieth-century American culture, although their names register, feature chiefly as context to the main relationship.  Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a theatre and television actress born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile, meet at a party (in 1946) and take an instant shine to each other.  By this point in Maestro, we’ve already seen Leonard with a male lover and obviously attracted to other men; while he’s decidedly heterosocial, we haven’t seen him in bed with a woman.  When he and Felicia first sleep together it doesn’t go quite according to plan but neither seems to mind.  They marry and have soon had three children.  Without dwelling on the details of the couple’s sex life together, Maestro makes clear – delightfully clear – that they adore each other’s company and complementary charisma:  his whirling-dervish energy, physical and verbal; her ladylike vivacity.  They chatter incessantly and laugh a lot.  (They also enjoy their cigarettes:  censor certificates for this film will have to warn of not just smoking but chain-smoking scenes.)  When they decide to marry – to ‘give it a whirl’ – Felicia’s aware of her husband-to-be’s bisexuality.  She knows, or thinks she knows, what she’s in for.

    Felicia’s disquiet is conveyed in momentary facial responses – expertly controlled and concealed from others – to Leonard’s flirty interactions with his own sex.  She has few words even after catching him in a clinch with a young male party guest at one of the famous gatherings at the Bernsteins’ upper-West Side apartment in New York.  But those few words – ‘Fix your hair – you’re getting sloppy’ are incisive and the tone in which they’re spoken conveys a sense of how long Felicia has been making allowances:  it’s as if she’s too tired of living with the issue to say more.  That changes in a much lengthier exchange that also takes place in the New York apartment, on Thanksgiving Day.  The rest of the family is celebrating in an adjoining room when Felicia lets rip at Leonard.  At the end of the scene, a larger-than-life Snoopy balloon, part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, floats by the window – a ludicrous counterpoint to the seismic discord that has played out on the other side of the glass.

    As an actor in other directors’ films, Bradley Cooper has never struck me as egocentric.  His first effort behind the camera made me think differently:  I liked A Star is Born (2018) but Cooper seemed to showcase himself beyond even the requirements of the melodramatic plot.  Maestro isn’t a modest undertaking either.  Particularly in its early stages, the film is determined to be artily attention-grabbing.  A prime example is Cooper’s account of the events that propelled Leonard Bernstein to fame in November 1943.  When Bruno Walter, guest conductor at the New York Philharmonic, went down with flu, twenty-five-year-old Bernstein, only recently appointed the orchestra’s assistant conductor, took the baton for a Carnegie Hall performance – at a few hours’ notice, without any rehearsal and to tremendous, headlines-making acclaim.  In Maestro, a ringing telephone rouses Bernstein from the bed he’s sharing; he receives the message about Walter, excitedly beats a hand tattoo on his still slumbering lover’s backside, and embarks on a greased-lightning, visually bravura journey from the sack to the podium.  The fast cutting of this is right enough, suggesting the disorienting, crazy speed of the young man’s meteoric rise.  The succession of spectacular camera angles is (much) too much.  In a sequence where he and Felicia watch a rehearsal for Bernstein’s ballet Fancy Free (the source of On the Town), both are suddenly transported from the auditorium into the performance – Leonard now one of the three sailor-suited male dancers, Felicia confronted by the sensual ecstasy he’s experiencing.  This certainly evokes the dream ballets that became all the rage in high-end Hollywood musicals of the early post-war era but also the pretentiousness of those fantasy interludes.

    There’s a big difference between A Star is Born and Maestro, though, in Cooper’s treatment of his picture’s female star.  To be fair, he had reason to foreground himself in the earlier movie:  Lady Gaga had no experience as a lead actress; Cooper was directing his first film but knew his job as a lead actor.  It was only because Lady Gaga gave a terrific performance – thanks in part to his skilful, encouraging direction – that the end product left an impression of Cooper’s promoting himself almost at her expense.  This time around, he has no doubt about his co-star’s calibre.  Just as well, because Carey Mulligan’s work in Maestro proves, beyond question, that she’s a world-class actress.  There’s self-interest, of course, in a director’s exploiting a superlative performance for all it’s worth; even so, Cooper shows generosity to Mulligan, giving her several solo opportunities to stun.  After Felicia and Leonard have separated, she lunches with his sister, Shirley (Sarah Silverstein) – the closest thing Felicia has to a confidante.  She describes her eager anticipation of going on a date with a new man, who soon made clear he was hoping Felicia could effect an introduction to a potential boyfriend.  Cooper keeps the camera on Mulligan’s face throughout this monologue:  the contrast between Felicia’s game, smiling good humour (‘It seems I’m attracted to a certain type!’) and desolate eyes is piercing – especially because of the animation in those eyes in numerous previous scenes.  A more prolonged highlight, also strengthened by Mulligan’s earlier joie de vivre, comes in the sequences of Felicia’s final illness and death.  These might be thought a gift to any actor worth their salt but I’ve rarely seen such painfully credible physical detail as when Felicia, trying still to be socially gracious, keeps coughing stuff up and disposing of it, as discreetly as she can, in neatly folded pieces of toilet tissue.

    Other outstanding passages in Maestro are two-handers for its stars.  The Thanksgiving Day domestic takes its place among the all-time-great marital rows on screen.  The showdown is startling because it’s the normally composed Felicia who vents her fury and her volatile husband who’s determined to stay quietly calm and reasonable.  The complex momentum that results makes the exchange thrilling as well as gruelling to watch.  Felicia wins the argument; eventually, Leonard is more than quiet – he has literally no answer to her justified accusations.  I know plenty of actors before Bradley Cooper have directed themselves but scenes like this made me wonder as never before at the miracle of doing it well.  The descriptions of Felicia’s cancer diagnosis and decline, when she and Leonard are back together, are differently impressive.  When a doctor delivers the grim news and sets out what might happen next, it’s Leonard who assents instantly to the radical surgery proposed – before the patient has time to collect herself to make her own reply.  His intervention strikes a fine balance:  he wants to take care of things for his wife, can’t help expressing his congenital single-mindedness to do what he wants.  Shortly before her death, the couple and their three children, now in their twenties (Maya Hawke, Sam Nivola and Alexa Swinton), recall happy memories by putting on the record player a family favourite – Shirley Ellis’s ‘The Clapping Song’.  I’ve a pretty strong resistance to group hugs, even as an observer, but the one that concludes this sequence is very effective.  It’s the paterfamilias, needless to say, who orchestrates it.

    Cooper doesn’t stint on knockout solos for himself either.  It helps that Leonard Bernstein was a notoriously, fearlessly theatrical conductor but Cooper’s giving his all fuses with that quality to extraordinary effect in the extended coverage of a performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral (where the scene was actually shot).  This occurs at a point in the narrative when, as far as the viewer knows, the Bernsteins are no longer a couple.  The camera moves between the conductor and others in the cathedral – orchestra, choir, soloists, audience and, just before the music ends, one other spectator:  Felicia, in a rear-view shot.  As the applause begins, Bernstein runs straight over to his wife and hugs her tight.  He’s drenched in sweat and exhilarated; the exhilaration is, for Felicia, contagious.  The moment brilliantly encapsulates how joyously irresistible Leonard can be.  It also makes emotional sense of the Bernsteins’ reconciliation, which is taken as read in scenes that follow, even though it hasn’t been otherwise explained.

    That is pretty typical of how Maestro works, and a big reason why it works so well.  There’s a great deal of smart, often overlapping dialogue – in a story dominated by smart, fast-talking people – but Cooper and Josh Singer mostly resist wordy explanations of Leonard Bernstein’s creative qualities and choices:  instead, Cooper communicates the force of Bernstein’s personality and his virtual addiction to music through his incarnation of the man and the restless rhythm of his film.  It makes sense, too, to blur the line between Bernstein’s genius and his egotism and there’s an intelligently nuanced attitude towards his sexuality.  The film makes plain that what’s natural to Leonard is painful to his wife – not least because Felicia is forced to recognise that she’s more anxious than he is to keep it secret.  At the same time, Cooper doesn’t overstress the difficulty of being gay and in the public eye in the middle of last century; he implies that it was, if anything, relatively less difficult for a powerful figure moving in artistic circles.

    In the Maestro trailer, Carey Mulligan’s name appears before Bradley Cooper’s.  Does giving Felicia pride of place detract from the film as the Leonard Bernstein story?  I don’t think so, although it definitely makes for an unexpected balance of power between the two principals.  Cooper explores and illuminates Bernstein by showing the effects of who he was on the person closest to him.  The message may be in the title:  it’s almost refreshing that this film isn’t ‘Bernstein’ and apt that it’s Maestro.  As Shirley Bernstein reminds Felicia, ‘There’s a price for being in my brother’s orbit – you know that’.  Felicia spectating in Ely Cathedral is the culmination of a series of images of her as onlooker – in the wings of a theatre stage or at a party.  She has to deal with satellite status in her husband’s sex life and in relation to his star power.  The Thanksgiving showdown derives a lot of its force from the convergence of those two elements:  Felicia excoriates Leonard for the combination of his egocentric demands and what she insists is his underlying self-loathing:  ‘Your truth makes you brave and strong and saps the rest of us of any kind of bravery or strength.  Because it’s so draining, Lenny, it’s so fucking draining to love and accept someone who doesn’t love and accept themselves’[1].

    The film’s last shot is of Felicia’s face – of Leonard remembering Felicia’s face.  Then the closing credits begin and footage of the actual Bernstein arrives on screen.  For once, this isn’t a letdown – for two reasons.  The first is obvious:  more than thirty years after his death, Bernstein remains a well-known face; many in the audience will have that face in mind even as they watch Bradley Cooper’s version of him; the result of the real thing finally usurping the actor is therefore less jarring than usual.  The second reason is more subtle.  Seeing Bernstein on library film – seeing someone not the same as the man on screen throughout the preceding two hours – seems somehow to acknowledge that a dramatisation of his life can only partly get to grips with him.  That’s no doubt true of biopics generally.  In this case, though, it chimes interestingly with the film’s style – the strong impression it gives of showing us ‘scenes from the life of …’ – as well as with the quasi-double life that Bernstein led.

    Like another of 2023’s big pictures, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Maestro alternates between black-and-white and colour cinematography.  As noted above, Cooper’s film is sometimes visually bombastic but this alternation isn’t (unlike Oppenheimer‘s) pretentiously confusing.  The black-and-white sequences are for the 1940s and 1950s, the colour sequences for the 1960s onwards.  This corresponds to collective memory of how things appeared on screen at those times.  It also links monochrome to youth, even innocence, and colour to ageing, and corruption.  In both modes, Matthew Libatique’s lighting and the work of the large make-up team are exceptional.  Bradley Cooper, who’s forty-eight, ages from mid-twenties to sixty plus and Carey Mulligan, who’s thirty-eight, from mid-twenties to mid-fifties.  They both always look the right age.  The make-up of the older Bernstein is more remarkable for the texture and mottling of his skin than for his prosthetic nose.

    Bradley Cooper didn’t attend this British premiere screening of Maestro at the London Film Festival – probably why Festival director Kristy Matheson saw fit to refer to the film’s producer, director, co-writer and star as simply ‘Cooper’ throughout her introduction.  (There seemed no reason other than ignorance for her persistent mispronunciation of the name of the film’s subject:  the VIP guests she welcomed to the stage of the Royal Festival Hall included Leonard Bernstein’s daughters, one of whom actually said her father’s name aloud, yet Matheson kept calling him ‘Burn-steen’ rather than ‘Burn-styne’.)  Just twenty-four hours on from her hyperbolic praise of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Matheson struck a different note for Maestro.  I got the feeling she wasn’t very keen on either of the leading men, Bradley or Leonard.  Judging from some of the film’s early reviews, it seems Kristy Matheson isn’t alone in this view, certainly about Bradley:  several critics have deplored his grandiosity.  Maestro isn’t Citizen Kane but some of the animus towards Cooper may well be, like the hostility shown Orson Welles in 1941, an expression of irritation with multi-talentedness.  Except for sounding a bit too adenoidal as the older Bernstein, Cooper’s acting is just about impeccable.  It’s true that his film-making radiates a persistent sense of dynamic showing off but this is so redolent of similar qualities in Leonard Bernstein – and the best parts of Maestro are so good – that the result is exciting cinema.

    9 October 2023

    [1] Afternote:  Watching Maestro a second time, with subtitles (on Netflix), was a mixed blessing.  It was good to pick up on a few lines I’d missed in the cinema.  A couple of times, though, I rather regretted hearing what was said.  For example, at the end of the Mahler in Ely Cathedral, as the Bernsteins embrace, he asks why she came and she replies, ‘There’s no hate in your heart’ – which was just what she accused him of  in her Thanksgiving tirade:  ‘Hate in your heart, and anger – for so many things, it’s hard to count – that’s what drives you. … You aren’t up on that podium allowing us all to experience the music the way it was intended.  You are throwing it in our faces’.   Of course, Felicia is caught up in the euphoria of the moment in the Cathedral; even so, the explicit renunciation of her earlier words rings false.

     

  • All of Us Strangers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Haigh (2023)

    Kristy Matheson, BFI’s new festivals director, introduced this European premiere of All of Us Strangers.  She promised that the protagonists of writer-director Andrew Haigh’s latest were ‘the sexiest couple’ we would see at this year’s London Film Festival – cue whooping and applause from the Royal Festival Hall audience.  This member of it couldn’t help thinking Matheson wouldn’t have said this if the lovers in question had been a woman and a man, or two women; I wondered what made the remark less prurient when applied to a gay male pairing.  Matheson also suggested that All of Us Strangers was one of the best films we would see not just this year but in our lifetime.  Follow that …  Haigh’s drama couldn’t although parts of it are very good indeed.

    Forty-something Adam (Andrew Scott) sprawls on the sofa in his flat, eating biscuits and watching television – doing both automatically.  Adam lives alone, on one of the topmost floors of a London high-rise.  He opens the door one night to a younger man he recognises as another resident of the building:  this is Harry (Paul Mescal), who’s carrying a bottle of Japanese whisky and wonders if Adam fancies a drink.  When the offer is declined, Harry asks if there’s anything else Adam might like him to come in for.  After some hesitation, the answer is still no and the door is closed.  Adam is writing a screenplay or, at any rate, beginning one – with ‘Ext: suburban house – 1987’.  Cut to him on a train journey.  Arrived at his destination, he walks down a suburban street and stops by a house, which he compares with the house in a photograph he has with him.  He wanders out into fields and sees in the middle distance another man, who seems to encourage Adam to follow him, which Adam does – back onto a street, towards a convenience store.  The man (Jamie Bell) appears to recognise Adam and suggests they head for a house where a woman (Claire Foy) opens the door and welcomes Adam in.  It’s soon clear from the conversation that Adam is her and the man’s son.  Yet he’s older than them.

    Kristy Matheson eventually got round to welcoming to the RFH stage Andrew Haigh and Sarah Harvey, one of the film’s producers.  If Harvey hadn’t explained the source material for Haigh’s screenplay I would have guessed it was a stage play but I’d have been wrong.  All of Us Strangers has a small cast – it’s virtually a four-hander.  The ease with which Adam moves between the present and a singular hybrid of present and past also suggests theatrical origins – so does the sequencing of scenes involving him and his parents.  After their first reunion, Adam returns to his childhood home (in Sanderstead, South Croydon) to talk first with just his mother, then with just his father – allowing all three characters to say their piece with minimal opposition, as they might on stage.  In fact, though, the screenplay is based on a novel, Strangers by Taichi Yamada, first published in 1987 and which Sarah Harvey described as ‘a Japanese ghost story’.  (All of Us Strangers is the second cinema adaptation of the novel, following Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Discarnates (1988).)  Adam and his parents resume as a screen trio for the later parts of one half of Haigh’s story.  In the other half, back in London, Adam lets Harry into his flat and his life, and a sexual relationship develops between them.

    Adam’s family home is unchanged from 1987; Mum and Dad (who are otherwise unnamed) look and dress as they might have done then.  We learn that this was the year they died, in a car crash returning from a Christmas party, when their only child wasn’t quite twelve.  (Adam then went to live with his maternal grandmother.)  Although they know they died and realise Adam is thirty-odd years older than when they last saw him, his parents aren’t otherwise au fait with what’s happened to him or the world since they left it – that, for example, their son is a scriptwriter and gay.  These scenes work remarkably well.  The dialogue is often incisive, sometimes funny, occasionally both at the same time.  When Adam tells his mother about his sexuality, her first question is ‘Since when?’ – a reasonable question from someone whose son was only eleven when she last talked with him.  Mum is astonished to learn that a male couple can now get married and have children together:  ‘Isn’t that having your cake and eating it?’

    This interaction and others seem to happen in a kind of suspended present but Adam also encounters his parents in particularly memorable childhood contexts.  Andrew Haigh does wonders with both types of sequence, as scenes involving the decoration of the family Christmas tree illustrate especially well.  Annual ritual dictated that Dad saw to the tree single-handed except that Adam was allowed to put the fairy on the top.  As he and his father recall this, they both laugh at its retrospective significance but it’s not long before Dad is tearfully contrite that he wasn’t more sensitive to his young son’s developing nature.  In a later sequence, when Dad decorates the tree, the watching figure of Adam, though still his adult self, is shot so as to suggest the small boy’s point of view, gazing up at his father.  A potentially very tricky episode in which Adam – still Andrew Scott but wearing kid’s nightwear – gets into his parents’ bed, between the two of them, is brought off with amazing skill.  Mum recalls that Adam often slept with her and Dad:  ‘You were always scared of something or other – murderers breaking in, rabies, nuclear war …’  She pauses before asking, ‘Do people still get rabies?’  Haigh is able to combine, without any apparent conflict between them, a credible, amusing verbal detail like that with the startling disruption of the scene, as Dad is suddenly replaced in the bed by Harry.

    The London sex scenes aren’t so interesting.  Jamie D Ramsay’s lighting stresses their importance yet the film narrows in these sequences.  There’s plenty more good dialogue for Adam and Harry on the margins of their love-making though it’s surprising, given the twenty-year age gap between the actors concerned, that Haigh doesn’t have them talk much about differences between growing up gay in the late eighties/early nineties and two decades later.  (This feels less surprising by the end of All of Us Strangers.)  Of course it’s clear that Harry is sexually bold compared with fearfully inhibited Adam but so was Joe Orton vis-à-vis Kenneth Halliwell:  you get a sharper sense of the particular experience of Adam’s generation through his mother’s reactions.  When he tells her he’s homosexual, Mum is immediately uncomfortable but disappointed rather than disparaging – she’s also alarmed, because of AIDS.  A sequence where Adam and Harry do hallucinogenic drugs at a dance club had, for this viewer, rather confusing consequences:  when Adam appears to have a fantasy wrapped in a nightmare inside a bad trip, he becomes an unreliable narrator at a different level.  The most potent bit in the Adam-Harry story comes once they’re in an apparently settled relationship and Adam wants Harry to meet his parents.  After taking the usual train journey, they arrive at the house but Mum and Dad don’t answer the door even though Harry, if not Adam, can glimpse them inside.

    They could see Harry, too, as we learn at Adam’s last session with his parents.  This takes place in an eatery at Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre – for Adam in the mid-1980s the next best thing to Disneyland.  (This sequence features one of the only two other credited cast members – Ami Tredrea as a waitress.  John Carter Grout makes a couple of brief appearances as the boy Adam – for example, when the older Adam stands outside the family home, looks up to what used to be his bedroom window and sees his younger self there.)  In Whitgift, Mum and Dad suggest that Adam stop seeing them, otherwise he’ll never move on.  He fills up childishly at first before accepting this.  This scene of farewell – something denied to Adam and his parents in 1987 – is understated; what follows isn’t.  Adam returns to the tower block in London to discover Harry dead in his own flat – and dead for some time, judging from the smell that hits Adam when he enters the place.  A few screen minutes later, Harry is talking again, telling Adam that he can’t bear to be remembered as a stinking corpse with only an empty bottle for company.

    Neither Harry’s corpse nor this post-mortem confrontation is a bolt from the blue.  Even allowing that the high-rise is newly built, it’s hard to accept as reality that Adam and Harry are apparently the only two people living in it:  we’re bound to wonder if the vast emptiness around Adam chiefly expresses his sense of isolation.  We may also have noticed that details in Adam’s scenes with his parents are echoed in the immediately following scenes between him and Harry.  When he leaves his parents after their first meeting, they ask him to come and see them again; after he and Harry have first been intimate, there’s a similar conversation about a repeat visit to Adam’s flat.  Adam arrives at Sanderstead in heavy rain; Mum insists he change into dry clothes of Dad’s though Adam’s embarrassed to undress in front of her.  He gets drenched on the way back to his London home, too; Harry runs Adam a hot bath and jokily asks if he should close his eyes as Adam prepares to get in it.  When he first sees a photograph of Dad, Harry pronounces him ‘handsome’ – the same adjective that Dad eventually uses to describe Harry.  As well as taking Dad’s place in the parental bed, Harry sounds a bit like Adam’s description of the kindly policeman who arrived at the house on the night of Mum and Dad’s fatal car crash.  Although Haigh’s screenplay makes few explicit references to the one that Adam’s writing, we never forget about it:  when Harry dies and, like Adam’s parents, persists beyond death, we realise that – as a piece of fiction is sometimes finally revealed to be all-just-a-dream – All of Us Strangers may be all-just-a-script.  Except that just-a-script doesn’t quite do justice to Andrew Haigh’s writing achievement.

    He also directs the actors impeccably.  All of Us Strangers gives Andrew Scott his first starring role in cinema since the feeble Steel Country (2018)[1] and he makes the most of it.  He inhabits the character of Adam completely and convincingly; since Adam is such a lonely, melancholy figure (and so much of what he has to do is reactive), it’s a welcome bonus that Haigh has supplied Scott with more than a few opportunities to remind us of his wit.  Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are excellent:  they clearly, thoroughly understand what Haigh has in mind; the suppleness and invention of Foy’s line readings are a revelation.  Words between Adam and Mum at the start of the bed sequence almost summarise what makes much of All of Us Strangers successful.  Adam asks his mother if what he’s experiencing is real; she responds by asking him if it feels real; when he says it does, she suggests he has answered his own question.  Watching the film is rather similar:  the impossible scenes between Adam and his parents are unarguably true.  I’m less sure about Adam and Harry, though.  You can’t say Paul Mescal isn’t effective but, despite his strong presence and sensitivity, this is the least satisfying performance I’ve seen from him.  Whether that’s because he’s playing an idea rather than an authentic character, is hard to say.  The exchanges between Adam’s adult self and his parents are steeped in regret – a sense of missed opportunities – on both sides.  Adam’s renewing contact with Harry beyond the latter’s death may also be fuelled by feelings of what-might-have-been but they don’t mean as much.  Did the pair have any actual relationship at all – at least beyond the point at which timid Adam declined to let Harry and his whisky cross the threshold?

    Like the film’s cinematography (the London part anyway), Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s electronic score tends to the portentous but Haigh uses it discreetly and 1980s pop songs powerfully – Fine Young Cannibals’ ‘Johnny Come Home’, the Housemartins’ ‘Build’, Pet Shop Boys’ cover of  ‘Always on My Mind’.  (For me, the potency of ‘Always on My Mind’ is twofold here:  it’s poignant that Mum and Dad, who didn’t get to see out 1987, sing along to the Christmas number one of that year; it’s resonant because Christmas 1987 happened to be important in my life, too, and ‘Always on My Mind’ was a memorable part of it.)  The most important number on the soundtrack, though it’s another terrific one, is more problematic.  Frankie Goes To Hollywood are performing ‘The Power of Love’ on the television screen that Adam’s watching at the start of the film; this is also the theme song for Haigh’s visually extravagant epilogue.  Adam lies on his bed with Harry, embraces him and quotes a bit of the lyric (‘I’ll protect you from the hooded claw …’) as an intro to what Paul Flynn in the London Evening Standard has neatly termed ‘a wildly sentimental, volte face closing frame, which suggests that if we only hold each other closer we can all be stars in the night sky’.  Despite this, and although Adam’s scenes with his parents are touching, there’s nothing in All of Us Strangers, intriguing and imaginative as it is, that has the emotional wallop of Tom Courtenay’s great speech, and Charlotte Rampling’s wonderful reaction to it, at the anniversary dinner in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015)[2].   The calculated chilly bleakness of Adam’s flat and the carefully tasteful sex scenes have a distancing effect.  They also share with the supposedly very different, OTT finale an excessive solemnity.

    8 October 2023

    [1] It was renamed A Dark Place for its North American release in 2019.

    [2] Afternote:  Although a second viewing of All of Us Strangers a few months later (on its general release in Britain) didn’t exactly change my mind on this, I did find it more consistently affecting – the Adam-Mum-Dad parts anyway – than I had done at the LFF screening.

     

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