Old Yorker

  • The Mind Benders

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1963)

    Dirk Bogarde is astonishing in this flawed but, thanks to him, dramatically powerful film.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Basil Dearden and his producing partner Michael Relph had developed a reputation for earnest social-issue dramas – Violent Playground (1958), Sapphire (1959), Victim (1961).  The pair’s best film during those years, The League of Gentlemen (1960), is a comedy thriller but a socially aware one, and The Mind Benders is inspired by topical controversy.  A legend on the screen after the opening titles announces that ‘This story was suggested by experiments on “THE REDUCTION OF SENSATION [sic]” recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States’.

    Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) takes a train from London Paddington to Oxford, where he heads a lab.  We’ve already seen that his briefcase contains wads of banknotes and that Sharpey’s worried by this.  During the train journey he suddenly gets up from his seat, opens the carriage door and jumps out.  Standing on the track beside the stopped train and the professor’s dead body, the eyes of his horrified colleague, Dr Tate (Michael Bryant), meet those of another man, Major Hall (John Clemens) from MI5.  Sharpey, a public supporter of CND, has recently been seen in the company of shady Eastern European-looking types.  Hall, who believes he killed himself from shame at betraying his country, comes to Oxford to investigate his scientific work.  He learns that, after studying the behavioural and psychological effects of exposure to extreme cold on a polar explorer (Roger Delgado), Sharpey’s team switched their focus to sensory deprivation of another kind.  The Oxford lab houses an isolation tank in which Sharpey and his right-hand man, Dr Henry Longman (Bogarde), have been making themselves the subjects of their own experiments.  According to Tate, the final mental stage resulting from such isolation is a kind of ‘zombie’ state.  Hall, who knows a thing or two about the subject, reckons there’s more to it than that:  prolonged immersion in the tank may have left Sharpey ripe for Soviet brainwashing.

    Hall first meets Longman at the latter’s home, which he shares with his wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) and their four young children.  Longman has been off work, traumatised by his own experiences of sensory deprivation.  Outraged when Hall accuses Sharpey of treason, he resolves to return to the lab and the isolation tank, it seems in order to refute the brainwashing theory.  The session goes ahead with Tate and lab assistant Norman (Terry Palmer), as well as Hall, in attendance.  While Longman is deep underwater, Hall asks the other two about their colleague’s strongest commitments:  Tate and Norman agree that love for his wife is one of Longman’s outstanding qualities.  After he emerges from the tank, the attempted brainwashing gets underway.  Tate, abetted by Hall, repeatedly disparages Oonagh – she’s a useless, faithless wife, can’t provide the care the couple’s children need, and so on.  When Oonagh arrives at the lab to take her husband home, it appears the brainwashing has been singularly ineffective.  Months later, when Tate visits the Longmans, things have changed dramatically.  Longman now addresses his wife, heavily pregnant with their fifth child, with a contempt that verges on outright hostility.

    The screenplay by James Kennaway (best known as the writer of Tunes of Glory (1960)) is intriguing but shaky, with a sometimes puzzling timeframe.  In particular, when Tate visits the Longmans and finds their relationship transformed, it appears he hasn’t seen either of them in some time.  The long vacation could be part of the reason but it turns out there’s a Bonfire Night party the very evening of Tate’s visit:  so has Longman been back on sick leave ever since his latest immersion?  Well as he plays Tate in the early stages, Michael Bryant is especially ill-served by the script’s defects.  Tate is surprisingly untroubled when he takes the brainwashing lead.  If the explanation for this – and for Tate’s lack of remorse for what then happens – is meant to be that, as is eventually revealed, he carries a torch for Oonagh, it’s unconvincing.  Tate admits that it’s only recently he has realised his true feelings for her, and Oonagh remains, despite everything, devoted to her husband.

    At the Guy Fawkes gathering, Longman drunkenly flirts with a young woman called Annabelle (Wendy Craig) and heads off to the lab with her, where they’re confronted by Tate and Hall (conveniently back in Oxford for the occasion).  The action then switches to Annabelle’s houseboat.  On grassland beside the canal, Longman cruelly humiliates Oonagh, who falls over as she tries to follow him.  Her drags her up and she goes into premature labour.  Inside the telephone-less houseboat, he instructs Annabel to hurry to the nearest call box to summon a doctor.  That’s not going to happen quickly so Longman himself delivers the baby:  it’s a boy.  In the process, tears – and the scales – fall from Longman’s eyes and he turns back into a loving husband.  More good news follows.  In the early light of the following morning, Longman is informed by Hall, in a towpath conversation, that it’s now clear Professor Sharpey wasn’t a traitor after all.  Clear to James Kennaway, that is.

    The climax, in other words, shows true love trumping psychological manipulation.  Implausible as this is, The Mind Benders often shows high-quality acting transcending improbable plotting.  Hall’s assurance to Tate that, once Longman hears the tape-recording of the brainwashing session, he’ll see reason and instantly revert to his normal, uxorious self, not only sounds facile at the time but undermines the dreadful power of brainwashing on which the story depends (besides, Hall claims both advanced medical training and knowledge of indoctrination techniques).  Yet Bogarde makes it a startling highlight of the film when Longman, on hearing the recording, derisively explains that Hall has wrongly assumed he needed to be convinced of Oonagh’s worthlessness:  Longman says he already saw through and despised her.  You would think Oonagh would be shocked and angry on learning what Hall and Tate have done to her husband.  She’s neither yet Mary Ure’s melancholy (masochistic) acquiescence is touching.

    There’s more wrong with The Mind Benders than unsatisfactory plotting.  Dearden’s staging of the scene that follows the brainwashing episode – Longman lies outside the lab, waiting to be stretchered into a waiting ambulance while a crowd of students gawp – is plain stupid.  There’s a bad continuity problem in sequences involving a stray dog outside Annabelle’s houseboat:  it’s after dark but not in images that show the dog alone rather than with people.  Georges Auric’s score, as well as being overused, is too rich.  It doesn’t fit either the storyline or the film’s visual conception of Oxford, where dreaming spires are soon replaced by brutalist university science buildings.  Denys Coop’s black-and-white photography, which strengthens the atmosphere of menacing modernity, is a plus point, though – so is Dearden’s handling of the pleasant domestic hubbub in the first scene at the Longmans’.  (Their amusingly named children are Persephone, Paul, Peers [sic?] and Penny – their new baby brother will be Pedro.)  Wendy Craig is an asset, too.  The role of Annabelle is crudely conceived and overwritten, at least until she does her bit to help, but Craig’s playing of it confirms there was more to her as an actress than future roles in domestic TV sitcoms might lead you to assume.

    It’s Dirk Bogarde who makes the difference, though.  He had worked before with Basil Dearden – as long ago as The Blue Lamp (1950), more recently in Victim – but his work in The Mind Benders is on a different level.  Later in 1963, he would earn well-deserved plaudits in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (in which Wendy Craig is again good – in a much better role).  When I last saw The Servant, I described Bogarde’s performance as his ‘most inventive and enjoyable’.  I think that’s probably right – it’s more satisfying than his performance here because The Servant is a much more cogent film – but he’s still brilliant as Longman.  His in extremis acting in the sensory-deprivation sequence is a considerable feat; the horrible fluency of his abuse of Oonagh is even more amazing.  Bogarde is so credibly volatile that he keeps the film suspenseful right through to the sequence where Longman turns midwife:  his voice when he yells at Oonagh to ‘Push, push!’ could just as easily express loathing as urgency.  (By the way, I’ve called Longman by his surname throughout because that’s what his wife does.  She also calls Tate Tate.)

    The Mind Benders was a commercial and critical failure.  Its original trailer was fronted by Edgar Lustgarten, solemnly explaining that:

    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the part of the programme where you normally see the trailer, advertising the next attraction to be screened at this theatre.  The film in question is The Mind Benders, which has an X certificate.  It’s so truly adult, so unusual and so exciting it would be spoiling things for you to show any of the scenes in advance unless we could include some of the controversial ones, which unfortunately we are forbidden to do in a trailer. …’

    This may now sound both OTT and quaint but there’s evidence to suggest it meant plenty at the time.  The BFI handout helpfully included some extracts from contemporary reviews in a range of publications, mostly Penelope Houston’s piece in Monthly Film Bulletin but also snippets from the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express.  None of the reviewers seems to like the film, notwithstanding Patrick Gibbs’s backhanded compliment in the Telegraph:  ‘… a stunning story, not to be missed by any connoisseur of the nasty or the absurd’.  The BFI handout also included Dirk Bogarde’s jaundiced recollections of the film’s reception in his 1978 memoir Snakes and Ladders:

    ‘The Mind Benders … was too far ahead of its time.  No one knew very much about brainwashing; no one really believed that it was possible … one headline which blared ‘Bogarde Thriller is Shabby and Nasty’ summed up the general reaction.  Another thumping failure in my brave new effort to disturb, illuminate and educate.  Someone was on the wrong track; it depressed me deeply that all the signs pointed towards myself. ‘       

    Perhaps brainwashing was widely seen in the early 1960s as a creature of paranoid fiction rather than a matter of political fact but that needn’t have prevented The Mind Benders from being a hit – like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, which arrived in British cinemas just three months before Dearden’s film.  It’s more likely that viewers were uncomfortable with the ‘truly adult’ nature of The Mind Benders – expecting more Cold War espionage or scientists-playing-God thrills, and less emotionally distressing material, than is actually delivered.  Edgar Lustgarten’s prediction in the trailer that this is ‘a film you’ll remember and discuss for a long time to come’ proved wide of the mark.  I’d never even heard of it.  (I think it was much more suitably included in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Hidden Gems of British Cinema’ season at BFI than Green for Danger.)  Lustgarten wasn’t completely wrong, though.  This viewer’s prediction is that Dirk Bogarde will ensure I don’t forget The Mind Benders.

    2 October 2024

  • Love Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Koji Fukada (2022)

    High in a Tokyo tower block, preparations are underway for a double celebration.  In the living room of an apartment, Taeko (Fumino Kimura) puts the finishing touches to a display proclaiming the victory of Keita (Tetta Shimada), her six-year-old son, in an inter-school competition playing the board game Othello.  (Othello-mad Keita takes a dim view of grown-ups calling it a game.)  In the kitchen, Taeko’s husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama), prepares food for the party guests who’ll soon be joining the threesome.  It’s also his father’s sixty-fifth birthday and Jiro has arranged for a group of his work colleagues to stand outside the apartment block, once the father arrives, holding balloons and happy-birthday placards.  Jiro’s parents, Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi) and Akie (Misuzu Kanno), bring presents for Keita; there’s one from Taeko and Jiro, too – a toy plane.  Later, with the party in full swing, Keita entertains himself with the plane, which he takes into the bathroom.  When it flies out of reach he climbs onto the ledge above the bath to retrieve it.  He slips and falls, hitting his head as he does so.  This shocking fatal accident occurs about half an hour into Love Life.  It’s a pivotal moment both for the adults in the story and for Koji Fukada’s film as a whole.

    Writer-director Fukada introduces the characters, their relationships and the tensions in these, clearly and convincingly.  Keita’s biological father is not Jiro but Taeko’s first husband.  We learn soon after Makoto arrives that he regards his daughter-in-law as a ‘cast-off’.  Akie tells him to apologise and he does, but minimally and grudgingly.  Akie then rubs salt in the wound by breezily telling Taeko things will be fine once  she has given Makoto and Akie their own grandchild.  The few scenes outside the flat are also instructive.  Jiro and Taeko both work in social services – he as a manager, she in a centre for homeless people.  Ahead of the party, she goes out briefly to deal with an emergency there, which interrupts an Othello session with Keita that he’s been begging her for.  On the way to the centre, she bumps into Jiro’s colleagues, due to report for duty soon outside the block of flats.  They include Risa (Hirona Yamazaki), who eyes Taeko anxiously.  Soon after this brief meeting, Risa decides she can’t go through with the performance and runs away, followed by one of the men in the group.  Another man tells a third that Risa used to be Jiro’s girlfriend, whom he ditched in favour of Taeko.

    Love Life is engrossing and well acted throughout but this family drama becomes less and less satisfying.  For a while, it seems too symmetrically plotted, though that reflects a potentially strong premise:  Keita’s death is so unbearable for Taeko and Jiro that both are moved to revert to relationships that preceded their time together.  Jiro, after helping his parents move to a new home outside the city, takes the opportunity to visit Risa:  they talk about their past relationship and kiss.  Risa confesses she was so hurt when Jiro left her for Taeko that she wanted something bad to spoil their happiness; she feels terrible now that something has happened.  At this stage, Taeko’s first husband, Park (Atom Sunada), seems to be Risa’s counterpart in Fukada’s scheme but not for long.  Park emerges as a much larger element of the story and the ensuing plot involving him is where Love Life really goes awry.

    Park, a deaf-mute Korean, first appears, unexpectedly, at Keita’s funeral – a scene nearly as shocking as that of the boy’s death.  Wearing a yellow shirt and jeans, dishevelled and wild-eyed, Park is incongruous among the black-clad mourners grieving as decorously as they can.  When he sees Taeko, Park hits her; she falls down, screaming hysterically.  Before Taeko got together with Jiro, Park walked out on her and Keita, and returned to his native South Korea.  Back in Japan, he’s now jobless and homeless, sleeping rough.  When he turns up at social services, Taeko is called in to interpret though she doesn’t mention to her colleague that she was married to Park.  You’d think his behaviour at Keita’s funeral might be a warning reminder to Taeko of how difficult he was to live with.  Far from it.  While Jiro is away with his parents, she invites Park home and they share physically intimate moments.  By the time Jiro returns, Park is lodging in the apartment, along with a kitten he has somehow acquired.  Taeko’s bond with Park proves so strong that, when he receives a letter and tells her he must return to Korea because his father is dying, Taeko decides to leave Jiro and accompany Park.  Once they’re in Korea, she discovers that the letter was not about the ailing father but from Park’s grown-up son whose existence is news to Taeko.  The son has defied his mother to invite Park to his wedding.  Taeko discovers all this backstory at the wedding reception that she and Park, after losing their way and hitching a lift, wander into.  Taeko promptly heads back to Tokyo and Jiro.

    The early scenes are so well crafted, drawing us into the story, sometimes making us smile.  As Taeko and Keita start to play Othello, Jiro light-heartedly complains that he is never invited to play.  Next time, Jiro is assured:  but a signed exchange between his wife and stepson, behind Jiro’s back, informs us that Keita thinks Jiro is rubbish at Othello so not worth playing.  Risa’s defection threatens to wreck the routine designed to greet Makoto; as she and her companion disappear down the street, we notice a couple of nuns standing there; next thing, they’ve been recruited to the birthday group to make up numbers, and are delighted to help out.  They come along to the party and enthusiastically join Keita in a karaoke number.  After that, even grumpy Makoto is prevailed on to join in the karaoke.  As he starts his song, he warns there are seven verses.  He’s not halfway through the marathon when Keita takes his toy plane into the bathroom.

    The actual cause of death isn’t a head injury but drowning:  Keita, concussed, lies unconscious in a bath full of water.  Fukada does a fine job directing Tetta Shimada.  He’s so engaging, even when Keita is showing off, that the viewer experiences his sudden departure from the film as a wrenching loss.  The trouble is, once the story deteriorates into implausible melodrama, you start questioning even what seemed strong points earlier on.  If Park abandoned his wife and child several years ago and Keita is only six now, he must have learned sign language in his cradle.  If Jiro has organised his father’s birthday celebrations carefully, as everyone says, how come he involved Risa in the first place?  Most Western viewers at least will be surprised the bath wasn’t drained after being last used.  Taeko bitterly reproaches herself for this, admitting that it’s a bad habit Jiro has kept reminding her about.  The bathwater still seems improbable, though, when the family is hosting a party.

    As the narrative moves on, signing between Taeko and Park does work well as a secret code between them – particularly in scenes where Jiro is also present and feels excluded.  Fukada illustrates in telling details the domestic aftermath to Keita’s death:  Taeko takes down reluctantly, bit by bit, the display she put up on the fateful day; the bathroom remains for her a virtual no-go area.  At the same time, Fukada and his talented leads impart a strong sense of Taeko’s and Jiro’s life without Keita becoming a new, benumbed normal.  I particularly liked a sequence in which, while Jiro takes a bath at home, Taeko visits his parents (before their move) and listens to Akie describe her recent religious conversion after a lifetime of unbelief.  Up to this point, Misuzu Kanno’s acting has seemed rather stagy compared with others in the cast but she’s very good in this quiet scene, making Akie strikingly downbeat, almost melancholy in her new-found faith.  Also effective is the surprising moment when, after Park’s kitten goes missing and Jiro finds it, Park makes him a gift of the animal.  While Fumino Kimura gives a strong performance in what proves to be the main role, most of Love Life’s highlights seem to involve Kento Nagayama’s Jiro.  The camera understandably focuses on Taeko immediately after Park’s outburst at the funeral but you also notice Jiro – or part of Jiro – in the shot.  Nagayama is so expressive that his left hand on its own seems to convey Jiro’s powerlessness in the situation.

    It’s frustrating that Fukada concentrates increasingly on the Taeko-Park relationship somewhat at Jiro’s expense and to the extent of dropping entirely other characters in whom we’ve become interested, especially Jiro’s parents.  When Taeko eventually returns to her second husband (and the cat Jiro has inherited) and apologises, she seems almost to be speaking on behalf of the director.  It’s some consolation that, right at the end, the film recovers to show the couple’s future together as uncertain.  They go for a walk, talking tentatively.  As the camera pulls up and away from the apartment building and its environs, a song starts up on the soundtrack and continues through the closing credits.  According to Wikipedia, Love Life is ‘inspired by a song of the same name by musician Akiko Yano, originally released on the album of the same name in 1991’.  (As far as I can see, Love Life has no Japanese title.)  Assuming that this is the dreary music at the end, it’s fair to say that the best parts of Koji Fumada’s film easily surpass its inspiration.

    28 September 2024

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