Old Yorker

  • The Exterminating Angel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    El ángel exterminador

    Luis Buñuel (1962)

    Set in Mexico and one of the last films that Luis Buñuel made there, The Exterminating Angel was shot in black and white (by Gabriel Figueroa) but it’s a thoroughly black comedy.  The guests at a posh dinner party find they’re unable to leave the house at the end of the evening.  There’s neither a physical barrier to their departure nor anyone actively detaining them in the house yet they’re stuck there.  They’re complaining and frightened; they have alarming dreams and hallucinations; they come to blows, and worse; but they can’t exit.  Roger Ebert, far from the only film writer to attempt a detailed interpretation of the piece, wrote that ‘The dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco’s Spain.  Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends.  They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac …’  Other critics have advised against this kind of approach, enjoining us instead simply to revel in the film’s excoriating social comment and surreal imagination.

    Although the angel of the title is a figure common to all three Abrahamic faiths, Buñuel’s inveterate hatred of the Catholic religion is prominent in various details of the film, which opens to the sound of a tolling church bell.  The inescapable house is on Calle de la Providencia – ‘Providence Street’.  The piano sonata played for the gathering by one of the women guests, Blanca (Patricia de Morelos), and which marks the starting point of their horrific predicament, is by the eighteenth-century Italian composer Paradisi.  All but one of the servants in the household leaves the premises before accidie overtakes their social superiors:  the exception is the majordomo, Julio (Claudio Brook), who reveals at one point that he received a Jesuit education.  The hostess (Lucy Gallardo) means to produce three sheep and a bear as a zany coup de théâtre for her guests to enjoy.  In the event, the sheep come to play a more traditional, sacrificial role albeit in bizarre circumstances:  days into their ordeal, the starving guests roast the animals on a fire.  At the very end – when the company, eventually released from its house arrest, is in church – a flock of sheep wanders across the screen.

    Perhaps it wasn’t Buñuel’s intention but this member of the audience found the church choral singing in the closing episode plangently beautiful.  And while The Exterminating Angel might seem quintessentially Buñuelian, the script, which the director wrote with Luis Alcoriza, isn’t entirely original.  It’s adapted from an unfinished play (Los náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia) by Buñuel’s fellow Spaniard José Bergamin (1895-1983), a writer who, at least according to Wikipedia, ‘attempted to reconcile Communism and Catholicism throughout his life’.  It’s striking that Bergamín (uncredited on the film) didn’t finish his play because Buñuel’s resolution is somewhat awkward.  Leticia (Silvia Pinal) suddenly notices that all the people and the furniture in the room happen to be in just the position they were when, on the night of the dinner, their stasis began.  She asks Blanca to replay the end of the Paradisi sonata, which she does, and for all concerned to remember what they said immediately after the music stopped, which they do.  This breaks the spell but it feels like an escape route for Buñuel as much as his characters.

    At the other end of the narrative, the breakdown of order gets underway immediately.  The doorman (Pancho Córdova) insists on stretching his legs before the guests arrive and Julio fires him on the spot.  On arrival, some of the guests say hello to each other repeatedly (though the tone of greeting keeps changing).  In the kitchen, we learn that the main course is to be served first:  that message doesn’t seem to get to a servant (Ángel Merino) who tries to bring a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the dining table for starters but trips and falls as he approaches.  The unexpected images – a severed hand with a life of its own, the bear swinging on a chandelier – are remarkable, to put it mildly, but Buñuel also builds a gruesomely convincing picture of the accumulating effects of a sizeable group of people, deprived of normal home comforts, in a confined space.  You hardly need one of the male guests, Francisco (Xavier Loyá), something of a loose cannon from the start, to tell Blanca she smells ‘like a hyena’, and that she’s not the only one.  Manny Farber’s description of this rancid degradation (in a piece written in 1969) is worth quoting at some length:

    ‘… festering, pock-marked with strange crowdedness, bedding conditions, and particularly with powerful images – a Goyaesque scene of people in soiled, crumpled evening clothes, huddled around a fire built of smashed violins and eighteenth-century furniture, in the center of an elegant sitting room, and gnawing on mutton bones. … the women, crushed in boned evening gowns; the men, a little too old, paunchy Don Juans in opera clothes; the very outfits that would be most insufferable if you were forced to keep them on for two months – literally give off a steam of sweat, ill temper, physical disgust, a remarkable intensity of discomfort that hasn’t been seen before in movies …’

    In retrospect, The Exterminating Angel seems like the first part of a diptych that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) completes.  I prefer the episodic structure of the later film, in which the dramatis personae have the opposite problem:  they keep trying to have a meal, in various places, but never succeed.  The characters’ plight in The Exterminating Angel occasionally gets a bit boring to watch.  That doesn’t seem quite right – even if boringness is part of what makes their situation hellish.  For some reason, I found those gathering on the street outside funnier than any of the prisoners – especially when a ghoulish crowd starts to break through a police cordon to get into the house then find themselves as paralysed as those sequestered inside, and turn tail (sheepishly).   The end is strong, though.  After the service of thanksgiving for their salvation, the churchgoers move towards the exit but get no further – a moment with the same kind of nightmare-beginning-all-over-again charge as the closing scene of Dead of Night (1945).  This time, the potential spectators in the street outside are shot by military police and, in effect, replaced by the sheep that appear from nowhere and head towards the church entrance.

    An academic from Warwick University – I didn’t catch the name – introduced this BFI screening.  His intro was workmanlike but there was one point I found particularly interesting.  He mentioned Buñuel’s continuing preoccupation with the idea of people trying but failing to achieve something simple – that’s clearly a hallmark of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and of this film, at least.  It’s also an experience familiar in dreams (you try, for example, to close or open a door and the effort required is beyond you).  It hadn’t occurred to me before that Buñuel’s surrealism puts this feature of unconscious life to dramatic use.  One other postscript.  This was the first time I’d seen The Exterminating Angel in a cinema but I had watched it once before, around half a century ago, on television late one evening.  It may have been on BBC2 but I think it was BBC1.  The idea of either of those channels airing a Buñuel film now seems a bit surreal in itself.

    25 September 2024

  • In Camera

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Naqqash Khalid (2023)

    Nabhaan Rizwan had a cameo in 1917 (2019) and a supporting role, as the protagonist’s flash rapper rival, in Mogul Mowgli (2020).  He’d already impressed on television in Informer (2018).  Earlier this year, I saw just a few minutes of a late-night TV screening of The Last Letter from Your Lover (2021):  I was half asleep and nearly on my way to bed but a scene between Rizwan and Felicity Jones was well acted enough to delay the journey upstairs.  In Camera, a smaller-budget independent film, gives Rizwan a lead role in cinema, which is great to see.  Naqqash Khalid’s debut feature has quite a bit to recommend it but this brilliant young actor (he’s twenty-seven) – in the role of an actor – is the standout.

    Like Moin Hussain’s Sky Peals (also 2023), In Camera is a first feature by a British-Asian millennial writer-director.  Also like Sky Peals, it’s more nuanced about ethnicity than some critics’ words of praise would lead you to expect.  That’s not to say that racial issues aren’t prominent in Khalid’s satirical comedy (which was shot in Manchester, his home city).  Auditioning to play a Middle-Eastern terrorist, Rizwan’s Aden is invited by the casting director to try an accent; when Aden asks what kind of accent, the reply is vague – just one ‘that’s not from here’.  We repeatedly see a group of British-Asian hopefuls, including Aden, lined up for auditions in a space so small it seems like a holding pen.  Aden shares a flat with Conrad (Amir El-Masry), a smooth-talking, self-promoting fashion consultant/stylist; he appears to be Aden’s temperamental polar opposite but assures him fraternally that ‘this is our time’ and ‘we’re the new currency’.  Conrad is proved right, sort of anyway.  At the start of In Camera, Aden plays a corpse in a police procedural featuring two white detectives; at the other end of the film, the series has been revamped with an Asian cop duo, one of them Aden.  Even so, Khalid strikes a balance between illustrating the frustrations of a young British-Asian actor specifically and those of aspiring actors more generally.  After filming the scene where Aden’s the corpse, the white actor (Aston McAuley) playing the younger detective talks to his agent on the phone.  He’s exasperated to learn that he’ll lose out on a film role because a second series of the standard-issue cop show has been commissioned.

    In Camera is a much stranger piece of work than those sharp comic elements might suggest.  The surreal aspect that makes the film distinctive is present from an early stage.  Aden’s other flatmate is Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), a junior doctor whose long hours are burning him out.  Failing to get a hospital vending machine to work, Bo puts his stethoscope against the glass; the machine’s booming heartbeat introduces an almost subliminal image of Asian women factory workers.  Aden evicts a buzzing insect through his bedroom window only for its noise to return, seemingly on the other side of the bedroom wall.  He puts his ear to the wall and the buzzing sound he hears is, like the sound that Bo hears through his stethoscope, hugely amplified.  Driving to his parents’ home along a road empty of traffic, Bo is confronted by a vending machine immediately ahead and stops his car.  This machine works and Bo gets his chocolate bar.  (Chris) Clark’s original music for the film, as well as his reworking of the Carpenters’ ‘Superstar’, contributes strongly to In Camera‘s growing strangeness.

    In a more sustained bizarre episode that calls to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011), surreality is intertwined with one of Aden’s acting assignments.  He stands between a therapist (Naomi Radcliffe) and her patient, Joanna (Josie Walker), both of whom are seated; he’s playing the part of Joanna’s dead son in an imagined conversation between them.  At one point the therapist tells Aden he’s too proactive in the dialogue but Joanna feels differently.  Afterwards she invites Aden to come to dinner as her late son.  At her house the role-playing works for Joanna, who smiles through tears as she tells the surrogate that she’s made his favourite food for dinner.  Joanna’s husband (Jamie Ballard) finds the whole thing intolerably upsetting and Aden is ordered to leave, throwing up in the front garden as he does so.  Compelling as these scenes are, they’re confusing, too.  Bo is Irish; the only other Irish accents in the film belong to Joanna and her husband.  Their son died in an accident; as far as reaching his parents’ home is concerned, we don’t see Bo progress beyond the vending machine on the road.  Although he doesn’t disappear from the narrative, it’s hard not to keep wondering, as the film’s sequencing becomes more cryptic and the boundary between reality and fantasy more porous, if Aden is substituting for Bo.

    The dinner that Aden fails to keep down is almost his first meal in In Camera.  When Bo suggests a takeaway he says he’s not hungry.  Conrad, on his first night in the flat, insists that Aden share the sushi that he’s ordered but Aden only picks at the food.  Later on, though, when Aden mysteriously decides to start imposing himself on his flatmates, he gorges his way through Bo’s fridge supplies.  Bo doesn’t notice when Aden suddenly launches into a vocal impression of Conrad but he does notice that all his food and drink have gone.  The kitchen turns into a confounding domestic arena.  This culminates in Aden’s stabbing Conrad with a kitchen knife.  The victim’s blood on Aden’s hands is blue – the same colour of blood that Bo says he sees coursing down the building where he works, in what is a recurring dream.  Yet when we see the dream the hospital is bleeding red.  Bo’s last appearance is in the kitchen.  He puts his scrubs into the washing machine then clambers in himself and shuts the door.

    There’s too much Bo in In Camera.  Privileging a white character may be relevant to the film’s concerns but it seems that Naqqash Khalid had ideas involving Bo – the vending machine, the dream, the washing machine – that he just didn’t want to jettison.  Khalid still doesn’t have enough material to make Bo a lead character, though.  Giving him so much screen time pulls the film out of shape because the director is much more interested in exploring the plight of a young actor struggling to get work than the plight of an overworked young doctor.  Rory Fleck Byrne (he played Ben Whishaw’s lover in what was an NHS drama, the TV serial This is Going to Hurt (2022)) is good enough although he sometimes delivers lines too haltingly.  This is meant to make them sound super-real but has the opposite effect in Bo’s phone message to his mother about his upcoming visit.  As Conrad, Amir El-Masry is splendid – funny and incisive.  The success of the actors in smaller roles depends on how natural their playing is.  Aston McAuley, Josie Walker and Jamie Ballard all do well, as does Gana Bayarsaikhan as a photographer taking pictures of Aden on a fashion shoot.  (Conrad needs someone to deputise at short notice for a no-show model – Aden reluctantly agrees.)  It’s not surprising that, with little time on screen, some other actors are anxious to make the most of it:  their caricatures don’t fit with the subtler contributions.  This lack of orchestration of the cast is probably down to Khalid’s inexperience.

    He gets a terrific performance from his leading man, though. Throughout the increasingly disorienting narrative, Aden’s anxious introspection anchors In Camera:  Nabhaan Rizwan projects such a strong sense of character that, however extraordinary Aden’s behaviour, you at some level accept it as something he could do.  It’s a nice irony of that try-an-accent joke that when Rizwan does put on an accent, it’s wonderfully accurate.  Some of the film’s most successful blending of real and imagined comes in Aden’s semi-fantasised auditions.  When he reads for a role, his mind takes him to a more advanced stage of playing it.  He goes for a part as an extra-terrestrial (another Sky Peals echo) who lands in an American high school; next moment, he’s in a blonde wig and has the American vocals down pat.  He’s just as vocally convincing when he’s up for a stage role in a tough northern drama, yelling home truths at the actor playing his father.  At other times, there’s remarkable emotional heft to Rizwan’s performance.  The photographer, who tells Aden she too tried to be an actor, takes a shine to him and gives him her business card:  this brief exchange is inexplicably touching.

    After Aden’s corpse bit at the start, a production assistant on the police drama tells him he can get changed now; when he explains he was wearing his own clothes for the filming she breezily says that shouldn’t have happened but he can claim expenses if the fake blood won’t come out.  In the last scene of In Camera, as detective Aden leaves the set, the same production assistant, more interested than before, seems to recognise him and asks if they’ve worked together previously.  (Aden replies no.)  Naqqash Khalid is saying that, once you’re a somebody, you get paid attention.  In one way, this moment therefore feels wrong because the production assistant wouldn’t remember a nobody.  On the other hand, you can well believe that Aden, in the person of Nabhaan Rizwan, is once seen never forgotten.

    18 September 2024

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