Old Yorker

  • Amulet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Romola Garai (2020)

    So Alex Garland’s Men wasn’t the first horror film this year to feature male parturition.  It also occurs a few minutes before the end of Romola Garai’s debut feature Amulet (which premiered at Sundance in 2020 but didn’t open in British cinemas until January 2022).  Garai’s protagonist, Tomaz (Alec Secăreanu), manages only a single birth, which might seem not to compare with the 4 x Rory Kinnear relay team in Men.  The achievement isn’t to be sniffed at, though:  Tomaz brings forth a demon (of sorts).  Alex Garland, of course, proclaims at an early stage of proceedings that all the men in Men are the devil incarnate.  I wish I liked and understood Amulet better than I do but Romola Garai, who also wrote the screenplay, has an edge on Garland in keeping Tomaz’s toxic masculinity under wraps for most of her film’s ninety-nine minutes – though it’s clear from the start that he’s haunted by his past.

    The action switches back and forth between that past, in a war-torn, unnamed European country, and Tomaz’s present life in London as an illegal immigrant.  In what was presumably his homeland, he was a border guard, stationed at a forest checkpoint and lodging in a cabin nearby.  (It’s in the forest that he unearths the ancient image of a female god that gives the film its name.)  When he sees a woman (Angeliki Papoulia) running for the border, Tomaz orders her to stop and threatens to shoot.  The woman collapses; he takes her to his cabin to recover; she tells him her name is Miriam and that she must cross the border to get to her daughter; he says that if she stays with him, he can help her.  In London, Tomaz works on a building site and sleeps in a derelict property with other refugees.  One night the place is set on fire and Tomaz, although he escapes, collapses in an alleyway after inhaling smoke.  He’s discovered there by a nun, Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton), who gets him to hospital and, when he’s recovered, suggests new accommodation.  She takes Tomaz to a dilapidated suburban house, occupied by Magda (Carla Juri) and her dying mother, for whom Magda cares.  The money Tomaz earned as a labourer disappeared on the night of the fire.  He stays in the house rent-free, doing repairs on the place in exchange for bed and board.  Magda is an excellent cook but night-times are an ordeal for Tomaz.  Sleeping with his arms and legs taped together, he’s plagued by flashback nightmares.

    Romola Garai lays on the ominous details pretty thick, with the help of Sarah Angliss’s eerie theremin music.  The invalid mother – in the attic – goes unseen for a time; her wheezing moans and occasional violent rage with her daughter are not unheard.  The nun, when Tomaz asks if she knows what happened to his hard-earned cash, pretends ignorance; as she walks away from Magda’s house, with Tomaz safely installed there, Sister Claire throws his wad of notes into a street grating.  A swinging, flickering light bulb is both an anomaly and a portent.  Magda tells Tomaz the house has no electricity supply – only gas for cooking, and candles – because mother tends to put her fingers in the sockets.  Although the resulting gloom is bad news for the viewer, at least it’s possible to discern Garai’s flair for creating potently revolting highlights:  a blocked toilet; a fish that Magda guts in preparation for Tomaz’s supper; and, in due course, the suppurating living cadaver of her mother (Anah Ruddin, under the grisly make-up).  The lack of light isn’t great either for Tomaz, who would like to work in his room in the evenings on his doctoral thesis.  He tells Magda his subject is philosophy and he reads a book by Hannah Arendt, though I couldn’t make out the title in the murk.

    As Tomaz tries to unblock the toilet, an animal form rises to the surface and he yanks it out.   Apparently the skeleton of a bat, the creature bites him before he kills it.  Later on, when Magda’s mother has appeared on the scene, she gives birth to a similar creature.  Tomaz consults Sister Claire, who explains the mother is the host body for a demon and has been charged to ‘contain’ it, with the help of Magda.  As she discourses, with solemn passion, on the nature of evil, Sister Claire is still wimpled but she has begun a process of transformation.  She now smokes a cigarette, in a holder, with a worldly air.  The next time Tomaz encounters her, she has swapped her clerical garb for a dress whose vivid colours are a welcome contrast to the dank, dark palette that dominates the film.

    Just as Jessie Buckley was in Men, so Amulet‘s protagonist is nearly the sole representative of their sex in evidence.  There are other male refugees; there must be men, too, in the night club where Tomaz takes Magda dancing and the local market where they shop together, but you don’t notice them.  Garai can thus concentrate exclusively on Tomaz’s relationships with and treatment of women.  At the start of the film, he does a little dance on a felled tree in the forest; he takes Magda to the night club because she tells him she’d like to spend all her nights out dancing rather than stuck at home.  They have a good time at the club until she kisses him and a momentary flashback makes Tomaz pull away.  They eventually sleep together but not before Garai has revealed his guilty secret.  Miriam, who stays with him, is nervous at first but he treats her kindly and is grateful for her company in his lonely vigil.  Her priority, though, remains to get back to her daughter.  She makes another run for the border with Tomaz in pursuit.  He overpowers Miriam and rapes her.

    Tomaz admits to Magda he’s done things that he regrets.  Calling to mind the male refrain from Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (also 2020), he insists he’s nevertheless a good guy.  Garai’s view is evidently that he can’t be, even if his raping Miriam was out of character.  And perhaps it wasn’t:  there’s already been a suggestion of frustration on his part that Miriam doesn’t reciprocate his interest in her.  (She worked for the local authority.  Tomaz recalls seeing her in the town hall while he was queueing for university application forms.  He finds it hard to believe Miriam doesn’t remember him.)  Yet Garai also, and cannily, predisposes her audience to sympathy with Tomaz.  He’s a victim himself – a refugee on the receiving end of racist abuse (and, presumably, racist arson) in London.  He’s quietly intelligent and apparently well meaning but his efforts to free Magda from her grim existence are doomed to spectacular, gory failure.  He tries to destroy the mother/demon by stabbing its throat; like the bat in the loo, it retaliates by attacking Tomaz before Magda pulls it off.  On a second attempt, he beheads the demon only to discover that its host wasn’t Magda’s mother:  the host body belonged to the previous occupant of the house, a man who murdered his wife in order to marry one of his daughters.  There’s been another male presence, hidden and malign, in the house – and the film – all along.

    Tomaz then learns from Sister Claire that he himself will be the demon’s new host.  Is this punishment for his assault on Miriam, which exposes him for what he is really is?   Nothing as simple as that, according to what Romola Garai told Alexandra Pollard in an Independent interview earlier this year:

    ‘I was trying to write about, not men who hate women being a threat to women, but men who love women being a threat to women,’ she explains. ‘The reverence of women – the idea of an all-forgiving, all-understanding woman – is a threat to women.  Tomaz is not a weird outsider, or some kind of social outcast, he’s a man who likes women, you know?  But that in itself is the problem.’

    Garai’s words elide the distinctions between men liking, loving and revering women but Amulet’s blood-soaked climax appears to teach Tomaz a lesson for chivalrous devotion to Magda.

    There were things I found increasingly puzzling in the film.  What’s the significance of Tomaz doing philosophy research?  Is there supposed to be a link between the apparently Eastern European setting of the war zone and Magda’s nationality, hinted at in her name and accented English (although Carla Juri is Swiss)?  In the finale to Amulet, I completely lost the plot.  What’s the connection, if any, between Magda and her mother, and the hapless women in the life of the house’s previous owner?  If the latter is the real host body, what’s the relationship between his body and that of Magda’s mother?  It’s when Tomaz discovers he’s the new host that he gives birth to another skeletal bat – but what do these evil offspring do in the world beyond blocking toilets?  Tomaz, as the host, is allowed by Sister Claire to choose a guardian and opts for Magda.  In an epilogue to the main action, she drives to a store and buys some meaty convenience food.  Miriam, who is working behind the counter, tells her it’s crap.  Magda says she doesn’t mind because she hates cooking anyway.  She returns to her car and chucks the food onto the back seat, where it’s received by something concealed by a blanket.  It’s no doubt Tomaz but I’ve no idea what this is meant to tell us.

    Garai also mentioned to the Independent that, ‘I don’t mind if people feel pissed off at the end.  That’s the fun’.  Until the closing stages, though, Amulet, despite its bizarreries, is rather dull.  This is partly the effect of the glum visuals, partly down to the main performances.  Carla Juri’s mostly forlorn and laconic Magda seems pretty generic.  Alec Secăreanu’s Tomaz, though his face is remarkably different according to whether he’s bearded (in London) or clean-shaven (in the forest scenes), is long-suffering in the wrong way:  he conveys tortured melancholy scrupulously but slowly and repetitively.  One good thing about Tomaz’s eventual demonisation is that it gives Secăreanu an eleventh-hour chance to be nastily dynamic, which he takes.  Imelda Staunton’s theatrical poise is fun but the staged metamorphosis of her character is too silly for words.  It’s hard to think this is what Romola Garai intended but who knows?

    2 August 2022

  • Grey Gardens

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer (1975)

    Grey Gardens is a fourteen-room mansion in East Hampton, New York.  Designed in 1897, the house and its surrounding estate were bought in 1923 by a married couple, Phelan and Edith Beale.  After they split up, the wife was left to look after the place and the couple’s children, including their one daughter, also named Edith.  According to Wikipedia, the house and grounds are in the neighbourhood of Georgica Pond, ‘a 290-acre … coastal lagoon (‘…the East Hampton Trustees … monitor a cycle of draining the lagoon and replenishing it with Atlantic Ocean water’); the mansion was named for ‘the color of the dunes, the concrete garden walls, and the sea mist’.  By the early 1970s, the place had fallen into such unsanitary disrepair that its remaining occupants – the two Ediths – were facing eviction and the razing of their home.  In the summer of 1972, relatives stepped in to fund structural improvements to the property, enabling the impoverished Beales to remain there.  The celebrity of one of these relatives, nieces of the elder and cousins of the younger Edith Beale, increased the publicity surrounding Grey Gardens.  The bill for repairs was paid by Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

    The Maysles brothers begin their documentary[1] with a montage of newspaper articles about the parlous state of Grey Gardens, where Jackie O spent summers as a child, and the financial lifeline that she and her sister threw their poor relations.  The camera then moves onto the property and indoors.  It doesn’t venture beyond the estate again, except in a sequence where the junior Beale swims in the nearby lagoon.  Otherwise, fifty-something ‘Little Edie’, as she’s known, is hardly less housebound than ‘Big Edie’, her nearly octogenarian mother.  Human visitors to the property are few and far between – the gardener, a teenage handyman whom Little Edie calls the Marble Faun (after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel), a well-dressed elderly man and a fortyish woman who call in to drink a toast and eat cake on Big Edie’s birthday.  Animal companions are more numerous.  The place is full of feral cats, some decorating the bed where Big Edie spends most of her time.  In the basement, raccoons eat food that the Beales have chucked away there.  You don’t need to see the insect life inside Grey Gardens to know it must abound.

    Both women are fond of sunbathing and unworried about exposing their flesh to the camera which, in Big Edie’s case, is part of what makes the film tough viewing for the squeamish.  Little Edie, though not exactly toned or slender, is easier to watch – or would be if she didn’t flirt so blatantly and awkwardly with the Maysleses and their camera.  When the brothers arrive at the start of the film, they introduce themselves as ‘gentleman callers’ and that famous phrase from The Glass Menagerie seems to give Little Edie her theatrical cue.  A quick-change artist, she appears in many outfits in the course of Grey Gardens, from fur coats to shorts and halter-neck tops to improvisations like ‘pantyhose … under a short skirt … then you can pull the stockings up over the pants under the skirt – or you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape’.  Her headgear is various, too – turban, headscarf, bathing cap, what looks like an adapted balaclava – but she’s never without it.

    The information that Little Edie developed alopecia (in her late thirties) is something else gleaned from Wikipedia rather than explained in the film.  I also learned from online reading that Phelan Beale departed the scene in 1931, leaving his wife dependent on the monthly allowance he paid her; that, after their eventual divorce in 1946, John Vernou Bouvier III (Jacqueline’s father) took over paying the allowance; that Little Edie, after living and working away, moved back to Grey Gardens in 1952; that her two brothers, both professionally successful, ‘refused to pay for the home’s utilities and upkeep in order to cause the women to leave the dilapidated mansion’ – a plan stymied by their cousins’ intervention.  It’s fair enough that the film-makers don’t supply this factual background.  They’re presenting rather than exploring who the Beales are.

    The Maysleses are nevertheless intent on conveying the regretful retrospection that pervades the Edies’ present.  (It’s another connection with The Glass Menagerie:  ‘The play is memory’.)   Before and during the early years of her marriage, Big Edie was a successful amateur singer, performing at parties in her home and at local functions.  When she launches into ‘Tea For Two’, ‘You and the Night and the Music’ and ‘Night and Day’, her recall of the lyrics is shaky but her voice still tuneful enough to suggest how good it might once have been or, with further training, might have become.  In her youth, Little Edie was a fashion model in New York City and Florida, and in the early post-war years a dancer in Manhattan.  As if to prove it, she does a couple of little solo routines for the Maysleses’s benefit, to embarrassing effect.  Whereas Big Edie is in no fit state to compete with these, Little Edie briefly trespasses on her mother’s singing territory – ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’, ‘Lili Marleen’.  This irks Big Edie – especially her daughter’s pronunciation of ‘love’ as ‘laahv’ in the former song:  ‘What d’you mean “laahv”?  You’re not Czechoslovakian or something.’  That gets Little Edie extending the vowel sound even further in the next verse.

    Squabbling is the Edies’ routine form of communication.  Whether or not this is how they normally behave when they’re not being filmed, it becomes – with occasional exceptions like the ‘laahv’ spat – boring.  So does their playing to camera more generally, even allowing that aborted performing careers may have intensified their appetite for doing so.  When I first saw Grey Gardens (I don’t remember exactly how long ago) I knew the scenario but was unprepared for the startling details.  With its shock value reduced, the film hardly rewards a second viewing.  The squalor of the house is still nauseating and serves to express how the Beales’s fortunes and hopes have decayed but ninety-five minutes is a long time to watch the same point being made in the same disagreeable way.

    That’s not the view of BFI member Jenny Newman (the film was shown as this month’s offering in the ‘Member Picks’ slot), who describes Grey Gardens on the programme note as ‘The most incredible documentary of all time’.  Although I obviously don’t agree, Jenny Newman’s accolade does make me wonder what the point was of dramatising the material.  In the years after Little Edie’s death (in 2002, twenty-five years after her mother), Grey Gardens became a stage musical then a TV film, both of them award-winning.  I can’t imagine how either preserves one of the most distinctive things about the documentary – that it shows real people behaving like people in a play (especially Little Edie, stage whispering to the Maysleses that she’s got to get away from the life she now has).  Turning the Beales into actual characters in a drama robs them of a crucial dimension – or, at least, removes a crucial dimension of how they perform.

    On its original release Grey Gardens was controversial.  Walter Goodman in the New York Times objected that the Maysleses presented the Beales ‘as a pair of grotesques’, asking ‘why were they put on exhibition this way?’   One straightforward, practical answer was supplied by Little Edie herself, who said she ‘made Grey Gardens in order to get some food for my mother’.  In an interview in 2014 Albert Maysles claimed the Beales’ ‘behavior was just their way of asserting themselves.  And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves?’  Walter Goodman was right that the Maysleses made a bizarre spectacle of the Beales and their degradation but it’s hard to believe they intended to make fun of them.  To the extent that both Edies address remarks to the brothers and their own voices are sometimes heard, the Maysleses are involved in Grey Gardens rather than merely observers.  They may well have developed an affection for their subjects.  They clearly regret the women’s fall from social grace:  why else is the camera repeatedly transfixed by photographs or portraits on the mansion walls that show younger, more beautiful versions of Big and Little Edie?

    It’s doubtful anyway that many newcomers to Grey Gardens in 2022 will find it offensively exploitative.  The BFI programme note for this screening also quoted a more recent and enthusiastic review, by Jane Giles in Sight & Sound (September 2014):  ‘It’s fingernails-down-the-blackboard wonderful … a cult classic, wildly entertaining and camp as Christmas. … But it’s also a film that allows women to speak in their own crazy voices …’   Giles’s effortless switch from levity to right-on overstatement encapsulates how the film is now likely to be seen – as anticipating the era of I-am-what-I-am, of DIY construction of ‘identity’  (particularly female ‘identity’) through the dressing-up box.  When Big and Little Edie move beyond bickering with each other to shouting in parallel in the camera’s direction, they’re harbingers of look-at-me-listen-to-me culture.  As such, they’ll appeal to plenty of present-day viewers but not to anyone oppressed by competing media and social media voices so insistent that you want them to shut up.  You want it all the more when the noisy, blinkered self-assertion seems – as it often does seem, and as the Beales’s surely was – a front for desperation.

    29 July 2022

    [1] As shown above, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer share the directing credit but Grey Gardens is usually thought of as a Maysles brothers’ film.  This note will reflect that.

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