Old Yorker

  • Eternal Beauty

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig Roberts (2019)

    In 2010 Craig Roberts played the lead and Sally Hawkins his mother in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine.  Roberts is now the writer-director and Hawkins the star of Eternal Beauty but I’ll be surprised if this film repeats the deserved success of Submarine.  Hawkins is Jane, fortyish and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.  On her wedding day, Jane (played as a youngster by Morfydd Clark) was jilted by her fiancé, Johnny; her stunningly unsympathetic mother Vivian (Penelope Wilton) declared she’d never been so embarrassed in her life.  The psychological effect on the bride-to-be was more serious and long-term.  Twenty or so years later, Jane lives alone in what’s presumably a council flat.  She totters about the estate in a haze of medication.  With her light-coloured clothes and white shoes with heels, she might be Miss Havisham’s younger sister.

    Jane has two actual sisters – one nice, one nasty.  The latter is coarsely glam Nicola (Billie Piper), a single mother with a grown-up, unspeaking daughter called Lucy (Rita Bernard-Shaw).  These two are lined up on the sofa, alongside Vivian and her husband Dennis (Robert Pugh), who’s also weirdly reserved, when Jane visits her parents on Christmas Day.  Carrying a pile of presents wrapped in shiny gold paper, she explains that these are from her family, for her.  Fed up of receiving soap and socks, she’s bought what she really wants – including a handbag that cost £250.  When Jane hands her the bill for this, Nicola vehemently tells her where to get off.  Jane then goes for Christmas dinner at the home of her nice sister, Alice (Alice Lowe), who’s estranged from their parents and Nicola.  The celebrations there are nearly as muted.  Alice’s young son Jack (Spencer Deere) is glum because his dog died earlier in the day.  Jane is uneasy with the carrots and asks Alice’s husband Tony (Paul Hilton) what he put on them:  Tony’s reply is coriander though from his tone of voice it might be strychnine.  Soon afterwards, Jane says she has to leave because she doesn’t like coriander.  Alice gives her a lift home and Jane tells her, not for the last time, that Tony is having an extramarital affair.

    These early scenes suggest a world out of joint.  The possibility that it’s the world seen from the heroine’s perspective holds your attention for a while.  People suffering from schizophrenia with paranoia can exhibit disorganised behaviour and speech, as Jane certainly does, and have delusions.  Some of the main people in her life – her mother, Nicola, Tony – are emphatically (entirely) malignant: or is this just how they seem to Jane?  Hers aren’t the only clothes that look stuck in a time warp and the same goes for the décor in her parents’ home.  Is this because time stopped for Jane when Johnny didn’t show up at the church?   (The film’s title apparently refers to a beauty product, featured in a TV commercial at one point, which promises to transform its users ‘from faceless to ageless’.)  Perhaps this is what Craig Roberts means us to think but I gradually lost faith in the idea.  Jane is on screen most of the time but not continuously.  Unless the bits of the film she’s absent from are her imaginings (and Roberts doesn’t make clear they are), there’s no evident difference between the world she perceives and the world that happens without her.

    The vaguely outmoded sets and costumes seem designed just to work up bizarre atmosphere – as if that were naturally appropriate to a story whose protagonist is disturbed.  The longer it goes on, the more Eternal Beauty seems driven by antique clichés of mental illness (on the screen):  that it equates to outlandish appearance and mannerisms; that it derives from one specific trauma; that an abnormal mind is able to perceive reality beyond the ken of the well-adjusted.  Jane’s super-perceptiveness seems to be a mixture of straightforward observation and clairvoyance.  She insists Tony has another woman because she’s seen them together.  When Alice eventually does, too, she has to accept that Jane is right.  (Tony might as well carry a neon sign reading ‘scumbag’ through the film yet his wife is inexplicably unsuspecting.)  Jane’s Christmas present to her nephew Jack was an umbrella; this irritated Alice, who said he wouldn’t need it.  But Jane knew better.  When Alice spots Tony and his bit on the side in his parked car, she leaves her own car and approaches the lovers in pouring rain.  Little Jack gallantly follows with his umbrella.

    Eternal Beauty is described on Wikipedia as a ‘dark comedy’ (yes, another one).  In the early stages, there were a few hopeful titters in NFT2 at Jane’s peculiar behaviour but they soon dried up:  this is a film that manages to be disorienting yet dreary.  It livens up briefly when Jane, in a doctor’s waiting-room, bumps into old acquaintance and failed musician Mike (David Thewlis).  They strike up a friendship and he moves in with her:  Sally Hawkins and David Thewlis give their scenes together an odd-couple spark.  Nicola, in the meantime, has married a much older man (Tony Leader); when he dies (and who can blame him?), she asks Jane if she can move in temporarily, too.  Of course, Nicola soon seduces Mike, which puts an end to Jane’s relationship with him and her short-lived happiness.

    This is Craig Roberts’s second feature.  In his first, Just Jim (2015), which I’ve not seen, he played the lead as well as writing and directing.  Although Roberts’s co-star in Just Jim was Emile Hirsch, he’s got together a higher-powered cast for Eternal Beauty, perhaps as a result of involving Sally Hawkins in the project at an early stage of development.  (According to Wikipedia, Hawkins signed up just as The Shape of Water started winning awards.)   It’s a pity that Roberts condemns good people like Penelope Wilton and Billie Piper to one-dimensional roles.  He also places an unreasonably heavy burden on Hawkins to carry the film.  She plays Jane with empathetic and characteristic finesse but the one-woman-show nature of Eternal Beauty eventually overtaxes her eccentric charm.

    Another trope of the mental-illness-drama tradition is the curative light-bulb moment.  Roberts deploys this, too.  Jane imagines talking on the phone to Johnny (voiced by Robert Aramayo), telling him she loves him, hearing him say he loves her, realising he’ll let her down again.  She takes a pair of scissors to the telephone wire.  Early on, she’s struck by a painting hanging in her doctor’s surgery.  It shows a figure in white on a beach; when Jane speaks wistfully about the painting, the doctor (Boyd Clack) burbles something about her becoming the figure in it as her condition improves.  In the closing stages of Eternal Beauty, the painting appears all over the place, including Vivian’s bedroom, above her deathbed.  In its final appearance in the doctor’s surgery, the figure is wearing a costume of a different, darker (no longer bridal?) colour.

    Although Roberts stops short of restoring Jane to pre-wedding day health, her decisive action with the phone wire is the cue for him to start wrapping things up.  In a conversation between them near the end, Alice says it’s hard work being normal (though Alice Lowe’s likeable, refreshing normality is, for the audience, anything but) while Jane admits she enjoys the ‘power’ of being the way she is.  You could easily miss that last remark, probably the most interesting in the script.  Potentially interesting, that is:  its implications haven’t been explored.  According to Sight & Sound (October 2020), Eternal Beauty was inspired by Craig Roberts’s schizophrenic aunt.  Despite that personal connection, her nephew is preoccupied here with using psychological disturbance as a means to the end of stylish strangeness.

    21 September 2020

  • La haine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mathieu Kassovitz (1995)

    La haine was first released in France on the last day of May in 1995.  BFI gave Mathieu Kassovitz’s famous film extensive twenty-fifth anniversary coverage in the May 2020 issue of Sight & Sound, with the three lead actors on the front cover and pieces inside about La haine‘s instant impact and lasting influence – the latter evident in the latest high-visibility drama of strife in the Paris banlieues, Ladj Ly’s Les misérables.  (This review may well exaggerate their kinship but I watched Les misérables ten days before seeing La haine for the first time:  a compare-and-contrast approach is hard to resist.)  In Ly’s film, a seminal act of police violence occurs on screen.  In Kassovitz’s, it has taken place before the action begins.  Abdel Ichacha, a teenager from a North African immigrant family, is in a coma, following a police beating; the incident has provoked serious unrest in the Chanteloup-les-Vignes commune.  Les misérables’s timeframe is no more than two days and La haine’s even more compressed – twenty hours.  The screen repeatedly indicates the time, to the minute.

    Whereas Ly’s main focus is on three police officers, Kassovitz’s is on three friends of Abdel.  Like him, these are residents of the Muguet housing projects.  Each is from a different ethnic group:  Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is Jewish, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is a North African Muslim, Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is Afro-French.  The last-named, a small-time drug dealer, is also a boxer, or was until the gym where he trains burned down in the recent riots.  Kassovitz follows them through the day and into the evening, when they take a train into central Paris.  By that stage, they’ve already had a couple of run-ins with the police, who break up a roof-top gathering and prevent Vinz, Saïd and Hubert from visiting Abdel in hospital.  Some of the threesome’s behaviour in between is aimless, unlike Kassovitz’s narrative.  Early on, Vinz vows to take revenge on the police if Abdel dies.  It soon emerges that, following a recent disturbance at the local police station, an officer lost his gun and that Vinz is now in possession of the weapon.  The destination of the story is pretty clear.

    How Kassovitz reaches that destination is less obvious.  He takes you by surprise both in his shocking presentation of racially motivated police brutality and through a series of encounters in central Paris that are variously disorienting for the principals.  Saïd’s amiably racist remarks to Hubert – when the latter declines his offer of chocolate, Saïd says, ‘Of course, you’re chocolate already’ – are startling enough.  They’re nothing beside the physical and verbal abuse meted out to the pair of them when they’re apprehended by plain clothes cops.  While the youngsters are in a public toilet, a diminutive old man (Tadek Lokcinski) emerges from a cubicle to recall being part of a consignment of Gulag prisoners, one of whom refused to defecate in front of others and froze to death as a result.  The trio then visits the sleek apartment of Astérix (François Levantal), a drug addict who owes Saïd money.  They leave with the debt unpaid and with Vinz rattled and humiliated:  hophead Astérix forces him to play Russian roulette before revealing that the gun had been unloaded.  Having missed their last Metro train home, the friends make a sex-pest nuisance of themselves when they gatecrash a late-night gathering in an art gallery.  They then try to hotwire a parked car and are interrupted in the act by a middle-aged drunk who tells them his wife has left him (small as the part is, Vincent Lindon makes a strong impression).

    This last encounter is the prelude to La haine’s violent climax.  Vinz, Saïd and Hubert spend the night in a shopping mall, where they learn from a news report on a giant TV screen that Abdel Ichacha is dead.  In a fight with a group of skinheads, Saïd and Hubert are coming off much the worse until Vinz and his .44 magnum intervene.  Vinz captures one of the skinheads (played by Mathieu Kassovitz), intending to kill him.  A combination of lack of nerve and Hubert dissuade him.  Early next morning, the three arrive back in Chanteloup-les-Vignes and bump into the police officer who was mocked by Vinz in a set-to the previous day.  By now, Vinz has handed his firearm to Hubert.  When the irate cop grabs Vinz and tauntingly holds a gun to his head, Hubert rushes in; the startled policeman lets his gun go off, killing Vinz instantly.  It was 06:00 when the friends emerged from the local station; the screen now shows 06:01.  Hubert and the officer point guns at each other.  Saïd can’t bear to watch and closes his eyes.  As the screen goes black, a single shot is heard.  La haine ends without an indication of whose weapon fired it.

    When he wrote and directed this film, at the age of twenty-seven, Mathieu Kassovitz was already a well-known actor:  earlier in 1995, he’d won the César for Most Promising Actor for Jacques Audiard’s See How They Fall.  Kassovitz is probably still thought of primarily as the author of La haine but none of the films he’s directed subsequently has made much impression, outside France anyway.  (The most recent, Rebellion, was nearly a decade ago, during which time he’s continued to do plenty of acting.)  It’s easy to say with hindsight but I don’t find it surprising that Kassovitz hasn’t come close to repeating this success, even allowing that La haine set the bar high.  The film is remarkable to look at – not only distinctive for its time because it’s in black and white but also full of unexpected perspectives:  nearly every shot is spectacular.  (The DP was Pierre Aïm.)  There are downsides to both things, though.  The monochrome that seems appropriate to the starkness of Kassovitz’s subject matter has an oddly hygienic quality[1].  The unrelenting high-impact images chime with the narrative’s remorselessness but they also turn La haine into a kind of show – albeit an extraordinary show.

    This effect is reinforced by the film’s dominant performance, from Vincent Cassel.  It’s no surprise that, of the three leads here, he went on to by far the most successful acting career.  Cassel has repeatedly demonstrated over the years that he’s an actor who thrives on energy (when he’s quiet, he’s hardly there at all); that trait is very much in evidence in this early role.   In one of the film’s most famous moments, Vinz stands at a bathroom mirror, doing his take on Taxi Driver‘s ‘You talkin’ to me?’ episode.  He isn’t actually holding a gun but mimes doing so, aiming at his reflection in the mirror.  Vinz’s version of Travis Bickle, powerful as it is, somehow encapsulates Cassel’s virtuoso playing of Vinz.  He’s exceptionally dynamic but on top of the character rather than inside it.  You never look at him and feel this really is a deprived youngster from the banlieues.

    The leaves-you-guessing confrontation that ends Les misérables looks like another debt to La haine.  So too, perhaps, is the high-minded Victor Hugo quote that appears on the screen at the close of Ladj Ly’s film – though La haine takes a rather different route to sententiousness.  At the very start, Hubert’s voiceover tells a joke:  ‘Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper?  On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself, “So far so good… so far so good”.  How you fall doesn’t matter.  It’s how you land!’  Hubert repeats the joke during the film.  During the final stand-off between him and the police officer, the voiceover returns, adjusting the words of the joke to deliver the moral of Kassovitz’s story:  ‘It’s about a society on its way down and, as it falls, it keeps telling itself …’  etc etc.

    At the beginning of the same month that ended with the release of La haine, Jacques Chirac became President of France.  His new Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, ‘commissioned a special screening of the film for the cabinet, which ministers were required to attend’ (Wikipedia).  Twenty-four years later, Emmanuel Macron, on seeing Les misérables, asked his‘government to find ideas and act to improve living conditions in the banlieues’ (also Wikipedia).  Macron’s reaction alone serves as compelling evidence of the continuing urgency of the sociopolitical issues that Mathieu Kassovitz’s succès de scandale raised.  Its legacy among cineastes, however, has a rather different feel.  When a film’s reputation has endured like this one’s has, people can get sentimental about it, despite the content.  I know the feeling:  I was a bit appalled when I settled down to watch A Clockwork Orange at BFI a couple of years ago in a nostalgic frame of mind, recalling the excitement of seeing it for the first time, as a teenager.   Kubrick’s film was still strong enough to bring me to my senses but that doesn’t seem to have happened to Mark Kermode, on his latest viewing of La haine.  He concluded his BBC slot the other week by saying that, although the title translates as ‘hate’, La haine left him thinking it was, rather, ‘about love’.   It’s true that Vinz, Saïd and Hubert have a desperate camaraderie.  But Kermode is superimposing his feelings about the film – as a piece of film-making that has stood the test of time – on the feelings that Mathieu Kassovitz means La haine to express.

    17 September 2020

    [1] I didn’t know, until reading an online review by an American called Quinton Bailey (https://tinyurl.com/y5n4uhqv), that La haine was ‘[f]ilmed in color but published entirely in black and white due to budget restrictions’.  Could this help to explain the resulting visuals’ lack of texture?

     

     

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