Old Yorker

  • After the Rehearsal

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Efter repetitionen

    Ingmar Bergman (1984)

    After the Rehearsal, conceived and first broadcast as a television film, was also shown out of competition at Cannes in 1984 and received a limited release in American cinemas.  Although Bergman, in Images: My Life in Film, remembered the shooting as ‘completely joyless’, this is, for the most part, one of his most satisfying late pieces.  Its subject is working and living in theatre.  The action takes place on a single set, a theatre stage.   In spite of this – and unlike The Rite (1969), which feels like an awkwardly adapted stage play or a badly reduced cinema film – After the Rehearsal is well suited to the medium for which it was designed.

    The title is slightly misleading.  The seventy-three minutes of screen time are more or less real time, between afternoon and evening rehearsals, for a production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which Henrik Vogler (Erland Josephson), an elder statesman of Swedish theatre, is directing.  The first and last thirds of After the Rehearsal comprise confrontation between Vogler and the young actress Anna Egerman (Lena Olin) who is playing Agnes, the main role in A Dream Play.   In the middle third, Vogler remembers an encounter on the same stage with Anna’s late mother Rakel (Ingrid Thulin), a former mistress of his – and whom Anna remembers with hatred.  In the declining years of her theatrical career, Rakel came to beg Vogler for a last big role.  Connections between the characters and the creator and interpreters of After the Rehearsal go beyond the autobiographical similarities of the protagonist and Bergman, and the several references in the script to Vogler’s earlier productions of Strindberg, Molière et al.  Erland Josephson was not only one of Bergman’s oldest friends and a regular collaborator but also, in the mid-1960s, succeeded him as head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.   Lena Olin’s father Stig had major roles in early Bergman films, including Crisis (1946) and To Joy (1950).

    Anna returns to the theatre, interrupting Vogler’s late afternoon nap and reflections, to find a bracelet she mislaid during the rehearsal.  Vogler’s voiceover informs us that he can see through this feeble pretext for a tête à tête.  He also tells us that what he says to Anna won’t be what he’s really thinking and feeling.  The idea of theatre creatures performing offstage as well as onstage, though hardly original, is pleasingly worked out in After the Rehearsal.   We soon get an idea that Vogler does mean some of what he says – or, at least, may not be sure what is and isn’t pretence.   His affectionate self-deprecation also now has a nostalgic appeal broader than Bergman’s personal feelings at the time.  In an age when, in the film world at least, it’s de rigueur for its leading lights to adopt and articulate political causes, it’s refreshing to hear Vogler assert that childishness is an essential part of the theatrical psyche:  he expresses amazement ‘that people take us seriously’.  At the same time, a speech in which Vogler describes his love of actors is one that rings true.  After the Rehearsal isn’t as jolly as these examples might suggest but the tensions between Vogler and Anna, which dominate their conversation, don’t have the lowering effect that personal disagreements sometimes have in later Bergman.  However much playacting may be going on, the tensions seem organic to the material rather than imposed on it.  Also, Bergman sees the funny, bellyaching side to egocentric turmoil.

    According to Bergman, Erland Josephson wasn’t at his best during shooting – overworked and struggling to remember lines.  You’d never guess it:  Josephson is, of course, a fine actor.  Vogler can be roused to anger, is capable of the martinet impatience of the clear-minded, and worries about getting old and losing his faculties.  Yet there’s an essential benignity and considerable mellowness to the man that Josephson, bright-eyed and ageing handsomely, creates.  (He has an occasional resemblance to Paul Scofield.)   It’s hardly surprising, in retrospect, that Lena OIin went on to work successfully in Hollywood for some years though her presence and, especially, her vocal depth and range are more striking here than in her subsequent roles in English language films.   On a couple of occasions, Vogler asks Anna to run through some of Agnes’s lines in A Dream Play:  Olin’s differentiation between playing Anna and Anna playing Agnes is delicately precise.  Vogler’s reverie on Rakel – a different kind of dream play – ups the histrionic ante of After the Rehearsal.   My impression is that Bergman wrote more admiringly about Ingrid Thulin than about almost any of his other major players.  She is technically brilliant and her face magnetises the camera (which, as usual, has Sven Nykvist behind it) but Thulin isn’t one of my favourites in the Bergman repertory company.  What I think of as her screen trademarks – simultaneous laughter and tears, with exceptional sniffling (see Winter Light); unexpectedly undressing (Bergman’s idea, presumably) – are again in evidence in After the Rehearsal and threaten to overwhelm the character she’s playing.  I was relieved when Rakel left Vogler’s mind and the stage.

    There are brief appearances by Anna (Nadja Palmstjerna-Weiss) and Vogler (Bertil Guve, who was Alexander in Fanny and Alexander) as children.  There is no music, not even the sound of church bells, which Anna mentions shortly before taking her leave, and which supplies the film’s closing line.  In Images, Bergman says that he envisaged ‘a bit of black comedy with dialogue in harsh yet comedic language’.  Although, with the passage of time, he finds the film ‘much better than I had remembered’, he still thinks it ‘lacklustre, with none of the vitality of the original screenplay’.   This viewer found After the Rehearsal a genuine black comedy and Vogler’s last line is a good illustration of its verbal style.  After the arguments, soul-baring and Anna’s unsmiling exit, Vogler’s voiceover makes a self-preoccupied admission:  ‘What worried me at that moment was actually that I didn’t hear the bells’.

    7 March 2018

  • Red Sparrow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Lawrence (2018)

    In Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence is Dominika Egorova – a Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, then a secret agent.  As well as being a huge star, Lawrence is a fine actress but the suspension of disbelief these premises require is colossal.  For a brief while, early in this long (140-minute) film, her miscasting is slightly amusing.  Before long, Lawrence’s glazed look and toneless voice (the effort of maintaining a not good Russian accent seems to have drained her of energy) leave the viewer’s face as glum as hers is.  About halfway through Francis Lawrence’s spy thriller, she changes her hairdo and hair colour.  The effect is to complete her petrification.

    The short-lived amusement at the start connects to Lawrence’s innate charm and sense of fun.  You don’t believe she can take this neo-Cold War tripe seriously (the way that a humourless, more self-regarding actress like Natalie Portman might have seemed to do).  You keep expecting Lawrence to drop the daft voice and burst out laughing.  Even though she doesn’t, there are comical elements in Red Sparrow, chiefly an abundance of clunky lines in Justin Haythe’s screenplay (adapted from a 2013 novel by Jason Matthews) and the aplomb with which they’re delivered.  ‘The Cold War did not end – it shattered into a thousand dangerous pieces’ is a good example.  This is spoken by Charlotte Rampling, ‘matron’ of ‘State School 4’, where Dominika Egorova is sent to train, with other young patriots, to become intelligence operatives.  The resulting cadre of ‘sparrows’, as they’re called, have been schooled to seduce targets through a combination of brains and beauty.  (Dominika is the star pupil in both departments.)

    I smiled non-stop through Charlotte Rampling’s first few minutes on screen, though I stopped once the aspiring sparrows’ ‘psychological training’, which involves a good deal of physical humiliation, was properly underway.  In general, the British actors playing officers in the SVR (effective successor to the KGB) approach their roles – and accents – with a calm, camp confidence that eludes Lawrence.  They include Ciarán Hinds, Jeremy Irons and Douglas Hodge:  the last-named – especially when his character makes an off-colour joke to Dominika and gives a dirty laugh – even suggests a possible human being.  The main American is actually Australian:  Joel Edgerton is the maverick CIA agent Nate Nash, whom Dominika is assigned to ensnare and with whom she falls in love (as he does with her).  Hard to say quite where Matthias Schoenaerts, another high-ranking SVR operative and Dominika’s creepy uncle, fits into this international scheme.  Along with Lawrence, Schoenaerts is the most conspicuously wasted actor in Red Sparrow but his appearance is striking.  He doesn’t just look convincingly Russian; he would be physically well cast as the young Vladimir Putin.

    Perhaps Hollywood, as much as large sections of the press and political establishments of Russia and the West, is partly relieved that Cold War hostilities are once again a growth industry.  Red Sparrow seems antique in the sense that the heroine’s career path – ballet and espionage – reflects what Soviets used to be best known for.  (The ballet side of things has been eclipsed by cheating at international sport – probably, in fact, another longstanding Russian tradition but it has a different profile now.)  The bad dialogue, the regulation who’s-double-crossing-who arrangements, the fur hats, the moles and agents being ‘turned’ are all reassuringly familiar – the story is set in the present but it’s like stepping back in time.  The film’s graphic violence is more de nos jours.  There may even be those who’ll regard the torturing of the female lead, as well as the male one, as evidence of equal screen rights in action.  Yet these modern elements are no less mechanical and phony than the traditional ones.  The same goes for James Newton Howard’s dim suspenseful music.

    A friend of mine who liked Winter’s Bone (2010) lamented a few years later that Jennifer Lawrence was being cast in ‘mainstream crap’.  As someone who didn’t much like Winter’s Bone or Lawrence in it, I disagreed.  I thought she was great in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013) and good against the odds in Joy (2015).  My friend probably had The Hunger Games films chiefly in mind though Lawrence was impressive too in the only one of those that I saw (the first one).  You have to draw the mainstream crap line somewhere, though, and Red Sparrow is well beyond it.

    8 March 2018

Posts navigation