Old Yorker

  • Breathe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andy Serkis (2017)

    Breathe purports to tell the true story of the life shared by Robin and Diana Cavendish.   In 1958, a year after their marriage, Robin was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and doctors gave him only three months to live.  He and his marriage to Diana survived for another thirty-six years.  Although paralysed from the neck downwards and able to breathe only through the help of a mechanical ventilator, Cavendish became an unflagging advocate for the physically disabled and played a significant role in the development of disability aids, especially for British responauts.  Andy Serkis had a deserved success playing the polio sufferer Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010) but Breathe, the first film that he’s directed, is weak.  The episodic narrative has no momentum.  The pace is unvarying.  Breathe is a motion picture going through the motions and I spent most of its two hours assuming that the underlying problem was Serkis’s inexperience behind the camera.  No doubt this does play a part but another possible explanation emerges at the very end.  Text on the screen summarises the afterlife of Diana Cavendish and of her and Robin’s only child, a son born just weeks after the onset of Robin’s polio.  Diana is still going strong today.  The news that Jonathan Cavendish grew up to be a film producer comes initially as a relief.  The film has portrayed Jonathan, even in his early twenties, as such a trembling wimp (Dean-Charles Chapman) that you’ve wondered fearfully what became of him.  But then we learn that Jonathan conceived and produced Breathe as ‘a ‘tribute to his parents’.  That may be a noble enterprise but it doesn’t guarantee a decent drama.  (Robin Cavendish’s life might have made for a stronger documentary).  Is it the producer’s strong personal engagement in the project that’s resulted in direction of such respectful, cautious dullness?

    The upper-middle-class scene-setting and the protagonists’ courtship at the start are perfunctory.    Period sports car, Robin (Andrew Garfield) at the wheel, whizzes down country lane en route to cricket match.  Robin hits a six, in the process smashing china teacups set out by the pavilion and spotting Diana (Claire Foy) among the spectators.  He’s warned that this English rose is a ‘heartbreaker’ but it’s love at first sight – they’re soon married and out in Keen-ya, where Robin works as a tea broker.  Breathe is marking time until illness strikes him down – what’s startling is that it gives the same impression once he’s contracted polio and the Cavendishes return to Britain.  In spite of the flatness of William Nicholson’s script, there were things I didn’t follow.  How does Robin’s grim initial prognosis improve?   If the answer is through his exceptional strength of will, there’s not much evidence of this – not, at least, until his friend, the scientist and inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), develops a wheelchair with a built-in respirator that means Robin isn’t permanently bedridden.  Diana is oppressed by the family’s parlous financial situation but only for a moment:  their lifestyle looks materially comfortable – enough, at least, for them to host, over the years, a succession of parties in the grounds of their home.  There’s a single mention of Robin’s successfully playing the stock market – is this how he and Diana continue to manage?   She has identical twin brothers (Tom Hollander), who share some early scenes together.  I can’t explain quite how but these seem artificial (compared with, say, the corresponding scenes in Legend).  Is this why, after a while, Andy Serkis features either one twin or the other (or perhaps the same one continuously) until a brief dual reappearance near the end?

    As Robin Cavendish embarks on his campaign to improve the lot of other disabled people, the film’s shallowness becomes seriously problematic.  It’s only to be expected that the medical establishment is instantly dismissed as unsympathetic and bureaucratic but the racial stereotyping is harder to swallow:  Germans are ice-hearted technocrats whereas Spaniards (as the Cavendishes’ holiday in their country reveals) are warm and life-loving.  Once Robin has delivered a rousing speech at an international disability conference, his campaigning work, as far as the film is concerned, is done.  Andy Serkis surprisingly decides to underlines the sketchiness of the story he’s telling by putting year dates up on the screen.  The speech in Germany is given in 1973; the narrative then jumps forward to 1981 and the events leading up to the euthanasia that Robin persuades his doctor and friend (bland Stephen Mangan) to administer.   It’s rather astonishing to learn that Robin Cavendish actually died in 1994.  Thirteen years have been docked from a life whose length defied expectations because they were, it seems, a narrative inconvenience in this ‘tribute’.

    Breathe naturally invites comparison with The Theory of Everything (2014) and the new film comes off badly.   Andy Serkis and William Nicholson do little to explore Robin’s feelings of remorse that his disability has imprisoned Diana as well as him.   (This comes up in only two exchanges between them, one of which is humorous.)  Robin is suicidally depressed in the first stages of his paralysis but, as he tells the disability conference in Germany, ‘I decided to live – my wife told me to’.  It really does seem to be as simple as that.  Although the character of Robin is much more broadly written than that of Stephen Hawking, Andrew Garfield’s charm and skill allow him to go some way to emulating Eddie Redmayne’s achievement in the able-bodied part of The Theory of Everything – creating a personality strong enough to give the viewer a continuing sense of what illness has taken away.   Garfield is much reduced in a role that doesn’t exploit his native eccentricity.  He doesn’t express much while silent as well as immobile but he finds a kind of eccentricity in Robin’s extreme poshness, which helps once he regains his voice.  Diana Cavendish’s selfless devotion to her husband, punctuated by occasional moments of anguish and exasperation, doesn’t give Claire Foy much to work with (Diana has nothing like the semi-independent life that Felicity Jones’s Jane Hawking built for herself).  However, Foy has perhaps the strongest moment in the film.  Her face is transformed as Diana takes in what a doctor tells her about Robin’s illness and she realises that her life isn’t going to be the mostly pleasurable and comfortable one she’d expected.  This facial transformation may not be realistic but it is dramatically powerful – and, as such, virtually unique in Breathe.   The protagonists are evidently courageous and admirable yet their son’s loving commemoration of them, sad to say, sells Robin and Diana Cavendish short.

    7 November 2017

  • Z

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Costa-Gavras (1969)

    Z establishes immediately its distinctive rhythm and tone.  The brisk opening titles sequence culminates in a knowingly unconventional assurance:  ‘Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is not coincidental.  It is intentional’.  Adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, the film has a plot inspired by the assassination in May 1963 of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis.  Its title refers to a slogan – meaning ‘he lives’ – that became popular among Lambrakis’s supporters following his murder at a rally in Salonika.  The Greek government at the time was conservative but Z’s chief satirical target is the regime in power when the film was in production.  Its tempo chimes with the disorienting speed of political change in Greece in the mid-1960s, culminating in the coup d’état of April 1967 – the year after the publication of Vassilikos’s novel – that brought to power the ‘Regime of the Colonels’.  Their military junta remained in charge until 1974.  The kinetic energy of Z – a motion picture if ever there was one – also reflects the angry urgency that drove the making of it.

    Costa-Gavras’s film was already famous and honoured by the time I began cinema-going in the early 1970s but I’d never caught up with Z until now.  It was an interesting coincidence to see it just a couple of weeks after The Death of Stalin.  Like Armando Iannucci’s film, Z switches between satiric ridicule and straight political drama but the combination of Costa-Gavras’s strength of feeling and definite, consistent visual style unifies the switches, and both aspects are effective.  From the start, the civilian members of the government are ludicrous, their military ‘advisers’ more alarmingly outrageous.  The former group listens to a comically dull slide-show lecture on agricultural policy before a security officer takes the floor, to deliver a high-octane address on the government’s programme to combat rising leftism.  Costa-Gavras yokes his political commitment and a commercial film-making instinct to brilliant effect:  Z is, as well as an eloquent polemic, a first-rate action thriller.  At the heart of the narrative is the investigation into the death of the Lambrakis figure, known as ‘the Deputy’, by an examining magistrate (based on the jurist Christos Sartzetakis, who went on to serve as President of Greece between 1985 and 1990).   The magistrate doesn’t capitulate, in spite of increasing pressure and threats from the powers-that-be.  The audience thus gets the satisfaction of seeing justice done – four senior military police officers, as well as the two right-wing extremist assassins, are indicted – before the film’s epilogue, which summarises the subsequent undoing of justice.  Finally, Costa-Gavras scrolls down the screen the long, long list of things banned by the Colonels – including pop music, avant-garde literature, philosophers ancient and modern, and ‘the use of the term “Z” ‘.

    Its exceptional speed makes Z at times borderline cartoonish but more often demanding – there’s a lot to take in both visually and verbally.  Things sometimes moved too quickly for this viewer to grasp what had happened though at least one instance of this is by design:  Costa-Gavras gradually reveals, in swift flashbacks, the details of the Deputy’s assassination.  Thanks to Françoise Bonnot’s crackerjack editing and Raoul Coutard’s dynamic cinematography, the film’s action still looks and feels modern, nearly half a century on:  the sequence in which the character played by Charles Denner desperately, resourcefully avoids a car that keeps trying to run him down is a fine illustration of this.  In comparison, a scene describing the grief of the Deputy’s widow (Irene Papas) now seems conventional.  The weakest element of Z is the characterisation of the Deputy – partly a result of admiring sympathy shading into sentimentality, partly a consequence of Yves Montand in the role.  Good actor as he was, Montand, a celebrity political progressive of the era, is too comfortably cast as the charismatic, courageous Lambrakis figure.  Montand had recently played a not dissimilar hero in Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966), also written by Jorge Semprún.

    Jean-Louis Trintignant is superb as the magistrate.  Remarkably anonymous in his early scenes, he gradually becomes the most magnetic, as well as morally the strongest, character of the story.  Trintignant’s poker face is a powerful instrument of suspense.  It keeps you wondering if the unsmilingness is mere professional correctness or a determined means of concealing inner thoughts – keeps you guessing too which way his judgment will go.   The film’s producer Jacques Perrin has a key role as an opportunistic photojournalist:  his tactics may be dubious but what he captures on camera helps substantiate the magistrate’s findings.  Z’s buoyant score perfectly epitomises its political currency and the engagement of the people who made it.  At the time the film appeared, Mikis Theodorakis, who composed the music, was under house arrest by order of the ruling junta.

    6 November 2017

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