Old Yorker

  • Funeral Games (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    James Ormerod (1968)

    ‘I think the Christian religion is a terrible mistake.  In the beginning at the time of the Roman Empire, it had meaning because Christians were probably rebels against a dreary, boring Establishment.’

    This was Joe Orton in an interview (with Barry Hanson) which formed part of the programme notes for the Royal Court productions of The Erpingham Camp and The Ruffian on the Stair in June 1967.  Orton’s remarks are at least as relevant to his television play Funeral Games, originally designed for the ‘charity’ episode of the Seven Deadly Virtues Rediffusion series that included The Good and Faithful Servant.  In the event,  Funeral Games was made for Yorkshire Television and screened, like Entertaining Mr Sloane, in the ITV Playhouse slot in 1968.  Although British churchgoing was already in decline, the Church in the 1960s was still a prime example of the ‘dreary, boring Establishment’ that was, in its various manifestations, anathema to Orton.  The decline has become much steeper since:  in 1964, 74% of those taking part in the British Social Attitudes survey ‘belong[ed] to a religion and attended services’; the corresponding figures in 1983 and 2005 were 55% and 31% respectively.  Religiophobia is in better shape:  there’s still a sizeable audience always ready to relish the ridiculing of organised religion, even in its infirmity.  But Funeral Games is so predominantly a lampoon of pious pretensions and hypocrisies – tabloid journalism and the public appetite for it are a distant second – that it now seems dated in a way that his other plays are not.

    There are other weaknesses.  John Lahr accurately describes the play as transitional between Loot and What the Butler Saw.  (The several resonances between Loot and Funeral Games include macabre hiding places and/or contents thereof – money in the coffin in Loot, a human hand in a cake tin in Funeral Games.)  Orton tried in Funeral Games, writes Lahr in Prick Up Your Ears, ‘to solidify the stylistic advances of language and logic in Loot … [and] to rev up his plotting to create the sharp, brief juxtapositions which the grotesque requires’.  This only partly succeeds.  Lahr is right that the ending of Funeral Games ‘fizzles out, with Orton unable to bring off in imagery the dizzying confusions and final resolution that, a few months later in What the Butler Saw, he would accomplish with such aplomb’.  Funeral Games lacks the farcical momentum of both Loot and What the Butler Saw and what are verbal highlights on the page don’t have the same impact when they’re spoken:

    [Tessa lifts out a small framed painting and holds it up.] …

    McCorquodale: It was my intention to represent – in a symbolic fashion – the Christian church.

    Tessa:  A bird of prey carrying an olive branch.  You’ve put the matter in a nutshell.

    James Ormerod, by now very experienced in directing Orton for television, ensures his actors play things straight but only Bill Fraser, as the defrocked priest McCorquodale, comes through strongly.  Michael Denison’s religious charlatan Pringle is amusingly sonorous but Denison is self-consciously straight-faced.  As the shady Caulfield, hired by Pringle to spy on Tessa (Pringle’s wife and McCorquodale’s health visitor), Ian McShane has a good sexual ambiguity but not much vocal dexterity.  A more surprising disappointment is Vivien Merchant’s Tessa.  Merchant mostly incants her lines, which results in some very odd emphases.

    In Accident and the film of The Homecoming, Vivien Merchant proved herself a superb interpreter of the work of her husband Harold Pinter, who seems to have been the only contemporary playwright Joe Orton admired.  The radio version of The Ruffian on the Stair ­– the first thing Orton sold, when the BBC accepted it in 1963 – was, in John Lahr’s words, ‘erected on the scaffold of [the] plots for The Room and The Birthday Party‘ and ‘embarrassingly derivative’.  Orton had rewritten The Ruffian on the Stair extensively by the time the Royal Court did it on stage, and this is the script used for the Yorkshire Television production directed by David Cunliffe.

    The framework and atmosphere of the play are too indebted to Pinter to shake him off entirely but The Ruffian on the Stair also foreshadows and mirrors a major Orton achievement – Entertaining Mr Sloane.  In Ruffian, it’s Wilson, the young visitor looking for a room, who is the injured – eventually, the fatally injured – party.   Whereas Sloane wants to escape punishment for homicide, Wilson is looking to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of another character.   Kath in Sloane and Joyce in Ruffian are both childless:  the former shows a babyish mother-love for a garden gnome; the latter is sentimentally attached to her goldfish.  While Mike and Joyce share a bed rather than blood ties, Mike also shares, with Ed in Sloane, a dubious professional life outside the home and a furious conviction that women spoil things for (and between) men.  The now-dead, idealised young man in the scheme of Sloane – who was Ed’s best mate and Kath’s short-lived husband – is, in Ruffian, Wilson’s slain elder sibling:  Wilson’s admiration for him reads as an expression of homosexual rather than brotherly love.   In both Ruffian and Sloane, the relationship of the surviving characters at the end of the play has the quality of a pathological refuge.

    A striking feature of the 1973 TV version is that it already defines The Ruffian on the Stair as a period piece.  A legend on the screen at the start indicates 1963.  There are early Beatles hits and Billy J Kramer’s version of ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ on the soundtrack, mostly coming from Wilson’s portable radio.  Billy Hamon’s Wilson is a serious weakness.  Right from the first shot of him on the staircase before he rings on Joyce’s door, Hamon is posing for the camera.  His characterisation is one-note – weakly thuggish – and he never gets the hang of the lines.  In a three-character play, it’s obviously bad news if you feel the piece is treading water whenever one of them is speaking.  All the more fortunate, then, that Michael Bryant and Judy Cornwell are excellent.  Cornwell is touchingly vulnerable as the used and abused Joyce.  Bryant’s Mike is a brutal spiv misogynist.  Both these characters are, in their different ways, hard to take.  Joe Orton’s phenomenal verbal flair and the actors’ craft and wit make them harder not to enjoy.

    20 August 2017

  • The Odyssey (2016)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’Odysée

    Jérôme Salle (2016)

    ‘The photography is breathtaking’ is the mantra of fans of natural world documentaries.  It’s always true but it’s rarely enough.  If it were enough, there’d be no need for anthropomorphic words and music to liven things up.  David Attenborough is obviously, as well as a national treasure, very brainy but I’ve always felt his jaunty commentaries provide essentially the same service as the voiceovers in the much-derided Disney nature films of yesteryear.  As a child, I quite enjoyed those – more, anyway, than I enjoyed The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau documentaries that the BBC showed in the late sixties and early seventies.  Maybe these were diminished on a black-and-white set but there was something too about Cousteau that I didn’t like:  he seemed autocratic and humourless.  Matias Boucard’s underwater photography in Jérôme Salle’s Cousteau biopic The Odyssey is often remarkable though, oddly enough, it’s an overground shot – of the tiny figures of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his son Philippe standing in a vast Antarctic icescape – that merits the word breathtaking.  The visuals, in this case, are definitely not enough, even though the wonders of nature include, in addition to marine flora and fauna, very good-looking lead actors (Lambert Wilson, Audrey Tautou, Pierre Niney).  The sounds of the ocean and of Alexandre Desplat’s agreeable score aren’t enough either.  The Odyssey achieves the unusual feat of being submarine, shallow and pedestrian.

    Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a wry take on Cousteau’s biography and myth, had as a central plot element the relationship between Steve Zissou and a young man claiming to be his son.  Jérôme Salle supplies the straight story of Cousteau’s relationships with his two boys.  For the most part, this reflects badly on Cousteau père and perhaps Salle feels he’s created a warts-and-all portrait but the narrative texture is too primitive to make it convincing as such.  For example, Cousteau, thanks largely to pressure from Philippe, becomes a belated convert to the environmentalist cause (earlier on, to show how far he has to travel in this direction, Salle shows a load of rubbish being tipped from Cousteau’s boat Calypso into the sea).  The conversion reconciles father and son.  A main cause of the bad blood between them has been Philippe’s disgusted belief that his father would do anything for fame and fortune.  You’re therefore bound to wonder if saving the planet appealed to Cousteau at least partly as a new means of getting attention and funding.  That wouldn’t, of course, invalidate his work as an eco-warrior but it would be consistent with the man the film has presented up to this point.  It would also make for complexity – Cousteau applying his self-centred drive to an altruistic project (more altruistic than his earlier passion for human colonisation of the undersea world).   Instead, Jérôme Salle and Laurent Turner, with whom Salle co-wrote The Odyssey, suddenly present Cousteau as a wholly reformed character, in readiness for the reverent on-screen legends at the end that pay tribute to his pioneering achievements in marine conservation etc.

    It’s as well that the protagonist’s line of work is visually distinctive because this film, as a sequence of events, is mostly biopic boilerplate.  Cousteau first enters the limelight at the premiere of one of his early films.  After the screening, his colleague Philippe Tailliez (Laurent Lucas), who had also worked with Cousteau on the development of the ‘aqua-lung’, is meant to give a speech.  Tailliez’s terrible stammer strikes him dumb and Cousteau steps in to rescue the situation and impress the large audience.  But why would Tailliez – in view of his impediment and since he doesn’t come across as a natural attention-seeker – be lined up for the speech in the first place?  Cousteau’s appetite for celebrity then makes him a distant father and a negligent husband – an adulterous one too, thanks to his appetite for women.  Philippe marries an American girl (Chloé Hirschman) and goes to live in the US, estranged from his parents:  it’s not clear why he and his father meet in an American diner other than to fulfil the generic requirement of a home-truths-telling showdown.  The death of Philippe, just when he and dad are starting to get on well, is a similarly obligatory cruel stroke of fate.  While Cousteau himself is abruptly transformed, other characters never change:  in the case of both Philippe and his elder brother Jean-Michel, the child is decidedly father to the man.  The film opens with the plane accident that kills Philippe – the craft he’s piloting crashes into the sea.  In the early parts of the flashback that follows (and which lasts for most of the film), the child Philippe (Ulysse Stein) is precociously intrepid and strong-willed – the polar opposite of cautious, uninteresting Jean-Michel (Rafaël de Ferran).  That’s how they stay.

    Casting Lambert Wilson as Cousteau makes the eleventh-hour conversion easier to accept, if only because this good actor hasn’t been very persuasive as a selfish bastard.  Wilson, with his weather-beaten face and aquiline profile, cuts an imposing figure but egomania doesn’t come easily to him – his Cousteau always seems a nice chap.  Pierre Niney holds the camera too but the role of Philippe is too thin to do much with and Niney does petulance better than righteous anger.  Benjamin Lavernhe has even less to work with as the well-meaning, risk-averse Jean-Michel.  The characterisation of Americans – from Philippe’s wife to the film and TV moneymen Cousteau does business with – is pathetically crude.  It’s a surprise of The Odyssey that Cousteau’s wife Simone (Audrey Tautou), whom her husband calls Loubi, becomes the most involving character.  You’d never predict this from the early stages, when she’s nothing more than a smiling, utterly supportive wife.  From the moment she discovers her husband’s been unfaithful, her face never cracks, she hits the bottle and starts playing solitaire – all the things you’d expect someone in her circumstances to do in a movie.   Things get more interesting when Cousteau is in deep financial trouble and Loubi, the sale of whose jewellery helped him to buy Calypso in the first place, says she doesn’t want him to sell the craft – that she wants to stay on it.  This is the film’s best dramatic moment:  not only has the boat become Loubi’s natural habitat; since she’s the only woman on board, it’s also the one place where she can be sure Cousteau isn’t playing away from home.  Audrey Tautou is excellent in suggesting a woman disappointed yet relieved by the half-a-loaf life into which she’s sunk.  In the end, I found this one of her most taking performances.  She turned forty last year:  she looks great but, for as long as her function in Jérôme Salle’s film seems purely decorative, you can’t help thinking of another screen Audrey whose gamine charm made her a star but whose best work was behind her by the time she was the age that Tautou is now.  The latter shows in The Odyssey her potential to take on more substantial roles.  I hope she gets the chance to do so.

    20 August 2017

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