Old Yorker

  • Rules Don’t Apply

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Warren Beatty (2016)

    Warren Beatty has experienced some unhappy evenings at the Academy Awards.   In 1968, Bonnie and Clyde won fewer awards than it deserved (two from ten nominations).  Heaven Can Wait fared no better in 1979 (one award from nine nominations).  More recently, Beatty’s wife Annette Bening should have been Best Actress for American Beauty (and maybe The Kids Are All Right too) but left the ceremony empty-handed.  Beatty has received the honorary Irving Thalberg award from AMPAS and a competitive Oscar for directing Reds.  Even so, the latter was another film that ended up with a smaller haul than expected (three awards from twelve nominations):  in one of the Academy’s gaga moments, Reds lost out to Chariots of Fire for Best Picture.  That surprise ending to the 1982 Oscars show doesn’t begin to compare, of course, with 2017’s cock-up climax – as a result of which Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway will, unfortunately, be linked forever not just with Bonnie and Clyde but also with Envelopegate.

    Beatty’s latest was never going to be an awards contender although it too is set in La La Land.  At ninety minutes (or less), Rules Don’t Apply might have been a slight but amusing tale of Hollywood:  with a running time of more than two hours, it comes across as listless and self-indulgent – and its commercial failure is unsurprising.  (The picture cost around $25m and, several months after its release in North America, has taken less than $4m.)  Beatty plays Howard Hughes and the experience of watching the movie suggests a couple of parallels between the two men.  Beatty isn’t on screen for the first half-hour or so:  the delay not only reflects Hughes’s notorious reclusiveness but is meant to make the wait for Beatty tantalising.  The film repeatedly illustrates the chasm between Hughes’s power and status, and his egocentric eccentricity.   Wanted on the phone by the Eisenhower White House, Hughes is too busy to take the call:  he’s preoccupied with commanding his flunkies to bulk-buy a particular flavour of ice cream for him.  You feel Warren Beatty must also be a hard man to whom to say no.  How else did he enlist the assistance of so many talented people in the folly of Rules Don’t Apply?

    This is a made-up story with a mixture of real and invented characters though that hardly matters:  Howard Hughes is such a mythical figure that the boundary between fact and fiction in his biography is exceedingly porous.  (Beatty puts on the screen, as an epigraph, one of Hughes’s best-known quotes: ‘Never check an interesting fact’.)  The film opens and closes in 1964; most of the action consists of an intervening flashback, five years earlier.  Beatty’s scene-setting is pleasant and witty but Rules Don’t Apply takes ages to develop a narrative groove, even though it’s soon clear who, in addition to Hughes, will be the main characters.  Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) works as a driver on Hughes’s staff; Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) is an aspiring actress newly arrived in Hollywood, chaperoned by her eagle-eyed mother Lucy (Annette Bening).  Marla is under contract with RKO; she and Lucy live in accommodation paid for by Hughes; Frank is their chauffeur.   What the two youngsters have in common, as well as liking the look of each other, is an increasing frustration that they don’t get to meet their boss.  But the persisting anticipatory atmosphere of the film is more a consequence of Beatty’s storytelling than of his/Hughes’s non-appearance:  successive short scenes build up in number but not in interest.  The vitality level dips further when Lucy Mabrey returns home to Virginia and Annette Bening departs the scene.

    Once the leading man eventually enters it, the effect is anti-climactic and no more than mildly entertaining.  Howard Hughes was only in his mid- to late fifties in the years in question; Warren Beatty is a good twenty years older.  (He turned eighty last month, although the film was actually shot in 2014 and early 2015.)  Yet he often seems like a middle-aged actor doing a geriatric character – complete with little wheezing noises and private chuckles.  His portrait of Hughes is sympathetic, perhaps sentimental and rather bland, except for a few expressive shots of his eyes.  His dilapidation is cosmetic:  Beatty’s Hughes could never have turned into the tramp-like figure incarnated by Jason Robards in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980).  (Bo Goldman, who wrote that fine movie, shares a story credit with Beatty for Rules Don’t Apply; Beatty has sole credit for the screenplay.)

    It’s an irony of the film – one that I find it hard to think intentional – that the two young leads are more impressive than the elder statesman.  Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich, deft and charming to begin with, are even better as they describe Marla’s and Frank’s maturation, which has both comical and saddening aspects.  At the start, their sex appeal and feelings for one another compete with religious scruples – Marla is a Baptist, Frank a Methodist.  Growing up and away from religion is part of their loss of innocence.  As Marla finds herself pregnant with Hughes’s child, Lily Collins loses her bloom.  Frank becomes an established member of the Hughes team:  the disillusion of company man life puts years and weight on Alden Ehrenreich.  It’s a relief that the story ends happily for Marla and Frank, who escape from Tinseltown together (with Marla’s little boy, sired by Hughes), even though this feels more willed by Warren Beatty than convincing.

    The amazing collection of people in the cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Oliver Platt, Paul Schneider, Martin Sheen and Paul Sorvino.  (Steve Coogan too but I’m anxious to put distance between him and the ‘amazing collection’ umbrella.)  Some of these actors appear for only a few seconds; it’s a bonus that Matthew Broderick, as one of Hughes’s longest-standing factotums, has much more screen time and the opportunity to demonstrate his genius for embodying discomfort and defeat.  For someone of my film-going age, there’s nostalgia in seeing these old faces again (and several of them really are now old) – nostalgia too in the list of credits of people behind the camera:  the cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel, the costume designer is Albert Wolsky, and the film looks lovely.  For these reasons, it’s hard not to feel kindly towards Rules Don’t Apply, even though it amounts to so little.  Apart from the original title song, the music mostly comprises variously humorous hit singles of the late 1950s and early 1960s (‘Rockin’ Robin’, ‘Take Two’).  When Mahler arrives on the soundtrack – with what I still think of as the Death in Venice music – Warren Beatty seems to be announcing, rather too obviously, that he has serious things to say about age and youth.  Coming out of Rules Don’t Apply, I was still in the dark as to what those things were.

    21 April 2017

  • The Handmaiden

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ah-ga-ssi

    Park Chan-wook (2016)

    Pornographic writings are a significant element in the plot and it would be hard to argue that pornographic images aren’t also a major feature of The Handmaiden.  By making some of these images seductive, Park Chan-wook implicates and disarms the viewer.  The momentum of this brilliant piece of film-making is so great that, while you’re watching, it’s irresistible.  The Handmaiden is ‘inspired by’ Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, with the setting changed from Victorian England to 1930s Korea, during the Japanese occupation of the country.   In spite of the cultural shift, the screenplay by Park and Chung Seo-kyung is – especially in the first of the three parts which both novel and film comprise – largely faithful to Waters’s storyline.  The Handmaiden’s four main characters correspond to the principals in Fingersmith – a young female pickpocket, an orphaned heiress, the uncle in whose house the heiress was raised and still lives, and a conman.  The class distinctions in the novel are amplified in the film by national differences.  The ‘fingersmith’ Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and the conman, the self-styled Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), are low born and Korean.  The heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Hin-mee) and her uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong) are Japanese – as Fujiwara pretends to be.  (All four actors are actually South Korean.  As explained at the start of The Handmaiden, the colouring of the English subtitles distinguishes the Japanese from the Korean dialogue.)

    Posing as a gentleman, Fujiwara plans to marry the heiress.  He will then, as he explains to Sook-hee, commit Hideko to a madhouse so that he can claim her fortune for himself.  He recruits Sook-hee to work as Hideko’s maid, in order to help win her trust.   His plan comes to fruition but not in the way that Sook-hee initially expects.   The heiress and the count, with Sook-hee accompanying them, elope, marry and cash in Hideko’s money.  When the threesome arrive at the mental asylum, however, Fujiwara identifies the maid as his deranged wife, and Sook-hee is committed to the asylum.  The duplicity at the heart of this first part of the story recurs and builds in what follows – this includes Park’s hoodwinking the viewer as well as deceptions between the main characters.   We know from the first part that, during the conman’s courtship of the heiress, she and her maid have become lovers.  The second part moves retrospectively through Hideko’s girlhood and her uncle’s abusive treatment of her and her aunt; through the arrival in Hideko’s life of Fujiwara and then Sook-hee; to the later events of the first part, now shown from Hideko’s point of view.  Park Chan-wook doesn’t reveal until late on in this second part that the two women exchanged confidences before the marriage took place – both thus became aware of Fujiwara’s schemes, and of each other’s involvement in them.  This prepares the ground for the expanding, accelerating trickery and revenge of the film’s third and final part, which ends in the death of the male protagonists and the heroines’ escape to a new life together in Shanghai.

    The sensual detail of The Handmaiden is rich and beguiling:  the textures and movement  of  costumes, including their buttons and other fastenings; doors that slide open and closed, suggesting subtly and strongly a world of secrets and subterfuge; tiny but memorable sounds like the slight crackle of a cigarette paper as Fujiwara inhales.  Cho Young-wuk’s gorgeous, exciting score, combining voluptuous warmth with dramatic heft, perfectly supports the narrative.  The actors are impressive, Ha Jung-woo especially so.  The conman is businesslike and inhabits his pretended identity with suave aplomb; Ha hints too at a cynical resignation on the part of ‘the Count’ that, as a fellow of humble origins, he’s bound to pay eventually for his fraudulent self-advancement.  Kim Tae-ri and Kim Hin-mee capture very effectively the temperamental differences and the growing spiritual kinship of the handmaiden and her mistress.  As Kouzuki, Cho Jin-woong has a more stylised theatricality than the others but he’s highly entertaining.

    When Sook-hee first comes to Kouzuki’s home, the housekeeper (Kim Hae-sook) describes her master to the newcomer as one of the richest and most cultured men in Japan.  The latter part of his reputation is thanks to his library.  This turns out to be an enormous collection of antiquarian erotica, readings from which – by Hideko’s aunt (Moon So-ri) then, after her suicide, by Hideko herself – Kouzuki regularly offers to his male guests as arousing entertainment.  Park Chan-wook physicalises the pornographic literature in various remarkable ways.  A sequence that sees Hideko and Sook-hee trash the library – defacing the books then, for good measure, submerging them in water – is doubly euphoric:  we feel the young women’s gleeful abandon and our own delight at Park’s cinematic brio.  (At the same time, there’s an inherent shock effect in seeing the destruction of a library, even a malignant one.)  In their final encounter, when he tortures Fujiwara, Kouzuki’s instruments of choice are his prized collection of antique bookmaking tools.

    Most English-language critics have admired The Handmaiden.  Dissenting voices have expressed concern at Park Chan-wook’s ‘objectification’ of women and what MaryAnn Johanson on Flick Filosopher terms ‘The male-gazey soft-core porn that undermines the female protagonists’.  (I’ve quoted Johanson because her choice of words is striking though complaints about The Handmaiden have been made by male reviewers too.)  The sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko call to mind the duration and explicitness of the lesbian love sequences in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), which attracted similar censure.  One difference between the films is that both female leads in Blue is the Warmest Colour publicly charged the director Abdellatif Kechiche with making them go too far; as far as I know, Park’s actresses haven’t done the same.  But this critical line raises interesting questions about the presentation on screen of sex between women (and of naked bodies more generally).  If a woman had made The Handmaiden, would the sex sequences be less objectionable?  Or do the critics concerned believe that no female behind the camera would have created the sequences that Park has created?  How is the ‘male-gazey’ issue modified if the male gazer at naked women is homosexual?  The bedroom scenes in Carol are so relatively brief and discreet that that film may not be a useful comparator – but is it supposed that Todd Haynes was bound to be more discreet because he’s gay?

    Fujiwara is unclothed in the scene in which he’s tortured by Kouzuki.  It’s true that his nakedness isn’t fully exposed but, if The Handmaiden had a female director, would she in this sequence have been guilty of ‘objectifying’ the male character/actor concerned?  Or does ‘objectification’ occur only when the naked bodies appear to be having sex?  I can’t answer any of these questions – but I can’t help thinking that Park Chan-wook’s established reputation for stylish brutality has influenced some of the negative critical reactions.  As someone who’d seen only Stoker from among his earlier work, I came to The Handmaiden from a very different angle:  Stoker was remarkable partly because the whole film was drenched with sexual feelings but there was no bare flesh in evidence.  For what it’s worth, the sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko seemed to me to convey primarily, sometimes humorously, the pair’s intense delight in their lovemaking.  Sarah Waters, in a recent interview in the Guardian, had this to say about The Handmaiden:

    ‘Though ironically the film is a story told by a man, it’s still very faithful to the idea that the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires.’

    19 April 2017

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