Old Yorker

  • The Spanish Gardener

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philip Leacock (1956)

    Based on a novel by A J Cronin (with a screenplay by John Bryan and Lesley Storm), this British drama is limited yet the narrowness of its focus gives it a peculiar intensity.   Consular official Harrington Brande is personally and professionally embittered.  His wife left him and his diplomatic career has stalled – because, we’re led to believe, he’s such a prickly, chilly character.   Passed over for a senior appointment at the British embassy in Madrid, Brande is posted to San Jorge, Catalonia, accompanied by his young son Nicholas.  He’s pathologically possessive of the boy, insisting that Nicholas is physically delicate, refusing to let him go to school or have any contact with other children, or with his estranged mother back in Scotland.   The heart of the story is the growth of the lonely, sequestered child’s friendship with Jose, the young gardener at the Brande residence, and of the father’s terrible jealousy of the relationship.  The (melo)dramatic climax is precipitated by Garcia, Brande’s wily, boozing chauffeur-valet, who frames Jose for stealing Nicholas’s watch.  There are some striking long shots of single figures dwarfed by the empty, bleached landscapes in which they stand but Philip Leacock’s direction is mostly unimaginative and the film is structured as a series of reminders to Harrington Brande that he’s a cold fish or a stuffed shirt or is doing untold damage to his son.   Nicholas, Jose, the sympathetic family doctor, his boss at the embassy all have at least one go at him – Brande won’t or can’t budge until the closing stages (and once the father has experienced the necessary personality change the ending seems perfunctory).   Yet this structure – and the playing of the father and son – lends The Spanish Gardener an emotional insistence, even relentlessness.

    In the superficially thankless role of the control freak father, Michael Hordern seems a shade overemphatic at first but his finely empathetic performance is eventually impressive.  You’re left in no doubt either that Brande loves his son deeply or that his desperately forbidding personality makes it impossible for him to seem anything other than a desiccated ogre to most people and baffling and hurtful to the boy.  As Nicholas, the eleven-year-old Jon Whiteley is often touching – an effect increased by the discrepancy between his slightly wooden line readings and his gut connection with the part.  Whiteley’s heavy, sad movement is very expressive.  Dirk Bogarde, still with one of the ‘Doctor’ films ahead of him when he made this one, is physically convincing as Jose in hair and eye colouring and, more important, in allowing us to see the idealised figure the gardener is in the mind of Nicholas.  Bogarde doesn’t, though, have a labourer’s physique.  He comes across more as aesthete than athlete even in the sequence when the Brandes go to watch a pelota game where Jose is the star turn.  In other respects, Bogarde seems completely miscast.  It’s not just the cultured voice – although it’s striking how limiting that RP accent is (Cyril Cusack retains his Irish accent as Garcia but you can still accept him as Spanish in a way you can’t Bogarde).  It’s also that Bogarde, in trying (honourably) not to be condescending and to make the gardener emotionally sensitive, suggests an intellectual sophistication – surely the actor’s own – that’s quite wrong for the character.

    Cyril Cusack’s Garcia is entertainingly, expressionistically seedy and sometimes frightening.  As usual, Cusack is outstanding among the supporting players but there are other good people on hand too – Bernard Lee as Brande’s boss, Geoffrey Keen as the doctor, Rosalie Crutchley as a housekeeper.  Lyndon Brook has a persuasive callowness as a junior consular official.  It’s unsurprising that Josephine Griffin, as his wife, and Maureen Swanson, as Jose’s girlfriend, were barely heard of again.  The same goes for Jon Whiteley – but that, according to Wikipedia, was because his mother insisted on his doing his eleven plus rather than making more films:  Whiteley went on to become an art historian at the Ashmolean.

    There are some very clumsy bits in the story.  It’s not clear why the father, blinkered as he is, should be blind to the conspicuous moral deficiencies of Garcia; even less clear as to how Jose and Nicholas communicate in writing when Brande has forbidden them to talk to each other.  (The notes that pass between them are in English – presumably because it wouldn’t have done in a mid-1950s British film to have them written in Spanish and subtitled?  The father may be outrageously biased against Jose in calling him an ‘illiterate oaf’ but, even with Dirk Bogarde’s presence confusing the issue, it’s hard to believe this young Spanish labourer would have written English.)  The cinematographer was Christopher Challis.  The overwrought score is by John Veale.

    11 September 2010

  • The Skin I Live In

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La piel que habito

    Pedro Almodóvar (2011)

    The rhythm of The Skin I Live In, edited by José Salcedo, has an inexorable, sinister quality that makes the film more compelling than either of Almodóvar’s last two movies, Broken Embraces and, before that, the smooth but thinly-textured Volver.  The lustrous images are defined with razor-sharp clarity by José Luis Alcaine – not only the vivid, startling combinations of colour which you expect in Almodóvar but also the clinical appurtenances peculiar to this story:  the hygienic, soulless gleam of surgical instruments, the ominous but oddly sensual rustle of gowns and sheets in the operating theatre, at the very private clinic of Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas).   The mannequins, masks and maquettes, recurring throughout the film in a range of physical contexts, also have an extraordinary variety of texture.  The surgeon’s prize patient Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya) wears a flesh-coloured body stocking that covers every bit of her except the face (reminding you that’s just the area concealed by criminals using nylon-tights disguises).   When the robber Zeca (Roberto Álamo), on the run from the police, arrives at Robert’s clinic and asks his mother Marilia (Marisa Paredes), Ledgard’s housekeeper, to hide him, it’s carnival time:  Zeca is wearing a tiger outfit, a mansize version of the carnival get-up we’re told he always wore as a child.  (The sequence in which this costumed beast breaks into the bowels of the clinic and rapes Vera – cutting open her body-stocking to expose her breasts – is somewhat reminiscent of the assault on the writer’s wife in A Clockwork Orange but, although shocking, it doesn’t have the detachment of the Kubrick sequence:  Zeca may look and behave like an animal but you feel his hunger.)  The film’s poster, with the faces of Banderas and Anaya in close-up side by side, introduces the textural mysteries of the film:  his complexion looks as artificial as hers.

    As might be expected from Almodóvar, what makes The Skin I Live In more than another sci-fi-ish melodrama about the perversion of medical expertise are the elements of sexual ambiguity – amounting to transgender elastics – and the balance of power in sexual relationships.  Exchanges between a character in charge and another on the receiving end are given an edge by one of the pair being naked or half-naked:  the complication is sometimes that the aggressor is the unclothed one, as when Zeca rapes Vera Cruz.  Vera is created by Robert Ledgard both to reanimate his beloved wife, who committed suicide when she saw that her face had been destroyed in the fire that followed a car crash, and to avenge the later suicide of his daughter Norma (Blanca Suárez), who was traumatised first by her mother’s death, then by the attentions of Vicente (Jan Cornet).  He works in a dress shop run by his mother – a set-up that might lead you to expect Vicente to be gay.  In fact, he’s the only character in The Skin I Live In who seems both straight and straightforward – until he’s kidnapped by Robert.  (Almodóvar could be making fun of our likely assumptions by making Vicente hetero but his mother’s assistant in the shop a lesbian, who spurns Vicente.)

    Having abducted Vicente, Robert demonstrates a surgical range beyond the facial reconstruction we assumed to be his specialty by carrying out a gender reassignment operation on the young man.  He then keeps him – that is, Vera Cruz – prisoner.  So when Robert sleeps with Vera Cruz – a woman who was once a man who tried to penetrate Robert’s daughter who lost her mind when she lost her mother who was Robert’s true love – it’s a pairing of formidable psychosexual complexity.  Robert’s housekeeper Marilia turns out to be his mother as well as Zeca’s.  And, perhaps predictably, Robert eventually dies at the hand of his own creation.  The sexual identity contortions of the plot are almost comically intricate – yet, in the closing scene, when Vera/Vicente returns to her/his mother in the dress shop, the effect is touching too.

    I didn’t like the film at first:  the mise en scène, because it isn’t strongly connected to the characters, is impressive but empty; the sinister skin graft story seems too obviously borrowed from Eyes Without a Face.  The source material for Almodóvar’s screenplay is a 1995 novel called Mygale (or ‘Tarantula’) by the French writer Thierry Jonquet; and the film has its clumsy aspects which, even if they derive from the original, Almodóvar hasn’t managed to resolve.  For example, the bald, wordy explanation of who’s who makes the careful crypticness of the first half of The Skin I Live In seem, in retrospect, a waste of effort.  Yet from the point at which Vicente enters the story it livens up.  When Robert is in his car hunting Vicente down, the warm red light of the speedometer is exciting:  Almodóvar has a talent for making images that generate a complicity between the audience and a character up to no good.  Alberto Iglesias’s score, excitative and elegiac by turns, expresses the film’s increasingly various moods.  A crazed medic horror movie is a new departure for Almodóvar but his humour hasn’t deserted him:  details like the incongruously bouncing tail on Zeca’s tiger suit and a scene in which a man comes into the dress shop wanting to get rid of his ex-wife’s wardrobe made me laugh.

    Almodóvar’s cinema includes a gallery of strong female roles but perhaps he loves actresses more than women, whom he seems to see – at least in their sexual prime – as archetypes rather than flesh and blood.  (This is rarely the problem it might be because he directs first-rate actresses so well.)  His male characters are sometimes relatively pallid but they may also be more human.  In the case of The Skin I Live In, the protagonist has both iconic and individual substance.  Antonio Banderas isn’t obvious casting for a madly obsessed scientist.  Yet although the role might seem to require a more dynamic presence, Banderas’s essential placidity is effective and affecting:  it gives the story of Robert Ledgard a melancholy, almost tragic heft.   The fact that he and Almodóvar used to work together often but haven’t done so for the last two decades has impact too.  Fifty-one-year-old Banderas still looks good but he looks his age.

    28 August 2011

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