Old Yorker

  • The Hi-Lo Country

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1998)

    Based on a novel by Max Evans, The Hi-Lo Country is set in New Mexico at the end of World War II but, compared with, say, Hud, this is only superficially a ‘modern Western’:  the cars and sex on the screen, the Country and Western songs on the radio – these bring into relief the familiar Western types who people the story but I couldn’t see that the film reinterpreted those types in any substantial way, other than in one, frustrating respect.   The story is rooted in the feelings of a callow young man called Pete Calder for a somewhat older man, ‘Big Boy’ Matson.  In the early stages of The Hi-Lo Country, you wonder – especially post-Brokeback Mountain – if these feelings are homosexual.  When America enters the War after Pearl Harbor, Big Boy joshes his friend about being a stay-at-home ‘wife’ although, in the event, it’s Pete who goes to fight.  When he returns in 1945, his reunion with Big Boy involves vigorous and extended rough-housing.  By the end of the film, though, the true nature of Pete’s feelings is still a mystery:  in his closing voiceover he speaks with loving, nostalgic admiration of Big Boy as an embodiment of old West characteristics and values, of the pair’s days of drinking, wenching, gambling.  (As we hear his closing words, we watch Pete heading off into the sunset and away from New Mexico in the direction of California.)  Nothing has happened in relation to the homoerotic theme in the meantime, except possibly in Pete’s rape of the supposed femme fatale, Mona, a married (then widowed) woman who becomes Big Boy’s sexual partner but whom Pete also desires.  Is Pete’s forcing himself on Mona an expression of resentment that she’s chosen Big Boy instead of him or that Big Boy has chosen Mona instead of Pete?

    Whether Pete is sexually attracted to Big Boy or hero worships him (or both), the scenario depends on Big Boy’s being at least charismatic – on the viewer’s feeling that and understanding why he means so much to Pete.  This doesn’t happen.  As Big Boy, Woody Harrelson, with his weird blonde hairdo and hard-edged aggression, has the look and menace of a screen Nazi officer who’s gay under his uniform:  Harrelson’s strenuous playing deprives Big Boy of any beguiling quality.  Billy Crudup, as Pete, is convincing as someone easily led (and by his feelings rather than his intellect) and who might be bisexual (although there’s no suggestion that he finds any men other than Big Boy attractive: shades of Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain).  But Pete is a frustrating first-person narrator:  his feelings seem so inchoate that it might have been better if Stephen Frears and Walon Green, who wrote the screenplay, had dispensed with the retrospective voiceover and its inherent implication that the speaker learned something from the experiences that he describes.

    Frears does a professional job in territory, both geographical and cultural, that you don’t readily associate with him.  The several fights between men and the moments of sexual intimacy, in different registers, between Pete and the two women in his life are well done.  But in sequences such as a card game for big stakes Frears seems to be straining to find something beyond cliché and failing:  the scene is merely slower and more drawn out than it would be in a more traditional, less pretentious Western.    Patricia Arquette is dull as Mona:  it’s unfortunate, given this actress’s voice, that she’s given the line, ‘I hate things that repeat on and on without changing’.  As the long-suffering Josepha, who loves Pete but finds herself playing second fiddle to Mona in his affections (maybe third fiddle overall), Penélope Cruz is very striking:  it’s remarkable now to see her cast as the supposedly less alluring woman in the story.  I liked her acting the best of anyone’s although this may have been because Cruz is playing the character that’s most likeable and sensible.  On the whole, the people in The Hi-Lo Country just aren’t interesting enough – they seem designed for a subplot rather than a whole movie.  In smaller roles, the likes of Sam Elliott, as a cattle baron, and Lane Smith, as Big Boy’s chief rival in the card game, give one-note performances (they are, respectively, smilingly malevolent and gloweringly malevolent); John Diehl does better as Mona’s cuckolded husband, the cattle baron’s foreman.  Katy Jurado has a cameo as a Mexican witch who foretells, unnecessarily, that things aren’t going to end happily for all concerned.

    I watched this film on television, with a friend who was seeing it for the fourth time and carefully explained its merits.  His knowledge of Westerns enables him to see it in a much larger and richer context than I can but I think he was also reading onto The Hi-Lo Country themes which may be implicit in the setting and character types of the story but which, for anyone other than a student of the Western genre, are barely realised on screen.   Carter Burwell’s music hovers on the edge of parody of Western score grandiosity but the (non-original) C&W music is one of the best things in the film, especially a number sung by Don Walser.  (The playing on the radio of Hank Williams’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Liked You Used To Do?’ brought to mind, for this viewer at least, The Last Picture Show.)

    28 October 2014

  • The Happiest Girl in the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cea mai fericita fata din lume

    Radu Jude (2009)

    This is the first feature by Radu Jude, who also wrote the screenplay, with Augustina Stanciu (who doubled up as art director).  Jude is an award-winning director of short films and, although The Happiest Girl in the World runs 100 minutes, it’s a very small- scale piece.   A teenage girl wins a car in a competition run by a soft drinks company and travels with her parents from their home in the sticks to Bucharest to collect the car.  Each of the competition winners, in order to claim their prize, is to feature in a commercial.  The title character has to sit in her new car and say, with a big smile on her face:

    ‘My name is Delia Cristina Fratila and I’m the luckiest, happiest girl in the world.  I sent in three Multifruit labels and I have been given this wonderful Logan Beach … [Drinks from bottle.] … Send them in now!’

    (It’s taken me ages to work out what that last line refers to – obviously the labels …)

    The film crew starts shooting in the sunny afternoon of a summer’s day.   They need so many takes – Delia doesn’t smile enough or drink for long enough or the camera picks up a hint of facial hair that has to be removed from her upper lip or the fruit juice needs to be mixed with Coca-Cola to make it a more appetising colour or the location is wrong or the crew’s generator packs up – that it’s getting dark by the time they wrap.   In the intervals between takes, Delia argues with her parents, who are urging her to sign a contract to sell the car immediately, a sale which will provide the cash that the Fratilas need to set up a boarding house in a property belonging to Delia’s grandmother, and thus prepare the ground for a more comfortable old age for themselves.

    That’s about it.   The story and themes don’t expand – although they do intensify.  I found myself getting desperate for Delia to win her battle with her parents not to sell the car, even if it was inevitable that – unless Radu Jude decided finally to reject the limited probabilities of the story – she would have to give in.  Sure enough, the film’s last shot is of Delia standing by the crappy car the family started with, waiting to be taken home by her father and mother.   On its own modest terms, The Happiest Girl in the World is hard to fault – although when the playing and writing is mostly as realistic as this only a small movement in the direction of deliberate farce is made to look crudely artificial.   For example, the make-up woman arrives with depilatories for Delia’s moustache.  It’s stupidly predictable when the treatment leaves a red mark more salient than the black one that’s been removed – and it’s not believable because we’ve seen elsewhere that the make-up woman is good at what she does.  The irritable exchanges between Mr Fratila and the film crew also tend to be overdone.

    How much is this a story tied to a particular time and place?  The plot summary on IMDB, credited to ‘the Warsaw Film Festival’, describes the film as ‘A wicked satire and a psychological portrait of a society perverted by its slavery to capitalism and consumerism’.   Michael Brooke’s Sight & Sound review, reproduced in the BFI programme note, thinks that ‘the same story could easily be transplanted to any country where consumerism and glossy commercials hold sway … ‘.   That may be true but it seems unlikely that a film artist in a capitalist society longer established than Romania’s would see this theme as original enough to sustain a feature-length picture.    It’s not entirely clear how typical or otherwise the Fratilas are of a Romanian couple who started a family in the years immediately after the fall of Ceausescu and the collapse of Eastern European communism.   The parents seem to want to suggest that they were unusually hard up and have sacrificed everything for Delia.  She in turn has a litany of grievances about being deprived of material treats that her schoolfriends have enjoyed.  Jude may mean to say that the Fratilas are typical in believing themselves exceptional – that’s certainly a universally familiar family habit.

    Andreea Bosneag hadn’t acted professionally before.  (Facially she’s like an unthreatening version of Charlie Brooks, who plays Janine in Eastenders.)   Bosneag is extremely convincing as Delia – truculent, sulky-faced, whiney but very delicately expressive when the girl is sitting on her own, wanting to experience the larger life that Bucharest seems to suggest the possibility of but which Delia is powerless to make happen.  The squabbles between Delia and her parents – with her mother while the father’s off setting up the car sale deal, with him once he’s back and getting down to business – are well written and acted.   Although she provides more than a caricature, Violeta Haret plays the naggingly attentive Mrs Fratila with conventional theatricality – it contrasts with Andreea Bosneag’s naturalness in a way that makes the difference in acting styles almost seem part of the tension between the generations.  After another unsuccessful attempt to get Delia to sign on the dotted line, her father tries what he thinks is a more casual, amiable approach – of course it looks clumsily obvious and Mr Fratila soon reverts to angry frustration with his daughter:  Vasile Muraru is particularly good in this scene.

    I liked the outfits for Delia and her mother.  Mrs Fratila dresses up for the big occasion in a gold-coloured two-piece which she fits into easily enough but always looks somehow silly in.  Delia has to abandon a top with dark blue flowers once the blue backdrop for the commercial is revealed; she continues in a plain white blouse and light blue skirt.  Mrs Fratila probably regrets this deglamorising of her daughter (it follows the de-lacquering of Delia’s hair by the make-up lady) but at least the girl ends up looking like a teenager rather than the same age as her mother.  The film begins with Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Rent’ playing on the Fratilas’ car radio.  By the end you think that choice of music – or words anyway (‘I love you, you pay my rent’) – was a bit too pointed.

    9 June 2010

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