Old Yorker

  • Radio On

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chris Petit (1979)

    It’s soon clear how important the music is going to be.  We’re used to seeing what’s featured on a film soundtrack in the closing credits.  Here the details are given at the start, immediately after the names of the three main actors.   This is a co-production between the BFI and Wim Wenders’ Road Movies Filmproduktion company; you get an early sense that the German strand of the film is going to count for a lot too.  The soundtrack includes Kraftwerk.  In a prologue the camera moves round an empty flat – including a study where the books are upstaged by handwritten words pinned to the bedroom wall – ‘We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun’, a Kraftwerk lyric.  David Bowie sings ‘Heroes’, the opening number, in German as well as English.  There are various other kinds of cultural communication and dependency in evidence in Radio On:  news and sport bulletins on the radio; porn films; television screens (even if they have nothing to show:  sets tend to be left on after transmission has ended or where the reception isn’t good enough to supply a picture).  The protagonist Robert’s London flat is above a cinema; and ‘Radio On’, at the climax to the opening credits, repeats in neon lights among the commercial names that illuminate the night-time cityscape.

    Robert is a disc jockey – according to Wikipedia, he works ‘at a radio station based on the United Biscuits Network, which broadcast to factories owned by United Biscuits’.  I soon forgot that he was a DJ, though.  This is partly because we don’t see much of him at work, partly because, when we do, Robert speaks in such a glum monotone – as he does wherever he is and whoever he’s talking to – that when he does play records it seems an expression of his personality rather than his job.  (He reads out a request for ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ but chooses to put on something ‘better’.)   About half an hour into Radio On, Robert learns from a phone call – it’s never made clear from whom – that his brother, who lived in Bristol, has been found dead in his bath.  (When the camera goes into the bathroom of the flat during the prologue, there’s a brief shot of the bath and of two hairy legs from the knees downwards.)   Even while Robert’s in London, he does a lot of driving around – not, it seems, because he needs to get anywhere but because he’s uncomfortable staying put.  Once he gets the news about his brother and sets off for Bristol, he has a reason to be on the move, and Radio On becomes the road movie that Chris Petit has, from the start, seemed anxious for it to be.  It seems that Robert’s brother committed suicide and that he may have been part of a Bristol porn ring that more than one radio news report refers to.   But the succession of soulless buildings and motorways that feature in the film – shot in black and white by Martin Schäfer (who was also Wenders’ cameraman at the time) – and the lack of any sustained connection between Robert and the various people he meets suggest a larger sense of degeneration.

    In a piece from 2008[1] Chris Petit writes as follows:

    ‘… It is now nearly thirty years since Radio On, and its DVD release last month confirmed it as [a] rare example of a European model in contemporary English cinema and a defining picture of post-war disenchantment. At the time it was described as ‘a film without a cinema’ but to my mind it never really was an English film and exactly this point is made in an essay accompanying the DVD: ‘There are long stretches when we could be in some comparable backwater in Belgium, or France or Germany. Industrial estate, dockside, car park. Rotterdam or the Ruhr.’ … I always thought of Radio On as more of a report than a dramatic narrative, about the way things looked and the music we played, about cultural climate and weather, buildings and landscape, a sense of alien record.’

    Petit is certainly determined to establish the film’s ‘European’ credentials through the technical and stylistic choices he makes but Radio On, viewed at this distance in time, feels as if its subject is Britain specifically.  What Petit, who wrote the screenplay with Heidi Adolph, couldn’t have known at the time was how pivotal a year 1979 would prove to be for the country from a much longer perspective.  In retrospect, Radio On not only evokes a place at the end of its tether but anticipates the bleaker picture that many people have of the decade that followed Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street.

    David Beames as Robert is fine as a camera subject but once he speaks he sounds phony.  It’s clear that Petit has encouraged Beames to go for deliberate lack of expression and the effect is artificial rather than anomic.  Petit may have wanted the British actors to emulate the less histrionic style he associates with good continental European acting; it’s surely no coincidence that the German cast members Liza Kreuzer (as Ingrid, a young German woman separated from her English husband and their child) and Sabina Michael (Ingrid’s unsympathetic mother-in-law) underplay more naturally.   On the rare occasions that Petit gives a character plenty to say, the acting is embarrassing – the worst example is a monologue from an aggressive army deserter (Andrew Byatt) to whom Robert gives a lift.  Even perfectly good people like Sandy Ratcliff, as the woman Robert’s brother lived with, sound forced and hollow.  Sting makes a cameo appearance as an Eddie Cochran aficionado.  He plays to the camera too much and reminds you why his acting career didn’t last long.

    Radio On is sometimes pointlessly clever – one particular example.  Ingrid apologises for the unfriendly behaviour of the other young woman she’s with when Robert first meets them, telling him that her friend ‘doesn’t like men right now’.  Robert asks how you say that in German and, when Ingrid tells him, he explains that, ‘There isn’t a word for it in English – only for a man who hates women’.   This is wrong:  the English word for a man-hater is misandrist.   Of course it could be Robert rather than his creator who doesn’t know that but I’d put money on Chris Petit’s expecting the audience to feel that this supposed lacuna in the language says something nationally significant.  In terms of its look, though, the film is impressive, even when compositions sit on the screen wanting to be admired – sometimes Petit holds a shot so long that he seems to pull you into being a part of what you’re seeing.  The music is powerfully evocative.  I especially liked the moment when Petit cuts away from Robert at his DJ station to the sound of the record that he’s put on merging with the noises of the factory in which it’s playing.

    25 July 2012

    [1] http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-4-issue-1-autumn-winter-2008/germany-and-england-england-and-germany-proposal-for-a-film/

     

  • Quartet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dustin Hoffman (2012)

    Quartet is of interest as Dustin Hoffman’s debut as a film director.  Because it was based on a play by Ronald Harwood I could justify going to see it, even though I’d determinedly avoided The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet is evidently aimed at the same ‘grey’ middle-class audience.  But the movie has what is, for me, a nightmare setting.  Beecham House is described as a home for ‘retired musicians’ but the community there is dominated by former opera singers.  A combination of the residents’ diminishing mental facilities and (according to Ronald Harwood) their undiminished desire for the limelight means they could burst into aria at any time – especially since they’re preparing for their annual concert to commemorate Verdi’s birthday, and Hoffman and Harwood provide little evidence to suggest that the denizens of Beecham House have any other interest in life.  They include the mild-mannered, vaguely superior Reginald (Tom Courtenay), deaf and dotty Cecily (‘Cissy’) (Pauline Collins) and shamelessly risqué Wilf (Billy Connolly).  The arrival at the home of the witheringly egocentric Jean Horton (Maggie Smith) is the plot’s catalyst.  If Jean can be persuaded to join the other three in the quartet from Rigoletto, it will be enough to persuade the director of the Verdi concert, Cedric Livingstone (Michael Gambon), to put them at the top of the bill – ahead of Ann Langley (Gwyneth Jones), who boasts incessantly of her past glories on stage and who was Jean’s inveterate rival during their professional careers.  There are two obstacles:  first, Jean is too self-regarding to want to debase her former greatness; second, she was, many years ago and for a matter of a few hours, married to Reg, who’s never seen her in the meantime.

    Ronald Harwood’s screenplay is more shameless than I expected.  When Jean arrives, Dr Cogan (Sheridan Smith), the young medic in charge of Beecham House, informs her that the place takes its name from one of Britain’s most famous conductors.   (Perhaps the doctor comes out with this statement to check that each new arrival still has their faculties – a kind of classical music equivalent of ‘Who’s the Prime Minister?’)   In the next breath, Dr Cogan tells Jean that her room is as big as Ann Langley’s – just so as to remind her of their rivalry, as you would.  Reg, Cissy and Wilf take Jean out to dinner (it’s implausible that she agrees even to go) with the aim of getting her drunk and persuading her to sing the Rigoletto quartet.  Jean sees through the ruse.  Next morning, this woman – who is still avid for compliments on her appearance and wardrobe and  fiercely determined to keep a superior distance from the lesser lights of Beecham House – walks into the breakfast room in her dressing gown and nightdress in order to shout ‘Fuck you’ at Reg, in front of all the other residents.   Moments before the concert performance at the climax of the film, Cissy’s memory deserts her and she says she has to leave the premises immediately.  No sooner has this droplet of suspense been added to the mixture than her memory returns.

    It’s something of a relief, after the look and sound of her in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (and Downton Abbey), that Maggie Smith isn’t being asked primarily to do a comic turn here.  Most of Quartet is so witless, though, that her delivery of Jean’s acidulous putdowns brought my face closer to cracking than anything else in the film.  There’s a bit of depth in the looks that Smith and Tom Courtenay exchange when Jean and Reg first meet up again – or, in his case, when he learns she’s coming to Beecham House.  Reg isn’t as crudely characterful as most of the other parts and Courtenay gives a decent (unexciting) performance.  Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins seem to be pretending to be geriatric, even though both of them have now turned seventy (Collins is only three years younger than Courtenay).  This is partly because, compared with Smith and Courtenay, they’re unsubtle actors but also, I think, because Harwood’s material and Hoffman’s handling of it exaggerate the old age of the characters for theatrical effect.   They are, for example, archaised by their names.   Harwood wrote the play in 1999 but it’s been ‘updated’ (references to Lady Gaga etc).  The principals in Quartet would have been born in the late 1930s (or even the following decade) – they’d have been no more likely to be christened Reginald and Cicely and Wilfred and Cedric than the Tom and Pauline and Billy and Michael who play them would have been[1].  Ronald Harwood suggests an antiquated – a somehow comfortable – idea of what old people are called.  He succeeds only in bringing to mind what Alan Bennett (or one of his characters) said about its being only a matter of time before nursing homes are full of Sharons and Kevins.

    Michael Gambon makes Cedric as dreary a caricature as the script would suggest (he’s yet another inmate with incontinent big-headedness).  Sheridan Smith plays Dr Cogan commendably straight but she’s probably miscast (she has to suppress her natural vividness) in a feeble role. This is her debut in a bigtime movie – I hope it won’t harm her prospects of cinema work more deserving of her talents.  Andrew Sachs gives a more understated account of himself than many others and there are some agreeable people in smaller parts – Trevor Peacock and especially David Ryall, whose genuinely splenetic quality is manna from heaven.  I’d have liked to see more of this pair’s Flanagan and Allen routine at the concert but at least Ryall and Peacock are doing their own singing, as of course is Gwyneth Jones.  Perhaps to illustrate the point that opera singers have to rule the roost, she’s still a Dame in the credits whereas Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay and Ronald Harwood are de-titled.

    Dustin Hoffman seems to have calculated that he could get such great performances out of the quartet that the fact we don’t hear them singing (or watch them miming to) the Rigoletto wouldn’t be anti-climactic.  He was probably wrong in any case – it’s difficult to lead up to a performance that doesn’t happen – but since the characters are too thin and shallow for the actors to do much with, and pretty well all that keeps you going is the expectation of what the quartet will be like back on the stage, it turns out to be a big mistake.  At one point a group of kids of school-leaving age visits Beecham House to hear Reg lecture on opera (this is where the Lady Gaga reference – cringingly awkward – occurs).  At the start of the lecture, Reg asks the kids what they think of opera.  The answer is given by a boy played by a young actor called Jumayn Hunter, who speaks in an uncertain, slightly hostile monotone.   After Reg has said his piece and the kids think there might be something to opera after all (as if), he asks the boy to explain his enthusiasm for rap.   This time the response is more conventional, so that the sequence can end in a friendly glow for all concerned, but the sudden reality of that Jumayn Hunter’s first response is electrifying.

    Early on in Quartet someone asks, ‘Who was it said that being old isn’t for sissies?’  (Although the answer is supplied, I couldn’t, by the time the line was repeated towards the end, remember what it was.  This short-term memory loss hit home on a personal level – about the only thing in the movie that did.)  The closing credits include photographs of the cast when they were young actors or musicians and the effect of these is poignant.  Old age and loss of faculties are the antithesis of safety yet this film – made by and starring variously gifted elderly people – seems determined to be lulling and soothing about getting old and losing the abilities you once had.  There’s no sympathy shown for Jean Horton’s fear of letting audiences hear that her voice has declined (Wilfred’s impatient rejoinder when she expresses her concerns – that Jean’s audiences are all dead now – is wrong if she’s a successful recording artist).  Although we’re expected to find egomania infinitely entertaining, we’re also meant to see as heartwarming Jean’s transformation from insatiably competitive bitch into a team player who’s quite a nice person really.  Being old may not be for sissies but here it’s very much a matter of turning into a Cissy, or a Cedric.  Dustin Hoffman is now seventy-five and Ronald Harwood seventy-eight and Quartet suggests that both of them may be past it.  That can’t have been the object of the exercise.

    3 January 2013

    [1] Having summoned the courage to watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on television, I found out the elderly characters in that had antiquated names too.

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