Old Yorker

  • Hobson’s Choice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1954)

    Harold Brighouse’s popular and durable four-act comedy, set in Salford in the 1880s and first staged in 1916, isn’t dramatically sophisticated and its characters are not subtly drawn.  It’s soon clear how things will turn out and, in David Lean’s film adaptation (he also wrote the screenplay), the final act feels a bit long-winded.  (This is partly the result of the preceding scene, in which the hero Willie Mossop’s nervous preparations for his wedding night are painstakingly described.  The sequence concludes on such a humorously triumphant note that you wonder for a moment if this might be the end of the whole film.)   But Hobson’s Choice is richly enjoyable, a minor eccentric classic.  Even with the two successful Dickens pictures already behind him, it now seems surprising – in view of what he went on to do – that Lean was drawn to a character-driven, largely indoors piece but he and his cinematographer, Jack Hildyard, make the material visually lively and interesting in all sorts of ways.  They do so right from the opening shot of the outside of bootseller Henry Hobson’s shop.  A great, black sample of Hobson’s wares hangs implacably above the door (and creaks in the wind).  Willie Mossop and Henry’s eldest daughter, Maggie, the first time they walk out together, sit on a bench overlooking a largely industrial landscape the extent of which contrasts startlingly with the cramped interiors of Hobson’s parlour, Willie’s lodgings and the snug at the Moonrakers pub, where Henry spends plenty of his time.  His blotto journey back from there late one night is a justly famous and funny sequence.  The full moon reflected in puddles on the dark cobbles is, in every sense, a highlight of his drunken hallucinations, which begin in the pub and continue into the grim morning after.  Lean and Hildyard also take full advantage of the distinctive physique and gait of the actors, especially Charles Laughton as Hobson and John Mills as Willie.

    All three principals are splendid:  Laughton is outstanding but Mills and Brenda de Banzie as Maggie are very fine too.  The clumsily tyrannical paterfamilias Henry Hobson doesn’t want any of his three daughters to marry because he’s better off, financially and personally, with them all working for him in the shop and in the family home behind it.  Laughton’s performance is essentially a theatrical turn but it’s full of wonderful histrionic invention; one of the strengths of all three characterisations is in how the actors combine comedy with reminders of the things that really matter to the people they’re playing.  Hobson is infuriating when, with his mason friends in the Moonrakers, he makes fun of Maggie and Willie but getting his own way is a deadly serious matter to this egocentric monster.  In the final part of the story, when he’s ailing and needs the now married Maggie and her new husband Willie to move back home, Hobson’s gorge keeps rising – in fury that he is forced to bargain with the man who used to be the shop’s boothand and with the daughter he ridiculed as an old maid.  The determination shown by Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie to land Willie is founded on anxiety that she is indeed on the verge of being unmarriageable – she makes the gradually blooming relationship between Maggie and Willie oddly affecting.  (Maggie is meant to be thirty but it’s right that Brenda de Banzie, who was in her mid-forties at the time, looks older.)  The real surprise here is John Mills.  Of course he has to work harder than Charles Laughton to be physically extraordinary but he succeeds.  Mills shows plenty of comic flair and imagination while remaining in character.  (He too was in his mid-forties when the film was made but his pint-size underdog quality makes him seem younger.)   The awkward, deeply unassuming Willie Mossop is the unsung craftsman of Hobson’s enterprise – a wealthy customer, Mrs Hepworth, recognises him as ‘the best bootmaker in Lancashire’ but Willie, at the start, can’t read or write.  Thanks to Maggie’s persistent instruction, he learns not only to do both but also to stand up for himself to the extent of disagreeing with his wife – in the final negotations with her father, about the future name of a business partnership between the two men.  Willie insists it must be ‘Mossop and Hobson’:  he gets his way then apologises to Maggie for standing his ground so firmly.  She, of course, is eventually delighted that he did.

    A host of cherishable character actors fill the smaller parts.  Hobson’s two other daughters, Alice and Vicky, are played by Daphne Anderson and a very young Prunella Scales; their respective suitors are Richard Wattis and Derek Blomfield.  Raymond Huntley is the latter’s temperance zealot father and John Laurie is Hobson’s no-nonsense doctor.  Helen Haye is Mrs Hepworth, who lends Willie and Maggie the funds to start up their own effectively (in both senses) rival business.  Jack Howarth (Albert Tatlock in Coronation Street) plays another of Hobson’s employees and  Dorothy Gordon Ada Figgis, the daughter of the woman with whom Willie lodges.  Ada is Willie’s intended until Maggie stakes her claim, to the chagrin of Madge Brindley’s scary Mrs Figgis.  The other fixtures in the Moonrakers include Gibb McLaughlin, Julien Mitchell, Philip Stainton and Joseph Tomelty.  Malcolm Arnold’s music is, in a sense, unnecessarily bold underlining of the humour but, like the film as a whole, it comes across as likeably apt and ingenious.

    26 May 2014

  • The Girl on the Train (2009)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La fille du RER

    André Téchiné (2009)

    It’s inspired by real events but this never used to assert that what we’re watching must be convincing because it’s-based-on-a-true-story – it’s just the starting point for André Téchiné.  The central event is technically a non-event.  A young woman called Jeanne Fabre claims to be the victim of an anti-semitic attack on a Paris train.   Even though she isn’t Jewish, a gang of youths – some white, some black – saw that she was carrying the business card of a well-known Jewish lawyer called Samuel Bleistein and set about Jeanne.  They cut her face and drew swastikas on her body.   The attack is Jeanne’s invention; the injuries and branding all her own work.  The film suggests events in her life which may have caused her to do what she does – and ‘may’ is the operative word.  One of the pleasures of this picture comes from watching characters who are always absorbing but eventually unfathomable.  The Girl on the Train is based on RER, a theatre piece by Jean-Marie Besset, who co-wrote the screenplay with Téchiné and Odile Barski.   The Besset play was staged in 2006 and this is when the film is set, although the actual event on which it’s based occurred in 2004.  It’s possible that Téchiné has moved the episode to make it closer in time to the kidnap and murder of Ilan Halimi, in February 2006.  This is the most notorious of the anti-semitic attacks that took place in France during the last decade.  Jeanne Fabre exploits it to fake the assault on her.

    I knew in advance what was going to happen so it’s a tribute to Téchiné that he creates a world and a series of relationships between the main characters in which things seem unpredictable.  Jeanne, stuck in a groove between school and the world of work and lacking the appetite to get out of it, lives with her mother Louise, who runs a child-minding service from home, on the outskirts of Paris.  Samuel Bleistein, who, before beginning his legal career, was in the army with Jeanne’s late father and hoped himself to marry her mother, first enters the story when Louise sees him on television – commenting on an anti-Jewish hate crime – and encourages Jeanne to apply for a secretarial job that’s going in Bleistein’s office.  Although the ‘attack’ that I knew was coming was always at the back of my mind, the front of it was soon otherwise engaged.  You always want to see what happens between the characters and this is especially so in what develops between Jeanne and a young man called Franck.  He starts following her when they’re both roller-blading by the Seine and his rather sinister persistence in getting her to spend time with him eventually pays off – although their relationship really begins to take off through internet chats.  These webcam interactions draw you in as ineluctably as they do the couple.  Franck is a professional wrestler:  there’s a fine sequence in which Jeanne drags a reluctant Louise along to watch him win a bout and the three have a remarkably tense meal together afterwards. Then Jeanne moves in with Franck:  they’re caretakers for the property of a man whose business – unbeknown to Jeanne but not to Franck – involves drugs-dealing.   In the film’s only and startling scene involving physical violence, Franck is stabbed by one of the dealer’s clients and seriously wounded.  When he recovers, as he tearfully tells Jeanne from a hospital bed, he’ll go to prison.   It’s this traumatising sequence of events and a collusion of other elements (watching a television documentary about Nazi atrocities, having the sense that Bleistein might have married her mother) which seem to propel Jeanne’s invention of the attack.

    Michel Blanc’s portrait of Samuel Bleistein is very skilful, especially in the way he shows how Bleistein gains a new sense of purpose from the opportunity – which his professional expertise and authority afford him – to make a difference to Louise’s life and compensate for the disappointment of his courtship of her when they were young.   Blanc makes Samuel so convincing that you suspend disbelief in what would otherwise be implausible details.   Nathan Bleistein (Jérémie Quaegebeur) eventually reveals to Jeanne that he knew she was lying about the attack because of the business card:  Nathan knows that his grandfather would never use one.   Part of you thinks Samuel would surely have made that clear to the police immediately.  Then you wonder if perhaps he wouldn’t, in order to reinforce the position of power in which he finds himself in relation to Louise.  Bleistein is the character who connects this story with a largely parallel (until the closing stages) narrative about relationships within his own family.  His son Alex who, at the start of the film, returns to France from a period abroad (I wasn’t clear what he was doing there), his estranged wife Judith, an Orthodox Jew who works for her father-in-law, and their son Nathan, who’s about to have his Bar Mitzvah.  This part of The Girl on the Train is neither as interesting (it lacks a life of its own) nor as well acted as the Jeanne-Louise-Franck part – Ronit Elkabetz, in particular, is incongruously actressy as Judith.  (Alex is played by Mathieu Demy, the son of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.)

    We saw several films in the Catherine Deneuve season at BFI a few years ago and she nearly always seemed, to a greater or lesser extent, miscast (never more so than as a  gallant factory worker alongside Björk in Dancer in the Dark).   The two exceptions were Les parapluies de Cherbourg and Ma saison préférée, in which Deneuve starred with Daniel Auteuil, and which is the only other film by André Téchiné that I’ve seen.   Deneuve gives one of her best performances in The Girl on the Train:  her Louise exudes a contained but powerful sense of regret (and the fact that we knew Catherine Deneuve as a young actress contributes to that sense).  Nicolas Duchauvelle is very impressive as Franck:  he has an edge which you keep thinking is going to lead to Franck doing physical harm to Jeanne (he keeps making jokes with a lethal humourlessness).  It’s one of the most effective elements of the film that Franck’s aggression is expressed purely in the wrestling hall, that he’s crazy about Jeanne, and that he turns out to be the victim of violence in The Girl on the Train.  And Émilie Dequenne is marvellous as Jeanne.  Her face suggests an emotional transparency which is utterly misleading:  Jeanne’s mind is hard to read.  It’s amazing that Dequenne, who was born in 1981 and played the title role in the Dardennes’ Rosetta ten years ago, is so convincing as a girl barely out of her teens.   Her youthfulness makes Dequenne particularly well equipped to incarnate a young woman who seems stuck between being a child and a grown up.   When we see Jeanne in the background at her mother’s home as Louise attends to the toddlers, she sometimes has the quality of an exile from childhood.   Philippe Sarde’s urgent score supports this idea of Jeanne.  Her roller-blading also fits with it, evoking a kid on roller skates but suggesting too an inevitable forward movement – like the movement of the train that we repeatedly see speeding over a bridge overlooking the family home.

    6 June 2010

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