Film review

  • Black Narcissus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1947)

    The gulf between the Archers’ visual imagination and their lack of touch with actors is undiminished here but the effect of the discrepancy is extraordinary.  Based on a novel by Rumer Godden (Powell and Pressburger did the adaptation), Black Narcissus is about some nuns who set up a school and hospital in the Himalayas, and the efflorescence of hysterical (in both senses of the word) tensions within the group.  Their enterprise is, of course, doomed to failure:  the film would have a lot more surprise if the nuns converted the locals to Christianity and coped with the geography.  We’re told at the start that they’re trying to succeed where a monastic order has already tried and failed.  The expeditionary force is an offshoot from an Anglican order based in Darjeeling.  The Mother Superior there (Nancy Roberts) tells Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), the leader of the project, that she’s too young for this kind of responsibility and we can see from the arrogant glint in Sister’s Clodagh’s eye and her poised smile that she needs taking down a peg or two.

    The colouring of Jack Cardiff’s photography and the production design by Alfred Junge are truly breathtaking (they both won Oscars for their work).  They make the settings lushly super-exotic and the sculpted whiteness of the nuns’ figures is beautifully contrasted with the exultant vibrancy of their surroundings.  The trompe l’oeil is quite remarkable.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘The film was made primarily at Pinewood Studios, but some scenes were shot in Leonardslee Gardens, West Sussex, the home of an Indian army retiree which had appropriate trees and plants for the Indian setting. The film makes extensive use of matte paintings and large scale landscape paintings to suggest the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, as well as some scale models for motion shots of the convent. Powell said later, “Our mountains were painted on glass. We decided to do the whole thing in the studio and that’s the way we managed to maintain colour control to the very end. Sometimes in a film its theme or its colour are more important than the plot.” ‘

    The look of the film, the garishness of the story, the broad, melodramatic conception of the characters, and the intensely stiff (or stiffly intense) performances are an unarguably bizarre combination.  The whole thing seems mad – and real admirers of Powell and Pressburger would, I’m sure, claim that this is just what they were aiming for:  that they wanted people to experience the film as if it was taking place within, and expressing, the febrile, dislocated collective psyche of the nuns.   Yet the acting style – the clipped accents, the obvious facial reactions – is incongruous with the other elements of Black Narcissus:  I don’t believe that incongruity is intentional but it heightens the disorienting effect of the piece (at the same time as making it laughable).   Although Deborah Kerr is the lead, the standout performance in the picture – and the epitome of its crackpot carnality – is from Kathleen Byron as the glamorously deranged Sister Ruth.  We can see immediately that this maniac-in-waiting doesn’t belong in a habit and wimple.    Once Ruth has admitted that she’s consumed with desire for Dean (David Farrar), the district agent whose brusque masculinity, shorts and increasingly exposed chest hair drive the nuns wild, she changes into civvies – a wine-coloured dress and red shoes (yet) – and applies brilliantly scarlet lipstick.  Kathleen Byron looks spectacularly, ideally beautiful but the idea is so tawdry and her presence still so cultured that she’s ridiculous too.

    In their big verbal set-to (the fish before the meat of their physical confrontation on the edge of a mountain), Sister Ruth accuses Sister Clodagh of herself being infatuated with Dean.  We already know by this stage that Clodagh has a sensual past:  she keeps having flashbacks to a teenage romance in her native Ireland – with a young man (Shaun Noble) so dull and snotty that it’s no surprise Clodagh took the veil.   The tonal contrasts between the alabaster, habited figure and the auburn-haired Irish girl in her sky-blue party dress are the most effective thing in Deborah Kerr’s performance.   As so often, she’s capable but mechanical:  she overstates the character’s private reactions to overheard remarks and, when Sister Clodagh is experiencing warring emotions, Deborah Kerr’s face presents them one at a time, as if we were meant to tick them off.   Flora Robson as the troubled Sister Philippa, who finds her spirituality dwarfed and overpowered by the scale and mystery of her new surroundings, is more convincingly complex; and David Farrar, although the role of Dean is remarkably obvious, gets across a sense not just of the man’s physical relaxedness but of his emotional exasperation too.   The other nuns are played by Judith Furse (pretty good) and Jenny Laird (bonkers).  Except for Esmond Knight as the silent wise man (an ex-soldier) who keeps a looking-into-eternity vigil on the margins of the convent, the Indian characters are ludicrous, whether they’re ethnically the genuine article or white actors in make-up.  Sabu is startlingly camp as an Anglophile princeling who comes to the nuns for his education.  In the film’s one visual failure, the Archers manage to make Jean Simmons look tacky, as well as act clumsily, as a lower caste dancing girl.    The film takes its name from a perfume the Sabu character buys from the Army & Navy store in London.

    18 October 2010

     

     

     

  • Tales from the Golden Age

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Amintiri din epoca de aur

    Hanno Höfer, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru, Razvan Marculescu (2009)

    Five short film stories, written by Cristian Mungiu and set in the later years of the Communist era in Romania.  Each has a different director and is based on an urban myth of the period. (There appears to have been a sixth segment – ‘The Legend of the Zealous Activist’ – which isn’t included in the version of the film now being shown over here.)   I spent an unusually long time asleep – don’t know why:  I wasn’t bored by what was on screen – and missed virtually the whole of ‘The Legend of the Chicken Driver’, the third piece.  I feel sorry as well as guilty about that.  It’s the one that Mungiu directed – and the one which, judging from the conversation between Julian Barnes and his companion which I heard on the way out of the Renoir and from an online review on the Channel 4 website, seems to be particularly admired.  The chicken driver is played by Vlad Ivanov, memorable as the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.  In that film, Mungiu set his story in this same historical context – he brought off an impressive balancing act so that the characters never seemed dramatically subordinate to the political message.  I’m not sure the same can be said for the first, second and fourth tales in Golden Age but the last one – ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ – is a half-hour masterpiece.

    In ‘The Legend of the Official Visit’ a senior party member, on the eve of the titular visit, tells the organising party to get hold of some pigeons for use in a rehearsal for the next day.    The man who takes the phone call passes on the instruction to a uniformed colleague, who’s supposedly keeping an eye on a group of workmen.  The man in uniform takes his leave of them to locate pigeons. ‘I’ll be gone half an hour’, he tells the workmen, ‘but I’ll be watching you’.  He wilts from officiousness into limp cluelessness as soon as he’s out of their sight and left by himself with the problem of finding the birds.   The ‘Official Visit’ ends with the organisers, the mayor et al on an all-night spin on a dizzying (in the mayor’s case nauseating) fairground ride.  Its operator is also along for the ride:  he’s just refuelled the mechanism and tells his companions it and they will keep on going until the tank is empty.  The story is neat and witty and the monotonously circling ride is a splendid image – but it’s too tidy a representation of the absurd, entropic political system – which the characters can’t get off until it finally runs out of steam – to be more than neat and witty.   ‘The Legend of the Party Photographer’ is about increasingly frantic efforts to manipulate a photograph of Nicolae Ceaușescu so that he doesn’t look ridiculous standing next to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who’s on a state visit to Romania.   Needless to say, the efforts fail. (Giscard D’Estaing – in a hat – is so much taller than the bare-headed Ceaușescu that the French president looks daft too.)  In ‘The Legend of the Greedy Policeman’ the title character takes illicit delivery of a pig just before the festive season (a relative term in Communist Romania – although this segment is a reminder that it was on 25 December 1989 that Ceaușescu and his wife were executed).  The family expected their Christmas feast to arrive as dead meat rather than alive and kicking – how do they reduce it to pork?  (I wasn’t convinced that no animals were harmed, or at least distressed, in the making of this section.)  I know next to nothing about Eastern European political satire during the Communist period but all three of these stories, with their broad, sarcastic humour, feel circumscribed and unsurprising.

    Like the ‘Greedy Policeman’, ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ illustrates the madly resourceful lengths to which Romanians were driven by their economic system.  In other respects, it has a suppleness that’s lacking in the clever but predetermined stories that have gone before it.  Crina, a teenager, arrives home from school one afternoon before either of her parents and opens the door to a young man from the Ministry of Chemistry, who tells her he’s in the apartment block in response to complaints from the tenants about their cloudy drinking water.  He shows an ID and although Crina won’t admit him because she’s alone in the flat she fills a bottle from the tap for him to take away for testing.  When her parents get home, she falls out with her father about money for a school trip (being organised, she says, by the students themselves and not, she insists, a ‘holiday camp’).  Her caring, cautious father and mother have been saving for ages to buy a car.  That evening, a girlfriend invites Crina over to her apartment, in a different block.  On the way over, the girlfriend talks about her new boyfriend, who’s got a video player – a group of them are going to watch a film.  The boyfriend, Bughi, turns out to be the young man from the Ministry of Chemistry and the video is Bonnie and Clyde.  When, later on, Crina and Bughi chat outside the apartment building, he tells her that he makes a living from the water-testing scam:  it’s a way of collecting considerable supplies of glass bottles, which he then sells off.   He invites Crina to join him in doing this.  They’re obviously attracted to each other, although her motives are probably more mixed than his:  since possession of any kind of video player is a mark of material privilege in the neighbourhood and Crina is desperate for cash so as not to depend on her father for the outing from school, she readily accepts the invitation.

    In ‘Air Sellers’ you’re interested in the characters in themselves, not just as vehicles to illustrate the ludicrous state of the nation.  The relationship between Crina and Bughi really develops.  Once the scam becomes a double act, she shows a flair for it and occasionally upstages her mentor.  She’s pretty, articulate, thinks on her feet to come up with fluent, plausible lies in answer to tricky questions (she’s driven by a desire both for independence and to impress Bughi).  The pair-from-the-ministry routines are very funny.  Of course people are willing to accept the basic premise:  their water is grotty (everyone is pretty sure it’s thanks to a local chemical plant).  The tale takes its title from the point at which Bughi and Crina vary their usual spiel to say they’ve come to take air rather than water samples.  This is the absurdist high point of the film.  Crina ask for two types of bottle to fill with air, which she captures with scientific concentration.  These have to be different bottles, she and Bughi explain to the elderly man in the flat, so that air quality in different parts of the block can be more finely compared.  When the man asks what they do in three- rather than two-room apartments, Bughi says they use a champagne bottle for the third room:  anyone with a three-room apartment must be rich enough to drink it.  ‘You kids think of everything,’ says the satisfied citizen.

    When they start going out together – he in his suit, she in the skirt and top she’s changed into from her school uniform – Bughi and Crina steal a car (his work isn’t so lucrative that he can afford one of those yet).  In the depressed surroundings, the couple do seem relatively glamorous but the Bonnie and Clyde connection isn’t pushed too far.   The group crowded round the small screen to watch a grotty black-and-white pirated recording of the picture in the apartment also hits home as a suggestion of how an adolescent cinema addict like Cristian Mungiu, born in 1968, might have had to access recent ‘decadent’ American cinema in the 1980s.  And the whole atmosphere of this gathering – youngsters drinking, smoking, dancing – gives the sequence a sense of sensual, sexual possibility that’s unusual in Tales from the Golden Age.  It’s as if once night falls there are ways of blotting out the glum monochrome of the daylight world which these people inhabit.   The young actors in the main roles – Diana Cavallioti as Crina, Radu Iacoban as Bughi – are great, especially in how they express the couple’s different mental and emotional speeds.   (Crina thinks faster than Bughi but, at the climax to the story, it’s her panic which causes the get-rich-quick scheme to unravel.)  As soon as these two get together, political parable and human interest story are perfectly combined.

    11 November 2009

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