Film review

  • Argo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ben Affleck (2012)

    For much of Argo, there’s a disappointing lack of traction between the political suspense and the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction Hollywood aspects of the film.  This is the story of how the CIA planned, and accomplished, the rescue from Iran in early 1980 of six American nationals who’d escaped from the US Embassy in Tehran – when it was stormed by an angry crowd in November 1979 – to take refuge in the neighbouring Canadian Embassy.  (Fifty-six other embassy workers remained as hostages until 20 January 1981:  the Ayatollah Khomeini’s determination to humiliate Jimmy Carter to the end saw the hostages released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President.) The CIA pretended that Tony Mendez, the agent in charge of the rescue operation, and these six ‘house guests’ of the Canadian ambassador were in Iran scouting locations for an Oriental-flavoured sci-fi movie called ‘Argo’.  As well as false identity papers and Canadian passports, story-boards and publicity for the movie were produced, for use both in Tehran and back in Burbank, California.   Ben Affleck, working from a screenplay by Chris Terrio (based on a 2007 Wired article, ‘How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran’, and Antonio Mendez’s memoir The Master of Disguise), sets up the situation with a potted explanation of the political history of Iran up to and including 1979.  This prologue is informative but far from zippy; Affleck’s staging of the invasion of the American Embassy is nothing special either.   Although it’s never boring to watch, Argo is unsatisfying.  This is one occasion when you feel that a film’s being based on a true story really ought to count for something.  The movie should feel unique yet it’s political thriller boilerplate, made with a good deal more proficiency than imagination.

    In the last half hour or so, however, Argo catches fire and I don’t think it’s simply because this is the climax of the rescue plot.  When Mendez and his team check in at Tehran airport there are no seats for them on the Swiss Air flight they’re planning to take to freedom.  The CIA has decided at the eleventh hour to abandon the rescue but Mendez refuses to accept orders and heads for the airport with his precious cargo anyway.  President Carter’s renewed authorisation of the plan comes through in the nick of time:  when the check-in girl looks again for reservations on the plane they’ve materialised.   The group’s progress through the airport is then interrupted by an aggressively suspicious security guard.  His interrogation is frightening partly because of the force of the actor playing the guard (he could be one of several names in the IMDB cast list).  It’s also partly because the guard’s questions are in Farsi and there are no subtitles on the screen:  the cinema audience is as helpless in the face of this incomprehensible grilling as the Americans actually on the receiving end of it (all but one of them, anyway – the one who understands the language).  Mendez gives the security guard a business card for the pretend film production company and asks him to call Hollywood to verify the travellers’ credentials.  Affleck cuts to Burbank and we watch the two men whom Mendez is relying on to take the call being delayed on a studio floor; the phone rings and rings in an empty room.  Just as the guard is about to hang up, the phone is picked up by the right person.   The guard’s questioning at the heart of these sequences has a documentary reality and grip that’s been missing until this point in the movie.  Before and after it are moments of considerable suspense that are not only hard to credit but which seem to be required elements in any fictional escape story worth its salt.   Because so much of what’s gone before is unimaginative I’m not wholly convinced that the combination of these two elements is fully intentional but it’s certainly effective.  It makes you feel this whole thing really happened at the same time that it expresses the crucial importance of Hollywood unreality in the rescue.  It’s when Argo is most real and at its most excitingly contrived that the movie is truest to its subject.

    Ben Affleck’s decision to cast himself in the lead role of Mendez was a mistake.  He’s minimally expressive and not a good enough actor to show anything going on behind the blank face and dead eyes.   The house guests, like the movie, take a long time to engage our sympathies but they’re gradually persuasive:  Scoot McNairy is the standout but all the others – Kerry Bishe, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Tate Donovan and Clea DuVall – do well too.  It’s not surprising that, back in Hollywood, John Goodman as John Chambers (the Oscar-winning make-up artist who is Mendez’s first contact there) and Alan Arkins as a film producer called Lester Siegel (a composite figure) have more fun than anyone in Iran or at CIA headquarters (where Bryan Cranston is Mendez’s boss). Goodman and Arkin have the best lines and make the most of them.   It’s amazing how much comic mileage there turns out to be in the characters’ shared catch phrase ‘Argo fuck yourself’:  Arkin’s exultant delivery of these words the last time we hear them is especially enjoyable. The momentum of the climax to Argo is just about irresistible.  It nearly survives even the lame happy ending of Tony Mendez, whose marriage was on the rocks and who’d moved out of the family home, returning to his wife and son.  During the airport sequence, the security guard flicks through a Hollywood trade paper.  This includes an article headed ‘Argo To Start Filming in March’ and a photograph of Meryl Streep in a still from Kramer vs Kramer – a reminder of what was actually big in the American film industry at the time.   The shot at the end of Argo of Tony Mendez reunited with his son is (I assume inadvertently) reminiscent of the ending of Kramer vs Kramer.  Ben Affleck redeems himself with a more pertinent summation of the story that he’s told as the camera moves along the rows of Star Wars figures in Mendez’s son’s bedroom.

    10 November 2012

  • Apur Panchali

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kaushik Ganguly (2014)

    An interesting idea but an increasingly frustrating film to watch.  The writer-director Kaushik Ganguly dramatises the life of Subir Banerjee who, as an eight-year-old, played Apu in Pather Panchali.  Banerjee didn’t reprise the role in the second and third films of Satyajit Ray’s famous trilogy; indeed, Banerjee never acted again and disappeared from the public eye.  He was tracked down in 1980 by an Indian magazine; at the time, he had a manual job in a factory in Calcutta.  According to an interview with Kaushik Ganguly conducted by New Delhi Television Limited in 2012, Banerjee subsequently ‘became a clerk at a central government office, and later took voluntary retirement’.  Ganguly’s film is dedicated to Banerjee particularly and, more generally, to the many child actors who made a big impression in their first screen appearance before vanishing without trace.

    In visual and structural terms, Apur Panchali (Apu’s Song) comprises three parts:  scenes, apparently in more or less the present day, involving the elderly Subir Banerjee (Ardhendu Bannerjee) and a young film studies student, Arko (Gaurav Chakrabarty), whose task is to persuade the reclusive Banerjee to travel to Germany to accept an award commemorating his childhood contribution to cinema;  the story of Banerjee’s life in his thirties (in which he’s played by Parambrata Chatterjee); and clips from Ray’s Apu films.  The Arko sequences (as I’ll call them) are in colour; the 1970s scenes are, like the Apu trilogy, in black and white.  Apur Panchali was screened at BFI as part of the recent London Indian Film Festival and the film was followed by a Q&A with Kaushik Ganguly.  He explained how, before he wrote the screenplay, he met and talked at length with Subir Banerjee.  Ganguly also acknowledged that not everything in this biographical film actually happened but he didn’t make clear what events were drawn from Banerjee’s life and what was poetic licence.  To be fair to Ganguly, Sangeeta Datta, who conducted the Q&A, seemed more anxious to laud than interrogate him; a more disciplined questioner might have ensured that Ganguly told us more.  It would have been good to know whether the Arko part of the film was pure invention.  If Subir Banerjee really is the melancholy hermit that Apur Panchali presents, it seems inconceivable that he would have agreed to emerge from decades of anonymity to travel to Germany to receive an award.  (It seems not much less unlikely that a European cinema foundation would rely on a film studies student on another continent to find Banerjee.)  On the other hand, Ganguly mentioned in the Q&A that Subir Banerjee had remarried in recent years and was happy with his new wife – so his continuing solitariness, although crucial to Ganguly’s movie, may be a fiction too.

    Apur Panchali doesn’t investigate what the legacy of Apu means to Banerjee beyond its being a burden to him – ‘a shadow’ that he’d prefer to put behind him.  When we first meet the thirtysomething Subir, he’s fundamentally oppressed by the Apu millstone round his neck:  this is before his own life starts to resonate with Apu’s experiences.   In the last film of Ray’s trilogy, Apu’s wife dies giving birth to their child and the grief-stricken young widower disowns the baby boy whom he considers responsible for her death.  Subir Banerjee doesn’t marry until he’s in his thirties; he and his wife’s baby dies, then the wife (Parno Mittra) commits suicide.  Kaushik Ganguly confirmed that this really happened to Banerjee but the film fails to address the horror of this resonance – to a man who already loathed not being able to escape from Apu – and of the fact that, unlike Apu, Subir loses both his wife and his child.   Until and except for this short-lived marriage, Subir Banerjee, in his thirties, appears to be an emotional recluse.  This isn’t convincingly explained; nor does Ganguly attempt to explore what difference the shocking trauma of his married life made to Banerjee’s outlook.  Of course it isn’t difficult for the viewer to accept that early, unrepeated success or celebrity can be problematic in later life but Apur Panchali seems phoney and lazy in the way that it links the biographies of Apu and Subir.   Ganguly interprets the persistence of Apu in Subir’s life too simply – as if nothing much can happen in it except for a personal trauma shared with his screen doppelgänger.  One of the few moments in the film that rings true comes when Arko asks Subir about the second Apu film, Aparajito, and how it felt not to be cast as the adolescent Apu.  Subir replies that, although he expected to play the part again, he ‘can’t really remember’.  In other words, it should have meant a lot but, at this distance in time, he can’t be sure if it did.

    The use of footage from the Ray films weakens Apur Panchali further.  It exposes the artificiality, and the relative lack of visual richness, of Ganguly’s piece; the crucial excerpts from The World of Apu also tend to dilute the connection between Subir Banerjee and Apu, since it’s Soumitra Chatterjee, not Banerjee, who’s playing Apu.  (There is a secondary connection – seeing Chatterjee reminds you of the deservedly long and honoured career he’s enjoyed in Indian cinema and how different that is from Banerjee’s own experience – although I’m not sure this is what Ganguly intended.)  I don’t know the original Ravi Shankar music for the Apu trilogy well enough to be able to tell how successfully Indradeep Dasgupta’s score for Apur Panchali has drawn on or developed it.  Both the actors playing Subir are impressive, Parambrata Chatterjee particularly so.  This in itself creates difficulties, however.  Chatterjee’s unsmiling face holds your interest enough for you to want to know more about why the younger Subir Banerjee feels as he does but Ganguly’s script doesn’t enable the actor to take things further:  Chatterjee gives the impression not so much of Subir’s resenting the legacy of Apu than of waiting for his bereavement to happen.  (On a slightly related point:  the print shown at BFI is the one that’s been shown in Indian cinemas and starts with a warning that ‘smoking kills’ – the two words then appear at the bottom right-hand corner of the frame throughout the film.  One of the more striking pieces of information Kaushik Ganguly gave in the Q&A was that this persisting visual reminder is a legal requirement in India.)

    13 July 2014

     

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