Film review

  • Jubilee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Derek Jarman (1978)

    Queen Elizabeth I, with the help of her occultist adviser John Dee and through the agency of the spirit guide Ariel, time-travels with them both to visit the realm of her namesake as queen of England, in the year of the latter’s Silver Jubilee.  Elizabeth II is dead, however, a recent victim of the urban violence that’s rife in the London of 1977 that the writer-director Derek Jarman puts on screen in Jubilee.  The first Queen Elizabeth, as incarnated by Jenny Runacre, is more beautiful than you might expect yet she’s anxious and weary too.  Her lady-in-waiting (Helen Wellington-Lloyd), who accompanies her on the journey to the twentieth century, has a glumly fascinated air.  As John Dee, Richard O’Brien speaks deliberately but hypnotically.  Ariel (David Haughton), wearing a silver suit and entirely black eyeballs, is beauteously artificial in appearance as well as in voice.  The sixteenth-century Elizabethan introduction to Jubilee is altogether arresting but Derek Jarman loses no time in transporting the queen and her retinue into the dystopia of late 1970s London – the waste lands, the sexual permutations, the anomie and anarchy – which they observe rather than interact with.  The end of the film sees the quartet return to the first Elizabethan England.

    Jubilee makes extensive use of punk aesthetics and the eclectic cast includes plenty of punk rock icons and/or performers but Jarman seems to have a larger interest in the dynamics between the sexes and between different sexual orientations.   The prime movers are young women:  Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), Mad (Toyah Willcox), Crabs (Nell Campbell), Chaos (Hermine Demoriane) and Bod (Jenny Runacre again).   Amyl Nitrate is an avowed admirer of Myra Hindley; Bod has killed Elizabeth II and appropriated her crown; but the female violence in the film – often avenging violence – is mostly directed at men or, in one case, a man dressed as a woman.  (This character, Lounge Lizard, is played by Wayne County, who went on to become, as Jayne County, rock’s first transgender singer.)   The male victims include two men who have casual sex with Crabs, whose relaxed promiscuity is disparaged by Mad and Bod in particular.  The first of these Victims is asphyxiated; the second is blown up by a homemade incendiary device.   He is one of a pair of Special Branch policemen, who have shot dead Angel (Ian Charleson) and Sphinx (Karl Johnson), incestuous brothers who inhabit the same squat as the five main women.  (The other Special Branch man has acid thrown in his face before being castrated by the women.)  The gay Angel and the bisexual Sphinx are unaggressive and (therefore) likeable males – the same goes for the young punk rocker Kid (Adam Ant).  The other key male character is the lavishly camp impresario Borgia Ginz (Orlando) with whom the female principals eventually sign a recording contract.

    This is another film I didn’t see when it first appeared and which it’s now just about impossible to see for what it started as.  In retrospect, Jubilee is affecting in various ways:  it seems both politically naive and prophetic.  The aggressive, cauterising energy of the female characters in the poxy, rundown London envisaged by Derek Jarman is a bizarre anticipation of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher little more than a year after Jubilee was released (so are the pearls worn by Amyl Nitrate).  Yet the film doesn’t foresee Thatcherism in a substantial or considered way and it certainly can’t predict another scourge of the coming years:  AIDS claimed the lives of Jarman, in 1994, and, four years earlier, Ian Charleson, the most gifted member of the Jubilee cast.  Sphinx, an artist called Viv (Linda Spurrier) and Angel lie in bed together – Angel is slightly separated from the other two, whose bodies touch, and sings ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’.   Charleson’s singing – he had a beautiful voice – expresses love and lust.  The moment is very poignant.

    Although he has to work quite hard to sustain his Cockney accent, Charleson, with his combination of authority and delicacy, is a remarkable presence in Jubilee.  The odd variety of players and performing styles works well, for the most part.   Jordan’s primitive acting as Amyl Nitrate is more effective than Toyah Willcox’s more conscious insistency as the pyromaniac Mad.  (And Jordan’s ‘Rule Britannia’ number is one of the musical highlights.)  I don’t think it was simply hindsight that made me feel that Willcox conventionalises the spirit of punk.  (Perhaps that’s what Jarman wanted:  it fits with the punk girls’ eventual surrender to the capitalist Borgia Ginz but Mad’s surrender, because of the way Willcox plays her, has relatively little impact.)  Karl Johnson gives Sphinx an ordinary reality that’s very distinctive in this rampantly eccentric world.

    The BFI screening of Jubilee was preceded by Punk Can Take It (1979), a short directed by Julien Temple.  It’s done in the form of a parody World War II documentary, with punks presented as heroic English patriots, resisting the attempts to do them down of establishment enemy factions.   After recently suffering (as much as I could take of) Temple’s Absolute Beginners, I wasn’t hopeful but Punk Can Take It is amusing, particularly the spoof narration, which is read by the veteran BBC broadcaster John Snagge.  According to a good but anonymous summary on IMDB, this was ‘a theatrically released promo for the UK Subs’ and clips of the Subs in concert are the pulse of the piece – although I found them rather upstaged by the other newsreel footage and the staged war comedy sketches that Temple has put together.

    29 September 2015

  • Mirror Mirror

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tarsem Singh Dhandwar (2012)

    In Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer recalls how, as a child, he was aroused by the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White.  Alvy’s precocious deviancy is taking on a new meaning in 2012, which will see the release of adaptations of the Grimms’ fairytale featuring Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron.   The Roberts film is first out of the gate and the star’s beauty is one of the most interesting things about it.  When Julia Roberts’ Queen Clementianna (sic) intones ‘Mirror, mirror …’ and prepares to ask the famous question, you may feel mildly irritated:  she must know the answer.   The looking-glass sequences are sometimes rather unsatisfying.  Once the Queen looks into the mirror on the wall, it becomes a portal to a house on a bleak, isolated island.  The reflection she sees is a different self – a mildly censorious conscience who appears pallid and (to me) rather older than the middle-aged woman looking into the glass.   (I couldn’t believe this was intended and indeed Wikipedia describes the mirror image as ‘a younger, wiser version of her, dressed in simple country clothes, suggesting the Queen had truly humble beginnings’.)    Otherwise, though, Julia Roberts is as fascinating to look at as ever.   Her shocked, incredulous shout of laughter when the Queen learns that Snow White is still alive recalls the famous moment with the jewellery case in Pretty Woman.  When good triumphs over her evil, the Queen is looking in the mirror:  in a reverse Dorian Gray effect, her face instantly ages and withers as the one in the glass remains unchanged.  At the wedding of Snow White and her prince, Roberts turns up – a shawl-shrouded crone – bearing the poison apple.  The old lady make-up is excellent but what you chiefly notice is that Julia Roberts’s bone structure is as good as ever.

    Offered the apple, Snow White thinks twice, slices it neatly and offers a piece back to the donor with a crushing ‘Age before beauty …’  That putdown gives a flavour of Marc Klein’s and Jason Keller’s dialogue.  There isn’t a character in Mirror Mirror who isn’t, at some point, knowing and ironic; many of the lines are good and all the actors handle them wittily.  But however much the director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the writers (Melisa Wallack also gets a credit) and the cast send up the original or the sugared manicheism of the Disney classic, they’re still stuck with the problem that Snow White is a dreary goody two shoes.   The film-makers understandably aren’t prepared to go the whole way and have the Wicked Queen win out; their solution to the problem is therefore to make Snow White somewhat cool to a younger audience because she can stand up for herself physically.  The same goes for the seven dwarves:  in the forest where much of the film’s action takes place they dart around on snazzy black stilt-legs that turn them into the tallest guys in the kingdom and accomplished bandits.  Of course the Grimms’ stories contain a variety of violent elements but I wasn’t expecting from this modernising take on Snow White so many protracted CGI fights, which also feature a fantastical beast unleashed by the Wicked Queen at strategic moments.  These sequences may well be the key to box-office success for Mirror Mirror but they detract from its distinctiveness.  The fights got on my nerves so much that I became impatient for the whole film to end and was relieved this Snow White was smart enough to decline the apple and deliver a short cut to the happy ever after.

    This is frustrating because, in other respects, the technical accomplishments of Mirror Mirror remind you how completely live-action cinema can now deliver the magic that was once largely the preserve of animated film:  the visual effects are, as far as I can tell, flawless – figures materialise and dematerialise, creatures are metamorphosed with vivid precision.  The set design is stylish and the costumes by Eiko Ishioka, who died shortly after completing work on the film, are beautiful and imaginative – a ball at which the guests wear various animal motifs and the Queen’s sinister swansdown wedding gown are perhaps the highlights.  (It’s a pity that Snow White’s wedding outfit is the weakest thing in the wardrobe – the royal blue dress and enormous orange sash suggest an expensive Easter egg.)  Alan Menken has written a serviceable score and the wedding party sing along to ‘I Believe in Love’ over the closing credits in Bollywood-cum-Slumdog Millionaire style.

    Lily Collins as the heroine has remarkably hairy black eyebrows:  when Queen Clementianna is asked to describe her stepdaughter and she’s trying to be as bitchy as possible, you can’t believe she doesn’t choose these very salient details of her appearance.   Collins acts well enough, though.  Armie Hammer impresses again, as the prince who keeps losing his dignity and his shirt – he’s both a gent and a twit, as his name, Prince Andrew Alcott, might suggest.  Hammer has Prince Charming looks which are also peculiarly modern.  He uses his sonorous voice to amusing effect.  Nathan Lane, a superb comic actor, has spot on timing as the Queen’s factotum.  The cast also includes Mare Winningham, Michael Lerner, Robert Emms and Sean Bean, as the King (Snow White’s father) who turns out not to be dead at all.   The dwarves are played by actors of genuinely restricted growth – Ronald Lee Clark, Joe Gnoffo, Martin Klebba, Mark Povinelli, Jordan Prentice, Sebastian Saraceno and Danny Woodburn.  Each has a reasonable supply of good lines and their seven enjoyable characterisations are strongly complementary.

    10 April 2012

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