Film review

  • The Remains of the Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Ivory (1993)

    In the Merchant-Ivory filmography, The Remains of the Day is typical and untypical.  Like most of their best-known work, it’s a period drama, adapted from an acclaimed novel.  Unusually, the book in question pre-dates the screen version by only a few years:  Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was first published in 1989.  In this sense, the film adaptation has more in common with that of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1983) than with the adaptations of E M Forster and Henry James novels for which Merchant-Ivory became famous.  Heat and Dust was published in 1975, when it won the Booker Prize – as Ishiguro’s novel would do fourteen years later.  The writing credit on the two films is a further link, as well as to those Forster-James pictures:  except for Maurice (1987), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted them all[1].  The Remains of the Day was a critical and box-office hit.  Returning to it now, for the first time since a viewing on its original release, I found it unsatisfying.  Although the story’s absorbing, there are problems with the script, with James Ivory’s direction and, much admired as they are, with the lead performances of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrative is anchored in the 1950s, when the protagonist and first-person narrator, Stevens, embarks on a short vacation from his duties as butler at Darlington Hall in Oxfordshire.  His long-time employer, Lord Darlington, has recently died and the stately home has a new, American owner called Farraday.  Stevens receives a letter from a former colleague, who worked as housekeeper at Darlington Hall, in the 1930s; the letter ‘set[s] off a certain chain of ideas to do with professional matters here at Darlington Hall’.  The place is now understaffed and, Stevens thinks, could benefit from the services of an able and experienced housekeeper.  Miss Kenton, as Stevens knew her, has for many years been Mrs Benn and living in the West Country but Stevens infers from her letter that she’s unhappy in her marriage and may be prepared to return to Darlington Hall.  Mr Farraday is going to America for several weeks and encourages Stevens to ‘get out of the house for a few days’ while he’s away, and make use of Farraday’s car.  Stevens does as his boss suggests.  The novel is divided into a prologue and chapters named for successive stops en route to a climactic, fruitless reunion in Weymouth with Mrs Benn.

    In the course of the journey, Stevens expounds his views on what makes a ‘great’ butler and recalls events – and non-events – at Darlington Hall in the years immediately before World War II, where Lord Darlington hosted gatherings of upper-crust sympathisers with Nazi Germany and Stevens managed to disappoint the romantic hopes of Miss Kenton, sending her into the arms of a man she didn’t love.  It’s an article of faith to Stevens that greatness in his line of work ‘has to do crucially with the butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits’.  It therefore wasn’t his place to query his employer’s motives in collaborating with the Hitler regime.  Stevens claims to have thought Lord Darlington was working for the good of humanity but that belief was secondary to the butler’s conviction that his purpose was to serve his master and that he was – ex officio – privileged to do so.  Though he wouldn’t have used the word, Stevens has ‘identified’ as a butler – an identity that has governed his personal as well as his working life:  it wasn’t his place either to enter into a romantic attachment.

    Ishiguro’s novel isn’t long (245 pages in our paperback copy); Ivory’s film (134 minutes) feels much longer.  The screenplay – commendably, in principle – tries to do without Stevens’s voiceover but doesn’t find an alternative way of focusing the storytelling.  Although Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation is largely faithful in terms of what happens, The Remains on the Day on screen moves mechanically to and fro between below-stairs confrontations, the political goings-on at Darlington Hall and Stevens’s ‘motoring trip’.  Nor does the film really address the challenge of inheriting from Ishiguro an unreliable – because a deluded – narrator.  It’s very late on in the novel that Stevens acknowledges his life has been lived in error – ‘I trusted … I can’t even say I made my own mistakes.  Really, one has to ask oneself, what dignity is there in that?’  (Stevens’s only bulwark against the horror of this realisation is retreat into his habitual, damaging self-deception.)

    Attenuating without fully rethinking Stevens’s perspective creates a particular problem vis-à-vis Lord Darlington (James Fox).  For much of the film, we seem to be seeing Darlington from his butler’s loyal, blinkered point of view.  Even when that can’t be sustained – most obviously in scenes from which Stevens is absent – Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala, compared with Ishiguro, go easy on his lordship, who usually comes across as an upper-class twit, exploited by nastier, cleverer appeasers.  A rare departure from the novel makes matters worse.  In the book, as he and his cronies ratchet up their anti-semitism, Darlington asks Stevens if there are any Jews on the Darlington Hall staff; there are two and they’re dismissed – to Stevens’s mute discomfort and Miss Kenton’s more vocal distress.  Ivory preserves those reactions but the staff concerned (Joanna Joseph and Emma Lewis) arrive at Darlington Hall, midway through the film, as refugees from Nazi Germany and are then promptly sent packing.  This makes no sense.  Lord Darlington’s fascist sympathies have already been made clear.  Stevens would hardly have taken the humanitarian initiative to rescue these girls by hiring them as housemaids.

    The story’s bleakness leaves little room for nostalgia about either the 1950s or the 1930s.  Even so, James Ivory, while not quite luxuriating in the period settings, is eager to showcase the production design and décor – to confirm that this is a prestige picture.  It’s just as well, in order to counteract admiring shots of a vintage Daimler, that Anthony Hopkins so deftly conveys Stevens’s respectful unease about using his new boss’s car for his West Country travels.  Ivory does better in describing the minutiae of domestic routine at Darlington Hall and Tony Pierce-Roberts’s cinematography captures the spatial differences between upstairs and downstairs life.  The constricted space of Stevens’s den is used to fine effect in a scene in which Miss Kenton, desperately trying to get an emotional response, virtually pins him down there.  Pierce-Roberts’s camerawork was among the virtues of the Merchant-Ivory Howards End (1992).  One of the relatively few weaknesses of that film was Richard Robbins’s score (or parts of it); the same composer does more damage in The Remains of the Day.  Robbins’s interfering ominous music is doubly frustrating when it drowns out the more interesting soundtrack of Darlington Hall – footsteps on various surfaces, the unique sound of a particular door being shut.

    For a drama in which class distinctions play such an important part, the film is in one crucial respect puzzling.  Anthony Hopkins’s Stevens is beautifully spoken – in contrast to his father, known as Mr Stevens Sr (Peter Vaughan), who has also spent his working life in service and, now well past his prime as a butler, is recruited by his son to the Darlington Hall staff, with unhappy results.  Ishiguro explains, through Stevens (Jr), this difference in accents:

    ‘… it must be remembered that my father was a butler of an earlier generation who began his career at a time when such attributes [as ‘good accent and command of language’, among others] were not considered proper, let alone desirable in a butler.  … [My] generation has been too much preoccupied with the “trimmings”; goodness knows how much time and energy has gone into the practising of accent and command of language …’

    There’s no such explanation in the film.  Stevens, at the head of the servants’ table, corrects the grammar of second footman George (Steve Dibben) but concedes that, without ‘my education’, he’d know no better himself.  On the page, Stevens’s costive, excessively formal manner of expression betrays the effort of ‘practising … command of language’:  his English is so unnaturally careful that he seems to be telling his story in what, to him, is almost a foreign language.  Although Hopkins also speaks carefully, the caution is a function of his character’s deference and emotional distance:  this Stevens doesn’t pronounce words in a way that suggests he’s fearful of not pronouncing them correctly.  When the Daimler breaks down in a Devon village, and Stevens has to stay overnight in an inn, it’s all too easy to believe that the locals, except for the GP (Pip Torrens) who gives him a lift next morning, accept Stevens as a man of high social rank.  Miss Kenton is almost relieved to find him in private reading a ‘sentimental old love story’ (her words), quickly dismayed when Stevens insists that ‘I read these books – any books – to develop my command and knowledge of the English language … to further my education’.  For the film’s audience, this explanation is welcome even if not convincing.  Up to this point, you’ve been tempted to wonder if Mr Stevens Sr somehow contrived to pay to send his son to private school or, at least, to elocution lessons.

    Unlike Hopkins, Emma Thompson does speak in voiceover – and does an accent into the bargain.  Her voice, reading the letter that takes Stevens on his travels, is the first that we hear in the film.  Although Thompson doesn’t overdo it, her vowels immediately make clear Mrs Benn’s lower-class origins; her unmistakably regretful tone penetrates the words of the letter and anticipates her character’s fate.  Once the younger Miss Kenton is working at Darlington Hall, Thompson’s accent tends to come and go a bit.  The most impressive part of the performance is her incarnation of Mrs Benn in the 1950s:  Thompson was only in her early thirties when she made The Remains of the Day but her movement – especially her walk – is believably that of a woman twenty years older.  She’s never socially quite right, though.  (I wish Lesley Manville, three years older than Thompson, had been a big enough name at the time to play this role.)  One or two of the small parts are overdone – Tim Pigott-Smith as Miss Kenton’s charmless future husband, Pip Torrens’s suspicious Dr Carlisle – but there’s good work from Hugh Grant (as Lord Darlington’s journalist godson), Ben Chaplin and Lena Headey (as servants who leave Darlington Hall to marry one another).  Christopher Reeve does well as Congressman Jack Lewis:  as in the novel, Lewis is a lone voice speaking out against appeasement in the pre-war gatherings; it’s a neat adjustment to the source material that he also becomes the post-war owner of Darlington Hall.  Best of all in the supporting cast is Peter Vaughan, whose aggressive presence develops an increasingly desperate quality:  Stevens Sr is a figure who both intimidates and embarrasses his son.

    In the film’s final scene, Stevens is back from his travels.  When a pigeon gets into one of the rooms at Darlington Hall, he’s able to guide the bird to the window he has opened and it flies away.  As a means of making clear what Stevens can’t do for himself, the image is banal but Anthony Hopkins’s eloquent underplaying redeems things.  I don’t mean to suggest that Hopkins isn’t impressive throughout.  Even though I feel his voice and assured delivery miss an important aspect of the character, his portrait of Stevens as a study in self-discipline and emotional repression is a considerable feat.  That Stevens’s plight didn’t move me has less to do with Hopkins than with Kazuo Ishiguro.  I wasn’t moved by the novel either – I think because, accomplished as it is, it strikes me as a scrupulously worked out idea.  Although it’s dramatically effective that Stevens’s code of conduct deprives him of agency in all parts of his life, I don’t really believe that it necessarily blinds him to the feelings he and Miss Kenton have for each other, as well to what Lord Darlington is up to.  The book has the edge on the film principally because, with Stevens telling the story, Ishiguro can keep the reader, like the narrator, in the dark for longer.  On the screen, The Remains of the Day says most of what it has to say in short order, and goes on saying it for too long.

    31 December 2022

    [1] Worth noting, though, that Harold Pinter wrote the first draft screenplay for The Remains of the Day.  At that stage, the film was set to be directed by Mike Nichols.  When the production changed hands (although Nichols was eventually credited as one of three producers), Pinter asked not to receive any writing credit.

  • Flux Gourmet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Strickland (2022)

    The Sonic Catering Institute is a formidably niche centre for the performing arts.  Headed by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who favours red lipstick, kohl eye make-up and power-dressing with frills, the Institute plays host to exponents of culinary-cum-acoustic theatre.  The latest to take up a residency there are a ‘collective’ comprising Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina Propria (Ariane Lebed) and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield).  Volatile control freak Elle di Elle (‘a pun on “low-density lipoprotein”, or “bad cholesterol”’, says Jonathan Romney) is decidedly the boss of the outfit.  She’s less decided, to Jan’s mounting exasperation, on the trio’s stage name.  Elle’s artistic mission in life was inspired by a traumatic happening in kindergarten, where her teacher suffered a fatal allergic reaction to a ‘chocolate wonder cake’.  The infant Elle experienced an epiphany – that food ‘so tasty for me could be so deadly for her’ – or so she tells Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), the Institute’s ‘dossierge’, whose job it is to interview visiting creatives and document their residency.  In their first workshop – watched by Jan, Stones and an invited audience of Institute members – Lamina and Billy throw food into pans on burners and twiddle sound knobs while Elle, naked and blood-smeared, plays the role of a pig being slaughtered (offstage, she’s vegetarian).  She worries that sonic hitches have ruined the performance but Jan reassures Elle that it was very well received.  This is confirmed in an after-show sub-orgy, with appreciative spectators fondling the artistes – the Institute’s usual, distinctive take on audience participation.  Even so, Jan’s concerned by the sound problems and wants a say in the staging of the collective’s future shows.  ‘You can keep the epicurean toxicity,’ she tells Elle, ‘but indulge me on the flanger, please’.  This is the start of the pair’s battle of wills.  Elle doesn’t know what a flanger is but it’s against her principles to accede to anyone else’s wishes.

    Before seeing Flux Gourmet, I’d never heard of a ‘flanger’ either – an electronic device used to create ‘an audio effect that results when the same signal is played from two sources with a minute but variable time delay between them’ (Collins online dictionary).  As an obscure word that crops up repeatedly in Peter Strickland’s script, ‘flanger’ acquires the quality of a double entendre – one of two reasons why it’s amusing each time you hear it.  The other reason is the reading of lines containing the word:  the delivery of these, usually by Gwendoline Christie, is straight-faced and straight-voiced – as it should be, since ‘flanger’ is always used according to its proper technical meaning.  As usual in a Strickland enterprise, the actors’ treating the material seriously is crucial.  It heightens the preposterousness of the story Strickland is telling yet makes the characters in it matter as people.  No surprise that Wikipedia calls Flux Gourmet, which is often macabre and occasionally revolting, a ‘black comedy’.  That overused term is often merely a euphemism for lack of comic clarity; in this case, the label simply doesn’t do justice to the complexity of Strickland’s creation.  He’s an expert purveyor of the painfully funny, an ingenious explorer on the boundary between funny ha-ha and funny peculiar.

    Strickland’s body of work is now large enough for Flux Gourmet, his fifth feature, to evoke facets of his earlier films.  The Sonic Catering Institute, which stands in its own grounds, is, like the principals’ habitat in The Duke of Burgundy (2014), a world apart.  The audiovisual properties of food were given a tryout in Berberian Sound Studio (2012).  (The concept of the Institute in this new film also has an autobiographical basis:  a Variety interview with Strickland at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where Flux Gourmet premiered, notes that, in 1996, he co-founded ‘the Sonic Catering Band project …, which took the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a vegetarian meal and treated them via processing, cutting, mixing and layering.  No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish were used and every dish was consumed by all members of the band’.)  Improvisation scenarios that Jan Stevens devises for Elle, Lamina and Billy have a supermarket setting that picks up the ‘retail malady’ theme of In Fabric (2018).  Each of these echoes is hard to miss.  None of them detracts from Flux Gourmet’s originality.

    There’s a voiceover narration (in Greek, though the rest of the dialogue is in English), supplied by Stones.  This squat, unprepossessing, middle-aged man – a self-described ‘hack writer’, despised by others at the Institute and at first peripheral to the power struggles going on under its roof – becomes increasingly hard to ignore.  He suffers from chronic flatulence – small consolation that (Stones’s voiceover tells us) the results sound worse than they smell.  Having to share a small dormitory with members of the residency is acutely embarrassing for him; besides, Stones has gastric reflux, and his breath does stink.  He seeks help from Dr Glock (Richard Bremmer), the Institute’s fiercely insensitive in-house medic, who carries out tests.  ‘Am I going to die?’ asks the miserably fearful patient.  ‘Name me a living thing that isn’t,’ the bedside-mannerless doctor replies.  In contrast to Glock, and to her own usual impatience with everyone but herself, Elle seems almost sympathetic to Stones’s doomed attempts to visit the dorm toilet discreetly during the night.  Her curiosity turns out to be creative opportunism.  Elle sees Stones’s potential to contribute to her art.

    This leads to Stones undergoing a public colonoscopy.  In front of the usual Institute audience, he lies on stage with Glock’s fibre-optic probe up his backside; what the high-definition camera discovers in his gut is projected on a screen that he can’t see but plenty of others can.  The exhibition seems to complete Stones’s humiliation but his fortunes then take a turn for the better.  He’s diagnosed as coeliac rather than dangerously ill.  By the time the collective’s concluding show takes place, he’s involved in the performance in (what he finds) a more rewarding way:  his voiceover explains that he’s glad at last to ‘feel part of something’.  Strickland has said that he hopes he ‘treats stomach problems responsibly while still pushing the boundaries of taste’.  Viewers with gastro-intestinal complaints of their own may reasonably struggle to think he gets the balance right but it’s fair to say Strickland hardly makes light of Stones’s health problems and resulting indignity.  The Flux Gourmet cast includes people with whom the writer-director has worked before and newcomers to his company.  Fatma Mohamed, uniquely, has appeared in every one of his features.  Gwendoline Christie, Richard Bremmer and Leo Bill (as Wim, the Institute’s technical assistant) are back for more after In Fabric.  Like Asa Butterfield and Ariane Lebed, Makis Papadimitriou is making his Strickland debut and he does outstanding work.  This actor has made plenty of movies in his native Greece but I’m guessing it was the best-known of them, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier (2015), through which Strickland noticed and remembered him.  As Stones, Papadimitriou is memorably melancholic.  You root for this sad-eyed underdog, who can’t even suffer in silence.  You enjoy his eventual sort-of triumph.

    In their different ways Jan and Elle are both prima donnas and, as events unfold, increasingly vulnerable.  Jan is disturbed by a series of phone calls:  we don’t hear what the caller says but it’s clear from the reaction that it’s threatening.  Elle’s autocratic leadership causes creative rifts with Lamina and Billy to widen – the other two both decide to go solo once the residency’s over.  The Institute and the collective alike are plagued by an outfit called The Mangrove Snacks, resentful that Jan turned them down for a residency – ‘I don’t like what they do to terrapins’ – and determined to wreak vengeful havoc.  Elle and co arrive for a rehearsal to find the room vandalised:  there’s a terrapin in a food blender and the slogan ‘The Patrons Are All Criminals’ daubed on furniture.  Jan assures all concerned that she’s contacted the police, who’ll take fingerprints and find the culprits.  Appearances can be deceptive with both leading ladies.  Jan’s clenched integrity and hauteur in conducting Institute business are somewhat undercut by her private life.  She seduces Billy, who rejects the idea of a long-term relationship and sends her into hysterics.  Elle, suspicious when nothing is removed from the rehearsal-room crime scene except the flanger that Jan has wanted to get her hands on ever since the opening show, investigates further.  With Billy and Lamina, she breaks into Jan’s bedroom where they find the flanger in a birdcage and Jan sleeping with the policeman who was meant to be pursuing The Mangrove Snacks.  After Stones delivers a stool sample to Dr Glock, Elle appears to appropriate it for a ‘scatological performance’ on stage.  She smears her face and body with what the audience is meant to think is excrement.  When technical assistant Wim decides to taste it, he discovers it’s chocolate mousse.

    Strickland punctuates the narrative with dinner-table sequences in which each of Elle, Billy and Lamina, in that order, makes a speech to Institute personnel.  Each speech is interrupted by Dr Glock – his snide, showoff heckling peppered with allusions to classical Greece – until the rarely combative Lamina finally shuts him up (‘I don’t need your meta-textual, pseudo-Hellenic, alpha-intellectual one-upmanship’).  As Lamina and Billy confirm they’re leaving Elle, two figures with rifles burst into the dining room; accusing her of orchestrating events to bring about the end of the collective, Elle tries to attack Jan and is shot by one of the intruders.  She falls to the ground and, after whispering her latest suggestion for her band’s stage name, expires.  The funerary sequence that follows features both a coffin that we assume contains Elle and ritual destruction of the gluten products that had made Stones’s life a misery.  Elle’s death is what gives him the opportunity to join Lamina and Billy in their last piece:  it’s also the culminating deception, on the part of Elle – and perhaps of Peter Strickland, too.  Human body parts – Elle’s, surely – are put into a blender and Stones partakes of the resulting smoothie on stage.  But when the audience breaks into enthusiastic applause, Elle is clapping along with the best of them.  Has she, rather than Jan Stevens, been the prime mover throughout?  Or is auteur Strickland finally acknowledging how much he has been playing the audience?  The closing credits are accompanied by Gene Pitney’s ‘Backstage’, an impassioned account of the chasm between performance and reality.

    The cinematographer Tim Sidell shoots the film, especially the comestibles, in a suitably extraordinary range of tones:  palette animating palate.  It goes almost without saying, given the subject and Strickland’s track record, that the sound design is ingenious.  The combination of food as bizarre theatre and digestive problems might suggest a two-pronged lampoon of artistic pretension and consumerism:  that may be one way of describing Flux Gourmet but it doesn’t feel like the whole story, either as you watch or in retrospect (just as In Fabric did much more than poke fun at the extremities of shopping culture).  This is thanks in part to Strickland’s surrealist flair:  even allowing that satire tends to trade in exaggeration, his images are often too startling to register as satirical.  It’s also thanks to his gift for convincing us that the absurd confrontations between his characters are genuinely important to the people involved.  Strickland himself may have skin in the game through his Sonic Catering Band but few viewers of Flux Gourmet will be able to apply any kind of aesthetic standard to the theatrical effort on display.  We can’t say if Elle et al are good or bad at what they profess to do because it’s so recherché – to put it mildly:  sonic catering is, for most of us, an artistic practice peculiar to the world of the film.  We can see, though, how much it matters to those concerned.  It’s hard to describe what Peter Strickland achieves here without making his work sound unappealingly weighty, which badly misrepresents Flux Gourmet.  The film is sometimes baffling, often funny, never mocking, always singularly entertaining.

    21 December 2022

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