Film review

  • Corpus Christi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Boże Ciało

    Jan Komasa (2019)

    Catholic vestments in modern Polish cinema are liable to clothe the unexpected.  In Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), the title character, a novitiate nun in Communist-era Poland, discovers that she’s Jewish.  The charismatic young priest and protagonist of Jan Komasa’s Corpus Christi, set in the present day, isn’t really a priest, though he’d like to be.  His real name is Daniel.  He’s recently been released from a juvenile detention centre, where he served time for second-degree murder.  Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) owns a clerical collar and bib (whether he got it from a fancy-dress shop or stole it from a sacristy isn’t clear).  He wanders into a rural church, gets talking with a young woman there, tells her he’s a priest and whips out the dog collar to prove it.  Within the space of a few hours, Daniel is accepting an invitation to deputise for the church’s priest, Father Wojciech (Zdzisław Wardejn), an alcoholic who needs time to dry out.

    Daniel calls himself Father Tomasz, the name of the priest who was his mentor while he was in ‘juve’.  Daniel wants to enter a seminary on his release.  As Father Tomasz (Łukasz Simlat) reminds him, he can’t, because of his criminal record; Tomasz helps arrange a job for him in a saw-mill instead.  Daniel takes one look at the place and heads off to the nearby church where his deception gets underway.  In an early scene in Corpus Christi, Father Tomasz  addresses the inmates in the detention centre.  His words resonate throughout the film – in Daniel’s mind and the viewer’s, too.  ‘I’m not here to pray mechanically,’ Tomasz tells the young offenders, ‘and I hope you’re not either…  We can go outside and… God will follow us.  … Each of us is the priest of Christ – each and every one of you. …  What does pray mean?  It means talk to God – tell him something important, personal.  … Sing to him about it!’  Father Tomasz then asks Daniel to do just that, and he sings the opening lines of ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’.  When Daniel stands before his congregation for the first time, at a loss for words, he repeats Tomasz’s, and acts on his advice, as he ‘talks to God’ – aloud – and reprises Psalm 23.

    The young woman Daniel meets in the church is Marta (Eliza Rycembel) whose mother, Lidia (Aleksandra Konieczna), is both church warden and housekeeper to Father Wojciech.  Lidia seems suspicious of Daniel from the start, insisting that he sleep not in the priest’s house but in a shabby annex.  Daniel learns from her and Marta about a recent family tragedy:  Kuba, their son and brother, was one of six teenagers, all travelling in the same car, who were killed in a road crash.  The driver of the other vehicle, who also died, had a bad reputation in life and in death is seen as a murderous drunk-driver.  His widow, Ewa (Barbara Kurzaj), has been receiving abusive anonymous letters ever since the accident; the villagers won’t even allow her husband’s cremated remains to receive Christian burial in the local cemetery.  Daniel leads the bereaved families in both prayerful vigils and more startling exercises to voice their furious grief.  Spending time with Marta and her contemporaries, he sees the persisting divisions between them that are a legacy of the crash.   Walkiewicz (Leszek Lichota), the mayor and owner of the saw-mill, ominously warns Daniel not to interfere in the dispute over burial of the ashes.

    Shot by Piotr Sobociński Jr, Corpus Christi is visually oppressive.  A green-greyish light predominates – in the detention centre, in domestic interiors, in most of the church sequences, sometimes even outdoors.  Occasional shafts of sunlight gilding the images are sinister rather than warming.  The film isn’t without humour:  the first time that he hears confession, Daniel cribs from the standard script he’s looked up on his phone.  The next confession sequence is very different.  When Walkiewicz asks him to bless the opening of a new wing to the saw-mill, Daniel is startled to recognise a face there.  Pinczer (Tomasz Zietek) is the latest young offender released from the detention centre to work at the mill.  A few screen minutes later, Daniel is hearing Pinczer’s voice and seeing his eyes on the other side of the confessional grille.

    Jan Komasa tells an absorbing story but the two main strands of Mateusz Pacewicz’s screenplay – Daniel’s pretence and the road accident that has traumatised the community – rather get in each other’s way.  The film’s climax sees the real Father Tomasz, tipped off by Pinczer, arrive in the village to confront Daniel.  In the latter’s lodgings, Tomasz surveys mementoes of Daniel’s time in the parish – photos, gifts from the locals with messages of gratitude.  This might seem the thematic crux of the piece:  how wrong can Daniel’s imposture be if, as a result of it, he’s been a positive influence on the lives of others?   The moment doesn’t register in this way, though.  Komasa focuses so much on the aftermath to the car crash that the theme of Daniel and the villagers getting to like his spiritual leadership hasn’t developed much texture.

    Father Wojciech describes the parish as a place of ‘many people, few believers’.  Church attendance (not that sparse even at the start) increases greatly while Daniel is running the show.  His passionate improvisations have understandable impact but it’s unclear what these mean to the locals beyond novelty.  In the pulpit, Daniel tells the congregation he once killed someone but their reactions to this are hardly explored.  It’s a nice question as to how much his sympathy for Ewa’s reviled husband relates to Daniel’s own past and how much it’s an expression of Christian charity.  He eventually succeeds in conducting a burial service for the man but the fatal crash doesn’t function as a larger parable of forgiveness or of failure to forgive.  The narrative prefers to drip-feed revelations about the crash – it was the kids who were drunk rather than the other driver, the latter had just stormed out of a row with his wife threatening to kill himself, and so on – in a dramatically conventional way.

    Daniel and Marta are drawn to each other from an early stage.  After they’ve confronted Lidia and others with their threatening letters to Ewa, Marta moves out of the rectory and stays with Daniel in the annex, where they have sex.  For the audience, knowing the truth about him naturally has the effect of making Daniel’s variously profane behaviour less remarkable than it might otherwise be.  Here too, however, Komasa leaves opaque what the locals think – even what Marta thinks about sleeping with a man she still believes to be a priest.   A pity because Eliza Rycembel is an expressive actress:  she’s so good at showing Marta’s divided feelings that it’s frustrating that, at this important stage, she’s not allowed to have any.  Bartosz Bielenia easily passes the charisma test (he sometimes brings to mind the young Christopher Walken).  His pale blue eyes certainly hold the camera; you never doubt the strength of Daniel’s appetite for the transformative.  At the same time, Bielenia’s zealous intensity makes his character perhaps too conspicuous.  Daniel always looks nervous, is never someone who blends into his surroundings.  The film’s best performance comes from Łukasz Simlat, a solemnly impressive presence as sad-eyed, gritty Father Tomasz.

    I neither liked nor understood the explosive, gory ending of Corpus Christi.  In the opening scenes in the detention centre, Daniel is threatened and abused by an inmate known as Bonus (Mateusz Czwartosz), who is the brother of the man Daniel killed.  Even at the start, some of the lads in the centre, especially Bonus, look strikingly mature for juvenile offenders.  Daniel doesn’t stand out in this way (although Bartosz Bielenia was in his mid-twenties when the film was shot) but, since he’s served his time there, it’s puzzling that, after his spell in the outside world, he’s sent back to ‘juve’ – for impersonating a priest?  I couldn’t help suspecting that the main reason for his return was to enable a showdown between Daniel and Bonus.  This is both brutal and bloodily protracted.  Daniel finally comes out on top – I assumed that Bonus was dead – and somehow walks free.  I just don’t know what Jan Komasa means this conclusion to say.

    8 May 2021

  • Tulip Fever

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Justin Chadwick (2017)

    Filming took place in mid-2014.  Over three years later, after (presumably) a lot of re-cutting and serial changes of release date, Tulip Fever opened in the US to dire reviews.  Fifteen more months went by before it limped into British cinemas.  I failed to act on a vague intention to see the film then and hadn’t been looking out since for its appearance in television listings.  I don’t know if the screening on BBC2 this May Bank Holiday was the TV premiere but the time slot was striking – immediately after transmission of the World Snooker Championship final.  Setting an end time for that is a well-proven inexact science.  Was the reasoning behind the scheduling ‘This movie is a dud – if the snooker goes down to the wire and we have to pull it no one will mind (and we’ll stick it on iPlayer anyway)’?    At 10pm, when the film was due to start, the snooker was still going on.  Half an hour or so later, the admirable Mark Selby had won his fourth world title and Tulip Fever, plagued by postponements throughout its life, could start without too much delay.  Even so, I decided to watch it on iPlayer next day out of a mixture of curiosity and pity.  The curiosity never disappeared – you always wonder how things went so wrong – though the pity soon turned to irritation.

    Adapted from a 1999 novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach, Justin Chadwick’s romantic drama is set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam during the time of tulpenmanie (tulip mania) – when ‘contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed … [This] is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history’ (Wikipedia).  Plonked into this historically specific context is a tangle of largely familiar plot lines.  The beautiful Sophia (Alicia Vikander), raised in an orphanage, is married off to Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy widower who wants a child.  He’s a bit past it and she fails to conceive.  Things look up when Cornelis commissions a portrait to be painted and Sophia starts an affair with the artist, Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan).  Below stairs, housemaid Maria (Holliday Grainger) is having it off with Willem (Jack O’Connell), the local fishmonger.  He makes a killing in the tulip market before being robbed of it and press-ganged into the bargain.  When Maria discovers that (a) she’s with child, (b) Willem has disappeared and (c) her mistress is adulterous, the two women devise a daring plan.  Sophia will pretend to be pregnant and, when the time comes, to die in childbirth.  Once her body has been removed from her husband’s house, she’ll come back to life and run away with Jan, who, in the meantime, will have made his fortune in tulip bulbs.  Unmarried mother Maria will thus be able to keep her job with Cornelis and – since a nurse will be needed – her baby too.

    That’s not the half of it but it’s more than enough for this note – the load of plot is a main reason why Tulip Fever is both hectic and tiresome.  It whizzes along but is so thinly textured that the effect is sometimes cartoonish.  I’d guess Justin Chadwick shot much too much and couldn’t shape it.  He may have been happy with what he saw in rushes but there are so many scenes and they’re mostly so short that there’s no kind of rhythm, either within individual sequences or in the narrative as a whole.  The film is like a 107-minute trailer.  Just occasionally, Chadwick manages to find a couple of bits of footage to stitch together agreeably.  One morning Cornelis, the blithely unaware cuckold, leaves his house humming a merry tune.  Cut to Sorgh (Tom Hollander), the unscrupulous, venal doctor who’s overseeing the fake pregnancy etc; he’s walking along, also humming contentedly.  It’s a shame there isn’t a third leg to the humming relay.

    There’s a lot of talent involved, behind and in front of the camera, which makes the resulting fiasco rather remarkable, as well as regrettable.  It’s no surprise that the film’s visual scheme tries to evoke art of the Dutch Golden Age but the lighting, by the Danish cinematographer Eigild Bryld, is impressive, especially in the outdoor sequences.  There are some fine interior compositions too but reliance on natural light sometimes makes indoors hard to make out, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the people on screen may be characters who hardly had time to register even when they were fully visible.  Deborah Moggach (who also wrote, inter alia, the screenplay for the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice and the novel Ol Parker turned into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) did the screenplay with, believe it or not, Tom Stoppard.  Who knows how it compares with Moggach’s novel – or even how what ended up on screen compares with the script Moggach and Stoppard wrote.  Explanations of tulpenmanie may have worked better in print; in the film, they’re  don’t amount to much more than repeated eruptions of noisy, hand-held-camera frenzy in the dealing centre.  As in the novel, there’s a first-person narrator but it’s Maria instead of Sophia.  You can’t help wondering if Holliday Grainger’s voiceover was added during part of the lengthy editing process, as a futile attempt to give the narrative some coherence.

    It will be clear from the names above that the film has quite a cast, and I’ve not yet mentioned the likes of Zach Galifianakis, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan – and Judi Dench.  As the pragmatic, wily abbess of the convent orphanage where Sophia grew up, Dench shows how hard it is for her not to give a good performance – even when the odds are stacked against it.  In the small role of a dressmaker, Joanna Scanlan does the same.  Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger both blend humour with single-mindedness.  You miss Willem when he’s carted off into the navy.  It’s good to see him finally return to make an honest woman of Maria; there’s a flash forward to them and their brood a few years into the future.  (It’s rather as if Cinderella lived happily ever after with Buttons and they had kids.)  Except for the uncharismatic Dane DeHaan, none of the actors is weak but you feel with most of them – Alicia Vikander especially – that you’re watching extracts from a performance.  Tulip Fever seems to have been a thoroughly ill-starred film.  Even the place it has in Hollywood history is unenviable.  This was the last movie to be theatrically released by the Weinstein Company.

    4 May 2021

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