Film review

  • My Octopus Teacher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (2020)

    Nature documentaries, however ecologically-minded, are inclined to anthropomorphism.  The music and voiceover in the 1950s Disney ‘True-Life Adventures’ series were often derided for this.  David Attenborough is understandably revered for his enduring environmentalism yet his television programmes, in this respect, don’t seem to me that different from the old Disneys.  Sacrilegious to say but I prefer the work of cameraman and conservationist Gordon Buchanan to Attenborough’s.  As their names suggest (The Bear Family and Me, etc), Buchanan’s TV films strike an honest balance between wildlife observation and personal involvement.  The recently Oscar-winning Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher similarly earns points for a title that lays its anthropomorphic cards on the table.

    The first person in this story is Craig Foster, a South African naturalist and documentary film-maker.   Every day for a year, Foster went diving in the kelp forests off False Bay, near Cape Town, where he found and started to film an octopus.  Not only does Foster become increasingly fascinated with the creature, a young female.  He also gains her trust – she lets him observe her habits at close quarters and even engages in play.  It’s impossible to avoid humanising language in a sentence like that last one – which more makes you sympathetic to the anthropomorphism you’ve just been hearing on the soundtrack.   Besides, there’s no denying the octopus justifies the treatment to a remarkable degree, especially in her resourceful self-defence against a pyjama shark.  One of its kind has already dismembered the octopus, who retreats to her den, allowing the arm gradually to regenerate.  She thwarts the next attack by attaching herself to the shark’s back, eventually sliding off to safety.  This episode makes a real heroine of the octopus, as smart as she is plucky.

    A female octopus’s biological design makes her a paradigm of maternal self-sacrifice, as well as of the natural order whereby the individual ends but the species lives on.  Once the octopus has been impregnated, she starts to die.  In nourishing her eggs, she gives up her own strength.  Her last act is to give birth; thoroughly depleted, she then expires.  When he sees ‘his’ octopus mating with a male, Foster knows it’s the beginning of the end.  A shark has the last word, making off with her remains.  Foster’s feelings of loss – even in longish retrospect (his year with the octopus was a decade ago) – crystallised the low spirits that nature documentaries, in spite of their manifold beauties, tend to leave me in (‘Birth, and copulation, and death.  That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks’).  My Octopus Teacher, it has to be said, is certainly not short of beauties.  A film of this kind is bound to be lauded for cinematography that’s amazing and breathtaking; here’s one that really merits those adjectives.  The world under the sea is hardly a new screen location but the images of Roger Horrocks and Foster, both of whom shot submarine sequences, have an exhilarating lucidity.

    Whereas you can’t get enough of the cephalopod teacher or the flora and fauna of which she’s part, I could have done with rather less of the human pupil.  Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed share the directing credit but Craig Foster produced and seems to have been the prime mover, in more ways than one, in the making of the film.  As well as doing the voiceover narrative, he also speaks regularly to camera, and he does go on a bit – in the regional accent that’s my least favourite.  (I realise this amounts to racial prejudice of a kind but I also know my dislike of the sound of white South African voices derives from first hearing them emerge from guardians of apartheid.)  This isn’t Foster’s fault, of course, but the same can’t be said for some of his clichéd remarks.  He explains, for example, how, before the events described, he’d been ‘through two years of hell’.  This turns out to mean little more than that he was overworked, jaded and seems to have felt the need to revitalise his relationship with his teenage son Tom.

    The octopus experience gave Foster a new lease of life on all fronts.  The closing legends explain that he still goes deep-sea swimming but now in the company of others – not only Tom but also colleagues in the Sea Change project, which Craig Foster co-founded in 2012, to help protect life in the kelp forests.  What exactly did Foster learn from the octopus?  The chief lesson, he says in the film’s closing lines, was ‘to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor:  that’s a huge difference’.  Fair enough, though why should the two things be mutually exclusive?  Foster also says the octopus educated him to ‘care for all life, even the smallest fish’.  I’m not sure if that all includes the pyjama sharks.

    2 May 2021

  • Music in Darkness

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Musik i mörker

    Ingmar Bergman (1948)

    The title is exactly what you get in the first few moments as Erland von Koch’s score plays on a black screen.  The fourth film that Ingmar Bergman directed is the first he didn’t also write.  Dagmar Edqvist’s screenplay is an adaptation of her novel of the same name, about a promising classical pianist who loses his sight.  This happens at the very start of Music in Darkness.  Bengt Vyldeke (Birger Malmsten) is taking part in a military training exercise (he’s presumably doing national service) – shooting practice.  When he sees a puppy dog wandering among the targets Bengt clambers up to rescue the animal.  As he moves the puppy out of harm’s way, he’s inadvertently shot by another soldier and blinded.

    The early scenes are among the film’s most potent.  The golden labrador or retriever puppy, a small white form amid the black framework of the shooting targets, is a telling image of innocent vulnerability; so is Bengt, smiling with tender concern as he reaches towards the creature.  Lying in his hospital bed with bandaged eyes, the injured man experiences what must one of Bergman’s first dream sequences – waking from it doesn’t restore Bengt to normality.  There are plenty of good bits in the story that follows but that’s how you register them – as bits – and Music is Darkness compels attention chiefly because of what the film-maker went on to do.  The sleeve of my Tartan Video DVD includes admiring blurb – ’Touchingly understated’ (Time Out), ’Beautifully lean and laconic’ (New York Times) – that puts a positive spin on a rather low-powered, choppy narrative.  The film runs only 84 minutes:  you get the sense that Dagmar Edqvist has drastically compressed her novel, that her script amounts to a checklist of key events in Bengt’s struggle to come to terms with blindness and the repeatedly interrupted progress of his relationship with Ingrid (Mai Zetterling), a servant of the relatives in whose house he lives after his accident.  Music in Darkness is often melodramatic.  It rarely has the imaginative intensity which transforms melodrama in vintage Bergman.

    According to his memoir Images: My Life in Film, Bergman made the picture because, after A Ship Bound for India and It Rains on our Love, he needed a commercial success – and was in no position to argue with the producer, Lorens Marmstedt.  This was a case of mission accomplished:  Music in Darkness did make money and put Bergman’s directing career back on track.  To some of the good bits …  After being turned down by a conservatoire, Bengt gets work playing piano in a hotel restaurant:  the scenes there and in Bengt’s lodgings are shot through with broad comedy and grossly insensitive behaviour which Bergman always had a talent for combining.   Less characteristically, he illustrates well the theme of new educational opportunities opening up for, and being seized by, the likes of Ingrid, who has had a rural, unschooled upbringing.  Bengt also spends time helping out in a school for blind children, who are evidently the real thing; this is striking and feels unusual in a 1940s film.  The tensions between Bengt and Ebbe (Bengt Eklund), Ingrid’s boyfriend and fellow student, are encapsulated in two physical exchanges:  first, semi-humorous arm wrestling, then when Ebbe strikes Bengt – who’s pleased to be treated, for once, just like a sighted person.

    As Bergman’s leading man in his early films, Birger Malmsten was certainly in the wars – blinded here, killed in a diving accident in Summer Interlude (1951).  Malmsten’s essentially gentle temperament isn’t ideal for the expression of Bengt’s furious frustration with his disability but it’s right for the young man’s persisting melancholy.  Malmsten’s understated romanticism works well too.  Mai Zetterling’s Ingrid is a much stronger (almost sturdy) physical presence and her face magnetises the camera.  (She briefly appears naked, in backview.  This is instructive since Harriet Andersson’s doing the same in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) seems widely to be regarded as a kind of first.)   On the face of it, it’s surprising that Zetterling didn’t appear in any subsequent Bergman films.  Among those in the cast who did, Naima Wifstrand has a small role here as one of Bengt’s relatives and Gunnar Björnstrand makes a fleeting but incisively witty appearance as Klasson, the bitterly humourless violinist who plays alongside Bengt in the restaurant.  They perform in matching sweaters with a ridiculous harlequin design.  This intensifies Klasson’s bad temper and makes you feel this may be one instance where Bengt is better off blind.

    28 April 2021

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