Film review

  • Marnie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1964)

    Margaret ‘Marnie’ Edgar is a frigid kleptomaniac.  The inevitable destination of Alfred Hitchcock’s film is an explanation of why.  Hitchcock reaches the destination after more than two hours but plenty of viewers will get there sooner, and get bored with the delaying tactics of the protagonist’s repeated lies and evasions.  It’s little wonder Marnie received largely negative press and failed to set the box office alight in 1964 but its cinematic reputation has kept rising since, while Hitchcock’s personal reputation has declined, thanks chiefly to his alleged treatment of certain actresses, particularly Marnie’s star, Tippi Hedren.  (The relationship was dramatised in the television film The Girl (2012), inspired by Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock biography.)  The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who rates Marnie its director’s finest work, isn’t wrong to say that ‘The movie’s story and its backstory converge’ although the impact of that may not be so great for those who’ve seen the earlier film on which Hitchcock and Hedren worked together.  Silly as The Birds (1963) mostly is, the progressive dismantling of Hedren’s character’s impeccable appearance is all the more unpleasant when you learn what Svengali Hitchcock put his Trilby through in shooting the relevant sequences.

    Richard Brody characteristically overeggs things with bonkers follow-up pronouncements, culminating in ‘Hedren’s performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema’ – a judgment whose daftness is mitigated only slightly by Brody’s gloss that the performance is ‘inseparable from the pathology of Hitchcock’s approach to her, personal and cinematic.’  Unless you’re aware of that ‘pathology’, the performance – on which Marnie crucially depends – is inadequate.  The Hitchcock oeuvre is hardly rich in substantial female lead roles.  A woman tends to be the male star’s helpmate, or the object of his desire or obsession, even if, occasionally, the actress concerned (Ingrid Bergman, at any rate) is strong enough to appear at least an equal partner.  Psycho (1960) seemed set to be the story of Marion Crane but look what happened to her.  So the two Hitchcock films starring Tippi Hedren are, in this sense, exceptional.  It’s true the heroine of The Birds is upstaged by the title characters but Marnie is a different matter:  whatever you think of the conception of the main character, the actress playing her needs to carry the drama.  Hitchcock hoped Grace Kelly would emerge from Monegasque retirement to take on the role.  Marilyn Monroe wanted it.  Lee Remick and Eva Marie Saint were among others considered.  It’s hardly surprising that Tippi Hedren retrospectively expressed herself ‘amazed’ to be offered the part.  She tries hard but lacks the emotional range and power to bring it off.  Brody’s enthusiasm for Hedren’s ‘presence that’s at the same time an absence’ is an unintended admission that her performance is inadequate.

    A main reason why ‘absence’ won’t cut the mustard in Marnie is the abundance of dialogue.  The psychological thrillers Hitchcock made shortly before this one – Vertigo (1958) then Psycho – have plenty of action and plenty of mystery.   Marnie is short on both but long on talk – in the two, protracted sequences featuring Marnie’s ex-prostitute, man-hating mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), and in many intervening scenes between Marnie and Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), the wealthy widowed businessman who blackmails Marnie into marrying him.  Some surprising names feature in the writing of the film, from the author of the (1961) source novel onwards.  He was Winston Graham, best known for the Poldark chronicles.  Joseph Stefano, who wrote the Psycho script, produced the first draft screenplay for Marnie; Evan Hunter, scenarist on The Birds, took over; when he and Hitchcock fell out, the latter brought in Jay Presson Allen, who had just adapted The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the stage and would go on to write the screenplay for the 1969 film version and for Cabaret (1972).  The surfeit of words in Marnie proves a problem both for Tippi Hedren, whose line readings are often colourless, and for Louise Latham, whose delivery of Bernice’s climactic speech is scaled for the theatre rather than the screen.

    Hitchcock’s far greater aptitude for visualisation, makes the film’s wordless – and music-less – moments all the more welcome.  He makes excessive use of Bernard Herrmann’s score which by now (Marnie was the seventh and last of their collaborations) sounds over-familiar:  when the music stops playing, however, it’s often a cue for a visual highlight.  One such is the opening sequence, where the camera follows a black-haired, dark-suited woman along a railway platform: just as she stops and starts to turn towards the camera, Hitchcock fades out.  There’s an enjoyably extended shot in Marnie’s workplace, when her colleagues have left for the night.  On the right-hand side of the frame, Marnie opens and empties a safe; on the left-hand side, an office cleaner (Edith Evanson) goes about her work.  Separated by a partition, each is oblivious to the other’s presence.  The best thing about the two episodes involving Bernice is the look of the Baltimore street on which she lives.  Beyond the houses, there are boats in a harbour.  This is a painted backdrop, one of matte artist Albert Whitlock’s ingenious creations – thoroughly realistic except that the lack of perspective renders the image unreal.  It’s repeated at the film’s end, when details of Marnie’s appalling childhood trauma have finally been revealed.  The vista’s static quality now seems to confirm the protagonist’s arrested development.  That impression is reinforced – this is one fine image that doesn’t go unaccompanied on the soundtrack – by children’s voices chanting a rhyme.

    In other respects, the clues to Marnie’s past are floridly banal.  The motif of a key turning in a bureau drawer, sometimes to discover another key inside the drawer, is a trite visualisation of the narrative’s quest to unlock Marnie’s secrets.  When, in stressful moments, she literally sees red, could this be triggered by a memory of blood?   When she’s terrified by thunder and lightning, might it be that whatever explains her predicament took place during a storm?  A more significant question:  does Hitchcock mean these things to be as obvious as they are?  (If yes, why not try something less obvious?  If no, how can they be admired as imaginative?)  Plenty of people are nervous of thunderstorms.  It’s probably not because, when they were five years old and saw their sex-worker mother being threatened by a male client, they came to her rescue by bashing him on the head with a poker, as lightning flashed and thunder crashed outside.  Marnie’s singular early childhood surely deserves a persisting phobia more extraordinary than this.

    The black-haired woman at the start – a yellow travel bag tucked under her left arm, a grey suitcase in her right hand – is soon revealed, as she washes out the hair dye, to be Tippi Hedren’s Marnie.  In the meantime, Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel), the boss from whom she stole the contents of her luggage (‘Nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven dollars!’), has told the police that the thief employee went by the name of Marion Holland.  A blonde secretary called Marion who makes off with a load of cash then washes in a rented room:  it’s as if the end of Psycho‘s leading lady is the beginning of Marnie‘s.  There’s also a connection between the last scene of dialogue in Psycho and the first one here.  The acting in smaller parts in Psycho is less comically creaky than it often is in late Hitchcock, except for Simon Oakland, as the psychiatrist who finally explains Norman Bates’s deranged personality:  Oakland hands the baton to Martin Gabel’s Strutt and the two detectives he’s talking to, played by Henry Beckman and an uncredited partner in crime.  The  big difference is that they herald the clunky playing of lesser roles that will prevail throughout Marnie.  The more these wooden actors are in evidence, the worse they seem.  I got to feeling embarrassed for Diane Baker, in the admittedly thankless role of Lil Mainwaring, whose sister was Mark’s first wife and who carries a torch for her brother-in-law.

    Sean Connery, the film’s co-star, doesn’t come into this category.  Indeed, in Richard Brody’s view, he’s more than a co-star:  Brody sees Marnie as first and foremost ‘the story … of Mark’s irrepressible lust for Marnie’, only ‘also’ as ‘a story of Marnie’s troubles and Mark’s willingness to turn his life upside down, and put himself at grave legal risk, to help her overcome them …’   If this were Hitchcock’s order of priorities, he wouldn’t have devoted so much screen time to the climactic explanation of Marnie’s ‘troubles’ or removed any sinister implication from the closing conversation between her and Mark.  (As they leave Bernice’s house together and prepare to get into their car, Marnie asks her husband if she’ll go to jail.  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he replies.  ‘I don’t want to go to jail,’ says Marnie, ‘I’d rather stay with you’.)  Brody’s piece was written in 2016, when Sean Connery was still alive, so it’s no surprise there’s no suggestion that the ‘movie’s story and its backstory converge’ also in relation to the male lead.  It’s quite hard, though, to watch the young Connery in this role without being reminded of both 007’s attitudes towards women and the actor’s own history of alleged domestic violence (and public remarks on the subject).

    Still, Marnie without Connery would be an even sorrier affair than it is.  He can’t salvage that much:  when Mark and Marnie honeymoon on a cruise ship, the scenes tread water – save for the one in which Mark startlingly asserts what he deems his conjugal rights.  But there’s no denying Connery’s presence (uncomplicated by absence!) and he can be subtly effective, too.  When sneaky, jealous Lil tips off Mark that his new wife’s mother is still alive, there’s real pain in Connery’s eyes as he registers that Marnie has lied to him (another clue that that this isn’t primarily ‘the story … of Mark’s irrepressible lust’).  After that tip-off, Mark hires a private detective to find out more about Marnie’s mother.  When he subsequently takes a call from the man, Mark says:  ‘You say she killed him? … That means the little girl must’ve been about five, is that right? … Look, have photostats made of all the court records’.  By mistakenly inferring that the unheard detective was telling Mark that Marnie had once killed someone, I anticipated the supposedly shock revelation of the film’s climax.  The misunderstanding was me being dim but it also reflected an assumption, proved right, that the source of Marnie’s lifelong nightmare had to be more than witnessing a terrible event.

    The tasteless melodrama of the closing stages is a mixture of laughable and upsetting.  Marnie’s happiest relationship is with her horse, Forio (‘Phorion’ is Greek for ‘stolen goods’), in whose company she feels free and unthreatened.  During a fox hunt on the Rutland estate, Marnie sets Forio off on a frantic gallop, as overwrought screen hunters tend to do; the horse eventually takes a crashing fall and breaks a leg.  The filming of the crazed gallop and the fall is ludicrously, no doubt knowingly, overblown yet the injured animal’s agonised screams sound real (and are hard to get out of your head).  Marnie puts both horse and audience out of their misery when she eventually gets hold of a gun and shoots Forio.  A flashback to what happened during the storm of yesteryear is crude and overlong but Bruce Dern brings clammy, malign vitality to his cameo as the sailor john menacing five-year-old Marnie (Melody Thomas Scott) and her twenty-year-old mother (Emmaline Henry).  It’s another relief when the little girl and the poker put an end to him.  This was an ill-fated year for Dern:  before 1964 was out, he would also come to a spectacularly bad end in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.  But he briefly animates both these bad films.

    31 March 2022

  • Paris, 13th District

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les Olympiades, Paris 13e

    Jacques Audiard (2021)

    Jacques Audiard has made some fine films – See How They Fall (1994), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009).  His recent output is making them seem a distant memory.  Audiard’s first English-language picture, the revisionist Western The Sisters Brothers (2018), was a fancy misfire and his latest continues the decline.  Paris, 13th District is meretricious and unintentionally desolating.

    The director wrote the screenplay with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius.  The source material is three short stories by the admired American graphic novelist and cartoonist Adrian Tomine, although, as Tomine makes clear in an interview on the Curzon cinemas website, Audiard’s film is ‘using my stuff as a very basic premise, and really going off in its own direction’.  The Tomine stories, according to the Curzon interview, concern ‘a former call-centre worker cast adrift in an uncertain period of her twenties’, ‘a young woman whose social life is plagued by her uncanny resemblance to a porn star’ and ‘a teenager [who] pursues stand-up comedy as a way of persevering through trying times at home’.  Each of the trio is recognisable in Paris, 13th District, though it’s a shame the stand-up – by some way the film’s most likeable character – has a relatively small role.

    Émilie Wong (Lucie Zhang), from a Taiwanese family, lives in an apartment belonging to her grandmother.  The old lady (Xing Xing Cheng) is now in an old people’s home, where her granddaughter occasionally visits her.  Overqualified for her soul-destroying call-centre job, Émilie tries to stave off boredom by repeatedly going off script with people on the other end of the phone line.  Outside work, she spends most of her time on dating apps until Camille Germain (Makita Samba), a teacher and part-time doctoral student, rents a room in her apartment and they start an affair.  (His younger sister, Eponine (Camille Léon-Fucien), still living at home with their widowed father (Pol White), is the would-be comedy performer.)  Émilie, having fallen in love with her tenant, falls out with him because Camille doesn’t feel the same way.  He leaves the apartment, quits teaching and, in order to fund his studies, gets a job in an estate agent’s office.  Working there for similar reasons is Nora Ligier (Noémie Merlant), whom Camille dates and beds, although she’s anxiously unresponsive.  Regularly mistaken for a porn star called Amber Sweet and slut-shamed as a result, Nora looks up and starts communicating online with her supposed doppelganger.  After quite a few of these interactions, Nora and Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth) eventually meet in reality, which confirms their shared belief that they’re made for each other.   After several further brief, narky encounters by phone or in person, Émilie and Camille reconcile and reach the same conclusion.

    Of the four main characters (including Amber Sweet), three are in their thirties and Émilie is a decade younger.  Jacques Audiard is sixty-nine.  There’s a lot of sex in the film and most of the nudity – all of the most graphic nudity – is female.   Paris, 13th District might have been expected to attract a deal of adverse criticism for this but the rare relevant references in reviews I’ve seen are indulgent.  In NME, Elizabeth Aubrey thinks the sex ‘never feels gratuitous or, crucially, a result of the male gaze in a film where women are always front and centre’.  Actually, Camille is often front and centre in terms of narrative prominence, though never full frontal, unlike Émilie and Nora.  A possible explanation for why this discriminating approach doesn’t amount to male gazing comes in a piece by M J O’Toole for Hammer To Nail.  O’Toole commends Audiard – ‘a widely acclaimed, but [sic!] white male filmmaker’ – as ‘wise for co-writing [Paris, 13th District] with two esteemed female French filmmakers …, resulting in a truly witty, genuine and thoughtful screenplay that helps subvert the male gaze’.  How does that work – if what the director chooses to let the camera see keeps de-subverting things?

    The title suggests the exact geographical setting – ‘Les Olympiades’ are high-rise apartment blocks in the 13th arrondissement – will be important but it turns out not to be (in striking contrast to the suburban Paris housing project that becomes the temporary home of the asylum seekers in Audiard’s Dheepan (2015)).  Paul Guilhaume’s black-and-white cinematography has been variously described as ‘sumptuous’ (Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia) and ‘harsh’ (Elizabeth Aubrey).  The former is closer to the mark.  There are atmospheric nighttime shots of the tower blocks but nothing hard-scrabble about the lives being described:  the concrete jungle that is Les Olympiades has no evident psychological effect on any of them.  Deciding to make the film in black and white comes across as a senior citizen’s bid to be distinctive and even modish.

    The bid has succeeded, at least in the eyes of the admiring critics who see fit to compare Paris, 13th District with films that appeared in the efflorescence of the nouvelle vague sixty years ago.  I suppose they do have in common young protagonists and the enduring dazzle of France’s capital city.  Also from more than half a century ago, I remember a review of Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970) by Margaret Drabble in The Listener.  Lofty denunciations of this box-office smash, the film of the Erich Segal novel that was already a commercial phenomenon, weren’t hard to find but Drabble’s was funny, especially on the impossibility of transposing Segal’s tale from America to England:  if the Harvard jock hero had been an Oxbridge rowing blue, she said, no one would have taken him seriously.  The workplace where Camille and Nora meet in Paris, 13th District kept reminding me of this.   Even if they were ‘trying to navigate love in a digital age be it via casual hook-ups, dating apps or online porn’ (NME again), millennial estate agents in London rather than Paris could only be characters in a broad comedy.

    The actors are good, especially Camille Léon-Fucien as the stammering stand-up and Noémie Merlant, who makes Nora’s literal-mindedness both amusing and sad.  But Nora’s outlook, like those of the other principals, is scarily shallow.  The problem isn’t their often thwarted hedonism but their lack of interest in anything outside themselves.  Camille shows no more intellectual appetite for the literature doctorate he’s working towards than for selling real estate.  His political views don’t extend beyond railing against the state of the over-scrutinised, under-resourced teaching profession he decides to leave.  He’s still preferable to Émilie, though.  The warning signs are there as soon as it’s clear we’re meant to find her dissident approach to call-centre work zany and endearing.  What Émilie later does in relation to her grandmother is something else.

    When Camille has moved out and she needs a new tenant, Émilie offers a prospective female flatmate a rent reduction in exchange for regularly visiting the grandmother on her behalf:  since her dementia means she no longer recognises Émilie, it won’t make any difference.  I wondered if, and hoped that, this breathtaking proposition – the most memorable thing in the film – might be revealed as masking Émilie’s intolerable distress at the extinction of a person she loved.  It’s true that, when the grandmother eventually dies, Émilie sheds tears.  But, on the day of the funeral, her misery seems to be about fearing Camille won’t turn up to accompany her to the event.  She’s about to leave the apartment when he arrives, and Audiard chooses this moment to deliver the standard rom-com resolution that puts a smile back on the heroine’s face.  When Émilie finally dashes out to meet Camille downstairs, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they’ll bother going to the funeral at all.  I wouldn’t have wanted Jacques Audiard to take a morally censorious attitude towards the people in Paris, 13th District.  I just wish he hadn’t bothered making a film about them.

    24 March 2022

Posts navigation