Film review

  • Blue Black Permanent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Margaret Tait (1992)

    In a 1983 interview about her work, the Scottish film-maker Margaret Tait (1918-99) described herself as a creator of ‘film poems’ that offer ‘felt rather than logical connections’.   A DVD produced by BFI in 2018 includes three of her short films, as well as this interview (with the video artist Tamara Krikorian) and a BFI Southbank panel discussion of Tait’s work.  The main item on the DVD is Blue Black Permanent, her only dramatic feature in a filmography comprising more than thirty pieces and spanning nearly fifty years.  Tait was in her mid-seventies when she made the feature, which proved to be her penultimate film.  I’m not sure why she decided at this late stage to attempt a full-length drama (though it’s still not long:  86 minutes) but the result didn’t leave me regretting she didn’t do more.

    Blue Black Permanent moves between Orkney and Edinburgh.  (Tait was born and raised in the former, went to university and worked for some years in the latter, and shot films in both locations.)  Barbara Thorburn (Celia Imrie), now in her late thirties, remembers her 1950s childhood.  The central figure in it was her mother Greta (Gerda Stevenson), whose death Barbara still struggles to come to terms with – as she tells her partner, Philip Lomax (Jack Shepherd).  He and Barbara share a home in Edinburgh, where Barbara’s parents also lived.  Greta hailed from Orkney, however, and, at the time of her death, was staying there with her three children, of whom ten-year-old Barbara (Katie Groat) is the eldest, in a coastal cottage belonging to a relative.  Greta’s body was found one morning on the seashore, near the water’s edge.  Greta wrote poetry:  her husband Jim (James Fleet) discovers in the cottage a poem that his wife had started but not finished.  Greta may or may not have ended her own life – Barbara speculates that she might have ‘sleepwalked’ into the sea.  It later emerges that Mary Kelday (Liz Robertson), Greta’s own mother, also drowned in the sea off Orkney.

    In the opening scene, Greta, Jim and their children are a happy family group on the beach at Orkney.   As Jim plays football with the Thorburns’ two little boys (James Holmes and Sean Holmes), the child Barbara swims in the sea.  She briefly disappears from her mother’s view; Greta is anxious and much relieved when Barbara reappears and runs back to her.  The sequence is visually striking throughout; Greta’s alarm resonates at later stages of the story, when we learn of her own fate and that of her mother.  For as long as Tait is working predominantly in images – of sea, sky and flotsam at Orkney, of buildings in Edinburgh – Blue Black Permanent is expressive.  This is often true of the characters’ faces too – in single shots.  At one point, the older Barbara looks out to sea and says wistfully that she wishes she could paint.  When Philip asks if she hasn’t photographed the scene, she replies dismissively that photography wouldn’t do it justice – an inadvertently ironic remark.  Tait’s camera delivers strong close-ups of people, almost as a series of photographs, but problems start up when her cast are speaking and interacting.  One of the most impressive presences in the film is Liz Robertson’s Mary Kelday, who says not a word.

    Gerda Stevenson’s dominant performance is self-consciously lyrical.  There’s a surfeit of rapt gazes, nervous laughter, catching the breath, halting delivery of lines.  Stevenson’s Greta is so fey that it’s hard to understand how she and her kindly but conventional husband got together, and have stayed together to raise a young family.   Perhaps Tait didn’t intend Greta to be interpreted realistically but Stevenson’s acting conflicts with the more naturalistic style of Celia Imrie, Jack Shepherd and James Fleet, none of whom seems comfortable.  Sean Scanlan is, more like Stevenson, very deliberate in his playing of Andrew Cunningham, an Edinburgh artist whose model is Wendy (Hilary Maclean) but whose muse seems to be Greta.

    There are effective rhyming sequences, for example on the Playfair Steps at the Mound in Edinburgh:  Greta stands there ecstatically during a cloudburst; decades later, Barbara gives money to a beggar at the foot of the steps.  (That too rhymes with a bit where a penny-for-the-guy gaggle of kids approach her and Philip, and startle Barbara with the masks they’re wearing.)   The film’s fine title refers to certain shots of the sea, as well as to the bottle of Quink left on the table with Greta’s incomplete poem, and the psychic legacy of her death.  But Margaret Tait’s gifts as a writer-director, on the evidence of Blue Black Permanent, didn’t include orchestration of actors or plausible dramatic construction.

    An episode in which Greta returns from Edinburgh to visit her elderly, ailing father Sam (Walter Leask) in Orkney includes a sequence where she and a few of his neighbours recall a local wedding they all attended.  They can’t stop laughing, much to the frustration of Sam, who didn’t go to the wedding:  the effect is awkwardly unnatural.  Barbara’s work as a photographer, barely mentioned for much of the film, belatedly becomes a main focus of attention, when she does a shoot for an Andrew Cunningham retrospective.  A more persistent difficulty is in what she tells Philip about herself.  It’s made repeatedly clear they’ve known each other for some time:  he’s startled when she describes him as a friend, replying that ‘I thought I was your lover’.  Either way, it’s unconvincing that Barbara, given her evident preoccupation with her past, has never mentioned it to Philip before.

    I’m glad I watched the feature before the short films (and the interview) on the DVD.  It would have been more disappointing to have seen the main course after these hors d’oeuvres.   The other way round, I ended up getting more from Tait’s earlier work than I did from Blue Black Permanent.  Each of the three shorts, all made in the 1950s, merits the ‘film poem’ label.  Her Orcadian mother is the subject of A Portrait of Ga (1953).  Rose Street (1956), at fifteen minutes the longest piece, is a day-in-the-life picture of the central Edinburgh street (it runs parallel to Princes Street), where Tait lived and worked at the time – the film closes on the door plate for her Ancona Films outfit on the second floor of one of the buildings.  Rose Street mostly comprises fascinating footage of workers, shoppers and kids playing in the street outside:  the contributions of both the last two groups seem performed yet revelatory too.  A published poet herself, Tait also created film poems of a more explicit kind.  The remaining piece, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955), is a series of images accompanying her voice reading the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.  (Another of her films, featured and discussed in the interview with Tamara Krikorian, is a portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid.)    These shorts, in their different ways, bear out what Margaret Tait describes as an abiding essential of her work – her conviction that there’s deep interest, even wonder, to be discovered in every particular place, in the things and the people it contains.

    31 July 2020

  • The King’s Choice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kongens nei

    Erik Poppe (2016)

    In April 1940 King Haakon VII of Norway, defying pressure from Nazi Germany, refused to approve the appointment of Vidkun Quisling as prime minister and head of a German puppet government.  Haakon also insisted that the decision on Quisling must lie with the Norwegian cabinet.  The king offered to abdicate if they took a different view but the cabinet endorsed his position.  The Germans retaliated instantly by bombing Elverum, where the royal family and the cabinet had temporarily relocated.  The monarch and others escaped to Britain, where they remained until 1945.  Haakon’s stand proved to be a crucial force for sustaining Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation of the country throughout the war years.

    The difference between the original title of Erik Poppe’s account of these events and its English translation summarises how differently Norwegian and Anglophone audiences are likely to experience this historical drama – at least if the Anglophones are as ignorant as I was about Norway’s situation in World War II.  (I’d heard of Quisling, and that’s about it.)  The Norwegian title literally means ‘The King’s No’.  Haakon’s refusal is a celebrated part of national history:  it would make no sense for a Norwegian director to conceal the royal ‘no’ as a ‘choice’.  It’s true Poppe’s consistently admiring portrait makes it pretty clear to any viewer what the king will eventually decide but there’s still an element of suspense if you don’t know the facts beforehand.  The English title is apt too in that the climactic choice isn’t the only one the protagonist makes.

    His first choice – to accept the throne of Norway – is explained in a prologue that combines plenty of text on screen with archive film from the early years of the twentieth century.  In 1905, in the light of dissolution of the Union between Sweden and Norway, the Norwegian government considered several princes of European royal houses for the crown.  Prince Carl of Denmark emerged as the favoured candidate:  he was descended from independent Norwegian kings and conveniently had an infant son, Olav, who would be heir apparent to the throne.   When formally offered the crown, Carl accepted but only on condition that the government’s (and parliament’s) choice was ratified through a referendum of the Norwegian people.  As Poppe’s film makes clear, it continued to matter to Haakon VII, as he became on accession to the throne of Norway, that his kingship was democratically approved.  The King’s Choice also points up the remarkable irony that a monarch whose role was meant to be strictly ceremonial came to make a momentous political decision.

    The opening newsreel isn’t just fascinating in itself.  It’s also refreshing to see the real dramatis personae at the beginning of a movie rather than the end, where their appearance can suddenly confuse or dilute the impression made by the actors who’ve been incarnating them.  At the start, the actual people concerned supply a route into The King’s Choice.  The following two hours are consistently absorbing and include some fine sequences yet the film often has the feel of documentary drama.  It’s possible that Poppe’s two obvious means of compelling attention reflect anxiety on his part that the screenplay (by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Jan Trygve Røyneland) isn’t quite enough.  It’s unfortunate that these superficial devices – overly conspicuous camera movement and overemphatic signposting of time and place – have the effect of reinforcing a sense of dramatic insufficiency.

    Political events in Norway in early April 1940 moved very quickly.  Most of the film’s action is concentrated into three days, and this is the justification for Poppe’s precise scene-setting.  Each move forward in time is marked by an intertitle, along the lines of ‘Elverum, 9th April, 11.20 am’.  The intertitles appear as white text on a black screen.  There’s no overlooking them.  Poppe earns full marks for clarity.  But these regular momentary breaks in the narrative also interrupt your involvement in it.  They sharpen your awareness that you’re watching a reconstruction.  The hyperactive parts of the camerawork (the DP is John Christian Rosenlund) also take you out of the drama.  When German aircraft fire on Elverum and Haakon, with other members of the royal family and the government, run for their lives, the handheld camera is effective – the sense of disorientation strengthens the scene.  It would have even more impact, though, if Poppe hadn’t already had the camera whizzing from one character to another in indoor sequences, merely as a means of getting ‘movement’ into dialogue exchanges.

    Jesper Christensen, one of the outstanding European screen actors of his generation, elevates The King’s Choice almost single-handedly.  Christensen was sixty-eight in 2016, exactly the age that Haakon VII was in 1940, but they’re physically not so similar.  The king (over 6’ 2”) was a good three inches taller than the actor playing him:  Christensen must be wearing lifts.  More important, he wears heavy make-up – I hardly recognised him in his opening scene and worried he might be submerged in disguise for longer than that.  Christensen soon shines through, though.  The script does give him opportunities to show a monarch’s more private side and these are highlights of the film – Haakon chatting and playing with his grandchildren, letting his age and weariness show when he’s on his own.  There’s also an excellent conversation between the king and a young guardsman (Arthur Hakalahti). By the end of the film, Christensen has created an authentically noble figure.

    The scenes illustrating tensions between the king and Crown Prince Olav are conventional but Anders Baasmo Christiansen is increasingly convincing as Olav.  The other main character is the German envoy, Curt Bräuer.  Karl Markovics plays him well enough but the dramatisation of Bräuer’s thankless intermediary task is unimaginative and the attempt to work up the issues he faced as a complement to those confronting Haakon feels mechanical.  The King’s Choice appeared very shortly after Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine, a Danish film with a World War II setting.  (To be precise, Zandvliet’s drama was set in the immediate aftermath of the end of hostilities but the proximity of these two Scandinavian WWII history films is still striking.)  The King’s Choice isn’t as good as Land of Mine but it tells a story well worth telling to an international audience – and it’s a story that Jesper Christensen makes memorable.

    21 July 2020

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