Film review

  • Young Ahmed

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le jeune Ahmed

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2019)

    Ahmed is young to attempt Islamism-inspired acts of violence – only thirteen.  The youngest of three children, living with his single mother and siblings in the Dardennes’ usual locale of small-town Wallonia, he’s very recently radicalised.  In an early scene, his exasperated mother, when he brands her a drunk because she likes a glass of wine, points out that Ahmed’s main interest a month ago was video games.  He’s been inspired to transform his life by the combination of an older cousin, gone abroad to become a jihadi fighter, and ‘that jerk of an imam’ (Ahmed’s mother’s phrase) at the local mosque.  When the boy tries and fails to stab a female teacher whom the imam considers a dangerous apostate, Ahmed is placed in a custodial rehabilitation centre for young people.  His mother visits him there.  By now, she’s less exasperated than deeply distressed.  She tells her son she wishes he could be the way he used to be.

    The difficulty of imagining the title character’s supposedly ‘normal’ past is a persisting problem in Young Ahmed.  Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) is so closed off he sometimes gives the impression of being on the autistic spectrum rather than in the grip of monomania, though nothing is said by his family or any other character to substantiate that impression.  Ahmed is bespectacled, humourless, not overweight but somehow dumpy; his movement is ungainly, occasionally seems slightly effeminate.  His brother Rachid (Amine Hamidou) and sister Yasmine (Cyra Lassman) are both conventionally better-looking.  Rachid, unlike Ahmed, has his own friends and is ready to skive off prayers to play sport until the imam, Youssouf (Othman Mouen), puts him right.  Yasmine fights with Ahmed when he deplores her revealing clothes.  All in all, he seems the sort of kid unlikely to be popular with his contemporaries – the sort, perhaps, who fastens on an extraordinary idée fixe as a mark of distinction and a means of distancing himself from peer pressure.  But this is only conjecture (like plenty more below) – necessarily so, since the writer-directors are intent on describing behaviour rather than exploring psychology.

    Psychology as a profession – represented by Ahmed’s psychologist at the rehab centre (Eva Zingaro-Meyer) – is made almost laughable.  The Dardennes don’t show any of her sessions with Ahmed as such but there’s a crucial conversation between them in the centre’s grounds.  Ahmed’s mother (Claire Bodson) has urged him to meet with Inès (Myriem Akheddiou), the teacher he tried to attack and succeeded in traumatising (even though she isn’t physically injured).  Ahmed refuses but then changes his mind and asks the psychologist if she’ll approve the meeting.  She’s sceptical until he says it might help Inès, rather than him.  The psychologist sees this as real empathetic progress – ‘For the first time, you’ve put yourself in someone else’s shoes’.  The meeting goes ahead, or nearly does so:  Inès breaks down as soon as she sees Ahmed and is escorted from the interview room in tears.  Just as well, since Ahmed had fashioned an improvised weapon with which to make a second attempt on her life, and smuggled it into the room.  The psychologist’s decision is all the more careless given that Ahmed actually told her that Inès had said the meeting might help her.  He didn’t even claim the idea as his own.

    We first see Ahmed and Inès together in an after-school algebra class, which the boy is anxious to leave in order to get to the mosque.  Ahmed’s mother is full of praise for the conscientious teacher, who, she says, has also helped her son’s dyslexia; Inès incurs the wrath of Youssouf by planning to teach Arabic to Muslim children in this French-speaking community in the form of Koranic verses put to music.  In the imam’s view, that would be a sacrilegious dilution and virtual secularisation of the holy text.  Yet when Ahmed bungles his attack and tells the imam what’s happened, Youssouf is alarmed.  He didn’t mean that Inès should be killed (the holy war to come, he says, will take care of that).  Ahmed’s actions will reflect badly on the mosque so must be reported to the police – Youssouf reassures Ahmed he won’t be put in detention for long.  The Dardennes may well mean this to illustrate the exploitation of Muslim youth by religious authority figures but don’t explain why, in view of the imam’s reaction, Ahmed continues to see the killing of Inès as unfinished business.

    Anticipating he’ll get the job done in the interview room, Ahmed writes his mother a note, asking her forgiveness then telling her that, once she thinks about it, she should realise what he’s done is right.  He passes the note to a member of centre staff, explaining that it contains details of the food he’d like his mother to bring on her next visit.  When the interview is aborted, Ahmed calmly explains that he’s changed his mind, asks for and gets the note back   Like Cyril, the young protagonist of The Kid with a Bike (2011), Ahmed is single-minded.  Unlike Cyril, he’s a thoroughly unsympathetic character.

    Especially because he’s a child, that intensifies your desire to understand, if not excuse, his actions.  It’s naturally tempting to wonder if he’s in search of a father figure.  Whether his own father has died or gone AWOL isn’t clear but Ahmed brands him a failure:  his mother’s alcohol consumption and the fact that neither she nor Yasmine wears the hijab is proof of that, according to Ahmed.  First Youssouf, then, more interestingly, the boy’s rehab centre caseworker are somewhat paternal presences in his life.  You sense that, even though he’s only pretending to be a reformed character, Ahmed has a degree of respect for his caseworker (Olivier Bonnaud).  Still, he and the system he’s part of must be opposed.  For Ahmed, the Prophet is the only reliable role model.

    Most of what Ahmed says is dogmatic and little of the rest is honest.  A rare exception to this occurs in the same conversation in which his mother tearfully regrets the change in her son.  Youngsters in the rehab centre have the opportunity to spend time, under their caseworker’s supervision, on a nearby farm.  After his first visit, Ahmed tells his mother he doesn’t want to return because the people there are ‘too nice’.  His baffled mother asks if he’d rather they were ‘nasty’ and Ahmed says he would.  (You know where you are when the enemy conforms to expectations.)  He returns to the farm, nevertheless.  The farmer’s adolescent daughter, Louise (Victoria Bluck), shows him how to milk cows, and so on, and their early interactions are among the best bits in the film.  Ahmed’s physically rigid resistance to Louise’s tentative friendliness, along with his fear of touching the farm animals, is painful to see.

    The Dardennes push this relationship improbably far, though, using it as the means of bringing their short (82-minute) film to its climax and conclusion.  While Louise’s affable curiosity about Ahmed is credible, her attempts to seduce him aren’t – nor is his capitulation.  After they’ve kissed, Ahmed tells Louise this would have been wrong even if she were Muslim but, since she’s not, is an unforgivable sin – unless she’s prepared to convert.  She tells him to get lost.  On the way back from the farm, Ahmed leaps out of his caseworker’s car, runs off and catches a bus into town, where he makes his way to Inès’s apartment block.  He can’t get into the place at ground level so clambers up the building, holding a jagged piece of something he breaks off from the exterior of the block.

    When Ahmed falls from a considerable height, it’s a shock – not least because (as you now realise) you’ve kept seeing him as a potential harm-doer rather than a potential injured party – whatever the Dardennes may have intended.   For this viewer, that feeling continued to the last.  Even lying on his back and disabled, Ahmed still appears to be clutching his sharp object.  When Inès emerges from the building and bends down to him, you hold your breath.  She says she’ll phone for an ambulance, moves away then turns back towards him as Ahmed calls her name; you hold your breath once more.  He tells her he’s sorry and she moves off again.  That’s the end of the film.  Although you feel relieved for the teacher, it’s an unconvincing finale – not least in Inès’s compassion for the injured boy, which is too considered.   It would be better if she seemed more in shock, to be acting automatically.

    Although Young Ahmed won the Dardennes the Best Director prize at last year’s Cannes, it hasn’t enjoyed the kind of critical success the pair usually enjoy, with detractors complaining that they fail to get inside Ahmed’s head.  It depends what you mean by fail:  I think the Dardennes intentionally avoid doing this but I agree the result is unsatisfying either as drama or quasi-documentary.  Ahmed is an unusual, arresting but frustratingly opaque character; and the Dardennes do much less than they might have to show how much cultural forces shape his attitudes.  There are fine things, even so.  Claire Bodson, Olivier Bonnaud and Victoria Bluck (until the plotting plays Louise false) give particularly good supporting performances.  There’s rationed and expressive use of a handheld camera, to accompany Ahmed at the points in the story where his obsession is driving him to extreme action, and a highly effective sequence in which Inès tries to justify her Arabic teaching plans to a Muslim audience holding widely differing views.  Benoît Dervaux’s camerawork is an important factor here too, whizzing from one speaker to another to reflect how thick and fast opinions are coming.   Ahmed’s contribution, reviling Inès for having a boyfriend who’s ‘a Jew’, stops the meeting and the camera in their tracks.  The Dardennes also build a compelling, detailed picture of Ahmed’s religious rituals.  Not that the repeated hand-washing seems as peculiar now as it would have done a few months ago.

    26 June 2020

  • Cast a Dark Shadow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lewis Gilbert (1955)

    This crime thriller is adapted from a stage play, and it shows.  The play, Murder Mistaken, was by Janet Green, whose screenwriting credits included The Clouded Yellow, Sapphire and Victim, but who didn’t work on Cast a Dark Shadow:  the adaptation is credited to John Cresswell alone.  Cresswell did a good job on Yield to the Night, released the following year, but not here.  Lewis Gilbert’s unimaginative direction doesn’t help.  Except for the opening sequence (see below), all the scenes that take place outside the room that was presumably the stage set, lack atmosphere.  The main characters’ entrances and exits, especially in the film’s climax, are decidedly stagy.  But the fundamental problems are the screenplay’s construction and the filmmakers’ failure to grasp the implications of opening out the material.

    Edward Bare (Dirk Bogarde) has married Monica (Mona Washbourne), a much older woman, for her money, the fruits of a successful family business.  He’s under the impression she hasn’t made a will and that, if Monica dies intestate, he’ll inherit her fortune as next of kin.  When he learns that her lawyer, Philip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), has drawn up a will, now ready to be signed and sealed, Edward anxiously speeds up plans to bring about his wife’s death.  He doesn’t realise she’d already made a will.  She was on the point of amending this to Edward’s advantage, so that he inherited everything immediately.  Since she dies before signing off the revised will,  Edward inherits Monica’s big house and smaller second home but no cash.  The remainder of her estate will be held in trust for the lifetime of her sister Dora, who now lives in Jamaica.  Only on Dora’s death will it pass to Edward.  Jamaica’s a long way away so he sets his sights on another well-off older woman, the widowed Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood).   It’s not long before she becomes the second Mrs Bare.

    The film starts with the end of a holiday that Monica and Edward have been taking in Brighton, as she recuperates from a bout of flu.  The couple then return home, where Philip has turned up with the draft will for Monica’s approval.  The marital relationship appears to consist of mutual infantilising – Monica affectionately calls her toyboy husband Teddy (Bear) – and Mona Washbourne plays this very well:  you feel how much Monica enjoys both indulging her Teddy and being indulged by him.  (The interactions are reminiscent of those between Dan and Mrs Bramson in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall.)  This can only be speculation but it’s easy to imagine that Janet Green’s stage play is structured so as to show the Bares at first as odd-couple sweethearts – and shock the audience when Edward is revealed in his true uxoricidal colours.

    That’s not what happens in Cast a Dark Shadow.  The theatrical release poster shown on the film’s Wikipedia entry features, along with remarkably garish colouring, the question ‘What was in his heart – love, greed or murder?’  (Actually, there’s no question mark and four ellipses.)  Lewis Gilbert answers this immediately.  In the opening sequence, Monica screams in terror.  We then realise she and Edward are in a funfair ghost train.  The camera moves from her face to his, highlighting Edward’s eyes in the darkness.  If looks could kill … The moment has terrific instant impact – it’s perhaps Dirk Bogarde’s best in the whole film – but it gives too much away.   Once the Bares are back home, Edward keeps plying Monica with spirits, even in her cups of tea.   You don’t wonder if he’s trying to inebriate her; you know he is, because Gilbert repeatedly shows Bogarde’s face signalling malice aforethought.  Edward offers to go to the public library to change Monica’s book; it’s 7.30pm, the library closes in half an hour but he assures her he can easily get there in time.  He tells Monica’s loyal, simple-minded maid Emmie (Kathleen Harrison) where he’s going and leaves the house by the front door.  He reappears at the French windows and re-enters the drawing room to set up his wife’s death, staged to suggest that she tried and, blind drunk, failed to light a gas fire, and asphyxiated.

    From-the-get-go exposure of Edward’s murderous intentions needn’t have been a weakness if Cast a Dark Shadow had developed into a character/case study but that doesn’t happen either.  Once an inquest into Monica’s death has confirmed it as accidental, his malignant personality goes on the back burner until the melodramatic business end of the film.  Instead, there’s just underpowered plot.  Edward meets and seduces Freda; once they’re married, she rules the domestic roost and frustrates his plans.  Another woman, Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh), appears in the locality, wanting to buy a house.  Edward worked in an estate agent’s office before he married Monica, and he shows Charlotte round properties, which raises Freda’s suspicions that they’re having an affair.  Edward does have designs on Charlotte but of an unromantic kind.  He discovers that she’s really Monica’s sister Dora, who smelt a rat even from the West Indies and has come to England incognito to pursue her suspicions of her brother-in-law.  Edward lures Dora to the house while Freda and Emmie are elsewhere.  Only when they unexpectedly return, along with Philip Mortimer – in other words, when all the main dramatis personae are gathered on stage together – is it time to bring Edward’s villainy back into the spotlight, and give him his comeuppance.

    Cast a Dark Shadow is moderately entertaining but next to nothing rings true.   Edward should be devastated, rather than mildly exasperated, by his impatient miscalculation in getting rid of Monica just before she makes a will that would have left him the lot.   Instead, he puts an affectionate hand on what used to be Monica’s favoured chair and confides in his late wife that he’s made things tricky for himself.   He talks to her several times after her death.  This might make blackly comic sense if his behaviour towards her in life had been different – if he’d seemed to have a soft spot for Monica at the same time as knowing he’d have to kill her.   His many ominous looks make clear, however, what a tiresome effort it is for Edward to be nice to his wife:  so the post-mortem chumminess is wholly artificial.  Although he can attract a soft-hearted, needy woman like Monica and, as he says, a woman of his own class like Freda, Edward thinks his ladykilling potential is circumscribed by his social position.  In the climactic showdown, reference is made to his past life in Acton and Romford, the choice of place names meant to announce the wrong side of the tracks.   Yet the supposedly significant class distinctions are muffled in a way that’s familiar in British films of this vintage:  except for Kathleen Harrison, the downmarket characters sound too upmarket.

    This is especially true of Dirk Bogarde – and puzzling, when you bear in mind his work in The Blue Lamp (as opposed to his work in The Sleeping Tiger).   In the opening sequence in Brighton, Edward has a London accent.  It returns occasionally but he mostly speaks RP.  The inconsistency isn’t explained by Edward’s putting on an act (in which case he’d drop the posh accent at times other than the times that he actually does).  It is, rather, part and parcel of Bogarde’s oddly indifferent performance.  He’s magnetic but overdoes Edward’s telltale shadow movements as if unable to come up with anything more.  Margaret Lockwood was box-office poison by the time she made this picture (which didn’t help the cause:  she won some critical praise but the film failed at the box office and Lockwood didn’t appear in another picture for twenty-one years).  Although she still seems a bit too classy for a barmaid who married the landlord and inherited his pub, Lockwood gives Cast a Dark Shadow what energy it has.  She’s quite a coarse actress but does well to transmute that coarseness into Freda’s brassy, no-nonsense bossiness.  Though you don’t believe it when Freda admits that, for all his faults (and she doesn’t know the half of them at this stage), she’s in love with Edward.

    The ending is crazy.  His crimes exposed, Edward dashes out of the house and drives off.  Having disabled the brakes on Charlotte/Dora’s car, he seems to think that, if he can make good his escape, he’ll inherit the money held in trust once Dora drives to her inevitable death – confident that Freda won’t testify against him (as his wife, she can’t be forced to).  He finds both Dora’s car and Philip’s blocking his getaway, and switches from his own car to Dora’s.   Even a motor-ignoramus like me recognised the number plate from an earlier scene; assuming Edward couldn’t fail to identify Dora’s vehicle, I thought I’d misunderstood his state of mind.  As he speeds off, I took his cackling glee to be you’ll-never-catch-me-alive bravado.  Not a bit of it – he’s just got the wrong car and realises too late … (It’s possible that, like the beginning of the film, this might work a bit better in the theatre, ie with another character simply reporting what happened to Edward.  I wouldn’t put money on that, though.)   Lewis Gilbert certainly gives the protagonist a big exit:  you’d be forgiven for thinking he made the film purely in order to show the car plunging from a cliff edge, smashing to smithereens, bursting into flames.  It’s a pity Gilbert didn’t devote more of his energies to animating the rest of Cast a Dark Shadow.

    22 June 2020

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