Film review

  • The Story of a Three-Day Pass

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La permission

    Melvin Van Peebles (1967)

    La permission was one of several novels Melvin Van Peebles wrote in French during his years in France (the 1960s, more or less).  His screen adaptation of La permission appeared the same year the novel was published.  In plot terms, the film is exactly what its title says.  Stylistically, it’s more complicated.

    Turner (Harry Baird) is a Black soldier in the US Army, stationed in France.  Summoned to the office of Captain Lutz (Harold Brav), he’s informed that he’s getting a promotion and a three-day pass for the weekend ahead.  Turner had hoped for the extra stripe; the pass is an unexpected bonus.  He spends the weekend in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with Miriam Duval (Nicole Berger), a white girl who works in a shop and suffers from poor health.  They spend two nights together in a hotel and take a day trip to a beach in Normandy, where three of Turner’s white colleagues from the army base also turn up.   When Turner returns to the base early on Monday morning, Lutz strips him of his promotion and confines him to barracks – for what the senior officer terms a betrayal of trust.  Turner’s punishment ends when a Black female gospel choir, on a European tour, calls in at the base and Lutz wants someone to show them round.   Turner eagerly takes advantage of his restored freedom to run to a phone box and call Nicole.  A male voice on the other end of the line tells him Nicole isn’t there and that she’s sick.  The film ends where and how it began, with a freeze frame of Corporal Turner on his dormitory bed.

    The BFI handout introduced the screening as ‘part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour’ and comprised a New Yorker piece from June 2020 by Richard Brody, whose view that this is ‘among the great American films of the sixties’ was also quoted in this month’s BFI programme brochure.  I know Brody’s writing well enough not to take such a judgment too seriously but I was keen to watch The Story of a Three-Day Pass, of which I’d never heard, and I’m glad to have seen it.  I don’t really get it, though.  Made in black and white, the picture is evidently influenced by the visual techniques of the French New Wave (freeze frames aren’t the only means used to interrupt the narrative, often to disorienting effect).  Richard Brody is a connoisseur of Godard, Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, which may partly explain his enthusiasm for Van Peebles’ movie, as well as his confidence in reading it.  Here’s an example of the latter.  Describing the fantasy sequences which occur as Turner and Miriam prepare to sleep together for the first time, Brody writes:

    ‘Turner’s [fantasy] is of himself as a velvet-cloaked and lace-bedecked aristocrat, sipping wine by the fire and approaching his lady fair on her canopied bed; whereas Miriam’s fantasy is of being captured in the wild by grass-skirted, spear-bearing, pelt-wearing black men and rescued by a similarly garbed and styled Turner.’

    I don’t see how Brody knows to whom these fantasies belong (assuming, though this too seems arguable, they belong to any individual character and aren’t, rather, ironic conceits on Van Peebles’ part).  Couldn’t Turner’s fantasy just as likely be Miriam’s and vice versa, especially given the attitudes they both express in a relatively realistic episode in the film?  The lovers go to a club where the performers are Spanish.  The emcee, noticing the couple, refers to them humorously as ‘Señorita Big Eyes and Señor Blackie’.  Turner is infuriated, a fight breaks out in the club and he’s thrown out.  Trying to calm him, Miriam tells the still angry Turner the emcee didn’t intend a racist slur.   She goes on to say something along the lines that people are just people and racial difference doesn’t matter.  Why, then, would she fantasise about being at the mercy of African tribesmen?  There’s nothing else in the story to suggest that white girl speaks with forked tongue.  Mightn’t it be Turner, sensitive to whites seeing Black men as ‘savages’, who imagines himself exceptional?

    Miriam’s remarks outside the club anticipate her wishful thinking later in the film.  As soon as his fellow soldiers see her with him on the beach, Turner fears the worst.  Miriam assures him the other men won’t tell tales at the base; later, she says that, even if they do, she’s sure Captain Lutz won’t reprimand Turner.  Miriam’s whiteness consistently blinds her to the racial implications of which Turner, for all that he’s mostly genial, is all too well aware.  That awareness is regularly expressed by his looking in the mirror where his reflection talks back to him.  At the start, as he excitedly prepares for his interview with Lutz, this alter ego tells Turner that, if he is to be promoted, it’s because ‘You are the captain’s new good colored boy, you are the captain’s Uncle Tom, baby!’   After Miriam has sought to allay his concerns about Lutz’s reaction to what he’s told by the other soldiers, the mirror image smiles, ‘I’m not so sure’.

    The exchanges between Turner and his reflection are Van Peebles’ strongest device (and Harry Baird does his best acting in them).  With the help of the cinematographer Michel Kelber, Van Peebles also offers a distinctive picture of Paris, thanks to the mostly unlovely people and places Turner encounters before Miriam – a suspicious bookseller, a sparse strip-show audience, a deserted, windswept park, and so on.  There are memorable moments.  In a club, Turner gazes at a white woman (not Miriam) before imagining himself moving in slow motion towards her:  the white clientele on the dance floor parts, Red Sea-like, on either side of him.  But I couldn’t make sense of why, on arrival in Paris, he changes out of his military uniform into trenchcoat and fedora, and wears shades – the get-up doesn’t appear to correspond to either his self-image or his idea of how others see him.  Turner’s perceptions and experience of racism gradually eclipse the ingenious style(s) of The Story of a Three-Day Pass, reducing its technical highlights to just that.  Although this film doesn’t look like a conventional inter-racial drama of the time, it increasingly feels like one.

    The piece is emphatically unrealistic, though – not only visually but also in the plotting and the supporting performances.  The three white soldiers happen to make their way to a beach that’s totally deserted except for Turner and Miriam; the gospel choir chooses a US army base as a port of call.  The overplaying of Harold Brav as Lutz and Tria French’s Mrs Abernathy, the first lady of the gospel choir, is intensified by Van Peebles shooting them in tight close-up.  (Lutz, when he’s talking to Turner, speaks to camera.)  In the lead roles, imposingly handsome Harry Baird and fragile, unassuming Nicole Berger are complementary and charming presences, evem though they’re required to indulge in an awful lot of unnatural laughter.  Still, the love scenes between Turner and Miriam are beguilingly shot and carry a real erotic charge.  Their unhappily short-lived romance is given extra meaning, sad to say, by the real-life fates of the actors.  Nicole Berger was killed in a car crash even before the film was released.  Harry Baird, after losing his sight, retired from acting in the mid-1970s.

    Richard Brody rightly notes that ‘Reality overtook the movie’ in other ways, too.   When it premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1967, there were no longer any US troops stationed in France – the result of Charles de Gaulle’s edict of March 1966.  By the time the film opened in American cinemas in mid-June 1968, de Gaulle was still in the Élysée Palace only by the skin of his teeth.   In light of May 68 and the protests still taking place the following month, the surprisingly empty streets of Paris in The Story of a Three-Day Pass must have looked very strange to audiences coming to the cinema straight from watching television news.

    10 August 2021

  • Nowhere Special

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Uberto Pasolini (2020)

    Describing his four-year-old son to potential adoptive parents, John, the child’s birth father, mentions that ‘Michael doesn’t say much’.   There’s no arguing with that.  Throughout the ninety-odd minutes of Nowhere Special, John (James Norton) and Michael (Daniel Lamont) meet with candidates for adopting or fostering Michael – four couples, one woman on her own.  After the fifth meeting, with the most unsuitable pair of the lot, Michael asks his father what adoption is and says he doesn’t like the idea of it.  It’s the first evidence of curiosity on the boy’s part as to why he and John keep going to the homes of complete strangers.

    The father is looking for a new home for his son in tragic circumstances.  A Belfast window-cleaner in his mid-thirties and a devoted single parent, John is terminally ill.  Writer-director Uberto Pasolini (no relation, though he is Luchino Visconti’s nephew) is discreet about the nature of the illness, presumably cancer.  There’s one brief hospital sequence, where he sits in a waiting area alongside a chemo patient, but John isn’t shown receiving treatment or talking with a doctor.  At one point, he throws up; at another, he struggles to retain his balance and is angry when he can’t.  Yet there’s nothing to suggest he’s in physical pain or worried that his condition might jeopardise his ability to look after Michael in the short term.  After so recently defending Our Friend’s reticence about the bodily horrors of cancer, I seem to be applying a double standard in criticising Nowhere Special for doing the same.  But it’s so central to Pasolini’s story that John is dying and having to cope alone, that his declining health and Michael’s apprehension (perhaps in both senses of the word) need to register more than they do.

    Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Layburn’s Ordinary Love (2019), which shares with Nowhere Special a cancer theme and, coincidentally, a Belfast setting, was limited by the total isolation of the married couple at the centre of the story:  there was no sign of family, friends or neighbours – or indication that any of these were fearfully avoiding the main characters.  John’s situation is less straightforward and more credible.  He himself grew up in care homes; the lack of family is easy to accept.  Michael’s mother returned to her home country of Russia when the boy was a few months old; she and John are no longer in touch.  In an early scene, when John gets back from work, he talks with a grey-haired woman who’s been looking after Michael and doing some ironing; she never reappears but it’s enough to make clear that John has a child minder to call on.  His commitment to his son rules out much of a social life outside working hours.  He’s personable, though, and people appear to know what he’s now up against.  A pub landlord gives him a drink on the house; a garage owner discounts MOT test charges; John gratefully accepts their generosity.   Rosemary (Stella McCusker), an elderly widow whose windows he cleans, talks with him about death and bereavement.

    After several interviews with couples, John tells Shona (Eileen O’Higgins), the social worker who accompanies him and Michael on their visits, he’s always assumed that he’ll know instantly when he meets the right carer(s) for his son.  The next person they meet is evidently just that:  you see it not only in James Norton’s eyes but also in DP Marius Panduru’s golden lighting of John’s beatific face.  Thirtyish Laura (Louise Mathews) explains that she was a teenage mother who had to give up her baby.  She immediately starts playing with Michael, and he’s easy in her company.  When, to everyone’s surprise (including the viewer’s), he asks a question about death, Laura answers Michael frankly but sensitively.   There’s no follow-up to this meeting.  Instead, Michael and his father are subjected to Lorraine (Niamh McGrady) and Trevor (Caolan Byrne).  Lorraine, after announcing that pregnancy wasn’t for her, remarks that Michael doesn’t look much like his photograph.  Her husband hands a toy rabbit to Michael before showing John his pride and joy – a model railway which, Trevor makes clear, is too precious for Michael to play with for some years yet.  At the end of the encounter, the couple asks for the rabbit back.

    This interview triggers a tirade from John (his only one) when he and Shona next talk.  He asks how come the likes of Lorraine and Trevor are allowed anywhere near children; he doesn’t say a word about the previous candidate and nor does Shona.  In the film’s closing scene, John and Michael return to Laura’s council flat:  she welcomes Michael into his new home.  Keeping Laura on ice as Pasolini does, takes the artificial structure of Nowhere Special to a new level.  In the meantime, John has sold his car and window-cleaning equipment, and prepared a memory box for Michael.  John looks paler now but it’s not obvious that he’s otherwise weaker.  There’s no sense of urgency or desperation in any of this, just a gentle, persistent melancholy (and increasing use of Andrew Simon’s McAllister’s hitherto tactful guitar music).  Pasolini’s I’ll-do-things-when-it-suits-me storytelling is in jarring contrast to his protagonist’s predicament.

    Pasolini’s priority is the father-son relationship and it’s certainly hard to fault James Norton, Daniel Lamont or the direction of their scenes together.  Lamont, from Ballymena, really was only four years old when the film was shot.  Michael’s words may be few but the puzzled stare on his naturally comical face is magnetic.  Norton relates to him effortlessly, and his own acting is admirably well judged.  It’s no surprise to see him get inside the skin and head of a working man, or hear him handle another regional accent comfortably, but it’s still exhilarating to experience.   Norton also enjoyably illustrates the hero’s native impetuosity.  After a new client (Sean Sloan) nastily disparages his window cleaning, John returns to chucks eggs at the man’s house and car windows.  In a nice punchline to this, when he and Michael are supermarket shopping, John suddenly remembers they’re out of eggs.

    There’s a downside to Pasolini’s concentration on the main pair.  Nearly all the rest of the cast have only one or two scenes, and, with few exceptions (notably Louise Mathews), tend to make too much of their few minutes on screen.  Other than Lorraine, Trevor and John’s lone dissatisfied customer, the people in the story are decent, which might have been refreshing if they weren’t also bland.  (Because they’re bland, the tendency to overplay them is more conspicuous.)  Nowhere Special, according to the closing titles, was ‘inspired by a true story’.  Its subject and central performances are enough for the film to be absorbing and poignant but it’s a rickety piece of drama.

    4 August 2021

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