Film review

  • Man Friday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Gold (1975)

    Jack Gold enjoyed a deserved succès d’estime with The Naked Civil Servant, first broadcast in December 1975.  Less than three months later, Gold’s Man Friday (which had premiered at Cannes the previous year) arrived in British cinemas and sank without trace – also deservedly, though it’s a curiosity worth watching.  Written by Adrian Mitchell, Man Friday started life on TV in 1972 in the BBC Play for Today slot, with Ram John Holder in the title role and Colin Blakely as Robinson Crusoe.  Mitchell reworked the piece as a stage play, produced in London in 1973, then did the screenplay for Gold’s cinema version, in which the coast of Mexico stands in for Crusoe’s desert island.

    That possessive is right enough.  At the start of the film, the white Christian castaway is reading his Bible – in Peter O’Toole’s interpretation of Crusoe, declaiming it.  Genesis, chapter one.  God, after creating man and woman (an amusing coincidence that ‘male and female created he them’ features in the Man Friday script as it also featured, memorably, in The Naked Civil Servant):

    ‘… blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’

    Five Caribbean islanders, sea fishing in their canoe, are caught in a storm and washed ashore.  The eldest dies; the others prepare his body, in a ceremony of some reverence, to be eaten.  Startled by footsteps in the sand, then to come upon the cannibalistic ritual, Crusoe asserts his dominion by shooting all but one of the men dead.  The sole survivor (Richard Roundtree) saves his skin by making clear he’s no threat to Crusoe, who spares and virtually enslaves him, and names him Friday.

    In Daniel Defoe’s original, Robinson Crusoe redeems the ‘savage’ Friday by teaching him English and converting him to Christianity.  Adrian Mitchell subverts Defoe’s adventure-parable into a lampoon of western, specifically English, mores and colonialism.  The Union Jack flies high above Crusoe’s shack, which he shares with his talking parrot.  The film quickly turns into an episodic, predictable demonstration, at Crusoe’s expense, of what’s morally objectionable, or ridiculous, about individual ownership, competition, fear of God, shame for carnal desires, and so on.  The values of the rigid, domineering Crusoe are contrasted with the community ethos of the island tribe to which Friday belongs.  As he recounts his life as Crusoe’s dogsbody to his people, in sequences that punctuate the main narrative, they’re sometimes puzzled, sometimes helpless with laughter.

    Once Crusoe has killed Friday’s companions, the pair’s only, and short-lived, human company on the island comes in the form of Carey (Peter Cellier) and McBain (Christopher Cabot), ashore from the British slave ship on which they’re senior crew.  Crusoe is ready to give the slave traders Friday in exchange for safe passage home; when it emerges that Carey and McBain plan to sell them both, Crusoe and Friday join forces to murder their visitors.  It’s inevitable, thanks to the lack of other personnel and to the moral of Mitchell’s take on Defoe’s story soon being obvious, that Man Friday‘s effectiveness depends almost entirely on the two principals.  Despite the change of title and hero, Crusoe remains the bigger part and emphatically the more talkative one, so the burden on Peter O’Toole is particularly heavy.  Even he struggles to make Crusoe’s irascible, lordly foolishness entertaining – it’s an uncharacteristically effortful turn.  Outside the regular moments of crisis, Richard Roundtree is an agreeably easygoing partner to O’Toole but, despite swapping John Shaft’s sharp wardrobe for a loincloth, an air of smooth modernity clings to Roundtree, most conspicuously in the tribal interludes.

    Friday’s quick thinking on their first encounter – he binds his hands and Crusoe assumes he was a prisoner of the cannibal party – predicts the intelligence he’ll show repeatedly.  He rapidly masters English so is well placed to interrogate Crusoe’s rules and customs.  (Bilingualism comes easily to the tribe more generally:  for comedy purposes, there are early references to Friday’s native tongue but the conversations on his own island are conducted entirely in English.)  Clever Friday is soon trying to educate benighted Crusoe into a more relaxed, less egotistical approach to life.  However, Friday’s intelligence also serves to expose as a plot contrivance how slowly he cottons on to the fraud of Crusoe ‘paying’ him to work.  After Crusoe has exhausted his stash of useless coins, Friday even obediently deep sea dives to recover a further supply of gold pieces from the ocean floor.

    Although Crusoe keeps reverting to assertions of superiority, it’s when he’s revealed as a weak and needy figure that Man Friday, in the closing stages, develops a bit more energy and momentum.  Peter O’Toole stops being hammily outrageous and starts being tragically doomed, and the transition is worth waiting for.  Friday brings Crusoe, via raft, to his native island; it transpires that he’s telling his people about his time with Crusoe before they decide whether to accept the Englishman into their community.  Crusoe insists he can teach them useful things but his egocentric tyranny has already taught Friday to be more worldly wise, less laidback than before.  He vigorously argues against the tribe’s adopting Crusoe, who’s sent back whence he came into lonely exile.  He no longer even has the parrot for company, having shot the bird by mistake when, in a deranged fit of anger, he was aiming at Friday.  Back in solitary confinement, Crusoe turns his rifle on himself.  Jack Gold cuts from the futile suicide to a closing sequence that plays throughout the final credits.  Friday and his people sing a weedy song (the last of several in the film) – something about the tribe and its traditions going on forever.   Perhaps, though the ending leaves you more inclined to think Crusoe has managed to corrupt Friday’s trusting beneficence.

    18 November 2020

  • Luxor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zeina Durra (2020)

    Hana (Andrea Riseborough), a British doctor, arrives in Luxor for a break between stints in her international aid work.  She’s recently been on the Lebanon-Syria border; her next assignment could be in Yemen.  She books into the Winter Palace hotel.  The first night she’s there, Carl (Michael Landes), a boring, brazen American tourist, tries to chat her up in the bar, and succeeds in getting her in his bed.  She quietly escapes from his room next morning and takes care to avoid him thereafter.  Hana, who has been in Luxor before, spends the first part of her stay mostly alone.  Drifting round the place and its ancient monuments, she appears to be going through the tourist motions.  At the same time, as she runs her fingers over hieroglyphics on a temple wall, she seems to be trying to rediscover something.  On a boat trip, Hana bumps into Sultan (Karim Saleh), an old flame, and they start spending time together.

    As soon as she sits down in her room on arrival at the Winter Palace, Hana looks weary and defeated.  (You suspect she sleeps with Carl because she hasn’t the energy to refuse.)  Although reticent about her work, she says enough in the course of Luxor to make clear that experiences in the field are the main cause of her exhaustion.  She tells Sultan she’s seen things no one should have to see.  Yet she also asks her ex-lover if he doesn’t miss ‘how hopeful we were’.  The heedlessness of youth that she regrets is something Sultan (who, like Hana, is about forty) seems to have retained rather more of, evidenced in occasional displays of extrovert humour.  His nostalgia – or preparation for nostalgia – is simpler, too, as he waxes lyrical about the faded grandeur of the Winter Palace and ruefully anticipates a forthcoming refurb.  Hana’s only burst of extroversion comes in the hotel bar, where she and Sultan have been drinking.  The lounge pianist plays a number that launches her into an almost frenzied solo dance.  Afterwards, for the only time in the film, she collapses in tears as Sultan guides her back to her room.

    Hana and Sultan are nicely contrasted revenants to Luxor, and the two actors’ physical qualities reinforce the contrast.  Sultan is a westernised Egyptian – an archaeologist now based in America who regularly returns to his native land on excavations there.  Swarthy, strong-featured Karim Saleh gives a good sense of a man comfortable in his own skin and genially shallow until the continuing company of Hana nudges him towards recognising her deeper feelings and becoming himself more reflective.  Andrea Riseborough, with her pale hair and eyes and limber slenderness, is a foreign body in the heat and dust of Luxor, as well as ill at ease with herself.

    While Sultan is cheerfully disengaged from the religious traditions of the culture he grew up in, Hana’s attitude towards the metaphysical is more volatile and hard to get a handle on.  After coming to the aid of a woman tourist who faints in the heat, Hana is accosted by the leader of the woman’s party, who has a determinedly spiritual agenda for their time in Egypt.  Hana finds this alienating but is more responsive to Salima (Salima Ikram), a senior archaeologist on Sultan’s dig, when she asserts that places of great antiquity can be imbued with the intensity of human feeling invested in them over many centuries.  Later, though, as Hana and Sultan dine with the other archaeologists, her mood plummets as Salina describes an unusually plausible case of alleged reincarnation.  It may well be this is an attack of the PTSD from which Hana seems to be suffering but the coincidence of dismay and more-things-in-heaven-and-earth talk is striking.

    Hana herself isn’t averse to gnomic spiritual insights, however.  She announces that the more unstable things are, the more the supernatural comes to the fore:  it’s frustrating that her interlocutor doesn’t ask what she means.  When she says to Sultan, ‘I’ve heard this thing:  the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born – now is the time of monsters’, he asks whose words these are but Hana laughs that she’s forgotten.  (They were Gramsci’s and have added relevance if you watch Luxor, as I did, in between reading news reports of Trump’s law suits in the light of the US presidential election.)   In the closing stages of the film, the hotel manager Dunia (Shirin Redha), who likes Hana and realises she’s struggling, takes her to see a wise woman.  This old lady says prayers, feels Hana’s hat and withdraws to intuit what her visitor needs to know – Dunia warns that the wait for this could take all night.  Hana falls asleep and has one of those dreams, more common on screen than in life, in which significant details of recent experience are woven into an elegantly suggestive whole.  While she’s sleeping, the shaman briefly reappears but Hana and Dunia leave without, it seems, further conversation with the old woman.  On the journey back to Luxor, their car gets a flat tyre.  While the chauffeur changes it, Hana stands at the roadside looking into the beautifully uncommunicative sky of stars.

    Writer-director Zeina Durra, now in her mid-forties, was born in London to a Bosnian-Palestinian mother and a Jordanian-Lebanese father.  This is her second feature, ten years after the first (The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, a romantic drama set in Manhattan but chiefly concerned with Middle East politics).  Durra, with her cinematographer, Zelma Gainza, has made a film that’s visually and atmospherically strong.  Andrea Riseborough’s thoughtful yet dissociated presence gives Luxor an individuality that ensures it comes over as a character rather than a case study.  But it’s one that doesn’t develop much.  Durra divides the narrative into chapters, with headings that name-check an eclectic collection of people (Freud, The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley) yet the film’s parts don’t amount to much more than a series of illustrations of how Hana is feeling.

    When Sultan first sees her on the boat, he asks Hana what she’s doing in Luxor.  She answers, ‘I’m on a date’ and, when he looks puzzled, laughs embarrassedly, ‘I mean I’m on leave’.  The Freudian slip is revealing of more than how Hana still feels about Sultan (she later admits to dreading seeing him, on Facebook, ‘on a beach, in Dubai, with kids’).  It also reflects the viewer’s primary means of staying engaged with Durra’s film.  By the time she meets Sultan, it’s already pretty clear that Hana’s solitary walks around the ruins will, in terms of what’s going on inside her head, be an unresolved mystery tour.  Hopes are therefore pinned on her love life to maintain interest in the story.  It takes time for Hana and Sultan to have sex together again; his disappearance for most of the last part of Luxor makes you wonder if it will end simply with Hana checking out of the Winter Palace, as it began with her checking in.  She does, indeed, leave the hotel but doesn’t head for the airport.  Her taxi takes Hana instead to the modest place where Sultan is staying.

    The leader of the party including the fainting woman urged Hana to accompany them on their trip to the town of Abydos, stressing the spiritual power of the place.  Hana declined the offer, of course.  Later, she claims not to remember going to Abydos with Sultan when they were lovers years ago.  At the last, she changes her mind about the place.  When Sultan says, ‘Let’s go to Abydos’, she replies, ‘That’s just what I was thinking’.  This is Luxor‘s closing line and its closing shot is an image of what is presumably Abydos.  Durra has told the Arab Times that her film ‘is about [Hana], and it’s about [Sultan] creating this opportunity for her to look back at her choices … He doesn’t save her.  She saves herself.  His presence is just an opportunity for her to think about how she wants to live again’.  That sounds emotionally complicated but what’s finally likeable – almost funny – about this sober, persistently opaque drama is Zeina Durra’s delivery of a romantic happy ending, scrupulously understated yet undeniable.

    10 November 2020

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