Film review

  • Goodbye, Mr Chips

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herbert Ross (1969)

    In both James Hilton’s 1934 novella Goodbye, Mr Chips and the first, famous Hollywood film adaptation five years later, the title character’s marriage is tragically brief.  Chipping, a shy and solitary classics master at Brookfield, a (fictional) public school for boys, is brought out of his shell by a young woman he meets while on holiday.  After she dies in childbirth, Chipping never remarries but love has transformed him.  He teaches at Brookfield for many more years but is no longer the dry-as-dust taskmaster he once was.  In retirement, he continues to live close to the school.  On his deathbed, he hears former colleagues talking about him.  He replies, ‘I thought you said it was a pity, a pity I never had any children.  But you’re wrong.  I have!  Thousands of ’em, thousands of ’em … and all … boys.’

    This film musical version of Goodbye, Mr Chips retains that ‘all boys’ line but Terence Rattigan’s screenplay recasts Hilton’s story in several ways.  Arthur Chipping (Peter O’Toole) first sees his future wife Katherine Bridges (Petula Clark) in a London theatre, where she’s performing on stage – she’s a music hall soubrette.  (They do, by an incredible coincidence, next meet on holiday, while each is wandering round the ruins of Pompeii.)  Katherine’s theatrical background and tendencies make it hard for her to adjust to life as a schoolmaster’s wife but she does so in time, and becomes a popular member of the Brookfield community, especially among the boys.  The Chippings’ marriage is childless but lasts a good few years.  In the advanced timeframe of the story, which begins in the 1920s and ends in the 1960s, Katherine dies in a World War II air raid – on the same day that her husband, after being passed over previously by the school governors, learns, too late to tell his wife, that he’s to become headmaster.  The narrative takes the widowed Chips into retirement and old age but he’s still going pretty strong, taking his walk in a country lane near Brookfield, when the closing credits roll.

    According to Wikipedia, a draft musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips had been ‘on file in the MGM script department since 1951’ but things didn’t progress until the mid-1960s.  From that point on, all the key personnel changed at least once before shooting got underway in 1968.  After first Vincente Minnelli then Gower Champion had left the project, it became the debut feature of Herbert Ross, who’d directed a musical for television but hitherto worked solely as a choreographer in cinema.  Leslie Bricusse’s song score replaced one written by Andre and Dory Previn.  The first names in the frame to play the leads were Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews.  Katherine turned into Samantha Eggar, Lee Remick and finally Petula Clark.  As Chips, Richard Burton, who’d followed on from Harrison, parted company with the production when Clark was cast, dismissing her as ‘a pop singer’.  Peter O’Toole stepped in.

    Rookie Herbert Ross was hardly in a position to stamp his personality on an expensive MGM production, and didn’t.  The film has the usual inflated feel of the Hollywood musical in decline:  Ross is keen, for example, on grandiose overhead shots to describe scenes that don’t justify them.  The two ensemble numbers with Petula Clark at their centre – one in the London theatre, the other on the school hall stage with some of the Brookfield boys – work well enough.  But Bricusse’s score, with the exception of Katherine’s sweetly melancholy solo ‘You and I’, is mediocre – a quality emphasised rather than concealed by the soaring orchestration sometimes in evidence.  The modest songs are more effective when Peter O’Toole is speak-singing them.  They become part of his marvellous portrait of Chips.

    O’Toole was thirty-six when he made the film.  For someone like me, coming to it for the first time half a century on, there’s a risk of underestimating the scale of his achievement in convincingly playing a character from his mid-thirties through to old age.  Seeing him age so naturally here can’t have the impact it would have had in 1969 simply because I saw O’Toole actually age as a screen actor, from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Dean Spanley (2008).   The hair and make-up (by George Blackler, Ivy Emmerton and Bill Lodge) are good – only on the geriatric Chips does it look like aging make-up – but it’s the combination of O’Toole’s technical skill and imaginative sympathy that’s at the heart of his characterisation and which creates its magic.  His mastery of the man’s subtly changing speech and movement across the decades is also a reflection of how deeply he inhabits Chips.

    As might be expected, O’Toole is as funny as he is affecting – for example, in showing sloppy use of the English language to be almost physically painful to Chips.  In the early stages of the romance with Katherine, he’s beautifully diffident:  he stands, inclined (in both senses) to move nearer to her but uncertain if he should.  His face shows tiny frown lines of anxious hesitancy.  The tasteful invention of his line readings is a wonder.  At two points of the story, Chips races out of the school grounds in pursuit of Katherine, being borne away first on a bus, then in a car.  Both travel faster than Chips’s legs can carry him but the literally dashing figure of O’Toole, so tall and slender he might be a cartoon, is something to behold.  In terms of expressive movement, these sprints are as good as many movie musical dance sequences.  The emotion in O’Toole’s eyes, behind spectacles, when he absorbs the news of Katherine’s death in the middle of a lesson and, later, when Chips conducts his final assembly, makes these moments extraordinarily moving.

    As both singer and actress, Petula Clark is competent but she’s too bland and wholesome for the woman she’s meant to be.  Katherine doesn’t have to be coarse but does need to convey why the Brookfield establishment at first sees her as highly unsuitable.  It’s hard to see what a snob or stick-in-the-mud would object to in the charming, ladylike Petula Clark.  In the 1939 film, the young woman who brings Robert Donat’s Chips to emotional life is differently outrageous – she’s a suffragette (played by Greer Garson).  Turning Katherine into a soubrette is best justified by Siân Phillips’s bravura comic turn as Ursula Mossbank, the high-camp cynosure of Katherine’s circle of bohemian friends.  Superbly dressed (by Julie Harris), Phillips delivers her lines not just with high-speed panache but also, thanks to her vocal range and control, without apparent effort – or seeming to draw breath.  The strong supporting cast also includes Michael Redgrave, as the headmaster of Brookfield; Alison Leggatt, as his formidably disapproving wife; Michael Bryant, as a German teacher on the staff; George Baker, as a philandering ‘philanthropist’ and all-round nasty piece of work; and Michael Culver, as the friend who introduces Chips to Katherine.

    It would be interesting to know how much changes to the original were Terence Rattigan’s own idea and how much imposed on him as supposedly necessary ingredients of a Hollywood musical-isation of the source material.  Rattigan had already, twenty years before in The Browning Version, got under the skin and revealed the soul of a long-serving public school classics master whose pupils thought him severe and humourless.  (Michael Redgrave’s presence in Goodbye, Mr Chips is a continuing reminder of that.)  Even though the plotting is obvious and sometimes clumsy, Rattigan’s dialogue, especially for Chips, is very good.  It often seems to reflect a penetrating insight into the main relationships in the story.   Herbert Ross’s direction tends to telegraph the dramatic twists and crises but O’Toole keeps rescuing the situation.

    Sally and I saw Goodbye, Mr Chips as part of BFI’s musical season.  The film was preceded by an interview with Siân Phillips (who was married to Peter O’Toole at the time it was made).  Now eighty-six, she still looks and sounds wonderful[1].  It was a special bonus for Sally when Phillips, asked by the interviewer to name her all-time favourite musical, chose Pal Joey because it was the start of her own career in stage musicals.  This was a 1980 production that Sally saw at the Half Moon Theatre (before it transferred to the West End), loved and has never forgotten.  (Denis Lawson was Joey.)  BFI presented this show as a special ‘50th anniversary screening’ of Goodbye, Mr Chips.  Since it’s not regarded as a film musical classic, that sounded a bit OTT.  But Peter O’Toole’s great performance is worth celebrating.

    20 October 2019

    [1] Phillips shared the NFT3 stage with an amiable man, now in his sixties, who played one of the Brookfield schoolboys.  I’m afraid I didn’t take a note of his name and can’t track it down on the IMDb cast list.

     

     

  • By the Grace of God

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Grâce à Dieu

    François Ozon (2019)

    In recent films like The New Girlfriend and L’amant double – in Frantz too, though more subtly – François Ozon has presented sexual unorthodoxy as something intriguing, amusing, perhaps appealing.  On the face of it, By the Grace of God is surprising material for him.  It’s an earnest, based-on-true-events account of the Catholic Church’s prolonged cover-up of sexual abuse by one of its priests.  The crimes took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s but the cover-up has continued into the 2010s.  Another surprise is what a good job Ozon, who also wrote the screenplay, makes of telling his story, especially in the film’s first half.  Chief among several positive factors at work are the personality and circumstances of the main character, Alexandre Guérin (Melvil Poupaud).

    A banker in his early forties, Alexandre is married with five children.  The family lives in Lyon, where Alexandre’s wife Marie (Aurélia Petit) teaches at the Lazaristes, a Catholic school.  She and her husband are both practising Catholics, raising their four sons and one daughter in the faith.  Alexandre is shocked to learn that a priest called Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley) has recently returned to work in the Lyon archdiocese:  as a pre-adolescent, Alexandre was abused by Preynat in church precincts and on church scout camps.  Alexandre is a quietly self-assured, emotionally controlled man but soon frank with his children about these traumatic boyhood experiences.  (His wife already knows about them.)  He talks with his elder sons not long after first writing to the Archbishop of Lyon, Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret), to explain what Preynat did to him and protest against his continuing to work as a priest, and with children.

    From the start, Alexandre’s campaign runs into implacable, though superficially compassionate, resistance from the church authorities.  He gets to see the fatuously reassuring, casuistical Barbarin, more disturbed by Alexandre’s use of the term paedophile to describe his abuser than by what the latter has done:  because ‘paedophile’ etymologically means one who loves children, Barbarin thinks the term ‘paedosexual’ more appropriately describes Preynat’s nature and behaviour.  Since the abuse occurred during the term of office of a former archbishop, Barbarin distances himself from accusations of whitewashing:  on the verge of becoming a cardinal, he’s dead set against any boat-rocking.  A meeting between Alexandre and Preynat himself is also arranged.  It’s mediated by another church employee (Martine Erhel), supposedly impartial but soon revealed to be in Barbarin’s pocket.  In the interview with Alexandre, Preynat freely admits to what he’s accused of and professes to be ashamed of his sexual tendencies.  He doesn’t, however, ask forgiveness for his carnal sins – to the disappointment of his superiors in the church (bizarre as that disappointment seems, given their unwillingness to take action against him).  Another senior cleric tells Alexandre it’s most unlikely that Preynat will ever be defrocked.   He also asks why that bothers Alexandre; after all, says the priest, Preynat is elderly and harmless now.

    Although Alexandre makes clear his anger at these outrageous reactions, he’s not inclined to shouty showdowns and Ozon’s businesslike approach chimes with his protagonist’s moderation.  Unobtrusive, well-groomed Alexandre turns up the pressure by going public; the church authorities don’t budge.  By describing Alexandre’s increasing activity and the archdiocese’s masterly inactivity with a minimum of dramatic emphasis, Ozon develops considerable traction between them, as well as narrative momentum.  There are moments that illustrate, with strong, instant impact, the growing effect of events on the Guérins’ family life.  The two elder sons, Gauthier (Max Libert) and Victor (Nicolas Bauwens), are confirmed by Barbarin, their parents watching the ceremony with a mixture of pride and unease.  On another occasion, Preynat turns up to take mass.  Alexandre can’t bear it and leads his family out of the church.  A later outing with his younger children, who are enjoying themselves, is instantly cut short when he gets a phone call that could be crucial for the campaign to expose Preynat.  Ozon’s direction, throughout these sequences, is disciplined in its discretion.  His lack of fuss has the effect of throwing into relief the scandal of the church authorities’ under-reaction.

    The first Ozon film I saw was Time to Leave (2005), in which a young, sexually reckless and thoroughly self-centred fashion photographer called Romain discovers that he has only a few months to live.  His blatant selfishness seemed to promise a distinctive twist on conventional terminal-illness drama.  In the event, Romain morphed, disappointingly, into a doomed protagonist of a more familiar kind:  I was left unsure how much this was down to the writer-director and how much to the actor, also new to me, who played Romain.  He was Melvil Poupaud.  In By the Grace of God, the first film on which he and Ozon have worked together since, his character’s particularity declines – but this time it’s certainly not the fault of Poupaud, who’s excellent.  The Alexandre of the first hour, though he remains a significant figure in the story, becomes somehow submerged in it.  This is partly because other characters become more prominent.  It’s also partly because Ozon isn’t able to follow through what makes Alexandre remarkable – a victim of sex crimes by a Catholic priest but still a determined, even spiritually fulfilled, member of the Catholic Church.

    Although the stories of other important dramatis personae are involving, By the Grace of God begins to look gradually more schematic.  Along with Alexandre, the main abuse victims are François Debord (Denis Ménochet) and Emmanuel Thomassin (Swann Arlaud) – also both impelled into action by the discovery that Preynat is still alive and active in the Church.  Whereas Alexandre is a professional high flyer and settled family man, drugs-dependent Emmanuel has been in and out of hospital, work and relationships throughout his adult life.   François is a husband and father whose assertive atheism counterpoints Alexandre’s keeping the faith.  The latter’s parents (Laurence Roy and Jacques Lagarde) told him as a child to stay quiet about what he claimed happened with Preynat:  his chilly, impersonal mother, in particular, disapproves of what her son is now revealing to the world.  François’s mother (Hélène Vincent), on the other hand, is remorseful that she didn’t do more to support him at the time he was abused.

    These biographical elements may well reflect the situations of the men on whom Ozon has based his characters but they come to feel like a compare-and-contrast design.  Support of spouses, friction with partners and relatives – these things are clearly, credibly described, and the film is consistently well acted, yet it loses power as the victims’ network expands and strengthens its profile.  There’s an increasing sense that Ozon is relying on the factual basis of the material as a guarantee of dramatic substance.  At any rate, his attempts to beef up the narrative are half-hearted.  At one point, he suggests that Alexandre is worried his involvement with the campaign may be bad for his career but that theme isn’t pursued.  Emmanuel tells Marie how he envies and admires the Guérins’ stable marriage and family life.  It’s too pat when she replies that Alexandre is fighting on her behalf as well as his own:  she too is a victim of childhood abuse (though by a male neighbour).

    A legend on the screen introduces By the Grace of God as ‘a fictional film based on known facts’.  Ozon is unsurprisingly selective in what he does and doesn’t invent.  The name Preynat, thanks to the homophones ‘pray’ and ‘prey’, is, to anglophone ears, incredibly apt for a predatory priest but it’s the name of the actual priest whose sex crimes are the basis of Ozon’s story.  With its hints of barbarism, Barbarin too is helpfully evocative, as well as the real name of the individual concerned.  Ozon isn’t faithful, however, to the chronology of Philippe Barbarin’s elevation to cardinal, which occurred as long ago as 2003, the year following his appointment as Archbishop of Lyon.  A quick online search yields nothing to suggest that the real surnames of victims are used:  a French Vanity Fair article of February 2019 names the ‘first victim’ of Preynat as Alexandre Dussot-Hezez.

    The film’s title is not only ironic but refers explicitly to Barbarin’s crucial slip of the tongue at a press conference where he defends his and others’ failure to deal with Preynat.  He says that, ‘grâce à Dieu‘, the statute of limitation on the alleged crimes has expired.  It goes without saying that subject matter of this nature will be praised as urgently topical but, in this case, the phrase is unusually meaningful.  By the Grace of God premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February (where it won the Jury Grand Prix).  The text Ozon puts on screen at the end must have been added since then.  This explains that, in March 2019, Barbarin was convicted by a court of failing to report sex abuse and given a suspended six-month prison sentence, against which he appealed.  Even that information has been overtaken by subsequent events:  in June, Barbarin lost his position as head of the Archdiocese of Lyon though he still retains his title.  Ozon’s closing legends also indicate that French statute of limitations law in cases of this kind has now been changed but that Bernard Preynat remains a priest.  That too is now out of date:  according to Wikipedia, Preynat, who tried and failed to block the film’s release in France, was defrocked in July this year.

    The timeframe of the action is 2014 to 2016.  There’s a Christmas scene for each of the three years, the last of which is also the film’s finale.  The leading campaign members gather at the Guérins’ home to celebrate the progress of their work and their award as Lyon’s citizens of the year (they’re grimly amused that the previous year’s winner was Barbarin), and to discuss what happens next.  Gilles Perret (Éric Caravaca) and his wife (Jeanne Rosa), who’ve played important roles in the group’s work, take the opportunity to announce they won’t continue because they feel the network is taking over their lives.  François calls vigorously for public apostasy all round.  Alexandre disagrees:  he says it’s important to fight for justice from within the Church.  When the guests have gone and his eldest son returns home after a night out with friends, Gauthier asks how the evening went.  Alexandre admits there were some tense moments.  His son then asks, ‘Dad, do you still believe in God?’

    Ozon’s expressive discretion extends to brief flashbacks to the scout camps, as remembered by the victims.  These show each of the boys entering or approaching a tent with the younger Preynat (Yves-Marie Bastien, whose creepy appearance may be a mistake:  there are repeated references to Preynat’s personal charm, which Bernard Verley is able to hint at) but go no further.  As several critics have suggested, By the Grace of God paints a distinctive portrait of male vulnerability at different ages.  It’s a worthy and, in several important ways, a skilful piece of work – more remarkable because it’s unexpected for a film-maker of Ozon’s temperament.  The ending, though, confirms a failure of imaginative sympathy on his part that limits the piece.  He keeps his camera on Melvil Poupaud’s gently unsmiling, then uncertain face for several seconds after Gauthier has asked about his father’s belief in God.  The clear implication is that Alexandre can no longer say yes.

    The weight given to this final moment is a cheat because Alexandre is being asked the wrong question.  He made clear at the very start that what happened to him as a boy and its aftermath had made it a struggle for him to remain a good Catholic but that he’d managed to do so.  The final question for him is, rather, ‘Can you really remain a member of a church still trying to evade the sexual abuse issue and to protect its own interests?’  Alexandre’s final silence may tell the viewer more about the personal views of the man who made the film than about the one whose face is on the screen.  Eliding the difference between faith in God and in the church as an institution, as Ozon does here, allows him to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  It also confirms his losing touch with what makes Alexandre an exceptionally interesting character.

    19 October 2019

     

     

     

     

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