Film review

  • Wicked Little Letters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Thea Sharrock (2023)

    A title card at the start announces that ‘This story is more true than you’d think’.  Wicked Little Letters is indeed based on a real-life case – a poison-pen mystery of the early 1920s in the Sussex seaside town of Littlehampton[1].  A woman called Edith Swan received a succession of abusive letters and postcards, the abuse couched in exuberantly foul language.  Edith brought a private prosecution against a neighbour, Rose Gooding, who was convicted of criminal libel and went to prison.  After her release, the letters to Edith – and now to other locals – resumed; Rose was tried and convicted a second time.  While she was behind bars, the letters started up once more.  Scotland Yard was called in and their investigation led to Rose Gooding’s conviction being quashed:  she was released from jail and awarded £250 compensation for wrongful conviction.  Examinations of handwriting had unmasked the actual culprit – Edith Swan herself.  When Edith first stood trial, she was acquitted:  the jury couldn’t believe such a respectable woman capable of scurrilous obscenity.  The police subsequently devised a sting operation, which involved the use of postage stamps marked with invisible ink, and Edith was caught red-handed.  She stood trial again, charged with attempting ‘to send an obscene and libellous letter to the Littlehampton sanitary inspector’.  This time, she was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison.

    The title card’s arch wording announces the persistently waggish tone of Thea Sharrock’s version of events.  It was a bad decision to turn them into comedy.  For a start, Wicked Little Letters is virtually laugh-free, thanks chiefly to performances that keep insisting what a hoot it is (with the help of Isobel Waller-Bridge’s cod-thriller score).  The treatment also makes light of a truly sad story:  according even to the film, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) was a miserably repressed spinster and an oppressed daughter, semi-infantilised by her mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) and tyrannised by her father Edward (Timothy Spall)[2].  Although they’re chalk and cheese, Edith at first makes friends with Rose (Jessie Buckley), the Irish immigrant next door, who seems an enviably free spirit to drab, churchgoing Edith.  The two women fall out when, sorely provoked by Edith’s father and his friends, Rose causes a scene at Edward Swan’s birthday party; she refuses to apologise, after which the abusive letters start.  (Rose tends to cuss and swear at the best of times so is an obvious suspect.)  The movie is serious in one respect only:  its cack-handed determination to be right-on.

    As it happens, I spent a weekend in Littlehampton last year.  On the evidence of Wicked Little Letters, the place was more ethnically diverse a hundred years ago than it is now.  It’s true that plenty of Littlehampton’s citizens of colour in the 1920s are examples of colour-blind casting.  Perhaps the people behind the film would claim they all are but, if they did, they’d be kidding themselves – or, more likely, trying to kid the audience.  Nearly all the non-white characters are thoroughly and merely nice, including Rose’s Black partner, Bill (Malachi Kirby, wasted in the role).  If they’re humorous – like Edith’s sort-of friend Kate (Lolly Adefope) – they’re mildly humorous.  The only one who amounts to more is the sole female officer at the local constabulary, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan).  Chief Constable (sic) Spedding (Paul Chahidi) and his inept sidekick PC Papperwick (Hugh Skinner) treat Gladys as a dimwit and a skivvy.  She’s anything but.  Dubious from the start that Rose wrote the letters, Gladys ignores Spedding’s instruction that she take no further part in the investigation; at the business end of the story, it’s not Scotland Yard but Gladys who proves Edith’s guilt.  Anjana Vasan was born in India to a Tamil Hindu family and brought up in Singapore.  Her character’s name might seem to confirm that Vasan is colour-blind cast as Gladys Moss yet the film-makers mean us to notice that the heroine of their story is a non-white woman.

    And that the victim of injustice in Wicked Little Letters is ethnically and thereby morally stigmatised, although the real Rose Gooding wasn’t Irish.  In the film, Rose claims – it turns out falsely – to be the widow of a soldier killed in the recent Great War:  she tells the lie to conceal the fact that her young daughter, Nancy (Alisha Weir), is illegitimate.  Jessie Buckley, able actress as she is, doesn’t seem right as Rose – she doesn’t come across as the bog-Irish hoyden offending narrow minds that the set-up seems to demand.  Buckley’s more like an in your-face student who’s arrived in Littlehampton from another era rather than another country.  Even so, the copious swear words in Jonny Sweet’s script sparked reactions from two posh women just behind me in the Curzon Wimbledon audience that might seem to vindicate the film’s Hibernianisation of Rose and suggest that anti-Irish prejudice is still alive and kicking in SW19 a century on.  The posh women were convulsed with laughter when profanities issued from the mouth of English national treasure Olivia Colman.  They were silent whenever Jessie Buckley swore – as if that’s just what they expected someone Irish to do.

    Political correctness ties Wicked Little Letters in knots, though.  In reality, the first non-white female officer in the British police served in the Met from 1968 to 1972.  Thea Sharrock would probably claim this alone dictates that we view Gladys Moss through a colour-blind lens but it’s practically impossible to do so when gender prejudice and one kind of racial prejudice are up-front themes in the film.  Gladys’s male colleagues despise her because she’s a woman; we’re supposed to ignore that she’s a woman of colour despite these colleagues being benighted men of a century ago.  Rose’s neighbours deplore her Irishness but not that she’s shacked up with a Black man.  The film’s broadside against patriarchy – in the form of vicious martinet Edward Swan – is half-hearted, too, because we learn that Gladys Moss was inspired to join the police by the example of her father, who served in the force for decades.  Mr Moss was a paterfamilias very different from Mr Swan, a policeman very different from Spedding and Papperwick.  How come – unless it’s because he wasn’t, like them, a white man?  (Gladys has a framed photograph of her father in her living room.)  Are we really meant to be colour blind to this?

    There’s plenty more that doesn’t make sense.  Unmarried Edith is the eldest of the Swans’ children – the only one who stayed at home, to the relief of her soppy, needy mother, who’s got her daughter where she wants her.  Edith reciprocates Victoria’s love and can see that she’s distraught by the letters that keep landing on the doormat.  Yet she doesn’t seem bothered by that until one of the letters causes her mother to collapse and die.  If local prejudices against Rose Gooding are as they’re shown to be for most of the film, why is there a prolonged standing ovation for her in court when she’s eventually cleared?  The Swan family’s religious devotion is derided throughout as sickeningly pious and/or hypocritical; the only halfway positive aspect of it is the so-called Christian whist group to which Edith (surprisingly) belongs – along with Kate, Ann (Joanna Scanlan) and Mabel (Eileen Atkins).  None of these other three is conspicuously Christian (they wouldn’t be, of course, because they’re not baddies).  In fact, Ann, Kate and Mabel stand bail for Rose at one point; yet this appears to have no effect on how Edith sees them.

    Although it’s mentioned at one point that the Swans are Methodists, the dog-collar at chapel is Father Ambrose (Tim Key), who wouldn’t be a Father if he was a Methodist.  Gladys mentions to Rose that women doing her job can’t be married and have children as if the police force were especially restrictive in this respect:  although Rose is incredulous, this was surely the case for most women in employment until well beyond the 1920s.  These examples are fairly typical of Jonny Sweet’s careless writing.  A careless writer is what Rose is meant to be – as revealed in another conversation with Gladys, who tactfully suggests Rose’s literacy falls short of that of the poison pen.  The script has Rose cheerfully admit to this in one breath and in the next refer to initial letters in sentences being ‘capitalised’.  Sweet evidently belongs to the oh-does-it-really-matter-it’s-a-comedy school of screenwriting.

    Thea Sharrock takes a similar approach to the material – one that effectively denies Olivia Colman, for all her aplomb, the chance to give Edith Swan the sympathy that she warrants.  After her huge and (despite the film) well-merited success in The Favourite (2018), Colman gave another strong performance in The Father (2020) and was a dramatic force to be reckoned with in The Lost Daughter (2021).  It’s a shame to see her retreating so soon into a film as tame as this – and tamer than it should be.  Timothy Spall is similarly thwarted.  At the start he seems just to be overacting; later on, after Swan’s wife’s death, Spall comes through with glints of real malice that give you an unsettling sense of what might have been in his portrait of Edward Swan.

    As Gladys, Anjana Vasan is competent but rather bland.  It’s potentially arguable that the most successful instance of colour-blind casting here is that of Paul Chahidi, though this too may be disingenuous on the film-makers’ part.  I’m not sure if Chahidi, born in Iran to an Iranian father and a British mother, defines himself as white or non-white.  Whichever, there’s no difficulty accepting him here as an establishment figure – not least because Chahidi is familiar from television’s This Country as the long-suffering vicar, whom he played so well.  (This is where the disingenuousness may come in.)  Chahidi can hardly be at his best in Wicked Little Letters but he’s a fine and versatile comedian.  Those two adjectives don’t apply to Hugh Skinner:  enough said.  The only performer who just about defies the film’s crippling limitations is Joanna Scanlan, as Ann, the pig and chicken farmer who frankly describes her own standards of hygiene as ‘medieval’.  It’s regrettable that Scanlan’s richly-deserved BAFTA Best Actress award for After Love in 2022 hasn’t resulted in other leading roles in cinema.  But each character that she plays rings true, however eccentric that character may be.  Joanna Scanlan proved that in, for example, Pin Cushion (2018).  On a smaller scale and against the odds, she proves it again in Wicked Little Letters.

    14 March 2024

    [1] The information in this paragraph derives largely from an article by Ellie Ayton on the Find My Past website (https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/history/wicked-little-letters) rather than the film.

    [2] Ellie Ayton’s piece notes that ‘It was speculated at the time of her trial whether Edith was in her right mind when she sent those letters.  There may be some truth in this.  Sadly, by 1939 Edith was an “incapacitated” patient, living at an institution in Worthing.  She died in Worthing in 1959 aged 68.’

  • Perfect Days

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wim Wenders (2023)

    The Academy Awards handout a few days ago mostly rewarded three hours of prolix self-importance and – worse – over two hours of noisome grandstanding:  Oppenheimer (seven wins) and Poor Things (four) dominated proceedings.  So despite my reservations about The Zone of Interest, its two Oscars (along with Anatomy of a Fall‘s richly-deserved Best Original Screenplay win) supplied some welcome relief.  Jonathan Glazer’s genuinely thought-provoking film won Best Sound and Best International Feature.  In the latter category it had at least one worthy rival among the other nominees ((I’ve not yet seen the remaining three[1]):  Perfect Days, his first dramatic feature in six years, is an unusually likeable picture from Wim Wenders.

    The Zone of Interest, written and directed by an Englishman and the UK representative in the International Feature category, is set in Germany.  Perfect Days, made by a German, represented Japan, where the story takes place.  The main character is sixty-something Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) and the film begins with attentive description of the start of his day.  Hirayama wakes, rolls up and puts away his bedding, brushes his teeth, washes his face and pulls on overalls.  He then waters house plants, steps outside, looks up and smiles gently before getting a drink from a vending machine in the courtyard of his apartment building.  He starts up his van and heads for central Tokyo, playing a cassette tape on the way.  Arrived at his destination, Hirayama takes equipment from the van and gets to work with it, cleaning public toilets.

    Over the next forty minutes or so, Wim Wenders describes Hirayama’s routines repeatedly, particularly the early morning routine.  While making clear this is pretty unvarying, Wenders doesn’t present it in exactly the same way each time.  He uses different camera angles and, as the viewer gets used to the routine, abbreviates it somewhat.  The repetition helps us notice things:  Hirayama doesn’t need an alarm clock to wake up at the right time; his smile to greet the morning as he steps outside is sometimes followed by a little yawn.  This treatment of quotidian procedure is very different from the real-time, minutely detailed observation of the title character in Chantal Akerman’s  Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).  Wenders’s start-of-day emphasis recalls more Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) but that connection emphasises the gulf between the two films’ protagonists.  Fosse’s alter ego, Joe Gideon – juggling high-pressure creative projects and the women in his life, subsisting on pills, alcohol, cigarettes and Alka-Seltzer – is famous, driven and dissatisfied.  Hirayama is apparently content with his circumscribed existence and takes pride in his menial job, for which he uses his own, presumably top-of-the-range cleaning equipment.

    His food intake exceeds Joe Gideon’s but Hirayama is still a modest eater.  Sitting on a park bench at lunchtime, he has a sandwich.  After work, he often cycles to a public bathhouse then on to a noodle restaurant for a meal and a drink.  He regularly takes photographs, with a camera rather than on a phone – particularly of trees in the park that he frequents.  At the weekend, he goes to a photographic shop to collect his latest photos and hand in the next film for developing; he also visits a laundrette and a second-hand book shop. His brief conversations with the shop’s owner, the man who develops his photos, the restaurant proprietor and a waiter there, are just about the extent of Hirayama’s social life.  He has a junior co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who’s decidedly chattier than his senior partner.  As Takashi says to his girlfriend, Aya (Aoi Yamada), Hirayama is ‘a great worker but not much of a talker’.  It must be a quarter of an hour into the film before he speaks at all – and then in laconic response to Takashi, who’s arrived late for work and explains why, at length.  Self-preoccupied Takashi demonstrates the virtues of reticence.  With him, everyone and everything is marked out of ten.  He tells Aya that Hirayama is ‘nine on a scale of weird’.  His own chances of making it with Aya, he admits to Hirayama, score lower.

    Hirayama and Takashi work for ‘The Tokyo Toilet’:  the words are emblazoned, in English, on the back of their overalls.  According to Wikipedia, Wim Wenders was invited to Tokyo in 2021

    ‘to observe the Tokyo Toilet Project, a project in which Japanese public toilets were redesigned in 17 locations throughout Shibuya with the help of 16 creators invited from around the world.  Wenders was invited to take a look at the uniqueness of each of these facilities.  At first, the producers envisioned Wenders would make a short film or series of short films on the facilities, but he opted for a feature film …’

    It comes as no surprise to learn that the public conveniences on display in Perfect Days are special.  Although Takashi complains how ‘gross’ his work can be – and even allowing that Hirayama goes about his meticulously – the toilets look, to British eyes, pristine, as well as hi-tech as far as door opening and locking mechanisms are concerned.  (Similarly striking that the drinks vending machine outside Hirayama’s home is never out of order.)

    Wenders’s sustained scrutiny of his main character’s small world makes Perfect Days peculiarly fascinating.  Because Hirayama continues to do the same things, we watch him doing them closely – for fear of missing something (Perfect Days does have this in common with Jeanne Dielman).  The film’s approach makes us more aware, too, of our expectations of screen narrative and protagonists, and the prejudicial assumptions underlying such expectations.  If we’re reasonably honest, we’ll probably admit to asking ourselves, as we watch, if the prescribed schedules of a toilet cleaner – even one as conscientious and engaging as Hirayama – are worth two hours of our time.  This viewer anyway started to wonder what had reduced him to this job, whether he wasn’t really lonely and concealing grief or misery.

    Certain elements encourage curiosity about whether there’s more to Hirayama than meets the eye:  his choice of music, from the 1960s or 1970s, to play on the way to work (more on that below); his book purchases (William Faulkner, Aya Koda, Patricia Highsmith); his scrupulously impenetrable dreams (there are a few too many of these flickering monochrome interludes).  Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, who shares the screenplay credit, tempt us increasingly into thinking more conventional drama is in the offing.  Hirayama sees a piece of paper half-inserted in a crevice in a washroom wall.  He takes it out to examine, writes something on it, puts it back; it’s still there next day and he follows the same procedure.  This has a Lunchbox (2013) vibe but it turns out Hirayama is just participating in a game of noughts and crosses:  the person who starts it isn’t identified.  On the park bench next to his at lunchtime sits an unsmiling young woman.  Hirayama always looks ready to talk to her.  She opens her mouth to eat, never to speak.  When Takashi suddenly quits his job, he’s replaced by a female cleaner but she hardly registers at all in what follows.  About halfway through the film, though, something does change.

    A girl in her late teens (Arisa Nakano) turns up at Hirayama’s home late one evening; he calls her Niko and remarks on how much she’s grown.  She’s his niece, daughter of the sister from whom he’s estranged.  So, at least for the moment, is Niko, who has fallen out with her mother and asks to stay at Hirayama’s.  The first part of her intervention in the film is very effectively done.  The audience has become so used to and absorbed by Hirayama’s routines that, although he himself is kindly hospitable to Niko, we feel almost put out that she is to some extent disturbing them.  That feeling gradually dissipates as she asks to accompany her uncle to work the following day; the day after that, they take photographs and go on a bike ride together.  In Niko’s company, Hirayama is more talkative.  Then his sister, Keiko (Yumi Asō), arrives to take her daughter home.  Keiko asks her brother if it’s true he’s a toilet cleaner, then if he’ll visit their father, who’s now in a nursing home and, adds Keiko, no longer capable of saying the hurtful things to his son that he used to say.  Hirayama shakes his head but, as he says goodbye to Keiko, hugs her and weeps.

    This last part of Niko’s visit is the least satisfying, for two reasons.  First, it’s clumsy that Keiko is in a chauffeured car:  we get that she’s well heeled without this how-the-other-half-lives underlining.  Second, the sudden evidence of Hirayama’s unhappy family background is, in effect, a sop to audience disbelief that Wenders’s hero can simply be the peaceful, contented soul he appears to be.  Despite the vast difference of their subject matter, Perfect Days and The Zone of Interest pose a similar challenge to their directors.  Both have a clear central theme; both must decide on the balance between illustrating that theme repeatedly and injecting dramatic incident.  It could be argued that Wim Wenders shows greater integrity to the prevailing style of his film in that no single definite story develops in Perfect Days.  On the other hand, Jonathan Glazer finds, in the events that interrupt the settled domestic arrangements of the Höss family, a convincing means of animating his ‘ambient genocide’ thesis.  Wenders eventually moves to crystallise his main theme, which seems to be:  make the most of whatever your life is (the movie’s title is not ironic).  He does so for a relatively much shorter time and on a smaller scale than Glazer but less successfully, too.

    Opening the door of his usual restaurant, Hirayama sees the woman proprietor (Sayuri Ishikawa) embracing a man (Tomokazu Miura).  Hirayama hurries out in embarrassment, buys cigarettes and three canned highballs.  He makes his way to a public area beside a lake.  He arrives there at dusk and is approached by the man he saw in the restaurant.  Recognising Hirayama from his brief appearance there, the man, whose name is Tomoyama, asks for a cigarette.  He then explains that the restaurant owner is his ex-wife; he hasn’t seen her in years but he now has terminal cancer and wants to make peace with her before he dies.  Tomoyama asks Hirayama if shadows deepen as it gets darker.  The two men then play a game of tag with their own shadows.  This is a rare self-consciously arty scene in Perfect Days and its intrusion into Wenders’s gracefully realistic texture jars.  Hirayama is certainly a creature of habit but it’s not clear how Tomoyama knows just where to find him, evidently some time after their momentary encounter in the restaurant.  Tomoyama seems to be directed to the lakeside area by the metaphysical importance of what he’ll have to say there.

    It’s a relief when normal service is resumed to conclude the film, as Hirayama starts another working day.  It’s darker now when he goes outside but he still has that gentle good-to-be-alive smile for the open air and sky.  He owns an impressive collection of music cassettes, which interest Takashi and Aya when he gives them a lift in the van.  Aya is intrigued by such antique artefacts; Takashi, short of the funds he thinks he needs to impress her, is sure that Hirayama could make a killing selling some of the cassettes.  Takashi is proved right when he drags Hirayama along to a dealer in vintage music but Hirayama refuses to sell.  (He lends Takashi the cash the cassettes would have made but doesn’t get it back.)   The songs played in Hirayama’s van in the course of Perfect Days include The Animals’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and, of course, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’.  What’s in effect the theme song is also played as an instrumental during the closing credits but Wenders chooses Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ for the finale inside the van.  Kōji Yakusho delivers a fine, admirably restrained performance throughout.  Wenders waits until this last sequence to give his lead actor his head.  As ‘Feeling Good’ plays, the camera stays on Hirayama’s face.  He smiles before his eyes fill with tears; Kōji Yakusho then alternates and blends the two things a second time.  His moment of bravura acting is well worth waiting for.

    14 March 2024

    [1] Afternote:  I’ve now also seen The Teachers’ Lounge.

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