Film review

  • Days of the Bagnold Summer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Simon Bird (2019)

    Graphic novels have generated screen dramas of real substance – Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2000) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) are two that come immediately to mind.   Simon Bird’s Days of the Bagnold Summer, with a screenplay by Lisa Owens (Bird’s wife) based on Joff Winterhart’s graphic novel of the same name, isn’t quite in that category.  When a six-week visit to his father in Florida falls through, teenager Daniel Bagnold (Earl Cave) has to spend the school summer holidays at home with his mother Sue (Monica Dolan) – home is somewhere/anywhere in provincial suburban England.  This debut feature from Bird (best known as one of The Inbetweeners) is low on momentum and Daniel’s grouchy listlessness isn’t enough to justify the lack of energy.  Compared with Marielle Heller’s graphic-novel-derived The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Bird’s film doesn’t have a coherent, eye-catching look – not, at any rate, in the washy print on show at this London Film Festival screening (at the seen-better-days Prince Charles Cinema).  Yet Days of the Bagnold Summer is sometimes poignant, often funny, consistently entertaining and always elevated by Monica Dolan’s acting.

    Fifteen-year-old Daniel is an only child whose parents divorced a while ago.  His father Bob is now married to a younger American woman, who’s about to give birth to their first child – the excuse for their calling off, at short notice, the planned visit from ‘Danny’, as they refer to him on the phone.  That ‘Danny’ irks Sue, as does nearly everything about her ex-husband.  Bob can afford to run an MG in America but can’t afford to send regular maintenance payments to England.  Sue works full-time at the local public library and keeps her house in good order but she’s not well off.  She’s devoted to Daniel, and treats him as younger than he is.  She does everything for him and, though she occasionally chunters about that, it’s also a comfort to her:  it means he still needs her.  Daniel complains about Sue’s moaning but she annoys him even more when she’s upbeat, as she usually tries to be.

    For much of the film, the role of Daniel seems underwritten.  He understandably misses his absent father and resents his ever-present mother.  He directs his angst and antagonism at the one parent available to be on the receiving end, and says some very hurtful things to her.  His isolation from his contemporaries isn’t so easy to explain.  His only friend, presumably from school, is the contrastingly self-confident Ky (Elliott Speller-Gillott), a sort of grunge dandy.  Daniel is a somewhat generic teenager, a less comically extreme version of Harry Enfield’s Kevin it’s-so-unfair Patterson.  Perhaps Bird and Owens mean to suggest Daniel doesn’t know who or what he is.  When his cousin (Grace Hogg-Robinson) calls him a Goth, he denies it, in spite of his black clothes, pale face, lank hair and metal-head music tastes.

    Sue knows what she is – a long-ago university student (that’s where she and Bob got together), fiftyish now, watching her life dwindle before her eyes.   She sees it happening through a pair of spectacles that certainly aren’t rose-coloured, though the frames are pinky-brown.  There’s a lot of pinky-brown about Sue and her surroundings.   Her knitwear and blouses tend to fawn; the décor in her home is decidedly beige.  Sue also knows she’s boring, especially to the son she loves, and how little she can do about it.  When she goes to pick Daniel up and drive him back from Ky’s house, she has doorstep conversations with the latter’s mother (Tamsin Greig), a reiki therapist with a particular liking for Nepalese bracelets.  Apart from occasional visits from her younger sister (Alice Lowe), Sue has next to no other social life outside the library.

    Until, that is, the arrival there of Douglas Porter (Rob Brydon), Daniel’s history teacher.   In the process of taking out some books, Mr Porter also proposes taking Sue out on a date – news of which naturally astonishes and disgusts her son.  The middle part of the film follows Sue’s short-lived romance in parallel with Daniel’s half-hearted attempts to get into a band and falling out with Ky, who gets him an audition with a trio of humiliatingly younger kids (Nathanael Salah, Alfie Todd and George Wilkins).  Douglas goes incommunicado.  Sue takes Daniel for a day at the seaside that proves to be the miserable debacle it was bound to be – the nadir reached in a fudge-making demonstration, where Daniel is forced by the fudge-maker (Rodrig Andfrisan) into audience participation.  After all this, Sue gives in when Ky’s mother again offers her a reiki session.  ‘After all, you only live once!’ says Sue brightly.  ‘Well …,’ replies Ky’s mother, signalling discreet dissent:  a believer in reincarnation, she knows better.

    The cast largely overcomes the tension in the material between caricature and realism.  Tamsin Greig can’t always resist the temptation to make fun of her character but the compassion Ky’s mother shows for Sue when she gets upset during the reiki treatment, feels sincere.  Bird cleverly exploits the awkward nice guy persona of Rob Brydon, an able but overeager actor.   We soon pick up that the history teacher always, smugly knows best and changes the subject whenever it threatens to stray from himself.  Even so, Brydon’s trademark smiley insistency gives an extra charge to Douglas’s exposure as a serial dater of his pupils’ single mothers.  Earl Cave (Nick Cave’s son) is actually nineteen but passes for younger.  His relatively minimal acting might have been a problem if Daniel had had to carry the film:  since he and Sue are joint protagonists, and the differences between them essential to the piece, Cave’s deadpan works well.

    Monica Dolan does more than just overcome the caricature-realism tension:  she thoroughly fuses the two aspects.  It may be ignorance of the literary genre that makes me expect a comic-strip quality to a film of a graphic novel, but I do; and Dolan satisfies that expectation brilliantly.  Her portrayal of Sue Bagnold combines the vivid definition of a cartoon type with emotional depth and individuality.  Painfully funny really is the operative term here – for example (one among many), when, after their trattoria outing, Sue phones Douglas Porter to suggest another meeting.  Prepared script in hand, she leaves a message on his answering machine.  She then realises she’s given him his own phone number to call her back on.  She leaves another message – spontaneous and a shambles.  She hangs up and, with her back to camera, shows her exasperation at the same time as holding it in:  the sound and the movement she makes are furiously small.  It’s no wonder Sue’s noisy outburst of distress in the later reiki session is so powerful.   Days of the Bagnold Summer won’t be a high-profile film but I can’t say how glad I am to see Monica Dolan getting a lead role in cinema.

    Bird divides the narrative into four chapter headings – ‘Early Days’, ‘Salad Days’, ‘Dog Days’ and ‘These Days’.  The third chapter refers to, as well as the time of year, the third member of the Bagnold household:  Riley, an elderly golden retriever, now falls ill and dies in his sleep.  The dog, acquired by Bob, has been around since Daniel was a young child.  Sue recalls being cross with when her husband brought the animal home but she and Daniel are agreed that Riley has been a happy part of their lives.  His low-key death marks the start of their low-key rapprochement.   The loss of a childhood pet makes sense as the trigger for this – not least because what gradually emerges to make Daniel more oddly appealing are hints that he wants to stay in childhood.  In spite of his first reaction to the pre-adolescent band, Daniel, who can’t beat them, joins them.

    The film begins, before the Florida holiday is called off, with Sue unavailingly trying to buy for Daniel a pair of shoes that aren’t trainers, for a wedding they’re going to later in the summer.   It comes to seem surprising that a duo as differently unsociable as these two have been invited anywhere but the wedding reception is the finale to Days of the Bagnold Summer.  The seating plan places Sue and Daniel at different tables.  His neighbours are two girls perhaps a year or two older than him.  They don’t seem hungry so he helps out by polishing off both their meals.  He mentions he’s in a band and one of the girls says she’d like to see them:  what’s the name?   ‘Daniel,’ he replies.

    The production and costume design, especially Alison McLaughlin’s wardrobe for Monica Dolan, are excellent.   Even though the film isn’t visually ambitious, I liked the way Bird and the cinematographer Simon Tindall shot familiar things – a shoe-shop window, clothing racks, library shelving units.   The camera angles amusingly give them the look of artefacts in a piece of science fiction.   I also liked part of the soundtrack – the Belle and Sebastian part rather than the bits of Metallica et al.   The opening balloon of Joff Winterhart’s graphic novel is, ‘When someone looks back and writes a history of this summer, two people they will almost certainly leave out are Sue and Daniel Bagnold … ‘  Without being explicitly retrospective, the Belle and Sebastian music somehow suggests, to touching effect, how Daniel will remember the summer and his mother.

    7 October 2019

  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

    Céline Sciamma (2019)

    In what’s become the best-known sequence of Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014), the heroine and her friends dance to and lip-sync Rihanna’s song ‘Diamonds’.  Girlhood is set in present-day Paris and Sciamma’s new film in eighteenth-century France but a female chorus also features in the most vibrantly dramatic scene of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, showing at the London Film Festival after winning prizes at Cannes.  A group of women, on a beach close to the house where most of the action takes place, chant the words ‘Fugere non possum’ repeatedly and urgently.  It’s night-time; what light there is comes from the fire built on the beach.  The voices are lovely and the meaning of the Latin phrase (‘I can’t escape’) significant.  The seashore company includes, as well as the chorus, the film’s two main characters – the young artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a near-contemporary whose portrait she’s been commissioned to paint.  Héloïse moves so close to the beach fire that the hem of her dress catches alight.  She gazes at Marianne, and into the camera, for some moments before falling to the ground.  Marianne and others run towards her to extinguish the flames.

    This scene is the centrepiece of the long flashback, in Marianne’s memory, that Portrait of a Lady on Fire mostly comprises.  The film’s opening sequence is the route into it.  Marianne is giving an art lesson to a group of six pupils – all girls, who look to be in their late teens.  She quietly instructs the class at the same time as sitting as their model.  When the lesson is over, she looks at a painting behind the row of girls and asks who was responsible for placing it there.   One of the pupils (Armande Boulanger) puts her hand up and asks if it was wrong for her to bring the painting out of storage.  Marianne confirms it was wrong, though in a tone of regret rather than reproof.  The camera, representing Marianne’s point of view, closes in on the painting, her own work, which shows a young woman whose dress hem is burning.  The flashback then begins.  Sciamma’s introduction has poise and gravitas though I didn’t get why, given the position in which she was sitting, Marianne seemed not to notice the painting until the end of the lesson.  This bugged me for a while until what followed in the film supplied a clear and simple answer.  Remarking the painting sooner would have spoiled the effect that Sciamma wanted to achieve.

    Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds to the love affair that develops between Marianne and Héloïse during the former’s painting of the latter’s portrait.  The affair lasts only the brief period of their acquaintance but is never forgotten by either of them.  ‘I can’t escape’, the film’s motto, refers both to the circumstances of eighteenth-century women and to the ineluctability of desire.  Héloïse, from an aristocratic family, is about to be married to a man previously engaged to her sister, who died suddenly.  We soon learn the sister took her own life.  Héloïse had been living in a convent, preparing to become a nun.  Her sister’s death – to be precise, her mother’s reaction to it – put an end to that.  The dowager countess (Valeria Golino) is determined that, since one of her daughters is no longer available to marry the eligible Italian gentleman in question, the other will.

    Marianne survives an eventful sea voyage en route to the countess’s isolated house off the Brittany coast:  when her canvases go overboard, she follows and rescues them.   (The sequence faintly echoes the climax to The Piano.)  On arrival at the house, she first meets the maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) and, soon afterwards, learns from the countess that the job of painting her daughter’s portrait, for the approval of her prospective husband, is a more complicated assignment than expected.   Héloïse has previously refused to sit for a portrait because she doesn’t want to be married.  Marianne will therefore be introduced to her as a hired companion to accompany Héloïse on daily walks – in order to see her at close quarters and commit her features to memory.  Marianne will then construct the portrait alone, at night.

    She and Héloïse soon bond; the painter is not prepared to deceive her subject and explains her presence in the household.  To her mother’s surprise, Héloïse agrees to be painted and the countess then departs for Italy.  A good deal happens during her seemingly short absence.  Héloïse and Marianne help the pregnant Sophie to have an abortion.  Following the chanting sequence on the beach, they fall in love.  The portrait of Héloïse is completed.  This isn’t, of course, the ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ seen in the prologue but a more conventional study, which in due course meets with the countess’s approval.

    Until Héloïse and Marianne express their mutual passion, the atmosphere exudes quivering, suppressed ardency, reflected in the looks the women exchange, in flickering firelight and candle flames.  This is an exceptionally beautiful film to look at.  The contrast between the DP Claire Mathon’s lighting of shadowy interiors and the translucent vividness of colours in the sunny, seaside outdoors is close to breathtaking.  The film is full of artful touches and rhymes.  Marianne is haunted by visions of Héloïse in a white gown.  The visions are spectral but the last time we see Héloïse in the gown, it really is her wedding dress.   One evening, Héloïse reads to Marianne (and Sophie) the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and there’s a discussion of why Orpheus really turned back.  When, later, the distraught Marianne is about to exit the countess’s house for the last time, she hears Héloïse’s voice calling behind her; Marianne turns, Orpheus-like. Waiting for the abortionist to do her work, Sophie lies on a bed and a newborn crawls on the pillow beside her.  (The abortionist is evidently a baby farmer too.)  Years after their romance, Marianne sees an updated portrait of Héloïse, now with an infant daughter, hanging in a gallery.  Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an impressive composition.  As a drama, though, it’s inert.  Sciamma, in illustrates the social restriction of her characters, locks them into her own schematic.

    Among the people in the gallery where she sees the portrait of Héloïse as a mother, and where her own latest work (a depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice!) is also on display, Marianne seems to be a lone woman among men.   Her solitude in this company draws attention to questions that, for me, remained unanswered at the end of the film.  How unusual was it at the time for a female portraitist to paint the picture of a prospective bride?   What leads the countess to commission Marianne to undertake the assignment?  While Héloïse is lost to a conventional marriage, are we to assume that Marianne remains unmarried?

    Except for the gallery scene and fleeting appearances by a boatman and a groom, men in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are conspicuous by their absence – including the Milanese bridegroom-to-be.  Adèle Haenel, a fine actress, is especially good when Marianne is preparing to paint and Héloïse positions herself for the sitting:  she seems fascinated by what she’s being asked to do and that it depends on her.  Haenel’s sometimes sulky persona gives proceedings a welcome touch of astringency.  Although Noémie Merlant is good, her strong features have a masklike quality.  The relentless beautifying of images gives the faces and bodies of the principals a lustrous perfection that occasionally suggests a twenty-first-century perfume commercial.  (I’m no expert but Valeria Golino’s hairdo also looked rather modern.)  Luàna Bajrami may have been cast because her face brings to mind an art-history serving girl but her features are actually more mobile than Merlant’s.  Armande Boulanger makes a good impression during her few minutes on screen.

    As well as seeing Héloïse again in a portrait frame years later, Marianne also catches sight of her one night at the theatre.  On the stage, a song Marianne once sang to Héloïse is playing.  It brings tears to the eyes of Héloïse, alone in her theatre box.  As Marianne watches, Céline Sciamma’s camera focuses on Adèle Haenel’s face, and stays there for what seems like two or three minutes.  Haenel is absorbing to watch throughout this final shot – and Sciamma, unlike Luca Guadagnino at the end of Call Me by Your Name, doesn’t dilute the effect by making the tearful face on the screen share it with the closing credits.  You’re nevertheless aware that Haenel’s success in holding your attention is a remarkable technical feat.  That makes it an all too fitting conclusion to Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

    8 October 2019

Posts navigation