Film review

  • Midsommar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ari Aster (2019)

    The Swedish festival at the heart of Midsommar takes place once every ninety years.  The writer-director Ari Aster, alas, is making films rather more often:  I saw this one almost a year to the day after Hereditary.   In that movie, Aster couldn’t wait to get the spooky horror underway and the early stages of Midsommar suggest more of the same.   The build-up to and visual confirmation of the family tragedy that overwhelms the young American heroine Dani (Florence Pugh) are emphatically macabre.  When the action switches to Sweden, as the car carrying Dani, her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and their friends to the festival approaches its destination, Aster shows the surrounding landscape – presumably from the visitors’ point of view and even before they’ve partaken of magic mushrooms – literally upside down.  This premature hyperbole turns out not to be a taste of things to come.  Aster rations the gory, supposedly scary highlights but that turns watching his second feature into something like watching a good many musicals.  You sit waiting for the latest longueur to end, the next big number to start.

    While it comes as no surprise when the smiling Swedes who welcome the newcomers are in due course revealed to be members of a lethal cult, the scheduling of their summer solstice celebrations was still a mystery to me at the end of Midsommar.  The various rituals begin with a couple of early senicides and climax in the impregnation of a young virgin by an outsider, followed by a few more human sacrifices, including most of the tourists.  Is that enough new blood to keep this rural community and their crops going for the best part of a century?   Besides, there’s nothing in the locals’ behaviour to suggest a sense of awestruck privilege that they’re participating in an event so exceptional it can’t be even described as a once-in-a-lifetime experience:  the community, we’re told, believes the natural span of a human life is seventy-two years max.

    Does that mean they’re killing off their senior citizens as standard practice – that when two oldsters plunge to their deaths from a clifftop (one of the pair doesn’t die immediately and has his skull crushed with a mallet to finish the job properly) this is just a more spectacular way than usual of doing things – a festival special?  Is the ninety years thing a front for cult crimes that are actually happening quite frequently?  In that case, why hasn’t the disappearance of previous visitors to the area been noticed or investigated?

    Aster’s debts to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) are clear enough, though.  (A major difference between the two films:  at 147 minutes, Midsommar lasts a whole hour longer.)  In The Wicker Man, the police sergeant ritually sacrificed to the islanders’ pagan Celtic gods to ensure a successful harvest, is a devout Christian and a virgin.  Those two things are now such an unlikely combination that the best you can do is give the corresponding character the culturally significant name Christian; and have him, like the sergeant, finally imprisoned in an edifice that goes up in flames.

    This Christian is not a cop but a graduate student in anthropology, as is his friend Josh (William Jackson Harper).  It’s their fellow student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who invites the two – along with another classmate Mark (Will Poulter) – to visit Sweden and witness the midsummer celebrations in Pelle’s native community – the Hårga, in Hälsingland.  (The former is fictional, the latter a real province of central Sweden.)  The tensions that flare up between the two anthropologists because Christian decides to copy Josh’s Hårga subject matter are resolved when it’s decided they’ll write a thesis together.  Decided, that is, not by their university but by the Hårga elders, who also stipulate the thesis must contain no names, geographical details or photographs.  Ari Aster must think an unsubstantiated academic thesis is as easy to get away with as a lazy, ridiculous screenplay.   Not that this particular contribution to extending knowledge ever gets to examination.

    To be honest, I went to see Midsommar only because Florence Pugh was in it.  Although Ari Aster has cause to be grateful to her, Pugh’s talents also make matters worse.  This young actress, regardless of the role she’s playing and its context, is able to make you believe in what a character is experiencing emotionally.  The impact of this is particularly strong in the early scenes here.  We’re immediately caught up in Dani’s anxiety about her bi-polar sister – the tenor of her recent emails, her lack of response to Dani’s urgent phone messages.  When she learns the sister has not only committed suicide but killed their parents too, Dani’s anguish is upsettingly credible, in spite of Aster’s insensitive staging of the death scene.  The longer-term effect of Pugh’s dynamic realism, however, is to underline how overscaled is the wintertime trauma that leaves Dani badly in need of a summer holiday.  If she’d already been an orphan and the sister had taken her own life, the disaster might have been closer to the right size.  As it is, the tragedy and Florence Pugh’s reaction to it leave too strong an impression – they cast a long shadow over the continuous sunlight of Scandinavian midsummer and the increasingly daft happenings at the festival.  If Dani more or less forgets what happened to her family, it’s only because Aster does.

    Instead, we’re meant to see the failing relationship between Dani and Christian as the seminal aspect of the American prologue – partly because, according to Wikipedia, Aster himself ‘had experienced a difficult breakup’, partly as another piece of opportunistic misandry.  Her understandable preoccupation with her sister makes Dani not the easiest person in the world to be in a relationship with but Aster, from the start, has it in for Christian and his pal Mark (Will Poulter), who urges him to dump Dani.  Christian stays with her not out of love but through lack of nerve to do otherwise.  The imprint of this arrangement hasn’t a hope of matching the emotional force of the deaths of Dani’s sister and parents.

    Although the film itself seems liable to vindicate Americans who don’t hold with foreign travel, Mark’s other function in the story is to illustrate the typical cocky, ignorant Yank abroad (he can’t even understand why it’s still light late in the evening in Sweden).  Christian reflects an essentially similar national self-confidence less crudely and Jack Reynor does this well.  The die is cast for Christian, though, from the moment we learn that the maiden Maja (Isabelle Grill) fancies him as a suitable candidate for getting her with child.  Reynor merely looks glum for most of the second half of the film, as if weighed down by the knowledge of what he’ll eventually be required to do:  (a) penetrate Maja in front of a large audience of naked female cult members; (b) run starkers round the festival area, with his hands over his privates; (c) lie inside a disembowelled bear, waiting to be sacrificed.

    The Hårga make a total of nine human sacrifices to their sun god(s), including at least four locals and at least four outsiders.  It transpires that Pelle and his brother Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg) lured to the festival, respectively, Christian et al and a couple of British youngsters, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and her fiancé Simon (Archie Madekwe).   Those two are done away with at quite an early stage.  Mark, who offends by urinating on an ancestral tree, and Josh, who sneaks into a temple and tries to photograph a sacred runic text, follow soon after.  The idea that they fail to respect Hårga cultural proprieties is a red herring; the locals need at least four sacrifices from the outside world and have only six people to choose from.  Connie’s and Simon’s only transgression seems to be to want to leave the place once they’ve witnessed the senicides.

    Dani and Christian show a remarkable lack of curiosity about the fate of their companions.  Perhaps it’s the effect of the drugs they unknowingly take, more likely that the incuriosity isn’t the characters’ but the writer-director’s.  (It’s hardly a question of whether Aster has any feeling for the people he puts on screen; he doesn’t care whether his audience has any feeling for them either.)  The first two local sacrifices are the geriatric suicides.  The next two are Ingemar and one of his pals.  They’re selected by lot – balls spinning in a drum, à la FA Cup draw or the National Lottery (‘It could be you …’)

    Florence Pugh is very strong in a sequence in which Dani takes part in a dance-till-you-drop competition with young Hårga women:  her growing euphoria as she stays in the contest may be thanks to the psychotropics her hosts administer but Pugh gets across a powerful sense of Dani’s temporary sense of liberation and abandonment to the dance.  She wins the competition; her prize is to be crowned May Queen (which suggests a different festival but let that pass).  It’s the Queen’s prerogative to select the final human sacrifice Dani chooses Christian, having happened to look through the keyhole of a building as the ceremonial impregnation of Maja was taking place inside.  Dani decides Christian has betrayed her and this is the only way she can get her own back.

    Since Christian was drugged before being taken by the elders to have sex with Maja, this seems a bit unfair.  On the other hand, we know he was too weak to finish with Dani back in America so it’s his fault she came to Sweden anyway.  So, yeah, serves him right!  In the closing stages, Florence Pugh is virtually submerged by the huge robe of flowers in which the Hårga dress their May Queen.  Only her face is visible and, as Dani reaches the verge of psychological collapse, it’s the face of a petulant, tearful child.  But when she contemplates the conflagration of the temple and the human sacrifices inside it, her expression turns to a mysterious smile.  Except that it’s not really mysterious:  female empowerment on screen can happen in the strangest circumstances.

    I’m making Midsommar sound more energetically offensive than it mostly is.  There are long stretches in which the viewer comes close to sharing Dani’s and Christian’s zonked stupor.  Aster and his DP Pawel Pogorzelski make the most of the high-latitude summer solstice, slightly exaggerating the brightness of cloudless days and white nights so that this viewer at first felt he needed protection from the glare.  Once you get used to the effect, however, it becomes a tiresome idea rather than a visual challenge.   It’s unusual to say of a horror movie the sets and costumes were nice but it’s true in this case.  The folk art decoration of the building interiors, the community’s white garb and the women’s floral chaplets are the best things to look at.

    The walls of the temple where the victims are prepared for sacrifice are more worrying, though.  The symbols painted there somewhat suggest swastikas.  With the Hårga into heliolatry, that seems fair enough but I hope it doesn’t give ideas to people who think Ari Aster’s films have to add up to something more than meets the eye.  Such ideas led to praise for Hereditary as a searing account of the breakdown of the American nuclear family.  The cult members’ hyper-Aryan looks and the final hint of holocaust could encourage similarly extravagant inferences from Midsommar.  Let’s look on the bright side, though.  We’re told that Josh, once he’s completed his observations of the Hårga, is heading off to study similar ‘community traditions’ elsewhere in Northern Europe.  Josh is the most conscientious and least dislikeable of the young men in the film.  In a way, it’s a shame he’s taken out as soon as he is.  But at least that would appear to reduce the immediate threat of Midsommar sequels set in England and Germany.

    10 July 2019

  • In Fabric

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Strickland (2018)

    The writer-director Peter Strickland’s fourth dramatic feature is fascinating and often very funny.  As visually inventive as his earlier work, this one advances the considerable verbal flair of its immediate predecessor, The Duke of Burgundy (2014).  In the opening shots, a pair of hands opens a cardboard box.  Red nail-varnished fingernails anticipate the box’s contents – a red dress – and introduce a title sequence comprising stills of what will be key images in the film to follow.  The montage is gripping, the grip maintained for most of the two hours of In Fabric ­– a singular horror-comedy whose strapline might be ‘consumerism gone mad’.

    Some of those images in the title sequence are disturbing but it ends prosaically enough:  the camera shows the text of an article in a local newspaper, heralding the start of the January sales, then moves to the paper’s lonely-hearts ads.  This combination introduces fiftyish Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose marriage has recently ended and who’s looking tentatively for another partner.  She sets up a date with ‘Adonis’ and goes to a local department store, Dentley & Soper, to buy a dress for the occasion.  Sheila, who works in a bank, badly needs to be reassured that she’s still attractive.  She’s disconsolate when her teenage son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) tells her his father already has a new woman.  It doesn’t help either that Vince, who lives with Sheila, sees his mother as a hindrance and treats her as a skivvy.  He’s meant to be studying for A levels but Vince’s chief interest is his older, dominating girlfriend Gwen (Gwendoline Christie).  Sheila leaves Dentley & Soper having purchased the red dress that we saw at the start.  That simple statement doesn’t begin to do justice to her shopping experience.

    The ladies’ fashions section is presided over by the bizarre Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), who offers service with a very discomfiting smile.  In spite of her English surname, she’s exotic – though impossible to place.   Her dark, lacquered hair, pale face and black costume – echoed in the appearance of her fellow store assistants – have a hint of geisha and a soupçon of nun; the bulky stiffness of her crinoline dress suggests a morbid lady toilet-roll holder.  She wears bright red lipstick and nail varnish:  it was obviously her taking delivery of the package in the prologue.   Her accent sounds vaguely Eastern European.  Her ludicrously convoluted turn of phrase transforms sales talk into high-falutin philosophical dicta alternating with ominous flirtation.  Sheila is taken with the red dress but she’s not sure – it’s bolder than she’d usually wear:  ‘The hesitation in your voice soon to be an echo in the spheres of retail’, says Miss Luckmoore encouragingly.  The store’s antiquated pneumatic tubes taking cash and giving change reinforce the implication of her extraordinary formality that In Fabric is set in the past.

    The details of Sheila’s home life don’t give quite so definite an impression, except for the chunky telephone and answering machine, whose recorded message is old-fashioned too:  Sheila’s voice conscientiously confirms the full number, including area code.  The behaviour and language of Vince and Gwen, however, could be present day.  Sheila’s home phone number has the non-existent STD code 01632[1].  The name of the town she lives in – Thames-Valley-on-Thames – is technically an invention too yet the film’s geographical setting couldn’t be clearer.  We can assume the location is spiritually coterminous with Reading, where Peter Strickland (born in 1973) grew up.

    Drawing on Strickland’s own youthful memories of town centre shopping, In Fabric is a nightmarish reverie on the secret life of clothes and a portrayal of consumer culture as something ingrained yet unstable – tending to spoliation.  Strickland shows a television commercial for Dentley & Soper, at both the start and the end of its New Year sales period.  This has the technical crumminess of adverts for local businesses you used to see at the cinema but the content is much weirder.  Jo Thompson’s clever costumes confirm the sense of a story that could just about be taking place in the present but which belongs to the past.  Characters’ names complete the effect.  The Sheilas, Vinces and Gwens of the world are a dying breed.  The film’s focus switches halfway through to a thirtyish, long-engaged couple – Babs (Hayley Squires) and Reg (Leo Bill).

    There’s no mention, needless to say, of online shopping but Strickland is clearly illustrating the death throes of the traditional high street.  These aren’t, though, a simple matter of a bang or a whimper.  Although the department store has an eerie phantom quality, furious appetite thrives beneath – that is, behind the surface civility and literally below the level of ladies’ fashions in Dentley & Soper.  (What a difference a D makes:  Bentley & Soper would have had a flavour of enduring reliability – Dentley gives the store’s name a used goods, come-down-in-the-world twist.)  January sales crowds, stampeding towards bargains as shop doors open, are a familiar sight on television news.  Strickland  makes use of such images but he’s interested in the other end of the day too.  Late on in the film, Babs enters the store and is told by Miss Luckmoore that, on this last day of the sale, they’ll be closing early.  Babs is used to getting her own way, stands her grounds and wins the argument.  The spat foreshadows a disagreement between two ordinary-looking women (Donna C Williams and Sara Dee) about who was first in a queue at the counter.

    Just as important is what goes in the bowels of the place after hours.  We watch Miss Luckmoore climb into a dumbwaiter, which descends to the basement.  She removes her wig, revealing a head as bald as those of the mannequins that she and her colleagues undress and bathe there.  The mannequins aren’t entirely hairless, though.  Removal of a pair of briefs from one of them reveals remarkably luxuriant pubic hair.  Mr Lundy (Richard Bremmer), the vampiric floorwalker who supervises Miss Luckmoore et al, observes the ritual, which affords him great sexual excitement.  It brings colour to his ashen face and a look of profound longing to his blue eyes.  As he masturbates, Miss Luckmoore’s lipstick leaks smears of blood.

    At the heart of the film is the increasingly menacing red dress that opened proceedings and which has a life of its own.  Inside the outfit is a motto, ‘You who wear me will know me’.  The dress brings a skin rash and ill fortune to a succession of owners.  When Sheila washes the dress, the washing machine goes berserk and injures her arm.  When she wears it on a walk, even under a coat, an Alsatian dog attacks it and her, causing a leg wound but no damage to the indestructible dress.  Sheila tries to return it to Dentley & Soper but Miss Luckmore refuses, even when Sheila insists she’s not after a refund – she just wants rid of the thing.  (On her way out, she encounters Mr Lundy, who, with the same grandiloquence as Miss Luckmoore, invites feedback:  ‘Did the experience consolidate your perception of the paradigm of retail’?)  It ends up in a charity shop, where it’s purchased by Clipper (Gavin Brocker), as a means to a laugh on his mate Reg’s stag night.  Bullied by his prospective father-in-law (Terry Bird) and Clipper to put the dress on, Reg eventually returns home with it, and it takes Babs’s fancy.

    The garment, whose unaccountable properties include fitting differently proportioned wearers, is described in the store catalogue as a ‘chiffon, silk and satin ambassadorial function dress’ in a shade of ‘artery red’.  It’s modelled in the catalogue by a familiar face – Sidse Babett Knudsen, who played the lead in The Duke of Burgundy.  As the model Jill, Knudsen is little more than a photograph here but her role isn’t insignificant.  Jill and Sheila both die in road accidents, though only Sheila’s, resulting from her car’s collision with a naked roadside mannequin, occurs on screen.  Her death also appears, as does Jill’s, as an article in the Thames-Valley-on-Thames newspaper.  In Sheila’s case, the ‘Bank clerk in road tragedy’ has an ambiguous charge.  The words suggest a typical headline in a local rag.  The nightmare of the accident as staged by Strickland tells an alarmingly different story.

    It’s an effective shock but also, I think, a weakness of the film when Sheila suddenly leaves it.  Even if he always planned the cursed dress to have more than one owner, the removal of Sheila amounts to an admission by Strickland that he’s unable to take her story further.   Still perhaps best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996), Marianne Jean-Baptiste seems a little too emphatic at the very start but that may be intentional – stressing Sheila’s unremarkableness lulls us into a false sense of security, sharpens the impact of the crazy things that happen to her.  Jean-Baptiste soon wins you over:  she makes Sheila very likeable, especially in her puzzled but tenaciously normal responses to the disorienting verbal displays of not only the Dentley & Soper staff but also her line managers at the bank (Julian Barratt and Steve Oram).  Her tryst with Adonis (Anthony Adjekum) is a fiasco but her next date with Zach (Barry Adamson) marks the start of a short-lived romance.  You want things to work out for Sheila.  Her fate is horrifying and you miss her when she’s gone.  Hayley Squires and Leo Bill are both good (though the eccentric-looking Bill could have done to downplay things even more).  Compared with the individuals in Sheila’s world, however, Babs and Reg seem types – overage spoiled princess and boringly ordinary bloke respectively.

    The narrative loses some of its momentum along with Sheila. The latter stages lack the sustained, often exciting surprise of the first hour or so:  there’s some repetition of the consequences of owning the dress and its antics become more predictable.  The fight between the two store customers expands into more general mayhem among the shoppers, including looting of goods.  The red dress, which Babs has taken off to try on something else in the dressing rooms (known as the ‘transformation sphere’), wriggles off in the direction of an electric fire.  Dentley & Soper goes up in flames.   Strickland then inserts a montage, in which each person who’s worn the dress – Jill, Sheila, Reg, Babs – is shown in turn at a sewing machine, working on the red material.  All four wear identical grey work clothes; the suggestion of sweatshop labour seems to convey a relatively conventional political message about modern retail.  Finally, the camera returns to the rubble of the department store.  A fireman walks through and picks up the red dress that alone has survived the inferno.  In Fabric‘s ending, although fully coherent with what’s gone before, is something of an anti-climax.  But, then, what’s gone before includes so many treats.

    Strickland’s surreal critique of the department store extends into other workplaces – Sheila’s bank, the washing machine repair company that employs Reg.   Their common features include differently unsettling bosses and absurd, quasi-Kafkaesque house rules.  Much of their sinister quality is generated by language – or, in the case of Cottrell (Graham Martin), Reg’s menacingly silent gaffer at Staverton’s Wash, by the lack of it:  the only sounds Cottrell makes come when, having sacked Reg, he eats his Staverton’s accreditation.  Reg’s transgression was in repairing the washing machine in his own home – after the red dress caused havoc in it.  In view of Sheila’s similar trouble, the advent of a character who repairs washing machines might suggest a saviour and Reg does have a reliably hypnotic effect.  His technical explanations of the machines’ inner workings put his listeners, their eyes glazed over, in a trance.  Reg’s surname is Speaks.

    When Sheila’s superiors at Waingel’s bank call her in for a chat, they talk in chummy, vacuous management cliches before pulling the rug from under her.  Her handshake isn’t always meaningful enough:  perhaps remedial role play (in Tudor costume, if Sheila prefers) is needed?  She shouldn’t have waved to the bank manager’s mistress – ‘informal salutation’ of this kind contravenes Waingel’s policy.  Her line managers then want to hear about the dreams Sheila’s been having.  (The duo go through some of the same routine when Reg, after losing his job, goes to Waingel’s in the vain hope of getting a bank loan.)  The opening credits refer to ‘Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as Stash & Clive’.  The implication of a double act is apt, and the playing of both actors admirably straight-faced.  Barratt has the lion’s share of the lines and makes the most of them.  Stash is a triumphant blend of ridiculous and intimidating.

    The soundtrack of In Fabric is doubly strong.  The intricate, melancholy score by Cavern Of Anti-Matter complements Martin Pavey’s imaginatively disconcerting sound design.  Although Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) was more fully indebted to Italian giallo, the coloration here naturally brings the tradition to mind – not least the redness.  Starting with the dress and nail varnish, the colour seems to imprint itself on all manner of everyday objects:  a laundry basket, a curtain in a passport photo booth, a mop handle.  The cinematic influences are evidently numerous.  Mark Kermode’s Observer review mentions Tobe Hooper’s I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990), about an Aztec ceremonial cloak that possesses anyone who wears it, and that movie’s more widely influential source material, a 1937 novella of the same name.   The Scotsman’s film critic Alistair Harkness interviewed Strickland and writes that:

    ‘When I half-jokingly toss around references to John Carpenter’s killer car movie Christine, Dario Argento’s witchy ballet wig-out Suspiria and vintage British sitcom Are You Being Served?, for instance, Strickland is nice enough not to dismiss me out of hand before launching into a sincere description of his love of objects in the cinema of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, artist filmmakers the Quay brothers and influential Soviet director Sergei Parajanov. “There’s a power to objects,” he says. “Objects can make you cry, can turn you on, can disgust you and obviously we have very strong reactions to clothing and I wanted to explore that.”’

    According to another interview, in Dazed, the original inspiration for In Fabric was a pair of corduroy trousers Strickland bought in a charity shop.  When he got the trousers home, he noticed a semen stain on them that started him thinking about the mysterious histories of clothes.  Those who’ve seen The Duke of Burgundy will already know Strickland as an unabashed illustrator of kinkiness.  Mr Lundy and his team vividly continue that tradition here; the goings-on between Sheila’s son and his girlfriend do the same in a minor key.  Sheila puts the red dress in the wash after Gwen, without asking, has tried it on then left it lying in the floor.  (Gwendoline Christie captures Gwen’s selfish entitlement very wittily.)  Although Sheila finds this behaviour creepy as well as rude and Vince’s loud love-making with Gwen oppressive, she’s not above watching them through the bedroom keyhole for longer than she might.

    Strickland contrasts this aspect of coupling with the striking absence of sexual possibility in Sheila’s encounter with Adonis (a splendid misnomer:  Anthony Adjekum captures his truculence with fine naturalism).  Adonis comes to the Greek restaurant where they meet armed with ‘love vouchers’ whose conditions of use require the lucky couple to share a pudding.  The same thing happens at the same venue on her next date, with Zach.   The first letter of his name rather suggests that Sheila has now gone through potential soulmates from A to Z but, once the love vouchers business is out of the way, things couldn’t be more different.   (Besides, she doesn’t wear the red dress for this date.)  Sheila and Zach (appealingly played by Barry Adamson) go on to a night club where they dance together.  In a later scene, they make love.  These tender, affecting moments stay in your mind.  In retrospect, they underline the tragedy of what happens to Sheila, who’s en route to staying the night at Zach’s when her car crashes.  They’re a further enrichment of Peter Strickland’s startling, beguiling, exceptionally entertaining film.

    4 July 2019

    [1] According to a Google search, ‘The area code 01632 is … reserved especially for fictional use in films, TV programmes and books’.

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