Film review

  • My Mother’s Smile

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’ora di religione (Il sorriso di mia madre)

    Marco Bellocchio (2002)

    Henry K Miller’s profile in this month’s Sight & Sound stresses Marco Bellocchio’s abiding preoccupations during a film-making career that now spans half a century.  Bellocchio’s main themes, which Miller defines as ‘the performance of normality; the toll taken on those who can’t or won’t achieve it, and the bad faith of those who do’, are ‘all there in his first two films Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China is Near (1967)’.  The lack of change in Bellocchio’s concerns is ‘itself a critique of a culture in stasis’.  My Mother’s Smile supports Miller’s argument.   The hero of this satirical drama is Ernesto Picciafuocco (Sergio Castellito), an artist and a confirmed atheist, who learns with horror that the Vatican is considering his late mother for canonisation.  The persisting tyranny of the Catholic Church and the pathological handcuffs of family are as central to this film as they were to Bellocchio’s mid-1960s work.  The tone, though, is different – bleaker and more coldly angry – except for a couple of elements that suggest a further change of heart:  Bellocchio in his mid-sixties is more anxious than he was in his twenties to find consolations.

    The first and last scenes of My Mother’s Smile both feature Ernesto’s young son Leonardo (Alberto Mondini).   At the start, the boy (he’s perhaps nine or ten – I’m not a good judge of children’s ages) is in the garden at home, watched by his mother Irene (Jacqueline Lustig) through a window.  Leonardo is talking to himself and gesticulating vigorously, ordering an invisible interlocutor to leave him alone.  When Irene comes out to ask what he’s doing, the boy explains that he’s telling God to go away.  Leonardo has recently learned in a religious education class at school that God is everywhere and sees all.  Leonardo hates the knowledge that he’ll never be free of God.   The child’s outburst of anti-theism gets the film off to a strong start yet he never again seems anguished.  Although Leonardo’s parents are separated, he still sees plenty of his father.  In their several conversations about religion, it’s Ernesto who’s troubled by and hostile towards it.  Alberto Mondini plays Leonardo naturally and with a lot of charm and Bellocchio increasingly presents him as a delightful emblem of hope for the future.  In the closing sequence, Ernesto takes Leonardo to school and the boy runs off enthusiastically to join other kids.  His father, in the final shot of My Mother’s Smile, watches him lovingly.

    Leonardo is also responsible for setting in motion the other less pessimistic strand of Bellocchio’s story.  Angered by what his son is being told in religious education classes, Ernesto goes to the school to have words with the teacher concerned.  She is the beautiful Diana Sereni (Chiara Conti) and Ernesto is instantly infatuated with her, though when he mentions her good looks to Leonardo, the boy is amused:  the ugliness of his class’s RE teacher, he tells his father, is a standing joke.  It’s debatable whether there are two different teachers and Ernesto sees the one who doesn’t teach Leonardo, or whether Diana is Ernesto’s fantasy.  Some of his encounters with her certainly have the quality of hallucinations.  In either case, Diana, like Leonardo (and as her surname suggests), does Ernesto good – in sharp contrast to the rest of his family, the Vatican’s intervention in his life, and the synergy of the two.

    Bellocchio builds their malignant combination cleverly.  Ernesto first receives news of the Vatican’s deliberations from an emissary (Bruno Cariello) who is allowed to be sensitive and likeable.  The emissary represents Cardinal Piumini (Maurizio Donadoni):  in Ernesto’s subsequent interview with him Bellocchio gives the cardinal‘s cunning intelligence its due.  The furious antipathy to the Church that Bellocchio shares with his protagonist accumulates gradually, in illustrations of the Vatican’s rituals and exploitation of those who need to believe – or have needs of a different kind.  Ernesto’s mother’s piety was exceptional in the Picciafuocco clan which, like the family in Fists in the Pocket, have seen both economically better days and matricide.  In My Mother’s Smile, the title character has died at the hand of Ernesto’s mentally disturbed brother Egidio (Donato Placido).  The exact circumstances of the killing are as crucial as attestations of the mother’s post-mortem miracle-working in deciding whether canonisation is a possibility.  If she was killed while she was sleeping, she fails the ‘heroic virtue’ criterion and the process can go no further.  If, as other members of the family are suggesting, she died as the result of pleading with Egidio to stop blaspheming, she can be considered a martyr and as a candidate for sainthood.

    Bellocchio scornfully pinpoints the vested interests of Ernesto’s two other brothers (Gigio Alberti and Gianfelice Imparato), their cynically clear-sighted aunt (Piera Degli Esposti) and Leonardo’s mother, who thinks that a saint in the family will help the boy’s prospects in the longer term.  The aunt describes religious belief as an ‘insurance policy on the afterlife’; the family’s virtual cost-benefit analysis of canonisation has a distinctly this-worldly ring.  Ernesto is informed of the process a full three years after it’s begun.  I didn’t understand how the process had reached what the Church people call its second stage if the question of how the mother died hadn’t been resolved but that’s presumably inattention on my part rather than carelessness on Bellocchio’s:  if his plot didn’t stick to the letter of the Vatican law, it would dilute the satirical force of the film.   (I should say that I struggled to maintain the concentration Bellocchio demands of the viewer and to keep up with the dialectical flow – more specifically, the fast-moving subtitles.)

    Sergio Castellito stands out in a capable cast but theophobia and mother-phobia have the starring roles in My Mother’s Smile.  Ernesto remembers the potential saint as a woman lacking in affection, her ‘lethal, indifferent smile of being a mother’ insisting on the gratitude of the children to whom she gave life.  Bellocchio also summons an array of supporting bugbears, ranging from a cultural hangover like swordplay to the artist’s persecution by commercial imperatives.  The swords are innocuous in Leonardo’s fencing lesson, bizarrely dangerous in a dawn duel in which Ernesto gets involved.  He saves his skin thanks to incompetence so evident and despicable that his antiquated royalist opponent Conte Bulla (Toni Bertorelli) decides the younger man just isn’t worth harming.  Ernesto supplements the money he makes from his paintings by illustrating children’s books.   In an early scene, he receives an fax responding to his proposed drawings for an edition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  The publisher angrily demands ‘More children and lots more rats!’   Twice in My Mother’s Smile, at opposite ends of the film, Ernesto in his studio edits an image of a grand building on his computer screen.  I wasn’t sure if the building was specifically the Vatican but there’s no doubt that it stands on pillars of the establishment.  The second time Ernesto edits the image he erases the building entirely.

    22 July 2018

  • The Servant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey (1963)

    Tony (James Fox), a rich young bachelor, has recently moved into a new home – a big house in London SW3 – and employs Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), a self-described ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, as his valet.   The two men get on well from the start though Tony’s well-bred girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) takes an immediate dislike – she’s snooty yet uneasy – to Barrett.  The latter persuades Tony that extra domestic help is needed in the Chelsea mansion and brings Vera (Sarah Miles), supposedly Barrett’s sister, into the household.   Vera is actually Barrett’s lover; she seduces Tony and starts sleeping with him too.   When Susan and Tony return unexpectedly early one night, they discover Barrett and Vera in Tony’s bed.  Tony angrily chucks them both out into the street but not before Barrett has revealed to Susan that Tony has had sex with Vera.  When they next see each other, in a nearby pub, Barrett pleads for another chance and Tony relents.  The rift between him and Susan means the two men have the place to themselves for a time, with Barrett increasingly dominant and Tony increasingly dissipated and dependent on him.  The end of The Servant sees Susan, in spite of a last ditch attempt to salvage her relationship with Tony, vanquished and leaving the house, Vera back in residence there, and the exchange of master-servant roles between Tony and Barrett complete.

    Although Harold Pinter’s screenplay is adapted from Robin Maugham’s 1948 novella (of the same name), the set-up and confrontations of The Servant suggest a Pinter original – the newcomer who threatens the established domestic order, the sexual (in this case, sexually ambiguous) power games.  Besides, with so much of the action occurring in a single location, it’s easy to think the piece began life in the theatre.  The film is stronger when Pinter, rather than Joseph Losey, seems to be the chief author.  As a socially acute drama of possession, it’s compelling and richly entertaining.  Details in the opening scenes – Barrett literally pushes at an open door on his first entry to the house, where he finds Tony asleep – are symbolic and predictive but with a reasonably light touch.  In the closing stages, when the balance shifts into baroque class critique more typical of Losey, The Servant becomes obvious and turgid.  The finale of the orgy chez Tony, involving a collection of mannequin-like women as well as Vera and, on the margins, Susan, goes on too long.  But not long enough to do much damage to the film as a whole.  Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) followed but this is the best of the three collaborations between Losey and Pinter.

    Dirk Bogarde several times played cultured, classy men who, for various reasons, were weary and weakened.  It’s quite an irony that he gave his most inventive and enjoyable performance as the socially lowly usurper Hugo Barrett.   From Barrett’s first appearance in outdoor clothes – belted raincoat and pork pie hat – the characteristically elegant Bogarde wears his lower-orders outfits expressively.   His shabby suit and sleeveless pullover fit him like a skin; it’s no surprise that Susan nastily asks Barrett if he uses a deodorant.  The Mancunian accent seems thoroughly absorbed; the camp inflections are deft; Barrett’s ever-so-‘umble self-effacement always verges on bitter sarcasm.  A lapidary actor, Bogarde brilliantly conveys the tiny but definite signs of Barrett’s taking offence, as he often does.  In the ménage à deux part of the story, his housewifely nagging of layabout Tony is very funny.  An adamantine will underlies all the splendid external elements of the characterisation.  As Barrett, Bogarde even just about overcomes his usual tendency to lose emotional power whenever he increases volume.

    All four of the principals, whatever one usually thinks of them, are at the top of their game.  James Fox, in one of his first screen roles, has never been better than he is as Tony, whose entitlement and helplessness he captures equally naturally.  I guess I first saw The Servant in the mid-1970s and recall being surprised to find Wendy Craig in it:  by then, she was virtually inseparable from the scatty middle-class mother she’d played successfully in television sitcoms.  As Susan, Craig combines offensive disdain for Barrett with fearful vulnerability:  she’s excellent when the two things fuse in her domestic power struggle with him – peremptorily demanding he make her lunch, reinstating a vase of flowers he’s banished to the background.  Even Sarah Miles is good:  her neurotic presence is more interestingly expressed in a slutty character like Vera than it was in most of the sensitive heroines she went on to play.

    One sometimes senses Joseph Losey’s impatience to get on to what he sees as the meat course:  exposure of the traditional British class system as not only decadent but moribund.  Nevertheless, Losey too does some of his best work here, with the considerable help of Douglas Slocombe’s black-and-white photography.  The large convex mirror that hangs on Tony’s living-room wall and distorts the reflections of those seen in it provided the film’s best-known images but Losey and Slocombe make use of other mirrors too, including a reflection of winter trees in a deep puddle in the street outside the Chelsea mansion.  The standing water presumably materialised near the end of the film’s shooting schedule, most of which coincided with Britain’s big freeze of 1962-63:  there are several short outdoor sequences in which snow is falling or on the ground.  Another fine image is Barrett’s shadow on the staircase when Tony and Susan come back to find the servants in flagrante delicto.  It’s clear that Barrett is naked:  that he holds his ground in the bedroom doorway is a potent expression of defiance; that his shadow, rather than his actual body, is seen, gives him a sinister authority.

    I may have misunderstood the director’s intentions in them but I liked the few extended sequences away from Tony’s house, an indication both of how claustrophobic the film’s main setting becomes and of how successfully Losey changes tempo outside it.   Tony and Susan twice visit the country pile of Lord and Lady Mounset (Richard Vernon and Catherine Lacey).  On the first occasion, an indoor scene featuring the visitors and their hosts, in which the actors hold stylised, almost frozen poses, anticipates the arrangement of bodies in the climactic orgy sequence at Tony’s house but is enlivened by Pinter’s amusing absurd dialogue about South America (Lady Mounset obstinately confusing ‘gauchos’ with ‘ponchos’, etc).   On the second visit, Tony and Susan play around in the snowy grounds of the estate:  Losey no doubt despises their silly self-indulgence but the effect is oddly poignant.  (Back at the house, the occasionally vicious ball game that Tony plays with Barrett on the staircase anticipates the indoor rugby set piece in Accident.)   An earlier sequence in which Tony wanders back from a pub to what he expects is an empty house also has a sympathetic quality:  the solitary Tony seems to head home only because he has nowhere else to go.  (Vera is waiting there, ready to seduce him.)  The score by John Dankworth is effective although Cleo Laine’s vocal, repeatedly put on Tony’s record player, is overused.  Dankworth appears briefly in the film as a band leader.  A restaurant scene provides cameos for, among others, Patrick Magee (funny as a bishop) and Harold Pinter.

    21 July 2018

Posts navigation