Film review

  • Virgin Island

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pat Jackson (1958)

    BFI’s regular ‘Projecting the Archive’ feature gives ‘a big-screen outing to films from the BFI National Archive that deserve rediscovery’.  It’s a valuable slot and curator Jo Botting’s introductions are always good value but Virgin Island hardly merits excavation, even though it involves an interesting collection of people.  The movie reunited John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, who had recently worked fruitfully together on Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957).   It provided a first lead role in the unfortunately brief film career of Virginia Maskell.   Freddie Francis was the cinematographer.  The screenplay is credited to the director Pat Jackson and Philip Rush:  the latter was actually Ring Lardner Jr, who, like some other members of the Hollywood Ten in the late 1950s, was working in Europe and pseudonymously.  But the scriptwriter of Virgin Island would have more than political reasons to protect his identity.

    The weakly punning title doesn’t refer, except for a single line of innuendo, to human virgins.  The setting is the British Virgin Islands, where newlyweds Evan (Cassavetes) and Tina (Maskell), American and British respectively, buy and set up home on an islet that’s uninhabited and undeveloped.  The scene-setting, with the same idyllic travelogue flavour as the previous year’s better-known Island in the Sun, is designed to bring out sunseeker longings in the British audience.  (The film opened in this country in the autumn of 1958.)  Evan is first an archaeological researcher then an aspiring novelist.  Tina (Virginia Maskell) abandons what, according to her mother (Isabel Dean), is a promising professional career back in England (doing what I wasn’t clear).  Stultified by the stuffy colonialist company she’s obliged to keep on the BVI, Tina enjoys a whirlwind romance with Evan and the British administrator (Colin Gordon) marries them.  To build their house from scratch they enlist the help of a genial joker of an islander called Marcus (Poitier).

    Ratification of their ownership of the little island is temporarily derailed when they inadvertently facilitate a local smuggling operation and receive alcoholic payment in kind.  (There’s a tincture of Ealing comedy in this detail – champagne galore – and the couple’s later unilateral declaration of independence whimsically recalls the Passport to Pimlico charter.)   In the end, Evan and Tina are confirmed as owners but decide to go back, with the baby they now have, to a more conventional existence, retaining their island as a holiday home and appointing Marcus and his sweetheart Ruth (Dee) as live-in caretakers.   It’s no surprise that a light-hearted exotic number like this (astonishing that Wikipedia terms it a drama and IMDB an adventure/drama/romance) is episodic.  It’s no problem either, except that the episodes are consistently tame.   Even on the rare occasions when there’s potential dramatic excitement, Pat Jackson pulls back from it.  When Tina goes into labour and they try to get back to the main island, the couple’s boat is becalmed; Evan has to swim to shore, through allegedly shark-infested waters, for help.  The sharks don’t show.  Evan seeks the assistance of Marcus and Ruth:  there’s five seconds of suspense as to whether Marcus’s motorboat engine will work.  After this, it’s plain sailing to put it mildly.  Jackson abandons the scene without even showing Tina’s reaction to the arrival of her rescuers.

    The contrast between the set, caricatural acting of most of the older Brits in the cast and the looser, more natural style of Poitier and Cassavetes is weird but that’s the only interest in the Old World-New World collisions of the film.  As usual at this stage of his career, Poitier is dynamic but his role is demeaning.  Cassavetes tries valiantly to stay true to his acting principles in speaking his lines but the dialogue is mostly so awkward that he tries in vain.  (Does Evan’s inability to move anywhere without sprinting there reflect Cassavetes’ need to let off frustrated steam?  His filmography says that he went straight from Virgin Island to making Shadows!)   The beautiful Virginia Maskell has a distinctive freedom of movement:  there’s wit, as well as the echo of drama school elocution classes, in her voice.  Ruby Dee is quietly vivid in her small role.  The colonial administrator is called Carruthers (truly) though Colin Gordon manages to introduce a few agreeably surprising notes into the character.  The instantly forgettable theme song that accompanies the opening titles is sung by Bryan Johnson, best known (to me) for ‘Looking High, High, High’, runner-up in the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest.

    The principals first meet when she comes across him digging for artefacts deep in the beach sand, although Cassevetes’s and Maskell’s tone makes it sound as if they’re already acquainted.  This could either be a subtle way of signalling that Evan and Tina are made for each other or indicate that the actors were already tired with shooting the film, paradisal setting notwithstanding.  At least the way they meet gives rise to a mildly humorous line, the very last one in the film:  Tina jokes that, when they return to the mainland, their baby daughter is bound to ‘get to know someone in the sand pit – it’s where you meet all the best people’.  That got a titter from the people sitting behind my friend and me.  So too, more worryingly, did plenty of other bits of antique imperial comedy.   It was almost eerie feeling surrounded by remnants of the original 1958 audience though I doubt the titterers were much older than I am (and I was coming up three when the film first appeared).  The seemingly unstoppable current trend of judging the past by the standards of the present has many foolish and infuriating results but it’s hard to swallow the racial and social ethos on display in Virgin Island.  You know what you’re in for from the opening shots of a group of little naked black boys, photographed as if they’re an amusing part of the island fauna.

    19 July 2018

  • Racer and the Jailbird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le Fidèle

    Michaël R Roskam (2017)

    When I first saw that Matthias Schoenaerts was starring in something called Racer and the Jailbird, I assumed it was a further step down for him into vacuous ‘international’ cinema (though a step down from Red Sparrow may be a contradiction in terms).  When I noticed that the director was Michaël R Roskam – the maker of Bullhead (2011), which gave Schoenaerts his breakthrough role – I thought again:  besides, the French title of this new film (a Franco-Belgian co-production) is Le Fidèle, suggesting something more quietly serious.  It turns out the English translation is just as close in spirit to the movie that Roskam has made.  He doesn’t want to jettison the arthouse elements entirely but his crime-action drama is straining to succeed in the global marketplace.  The first name on the screenplay is Thomas Bidegain (Noé Debré and Roskam are also credited).  Bidegain co-wrote A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012) with Jacques Audiard but Racer and the Jailbird is an awkward concoction.  It’s no surprise it’s gone down badly with critics and failed commercially too[1].

    Schoenaerts is Gino (Gigi), a Brussels gangster with a cover story that he’s in the automotive import-export business.   Adèle Exarchopoulos is Bénédicte (Bibi), who works for her father’s engineering firm and drives racing cars competitively.  Roskam opens with a flashback to Gigi’s childhood, demonstrating the otherwise fearless boy’s terror of dogs (a phobia that’s seriously overworked in what follows).  The narrative then switches to the present; briskly gets Gigi and Bibi, who are introduced through her brother (Thomas Coumans), into a relationship; and illustrates each of them doing their own thing.  This makes for a regular supply of bedroom scenes; fast-moving cars, whizzing round a racing circuit or away from a crime scene; and bits of dialogue that are obviously significant because they’re so deliberately placed.  Bibi asks Gigi if she can trust him and if he has any secrets.  The answers are yes and ‘I’m a gangster – I rob banks’:  Bibi laughs – he’s joking, of course.  Her own secret, she tells him, is that she’s immortal and her dream destination is Buenos Aires.  When Gigi, in an old-school moment, asks Bibi’s father Freddy (Eric De Staercke) for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Freddy says it’s a good idea – ‘You look the faithful sort’ (hence the French title) – but warns that Gigi has to ‘stop lying’ about the car import-expert business and ‘be a man’.

    Although Bibi didn’t take Gigi seriously when he said was a professional criminal, she begins to suspect the truth after meeting some of his associates socially.  Serge (Jean-Benoit Ugeux), Younes (Nabil Missoumi) and Gigi go back a long way, to juvenile detention centre.  Bibi’s increasing realisation that Gigi may not have been joking is well done and a sequence in a bar, where the couple are drinking with Bibi’s pals and their girlfriends, is excellent.  There’s enough going on between the characters and beneath the jokey conversation to raise hopes that Roskam may be looking to dramatise the men’s professional vs private lives à la Godfather.   The hopes are short-lived.  The story soon plummets into cliché, without appearing either to recognise it as such or to try to reinvigorate it.  The leading man takes part in one last big heist before giving up crime for the leading woman he loves (and has now married).  The heist goes disastrously wrong and Gigi, Serge et al end up in prison.

    Once Gigi is behind bars, you wonder for a while why Roskam went to all that dynamic action-movie trouble in the first part of the film.  This, at any rate, is exposed as box-office-minded padding to the story of star-crossed and devoted lovers.  It’s hard to see that the predicament they now find themselves in would be any different if Gigi had been a smaller-time crook and Bibi never behind the wheel of a racing car.   But Racer and the Jailbird then lurches into sustained and increasingly gruesome melodrama.   Gigi and Bibi want a baby and secretly have sex during her prison visits but she can’t get pregnant and receives fertility treatments.  On temporary release from jail, Gigi gets bitten by a (small) dog in a busy street, kicks the animal and, when the police are called, panics and goes on the run.  Bibi hides him until she decides he’d better give himself up.  Bang goes Gigi’s parole.  Back inside, he keeps trying to escape, which seems a good way of delaying his release indefinitely.

    It never rains but … medical tests reveal that Bibi has ovarian cancer.  She engages some Albanian gangsters to get Gigi out of prison – but only if she dies.  She dies.  Gigi is informed of the plan to get him out of jail and arrange safe passage to Buenos Aires.  He doesn’t want to go, telling the gangsters that Bibi didn’t understand he was hellbent not on escape, just on being with her.  The gang leader Bezne (Kerem Can) tells Gigi he has no choice in the matter:  the gang won’t get paid unless Gigi goes free.  (I didn’t follow how this requirement was to be applied, now that Bibi was dead.)  Bezne has Gigi savagely beaten up and sent, for his own safety, to a different prison.  The breakout happens en route and there follows another flashily violent episode in the course of which the hero sort of conquers his cynophobia, though with a guard dog biting, among several other body parts, the Albanian hand that fed Gigi.

    The closing sequence of Racer and the Jailbird is an extended, driver’s-eye-view car journey through a deserted Brussels at dawn.  The last of Gigi’s getaways, this not only recalls earlier scenes photographed from a similar perspective (including Bibi’s on the racing track) but is also a reminder of Michaël R Roskam’s film-making talent, hidden from view for so much of this movie.  Voiceovers repeating in Gigi’s mind the significant dialogue from the first half-hour detract only a little from this sequence, which wonderfully captures the headlong speed and sinuosity of the car’s progress through the streets and invests the cityscape with a grave beauty.  The sense of uncontrolled forward impulsion is very strong but the car doesn’t crash.  It stops outside a cemetery.  The last we see of Gigi, he’s climbing over the high, locked gates of the place, presumably in search of Bibi’s grave.

    The film leaves you asking questions albeit not searching ones.   Even if Bibi doesn’t misunderstand Gigi’s motivation for trying to escape from prison, why does she think he’d want to end up in Buenos Aires without her?  What becomes of her father and brother, both of whom seem important to Bibi, as she is to them, but who disappear without trace when she’s terminally ill?   Why Le Fidèle rather than La Fidèle (or Les Fidèles)?  Did Roskam think Matthias Schoenaerts’s talent and star status were enough to mend the split personality of Racer and the Jailbird and make it money?   It’s somewhat understandable if Roskam did think this:  Schoenaerts certainly moves between the action-man and human aspects of the story with remarkable ease.  Adèle Exarchopoulos, so good in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), shows her quality again here but seems less comfortable than Schoenaerts on the commercial movie side of things.   The film is well acted throughout – perhaps Kerem Can slightly overdoes the sinister-charismatic Bezne but, after all, he is playing someone from Albania.   The negative racial stereotyping of which cinema is now so wary never seems to be avoided when it comes to Albanians.

    18 July 2018

    [1] At the time of writing, the film has a 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has recouped around $350k of a $9.6m budget.

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