Film review

  • The Odyssey (2016)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’Odysée

    Jérôme Salle (2016)

    ‘The photography is breathtaking’ is the mantra of fans of natural world documentaries.  It’s always true but it’s rarely enough.  If it were enough, there’d be no need for anthropomorphic words and music to liven things up.  David Attenborough is obviously, as well as a national treasure, very brainy but I’ve always felt his jaunty commentaries provide essentially the same service as the voiceovers in the much-derided Disney nature films of yesteryear.  As a child, I quite enjoyed those – more, anyway, than I enjoyed The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau documentaries that the BBC showed in the late sixties and early seventies.  Maybe these were diminished on a black-and-white set but there was something too about Cousteau that I didn’t like:  he seemed autocratic and humourless.  Matias Boucard’s underwater photography in Jérôme Salle’s Cousteau biopic The Odyssey is often remarkable though, oddly enough, it’s an overground shot – of the tiny figures of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his son Philippe standing in a vast Antarctic icescape – that merits the word breathtaking.  The visuals, in this case, are definitely not enough, even though the wonders of nature include, in addition to marine flora and fauna, very good-looking lead actors (Lambert Wilson, Audrey Tautou, Pierre Niney).  The sounds of the ocean and of Alexandre Desplat’s agreeable score aren’t enough either.  The Odyssey achieves the unusual feat of being submarine, shallow and pedestrian.

    Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a wry take on Cousteau’s biography and myth, had as a central plot element the relationship between Steve Zissou and a young man claiming to be his son.  Jérôme Salle supplies the straight story of Cousteau’s relationships with his two boys.  For the most part, this reflects badly on Cousteau père and perhaps Salle feels he’s created a warts-and-all portrait but the narrative texture is too primitive to make it convincing as such.  For example, Cousteau, thanks largely to pressure from Philippe, becomes a belated convert to the environmentalist cause (earlier on, to show how far he has to travel in this direction, Salle shows a load of rubbish being tipped from Cousteau’s boat Calypso into the sea).  The conversion reconciles father and son.  A main cause of the bad blood between them has been Philippe’s disgusted belief that his father would do anything for fame and fortune.  You’re therefore bound to wonder if saving the planet appealed to Cousteau at least partly as a new means of getting attention and funding.  That wouldn’t, of course, invalidate his work as an eco-warrior but it would be consistent with the man the film has presented up to this point.  It would also make for complexity – Cousteau applying his self-centred drive to an altruistic project (more altruistic than his earlier passion for human colonisation of the undersea world).   Instead, Jérôme Salle and Laurent Turner, with whom Salle co-wrote The Odyssey, suddenly present Cousteau as a wholly reformed character, in readiness for the reverent on-screen legends at the end that pay tribute to his pioneering achievements in marine conservation etc.

    It’s as well that the protagonist’s line of work is visually distinctive because this film, as a sequence of events, is mostly biopic boilerplate.  Cousteau first enters the limelight at the premiere of one of his early films.  After the screening, his colleague Philippe Tailliez (Laurent Lucas), who had also worked with Cousteau on the development of the ‘aqua-lung’, is meant to give a speech.  Tailliez’s terrible stammer strikes him dumb and Cousteau steps in to rescue the situation and impress the large audience.  But why would Tailliez – in view of his impediment and since he doesn’t come across as a natural attention-seeker – be lined up for the speech in the first place?  Cousteau’s appetite for celebrity then makes him a distant father and a negligent husband – an adulterous one too, thanks to his appetite for women.  Philippe marries an American girl (Chloé Hirschman) and goes to live in the US, estranged from his parents:  it’s not clear why he and his father meet in an American diner other than to fulfil the generic requirement of a home-truths-telling showdown.  The death of Philippe, just when he and dad are starting to get on well, is a similarly obligatory cruel stroke of fate.  While Cousteau himself is abruptly transformed, other characters never change:  in the case of both Philippe and his elder brother Jean-Michel, the child is decidedly father to the man.  The film opens with the plane accident that kills Philippe – the craft he’s piloting crashes into the sea.  In the early parts of the flashback that follows (and which lasts for most of the film), the child Philippe (Ulysse Stein) is precociously intrepid and strong-willed – the polar opposite of cautious, uninteresting Jean-Michel (Rafaël de Ferran).  That’s how they stay.

    Casting Lambert Wilson as Cousteau makes the eleventh-hour conversion easier to accept, if only because this good actor hasn’t been very persuasive as a selfish bastard.  Wilson, with his weather-beaten face and aquiline profile, cuts an imposing figure but egomania doesn’t come easily to him – his Cousteau always seems a nice chap.  Pierre Niney holds the camera too but the role of Philippe is too thin to do much with and Niney does petulance better than righteous anger.  Benjamin Lavernhe has even less to work with as the well-meaning, risk-averse Jean-Michel.  The characterisation of Americans – from Philippe’s wife to the film and TV moneymen Cousteau does business with – is pathetically crude.  It’s a surprise of The Odyssey that Cousteau’s wife Simone (Audrey Tautou), whom her husband calls Loubi, becomes the most involving character.  You’d never predict this from the early stages, when she’s nothing more than a smiling, utterly supportive wife.  From the moment she discovers her husband’s been unfaithful, her face never cracks, she hits the bottle and starts playing solitaire – all the things you’d expect someone in her circumstances to do in a movie.   Things get more interesting when Cousteau is in deep financial trouble and Loubi, the sale of whose jewellery helped him to buy Calypso in the first place, says she doesn’t want him to sell the craft – that she wants to stay on it.  This is the film’s best dramatic moment:  not only has the boat become Loubi’s natural habitat; since she’s the only woman on board, it’s also the one place where she can be sure Cousteau isn’t playing away from home.  Audrey Tautou is excellent in suggesting a woman disappointed yet relieved by the half-a-loaf life into which she’s sunk.  In the end, I found this one of her most taking performances.  She turned forty last year:  she looks great but, for as long as her function in Jérôme Salle’s film seems purely decorative, you can’t help thinking of another screen Audrey whose gamine charm made her a star but whose best work was behind her by the time she was the age that Tautou is now.  The latter shows in The Odyssey her potential to take on more substantial roles.  I hope she gets the chance to do so.

    20 August 2017

  • Entertaining Mr Sloane

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas Hickox (1970)

    Joe Orton died before either of these screen adaptations of his play went into production.   The first read-through for the ITV Playhouse version, broadcast in July 1968, took place just a week after Orton’s murder, according to Clive Francis, who played Sloane.  The opening titles of the cinema version, released in April 1970, appear against shots of a cemetery:  the words ‘In Loving Memory’ on a gravestone and the name of Joe Orton are juxtaposed on the screen.  Peter Moffatt’s TV Sloane, for which Orton himself did the adaptation, is unsurprisingly relaxed about restricting the action to a single studio set and, in this important respect, more successful than Douglas Hickox’s film, which has a screenplay by Clive Exton.  The performances in the big-screen Sloane are more memorable, though, especially those of Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews as the middle-aged siblings Kath and Ed – hosts to the young psychopath Sloane and, eventually, his joint captors.

    Peter Moffatt begins and ends with shots from outside the front window of the house that Kath shares with her father Kemp, known as ‘Dadda’.  There are a couple of brief sequences in the hallway to the stairs.  Otherwise, Moffatt uses a single location – the living room.  The concentration of the action expresses justifiable confidence in Orton’s writing and guards against diluting the black comedy momentum.  The very confined space has some disadvantages, though.  With the camera always close up, much of the acting seems too big.  In view of Ed’s raging misogynist disgust for Kath, it feels wrong that he’s so often in such physical proximity to her.

    Sheila Hancock had already played Kath in the ill-fated Broadway production of Sloane, which ran for only twelve performances in 1965.  Born just a few weeks after Joe Orton in 1933, she’s young for Kath, who may be older than the forty-one she admits to being.  That turns out not to be a problem with Hancock’s performance but there are others.  Her distinctive speech rhythms are too unvarying and her voice always sounds like a put-on voice.  She’s continuously on the lookout for pointing a line or doing a bit of business that will get a laugh.  Her character’s avidity is, to say the most, intermittent:  Hancock’s Kath is sex-starved without being ravenous.  Edward Woodward, though occasionally stagy as Ed, is the strongest member of Peter Moffatt’s cast and realises Ed’s wound-up lust for Sloane to startling and funny effect.  Perhaps because Sheila Hancock isn’t rapacious enough, Woodward comes across, in Ed’s first scene with Sloane, as too eager too soon but his delivery of the monologue in which Ed warns Sloane off women, is a great success.  Although his playing too seems conceived for a larger performing space, Arthur Lovegrove is good as the unfortunate Dadda.

    ‘Eddie’, wrote Orton (to the director of the ill-fated Broadway production, Alan Schneider), ‘naturally, doesn’t know how amoral Sloane is.  He imagines that he has a virgin on his hands’.  Clive Francis, only twenty-one at the time, is physically suitable as the innocent that both Ed and Kath imagine him to be, and as a boyish killer.  Francis is good when he’s insouciant but that’s not often enough.  He’s anxious to act – especially to react – even if the result doesn’t seem right for the character:  Sloane is too often uneasy or upset.  There’s a hint of the Harold Steptoe quaver in Francis’s voice and Peter Moffatt also has Sloane occasionally mispronounce big words – which misses the point of Joe Orton’s stylised writing.

    The look of the cinema Sloane contrasts instantly with the suburban drabness of the TV version (which is black and white, of course – the film is in colour).  The prologue in the cemetery raises hopes of an assured visual style.  The camera cuts from one grave to another before switching from stones and statuary to the pink-varnished nails of a hand.  It moves up to a wrist with a multi-coloured bracelet, a chiffon-covered arm, a throat bearing a necklace matching the bracelet and a gold crucifix.  Then a mouth, which sucks (audibly) on an orange and yellow ice lolly.  The face of Beryl Reid’s Kath is revealed.  She first encounters Peter McEnery’s Sloane working out among the gravestones.  The lines of the opening scene of Orton’s play are delivered as the pair move around the cemetery, Reid teetering, unforgettably, in high heels and a diaphanous mini-dress.  This episode introduces a performance that’s as physically fearless as it’s vocally imaginative.   There are misjudgments in Clive Exton’s screenplay but changing Kath’s ‘I’m forty-one’ to ‘I’m thirty-nine’, when the claim is made by fifty-year-old Beryl Reid, isn’t one of them.  Reid’s Kath – randy and prim, soppy and scolding, grotesque and touching – is a singularly bizarre, brilliant concoction.

    The stylistic promise of the start isn’t fulfilled.  Entertaining Mr Sloane is hardly the first screen adaptation of a stage play to resort to anxious opening out of the material but Douglas Hickox’s direction is, in more ways than one, all over the place.  Hickox is in trouble almost as soon as the sequence of single shots in the cemetery is done and he has to put together a motion picture.  He appears to have taken the view that, because the source material is richly subversive, the film can be as undisciplined as he likes, so long as it’s oddly eye-catching.  The family home is church-like, with stained glass windows.  Wolfgang Suschitzky’s camera zooms incontinently.  There are frenetically unfunny action sequences involving Ed’s car.  These and a visit by Sloane and Ed to an outdoor swimming pool contradict the essentially offstage nature of what the two get up to – though the swimming-pool bit is partly salvaged by Harry Andrews’s blend of arousal and distaste, as Ed rubs sun oil into Sloane’s back, complains it’s ‘filthy stuff’ and wipes his hands clean.  The phallic images – the spadix of the graveside lilies, Kath’s ice lolly – are amusing at first but soon desperate.  There’s a sausage on a breakfast plate, with two fried eggs for good measure.  Cadbury’s Flake is prominent in a shop confectionery display (the product had been advertised suggestively on television well before the film was made).

    The potent understatement of the play’s last scene – Kath and Ed, having blackmailed Sloane into staying with them, agree a contract to share him sexually, six months at a time – is replaced by a double wedding ceremony.  The film ends on a freeze frame of the trio’s faces:  as Harry Andrews and Beryl Reid, on either side, kiss him, Peter McEnery gives a rueful, what-can-you-do smile to camera, as if to reassure the audience they’ve been watching a cheeky, innocuous sex caper.  There’s a title song, performed by Georgie Fame; pleasant, mellow and mildly witty, it has nothing in common with other aspects of the film, let alone with Joe Orton’s original.  Hickox’s weirdly angled close-ups of the characters are counterproductive.  Orton’s language is often coded but it’s rarely difficult to understand, especially if the actors deliver the lines as expertly as they do here.  It’s a tautology to see their close-up faces expressing the same message as their voices.

    This is a particular problem with Sloane.  Peter McEnery, in his T-shirts and leathers and with his hair dyed blond, is a strong 1960s image.  He’s not a boy, though (he was thirty), and, though he shows a lot of skill, he’s too knowing.  The camera’s proximity exposes both these things.  As a result, Sloane is both less seemingly innocent and less threatening than he needs to be.  Alan Webb plays Kemp busily but he justifies Kath’s chiding of Dadda for behaving ‘like a sick child’.  The three older actors all give their character an emotional age much younger than their physical one.  This is especially engaging with Harry Andrews’s Ed, whose nostalgia for his youthful good times with his ‘matie’ is rather less blatant than Kath’s infantilism or Kemp’s petulance.  Andrews uses his pronounced jaw and lofty, ramrod rectitude splendidly – the connotations of his many screen roles as senior military men increase his comic force.  The zeal of Ed’s contempt for loose living – ie for having anything to do with women – is breathtaking.  When Andrews hints occasionally at Ed’s emotional need, as well as his carnal appetite, for Sloane the effect is remarkably poignant.  Ed’s sartorial style and Kath’s blowsy lack of taste are a triumphant combination:  Harry Andrews and Beryl Reid both wear their clothes superbly.   They completely respect Joe Orton’s injunction that his characters should be played straight:  as a result, they’re formidably funny.   As a piece of film-making, Entertaining Mr Sloane is a mess[1]. But it’s a treasure too – a record of the two best performances in a Joe Orton piece ever given on screen.

    14 and 22 August 2017

    [1] The film version of Loot – directed by Silvio Narizzano, with a screenplay by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – arrived in British cinemas just a few weeks after Entertaining Mr Sloane in 1970.    The cast is nothing if not eclectic – Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick, Milo O’Shea, Hywel Bennett, Roy Holder, Dick Emery.  Like Douglas Hickox, Silvio Narizzano tries desperately to be zany and with-it but the farce plot of Loot puts a higher premium on coherent direction.  The actors can’t rise above the lack of it as they do in Entertaining Mr Sloane and the result is unwatchable.  I gave up on Loot after half an hour.

     

     

Posts navigation