Film review

  • The Orgy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sam Baron (2018)

    I stumbled across this fourteen-minute British comedy on IMDb and watched it on YouTube.  I rarely write about shorts but writer-director Sam Baron’s The Orgy is worth making an exception for.

    John (Amit Shah), bearing wine and chocolates, arrives at a suburban house.  He might have come for a meal with friends except that he’s noticeably twitchy.  In fact, he’s come for an orgy with people he’s met only through online chat.  He thought the event began at 7pm; Karen (Kerry Godliman), the lady of the house, informs him the start time has been put back – didn’t John get the email?   Karen then starts arguing with her husband Geoff (Nicholas Burns), who’s leaving to go to work.  John, still standing outside their front door and startled by the domestic, drops and smashes his bottle of wine.  Karen sends him to the back garden to wait with Gary (Dustin Demri-Burns), who didn’t get the email either.  Gary is as laidback as John, holding on to his box of chocolates, is nervous.  After a bit of halting conversation, John remembers he has ‘something to do’ and escapes.  He sits on a park bench, eating chocolates.  He sees a couple kissing nearby and returns to Karen’s place.  It’s getting dark by now.

    We learn from his first exchange with John that Gary has done some questionable online research on his fellow orgiasts.  So he knows John’s ‘into fencing’, though he doesn’t know what John’s on about when he tries to explain this is fencing with swords and masks.  Gary assumed garden fencing, not least because of John’s chat-room user name.  John ruefully admits that I_Got_Wood78 (he’s very clear about the underscores when Karen checks she has his contact details right) is ‘just a silly sexual reference joke because of the …’   Gary has also accessed John’s wedding page and asks if his wife’s coming to the orgy.  John says the wedding never happened, Gary that he’s sorry because the bride-to-be was ‘fit’.  These few details supply all the backstory we need to find the rest of The Orgy making complete sense.  John isn’t there for debauchery:  he’s just looking for the right girl.

    Has he found her in Meg (Alexandra Roach), username the.vicar’s.daughter, who interrupts John’s panicked exile in Karen’s sauna room?  Their conversation there is beautifully played and written, with quite a focus on literacy.  Meg enjoys I_Got_Wood’s posts; John says she wouldn’t believe how long it takes him to write them; Meg can imagine – ‘the grammar and syntax are impeccable’.  John liked a post from the.vicar’s.daughter proposing an orgy to raise funds for refugees; someone else made a tasteless suggestion in response to this and Meg got him banned from the chat-room.  John’s pleased to hear it:  the man ‘was an idiot’.  Meg corrects him – ‘He was a prick!’   That causes a brief awkward silence that John fills by asking if Meg’s dad’s really a vicar.  The answer is no and John laughs sheepishly.  ‘It’s my mum that’s the vicar’, Meg adds.  They discuss the past participle of ‘to smite’ but John’s dumbstruck again when Meg asks if he wants a kiss.  ‘Maybe later’, she says comfortingly and exits the sauna.

    John is about to exit the whole thing for a second time after seeing Gary in a clinch with Meg.  He has his coat on when she reappears with her phone, checking with her babysitter that all’s well with her six-year-old son.  Meg seems sorry John’s leaving and asks if he’d now like to go upstairs with her.  He suddenly throws caution to the winds, kissing and touching her.   When they do head upstairs to continue you feel the glow of relief of a looming happy ending.  Only for a moment, though, as Gary joins in, with Meg happy for him to do so.  It is an orgy, after all.  The film’s closing credits begin.  Sam Baron interrupts them to show Karen and Geoff, the morning after, removing protective plastic covers from their sofa and its cushions; and John arriving somewhere for a fencing class, looking characteristically unsure.  The fencing instructor (Raphael von Blumenthal) pleasantly assures him he’s in the right place. Putting his bag down, John asks a girl fencer (Ella Jones) if it’s in her way.  She replies not at all, with a smile, and he smiles back.  When the girl looks away to concentrate on her fencing stuff John glances at her again, hopefully.

    Sam Baron’s direction of proceedings is admirably matter-of-fact and the whole cast plays impeccably straight.  In a charming, perfectly judged performance, Amit Shah – tall, skinny, his large eyes full of fear – makes John very funny and truly touching.  Vivid Alexandra Roach partners him splendidly.  Kerry Godliman’s Karen wants to be a good hostess but her short fuse repeatedly gets in the way.  Dustin Demri-Burns keeps you smiling, against your better judgment, at Gary’s whatever candour.  Sam Baron and Amit Shah evidently enjoyed working together:  they’ve collaborated on two more shorts since – Big Ears (2021) and Tall Dark and Handsome (2023).  I’m looking forward to seeing them.

    11 April 2024

  • When Harry Met Sally

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Reiner (1989)

    Well, I’ve seen this famous romcom at long last and I watched it through increasingly clenched teeth.  The title characters first meet in 1977, when both have just graduated from the University of Chicago.  They can barely stand each other’s company on the car drive they share from Chicago to New York City, where Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) has a job lined up and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) will start a college course in journalism.  Their tetchy conversation on the road introduces the subject of debate that persists throughout Rob Reiner’s film:  can a man and a woman ever be good friends – or will sex always get in the way of friendship?  Sally says yes to the first question, Harry to the second.  In 1982 they coincide in an airport lounge then on a plane flight.  By now, Sally’s a magazine journalist and dating one of Harry’s pals; Harry, a ‘political consultant’, is not only engaged to be married but has also changed his mind on the men-and-women friendship issue.  Another five years later, he and Sally happen to meet in a New York bookstore, discuss their respective failed romances and decide to try being friends.  It works until, at some point in 1988, sex does indeed, and unexpectedly, get in the way (it happens when Harry goes round to her apartment to comfort Sally, who’s reeling from the news that her ex is about to tie the knot with someone else).  Following a morning-after bust-up, Sally calls their friendship off.  In a crowd but alone at a party to see in New Year 1989, she’s missing Harry, when he suddenly appears to list all the reasons why he loves her.  They get married.

    Two people refusing or failing to see, for as long as humanly possible, that they’re made for each other, is the bedrock of romantic comedy.  The inevitability that the scales will fall from their eyes at the eleventh hour is an essential delight of the genre.  It’s no problem at all, then, that you know just where Nora Ephron’s script, replete with smart one-liners, is heading.  What’s vexing about When Harry Met Sally is that Rob Reiner’s treatment of the material is so relentlessly slick.  There can be pleasure, of course, in watching a piece of precision engineering on screen – but only if there’s some emotional substance to complement this.  You don’t get that in this film in either the direction or the lead performances – not enough anyway to divert attention from the underlying clockwork.

    I’m not suggesting this is what Reiner intended.  Working with a screenplay full of genre tropes, he may have been looking for a kind of distillation of vintage Hollywood romcoms.  One seeming clue is in the choice of music.  A roguish instrumental of ‘It Had To Be You’, arranged by Harry Connick Jr, plays over the opening credits.  In the course of the film, there are plenty more standards, or snatches of them, voiced by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles and Bing Crosby, culminating in a reprise of ‘It Had To Be You’ sung by Frank Sinatra.  But this Great-American-Songbook approach to soundtrack, rather than elevating the movie to the same ‘classic’ level of the numbers and their interpreters, points up When Harry Met Sally‘s synthetic quality (Harry Connick Jr’s arrangements reinforce that).  Reiner’s involvement in the project began not long after his first marriage, to Penny Marshall, ended.  He’s the son of a show-business marriage of famous longevity:  when this film was made, Carl and Estelle Reiner had already been married approaching fifty years and they stayed married until Estelle died in 2008.  As if in tribute to his parents, Reiner punctuates the narrative with snippets of elderly married couples telling an unseen interviewer how they first met etc.  The ‘documentary’ inserts are amusing enough (not least as a light-hearted echo of the aged witnesses in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981)) but even these bits are performed (the ‘real’ oldies are actually actors).  The last such interviewees, needless to say, are Harry and Sally, reminiscing about their wedding day.

    A striking feature ­– and a surprising one, in view of the cachet When Harry Met Sally has acquired over the years – is how much Reiner and Nora Ephron borrow from Woody Allen, from the introductory music onwards (though Allen’s music choices, for all that they’ve become nearly a cliché in his work, always seem also an expression of his individuality).  These borrowings are shallow, though.  Harry’s mixture of pessimism and romanticism suggests a protagonist who’s Woody-like.  But also Woody-lite:  the morbid thoughts Harry proclaims during the opening car journey are a stuck-on feature – he’s nowhere near a thoroughgoing neurotic.  This is almost acknowledged in one of Ephron’s best lines when, later on, Harry declares that he’s ‘coming down with something … probably one of those 24-hour tumours’.   The finale sees Harry running along a New York street on a mission of declaring his true feelings to the girl he loves – as the Allen character does in Manhattan (1979), although the result there isn’t an unequivocally happy ending.

    It’s nice – as well as apt, given Reiner’s old-couples device – to see from Wikipedia that Billy Crystal’s marriage in 1970, to his high-school sweetheart, is now in its fifty-fourth year.  No surprise that Crystal is comically dexterous as Harry – and likeable, though he’s not strong enough to escape the bland straitjacket of When Harry Met Sally.  It’s Meg Ryan who embodies the film’s most grating aspects.  She’s technically accomplished – she has more emotional and vocal variety than Crystal – yet infuriatingly smug and hollow.  The fake-orgasm-in-the-deli scene – which succeeds chiefly thanks to the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ punchline, delivered by Estelle Reiner, in her cameo as a diner at a nearby table – made Meg Ryan a star.  I have to say I’m relieved her star faded some time ago now.  Each of Sally and Harry has a confidante – hers is Marie (Carrie Fisher), his is Jess (Bruno Kirby).  At one point, the two leads match-make with the help of these friends:  Harry tries to pair Sally up with Jess, Sally to pair Harry up with Marie.  The attempt is a complete failure except that Marie and Jess instantly hit it off and soon get married.   This minor couple realises straight away that they’re made for each other.  When they dash off from the restaurant where the foursome has met to get into a yellow cab together, it’s the funniest, most enjoyable moment in the whole picture.  Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby aren’t given much to do but they do enough to make you sorry we got the protagonists we did, rather than ‘When Jess Met Marie’.

    6 April 2024

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