Film review

  • The Unknown Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La Fille inconnue  

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2016)

    Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) is a young general practitioner working in Seraing, near Liège (the Dardenne brothers’ home turf and the usual setting for their films).  When the buzzer on the entrance to the surgery sounds, well after the end of normal opening hours, Jenny tells her medical student intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) not to answer.  The next day, as she arrives for work, Jenny learns from the police that the body of a young woman has been discovered on the banks of the nearby River Meuse.  The police ask to look at the health centre’s CCTV to see if it shows anything useful to them.  Jenny readily agrees.  The dead girl, who hasn’t been identified, turns out to be the person whose call the previous evening was ignored.  The CCTV footage lasts only a matter of seconds but shows that the girl (Ange-Déborah Goulehi), as she tried to gain entry to the health centre, was in a greatly agitated state.

    The first twenty or so minutes of The Unknown Girl characterise and contextualise Jenny Davin very well.  She’s businesslike to the point of brusqueness but essentially compassionate and extremely hard-working.  The decision she took in the film’s opening scene was misleading insofar as Jenny appears to be on call day and night.  There are eloquent illustrations of the various difficulties faced by her patients.  An immigrant (Kamil Alisultanov) has resisted going to hospital for fear of being required to produce his passport; his leg wound is now much more serious as a result.   A seriously overweight elderly man (Jean-Michel Balthazar), suffering from diabetes and foot sores, has no heating in his apartment because of problems with a budgeted meter; Jenny phones social services on his behalf to get this sorted out.  She herself lives a solitary and somewhat Spartan existence, and the degree of her professional commitment makes this credible in both respects.  Her meals are as basic as her wardrobe.  She allows herself an occasional, stress-relieving cigarette, smoked through an open window.  The evidence of her strong sense of responsibility to others makes Jenny’s distress about failing to respond to the girl’s call at the surgery very believable.  To make matters worse, she tells the police, she instructed the intern not to answer the door only because she wanted to exert her authority.  (It was clear from the exchange between Jenny and Julien at the start that his mixture of taciturnity and lack of initiative was vexing her.)  The detectives (Ben Hamidou and Laurent Caron) assure Jenny she has no reason to blame herself, but to no avail – she’s thoroughly shaken up.  She was about to start work with what appears to be a larger and better-resourced medical practice but decides to pull out of the new job.

    The continuing anonymity of the dead girl is all too believable as well.  The Dardennes use it to make a political point and they do so effectively.  The Unknown Girl starts to go wrong as the writer-directors expand their communitarian message:  the result is a story that is immediately absorbing but increasingly implausible.  There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for the professional doctor to turn amateur sleuth but this is what happens.  Jenny, impelled by remorse for ignoring the unknown girl, resolves to find out who she was and how she died.   The Dardennes’ gritty naturalism makes matter worse.  If we weren’t so convinced by Jenny’s personality and situation in the early stages, it mightn’t be so hard to accept her in the basically conventional whodunit (and who got dun) plot that develops.  Adèle Haenel inhabits her role so thoroughly that we always believe in Jenny as a real person.  That reality exposes the growing improbability of her behaviour.

    We can accept (just about) that Jenny would be so affected by what’s happened that she buys a cemetery plot in which the dead girl can be buried if no family members come forward to claim her body.  We can’t accept that so conscientious a person as Jenny would exploit her medical position to play detective.  An examination of one of her patients, the teenage Bryan (Louka Minnella), is, in effect, the starting point in the process of solving the mystery.  From then on, Jenny keeps pushing Bryan and subsequently his father (Jérémie Renier) to tell her what they know.  It makes no sense either that Jenny would fail to keep the police – whom she recognises as colleagues to the extent that they too provide a social service – up to speed with much of what she’s finding out.  A visit she makes to a cyber-café, for example, yields important information that has no implications for patient confidentiality but which Jenny keeps to herself until very late in the day.  No wonder the real detectives get pissed off with her.

    Jenny’s persistence eventually leads both Bryan’s father and the cyber-café cashier (Nadège Ouedraogo), who turns out to be the dead girl’s sister, to own up to, respectively, what they’ve done and who they are.  (Reluctance to do so is, in both cases, very understandable.)  This seems meant to confirm the social responsibility theme but the effect is weak – partly because these two individuals’ relationships to the title character are too particular, partly because most viewers will by now have lost belief in The Unknown Girl as a social document.  Even at 106 minutes, it feels padded:  a subplot involving Julien’s decision to abandon his medical career and Jenny’s successful attempts to change his mind feels, in the world of the Dardennes that we’ve come to know, anomalous in its neatness.  In spite of all this, the film is well worth seeing.  The acting is excellent throughout:  Adèle Haenel, working with the Dardennes for the time, gets good support from regulars in their films – notably Olivier Gourmet, Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione.  Gourmet has a startling outburst of anger as a man rattled by Jenny’s snooping.  Renier defines the changing moods of Bryan’s father sharply and strongly.  At a reception held for Jenny to welcome her into the new job she doesn’t take up, Rongione has a good affable tenseness as the senior doctor in the practice.   The Dardennes demonstrate again that doing without music in a film is not only possible but can be dramatically fortifying.  The orchestration of doorbells, buzzers and phone ringtones is an expressive and sufficient soundtrack to The Unknown Girl.

    5 December 2016

  • Blue Velvet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lynch (1986)

    The Odeon at present has a weedy voiceover introducing the adverts, the trailers and the film itself – the main (and vain) objective seems to be to get people to turn off their phones.  The spiel begins with ‘I’m guessing you’ve come here to lose yourself in the magic of the big screen.  Am I right?  Thought so …’   I always want to answer, ‘No, wrong’:  deciding in advance to ‘surrender’ to a movie sounds as dreary as planning to get drunk.  Preferring to keep your wits about you as a rule makes it all the more exciting to encounter a film that’s twist-in-your-sobriety – a film like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.   I saw it in the early 1990s and, since I rarely get round to watching any of the DVDs I own, decided its thirtieth anniversary re-release was a good opportunity to revisit Blue Velvet at the cinema, though at BFI rather than the Odeon.  After experiencing the magic on the NFT2 screen, I was reminded of the epigraph to Pauline Kael’s 1986 review:

    ‘“Maybe I’m sick but I want to see that again.” – Overheard after a showing of Blue Velvet.’

    The film is set in the North Carolina logging town of Lumberton – a real place but one that functions here as a cultural epitome, as well as anticipating the fictional setting of Twin Peaks (as essential themes and various quirky details of Blue Velvet also do).  From the start, David Lynch juxtaposes a surface, sun-filled day world and a nocturnal, subterranean one.  He also expresses their proximity to each other.  The shiny, midnight blue material that wafts weirdly on the screen under the opening titles is replaced by a clear blue sky.  Angelo Badalamenti’s passionate, melodic strings music gives way to Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ vocal, which links the tacky, mysterious fabric and the images of suburban security that follow, and have a nostalgic pull.  Red roses bloom against a white picket fence and the sky.  Three cheers for the red, white and blue.  The colours are so intense, though, they’re ominous: the daytime sky is such a deep blue that it seems to contain darkness.  A lollipop lady sees a crocodile of schoolchildren safely across the road but the sun casts long shadows over them, and over the garden lawn that a middle-aged man is watering.  Inside the house, a middle-aged woman sits with a cup of something, watching television.  On the TV screen, a gun is being pointed.

    The very uneasy calm is broken by the sight and sound of water leaking from the hosepipe attachment, which seems to have been pulled too tight.  As the gardener tries to correct this, he suffers some kind of seizure and falls to the ground, clutching the back of his neck with his left hand, holding on to the garden hose with his right.  A toddler from the next-door garden wanders up to look at what’s going on:  a little terrier dog has arrived on the scene, barking excitedly as he jumps on the now unconscious man and drinks the water still spraying out of the hose.  The effect is shocking and comical.  The camera moves down to lawn level, then below it, to reveal pulsing, disgusting insect life the harsh cacophony of which builds in volume as Bobby Vinton fades away.  (The greedy crunching noise of the insects echoes the eerie soundtrack of infernal machinery in Lynch’s early film Eraserhead.)

    The man laid out on his own back lawn is Tom Beaumont (Jack Harvey), who owns the local hardware store.  The TV viewer is his wife (Priscilla Pointer).  The serious stroke that Tom has suffered brings the Beaumonts’ son Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) home from college.  After visiting his father in hospital, Jeffrey is walking back through a vacant lot and stops to throw pebbles at a bottle propped up against a discarded mirror.  He seems to throw idly but he could be thinking of happier times when he did the same thing as a kid.  As he bends down for more stones, Jeffrey finds something else in the grass:  a human ear.  He puts it in a paper bag, takes the objet trouvé to the police station and hands it over to Detective John Williams (George Dickerson).  In a follow-up visit to the detective’s home, Jeffrey gets into conversation with Williams’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern).  She tells Jeffrey she’s overheard her father discussing with colleagues a woman called Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer, whom the police suspect may somehow be connected to the mystery of the severed ear.

    The discovery of that ear is the point of departure for Jeffrey Beaumont’s journey into the underbelly of Lumberton, the organ itself a portal to the darker parts of Jeffrey’s psyche.  He’s immediately curious about Dorothy Vallens and wants to know more.  He goes to her apartment, posing as an insect extermination man, and, while Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is distracted, steals a spare key to the apartment.  He and Sandy go to watch Dorothy perform in the nightclub, where she’s introduced as the Blue Lady and sings a slow version of ‘Blue Velvet’.   The two youngsters leave the club early in order for Jeffrey to let himself into Dorothy’s apartment and snoop around before she gets back.  Sandy stays outside and he asks her to sound the car horn in warning if Dorothy returns.  Sandy obliges but Jeffrey doesn’t hear:  he’s flushing the toilet in the apartment at just the wrong moment.   When Dorothy comes in, Jeffrey takes hasty refuge in a closet with slatted doors, through which he watches her undress.  She also takes off what neither Jeffrey nor this viewer recognised as a wig.  (It’s the loss of these abundant dark curls and the revelation of very short hair, rather than the removal of clothing, that seems to expose Dorothy so suddenly and startlingly.)  Hearing a noise and realising she’s not alone in the room, she approaches the closet, now wearing a blue velvet bathrobe and armed with a kitchen knife.  She discovers Jeffrey and forces him to strip.  She is both indignant at and stimulated by his spying on her, and begins to fellate him.  There’s a knock on the front door of the apartment and Dorothy tells Jeffrey to return to his hiding place.

    When she first discovers him, Dorothy accuses Jeffrey of being a peeping Tom and although he protests, she’s not wrong.  And while Blue Velvet isn’t an obvious critique of filmgoer voyeurism, David Lynch makes you conscious of your complicity with Jeffrey and his mixed feelings – fear, fascination, possibly arousal – about what he sees next through the slats.  (The light in Kyle MacLachlan’s eyes captures the different feelings wonderfully.)  Dorothy’s visitor is a man called Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).  It’s a sociopathic rather than a social call, in keeping with Frank’s personality, which instantly imposes itself on the film.  He is violently abusive in word and deed, yelling foul-mouthed threats at Dorothy before putting on a mask to inhale some kind of gas to heighten the sensation of dry humping her.  In doing so, he refers to himself both as ‘Daddy’ and as the ‘baby’, the two personas united in their desire to ‘fuck Mommy’.  Frank also uses the sash from Dorothy’s blue robe as a fetish.  Climax for him consists of an explosion of even greater anger than before.  We learn from this episode that he’s behind the abduction and mutilation of Dorothy’s husband (Frank instructs Dorothy, as he forces her to have sex with him, to ‘do it for Van Gogh’) and the kidnap of her young son.

    Behind the closet door, Jeffrey witnesses, in other words, a primal scene in which the male participant is both father and child, and Blue Velvet is an undeniably Freudian tale.  Jeffrey’s rite of passage takes place while his own father is hors de combat, in a hospital rather than the marriage bed.  Frank functions as the id of the father figure and of the Oedipal boy-child contestant.  In the climax to the thriller plot, Jeffrey – inside the same closet from which he first saw Frank – incredulously fires a fatal shot at him.  (Perhaps Jeffrey slays his own ‘baby’ id:  in the final section of the film, Tom Beaumont has made a good recovery and returned to home and garden.)  Although you’re always aware of the Freudian framework as you watch the film, you don’t reduce the story to a psychoanalytical detective puzzle. The narrative has too much giddying momentum and the images that Lynch and his DoP Frederick Elmes devise are too beguiling for that.  All the major players in this movie – the protagonist, the writer-director and the audience – are on a voyage of discovery, or self-discovery.  The criminal underworld of Lumberton, in which nosey-parker Jeffrey Beaumont gets entangled, is not only the place’s shadow side:  the town’s hemispheres correspond to the rational and irrational parts of Jeffrey’s and David Lynch’s brain.  The popular culture mental storeroom of many people watching the film will be crammed, like Lynch’s, with noir movie imagery and plaintive, yearning pop songs, both of which play important parts in Blue Velvet.

    Quite early on in their relationship, Sandy says to Jeffrey, ‘I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert’.  He replies, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out’.  The question of what Jeffrey really does know, and what he finds out, about himself is one of the abiding fascinations of this extraordinary coming-of-age story.  Sandy’s friends admire Jeffrey’s looks.  You can see why, but he’s so neatly and innocuously handsome that his tidy appearance is somehow silly.  His unabbreviated forename – he’s never Jeff – is virtually an emblem of his good manners.  Yet the tiny ring Jeffrey wears in his left ear is a discreet complication to his ultra-straight appearance, a telltale sign of subversive potential.   When he delivers that other left ear to the police, Jeffrey is a combination of responsible citizen and boy detective, pleased with himself but quietly excited too.  Kyle MacLachlan is perfect in the role:  he inhabits Jeffrey’s wholesome social personality and inner depths equally persuasively – so that the attractions Sandy and Dorothy hold for him are entirely credible.  You believe in his courtship of the former and his turbulent sexual relationship with the latter.  You always root for him.

    The two main women characters, representatives of the daytime and nighttime worlds, are superlatively cast.  Laura Dern’s Sandy, who’s gently and likeably humorous, seems more grown up than Jeffrey at first but her personal trajectory in the story is complementary to his:  as he goes deeper, Sandy is increasingly and naively stranded above ground.   Their future together seems to be in peril when Dorothy turns up naked, bruised and weeping on the front lawn of the Beaumont house and the intimacy there has been between her and Jeffrey is revealed to Sandy.  Isabella Rossellini’s blend of vulnerability and masochism is compelling.  When Dorothy delivers ‘Blue Velvet’ in the nightclub, the plangent clarity of Rossellini’s voice transcends the technical defects of her singing; in the performance as a whole, her screen presence – carnal yet fragile – overcomes her acting limitations.

    The orderly, hygienic parents in the day world counterpoint Frank and his lowlife henchmen (who include Brad Dourif and Jack Nance) and the police force seems to function in a strange borderland between them.  Detective Williams’s yellow-suited colleague (Fred Pickler) is soon revealed to be one of the bad guys and ends up among the several corpses at the scene of the primal scene.  Lynch leaves it fuzzy – rather unsatisfactorily so – as to whether Detective Williams himself has a foot in both camps.  As Frank, Dennis Hopper achieves a breathtaking balance of frightening and funny.  Even more remarkably, he achieves pathos – on the confounding visit of Frank’s entourage to the abode of his hophead partner-in-crime Ben (Dean Stockwell), who serenades the furiously screwed-up Frank in a woozy, camp mime to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’.  Jeffrey, whom Frank has taken captive on a mad night ride, is an astonished spectator.  The choice of song is perfectly apt.  The sequence has a strongly oneiric look and rhythm.  It also encapsulates the message of Blue Velvet that in dreams is both a seductive and a scary place to be.

    The richly ambiguous finale starts with the camera moving out from a close-up of Jeffrey’s right ear (we might think of this as the good ear – as distinct from the sinister one).  He’s emerging from a doze in his parents’ garden. Sandy’s voice calls to him that lunch is ready.  Her father and Jeffrey’s recovered father are talking amiably together in the garden; ditto his mother and Sandy’s mother (Hope Lange) indoors.  Jeffrey and Sandy, after the rupture between them caused by Dorothy, seem to be going steady again.  You wonder for a moment if the whole film up to this point has been a dream that Jeffrey dreamed as he waited for his lunch.   If so, the dream seems to have been wiped instantly from his conscious mind.  He looks contentedly invigorated:  is he fortified by the terrifying recent experiences that have made a man of him, or just refreshed by a snooze?  I doubt we are meant to think it-was-all-a-daytime-nightmare but it’s typical of David Lynch’s storytelling that he can make us unsure.

    In the kitchen, Sandy, Jeffrey and his elderly maiden aunt (Frances Bay), the other member of the Beaumont household, watch a robin that’s appeared on the windowsill.  Early in the story, Sandy told Jeffrey about a dream she had the night she met him:

    ‘In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins and the robins represented love.  And for the longest time, there was this darkness.  And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love.  And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference, and it did.  So, I guess it means that there is trouble until the robins come.’

    There’s only the one robin but its advent signals a happy ending – an ending that makes you smile, at any rate, thanks to the discombobulating wit that’s a hallmark of Blue Velvet.  The bird’s arrival is as incredibly auspicious as its appearance is unconvincing:  the robin ex machina is a mechanical robin.  It’s accompanied by another form of natural life that’s been a motif throughout the film:  the bird has an insect in its mouth.  Jeffrey’s aunt’s delight at the cute birdie changes quickly to squeamishness (‘I could never eat a bug’), as she pops a piece of food into her own mouth.   A postscript shows a smiling Dorothy back together with her infant son.   Pauline Kael, for all her admiration for Blue Velvet, found this a real letdown but the sustained kinkiness of the film ensures that the mother-and-child reunion is no more straightforward than anything else.  The happy family picture is incomplete:  we can hardly forget that Dorothy’s husband ended up not just an ear short but sans everything.  (That arrangement may suit her little boy, of course.)  These closing images, accompanied by Isabella Rossellini’s wistful rendering of the last line of the ‘Blue Velvet’ lyric, are succeeded by a return to a screen filled by implacable blue sky.  And the sky reverts to the shimmering title material of Dorothy’s robe.

    2 December 2016

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