Film review

  • Under the Shadow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zir-e Sayeh

    Babak Anvari (2016)

    The writer-director Babak Anvari makes clever use of the place and the time – Tehran, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War – to give an original twist to familiar horror elements.   Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is refused permission to resume the medical studies she suspended a few years ago, when she married and had a child:  the reason given by the authorities is her former involvement in left-wing student politics.  Her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi) is a doctor working for the Iranian military.  When he receives a new assignment, to an area where frontline fighting is taking place, Iraj wants Shideh and the couple’s young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) to leave Tehran and go to stay with his family.  The capital is under increasing attack, as part of Saddam Hussein’s ‘War of the Cities’ – a series of air raids, missile attacks and artillery shellings of Iran’s major urban areas.  Shideh insists on staying put.  From the very start of the film, she’s thwarted, impatient, full of suppressed energy.  She’s angry at being prevented from completing her studies and thereby from increasing her sense of independence – her husband’s unsympathetic reaction makes things worse.  She reminds Dorsa, as the little girl plays with her doll, that toys aren’t allowed at the breakfast table.  Once breakfast is over, Shideh lets off steam by exercising to one of her cache of banned Jane Fonda workout videos.

    Like many a no-nonsense rationalist before her, Shideh is forced to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth, etc – but she does so within a framework that combines supernatural horror story and political parable.  The events in Under the Shadow repeatedly evoke horror tropes that reverberate in a new way, thanks to the particular, actual context of the narrative.  It’s conventional for the house at the centre of a horror story to be threatened by something nasty trying to penetrate it.  In this case, a war is going on outside: one of the somethings that penetrates the apartment building is a missile, which comes through the roof but doesn’t explode.  When the lights suddenly go out in the building, it’s usually because of a power cut.  While there may be no rational explanation for other goings-on, there’s a popular irrational explanation for them.  The belief that a djinn has got into their world is shared by Dorsa, Mrs Ebrahimi (Aram Ghasemy), whose husband (Ray Haratian) owns the building, and other residents.  The grown-ups believe the djinn has possessed the child.  Dorsa’s doll becomes an important presence – and absence – in the film.  It goes missing and Dorsa accuses her mother of having stolen it.  The doll later turns up in a drawer, alongside the medical dictionary that the teenage Shideh received as a gift from her mother.  It was the latter, as her inscription on the dictionary’s title page makes clear, who wanted her daughter to become a doctor:  Iraj suggests that it was her mother’s recent death that made Shideh want to return to her studies.

    As often happens in the horror genre, the central location gradually empties of people until only the protagonists are left to fight on.  The apartment building becomes a less secure environment the moment that Iraj leaves it.  Babak Anvari achieves that effect by the ominous sight and sound of the gates to the building locking behind Iraj; this is repeated after one or two subsequent departures from the place.  Shideh finds herself on the receiving end of a collection of oppressive forces.  Although apparently disparate, these combine not only to frustrate her ambitions to be a modern woman but also to make her feel she’s a bad mother to Dorsa – at first intolerant of her daughter, then unable to comfort and protect her.  In time, Shideh thinks she sees the djinn – and the audience of Under the Shadow sees what she sees.  It’s a violently sinuous sheet of patterned fabric:  what else it may be – a nightmarish vision, a symbol of what Shideh is up against in 1980s Iran – Anvari leaves ambiguous.

    One night, Shideh, with Dorsa in her arms, rushes from the building and into the dark street in terror.  To her huge relief, she sees the lights of a police vehicle ahead.  When she reaches it, the police officers aren’t at all comforting:  they take Shideh into custody for failing to wear a chador in public (she is released with a ticking off).  Anvari’s intelligent approach comes at some cost to spine-chilling.  There are some frights and jolts – the djinn-in-sheet’s-clothing, Shideh’s desperate use of gaffer tape to keep out what’s trying to get in through cracks in the windows and ceiling, even the shock of toast springing from a toaster in sudden close-up – but continuing awareness of the political and cultural dimensions of the story, and how artfully these are worked into it, distance one from the scary effects.  The viewer, unlike Shideh, is never helplessly submerged in the horror of Under the Shadow yet this is still an accomplished and effective piece of cinema.

    20 October 2016

  • Kate Plays Christine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Greene (2016)

    Kate Plays Christine is formally more ingenious than the label ‘documentary’ might imply.  Kate is the actress Kate Lyn Sheil, Christine the journalist Christine Chubbuck, whom Sheil is to portray in a movie.  The actress researches her character by visiting places where Chubbuck spent time; she talks to various people who might offer helpful insights – a psychologist, a friend of the Chubbuck family, colleagues at WXLT-TV in the period leading up to Christine’s on-air suicide, as she read the news, in July 1974.  As she struggles to understand better who Christine Chubbuck was, Sheil examines her own personality and (as she sees them) limitations.  The talking heads include other members of the cast of the movie in which Sheil will play Chubbuck.  But just as Kate Lyn Sheil finds the ‘real’ Christine Chubbuck ever more elusive, so the reality of the film within Robert Greene’s film gradually recedes.  By the end, the movie in which Kate was to play Christine has virtually evaporated – if it ever existed at all, and that seems doubtful:  it’s an artifice through which to describe Chubbuck’s life and legacy, and to explore an actor’s struggles to achieve truthfulness in a biopic.

    Kate Lyn Sheil is new to me but she has 55 acting credits on IMDB.  Many of these are in obscure indie films though Sheil has appeared in the last couple of years in, among other things, the American House of Cards and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip.  In Kate Plays Christine, she’s intelligently articulate but not very expressive:  she becomes progressively less engaging as a performer, if not as a personality in her own right.  It’s hard to know quite how intentional this is.  The effect of Sheil’s wan screen presence is to realise the distance that she feels separates her from Christine Chubbuck, and to focus interest on the latter – Robert Greene may well have aimed to achieve both these things.  Yet Sheil’s failure to convince goes beyond failing to convince herself that she can get inside Chubbuck’s head, and this made me uncomfortable.  When she visits a house where Chubbuck once lived or stands on the beach where a memorial service for her took place, we’re doubly removed from reality:  Sheil comes across as an actress pretending to be an actress trying to get close to the woman she’s playing.  Another effect of Sheil’s underpowered acting, if you’ve seen Christine (as I had two days previously), is to make you appreciate all the more Rachel Hall’s achievement in the lead role of Antonio Campos’s film.

    There’s an increasing, interesting imbalance in Robert Greene’s piece – between what feels like enervated contrivance and the impact of the mythology that’s grown up around Christine Chubbuck’s death.  Early on, Kate Lyn Sheil visits and talks with an elderly woman who’ll be making her Christine wig; later, Sheil goes swimming in the ocean wearing the wig, and it keeps coming off.  If this is meant as an illustration of how Christine keeps ‘getting away from’ the actress trying to inhabit her, it’s a daft one:  the wig, which never looks convincing even on dry land, seems almost certain to come off underwater.  The aforementioned beach scene on the site of Christine’s memorial service is accompanied by thunder and lightning.  While it’s perfectly possible that the brewing storm is a spectacular atmospheric coincidence, one suspects by this stage that Greene kept a close eye on weather forecasts before deciding when to shoot the sequence.  Watching footage of the real Christine Chubbuck on film is presented as a pivotal moment in Kate Lyn Sheil’s apprehension of Christine’s ‘otherness’:  we’re supposed to think Kate has never seen Christine before, even though at least one of the video clips of Chubbuck currently available on YouTube was posted there several years ago.

    This moment is also a letdown to the extent that the real Christine Chubbuck is hardly electrifying – not compared with Rebecca Hall, anyway.  Nevertheless, Kate Plays Christine conveys biographical information and theories about Chubbuck economically and effectively.  The psychologist whom Sheil meets suggests that Chubbuck resolved to attempt suicide in a way that expressed her deep personal anger through her chosen line of work.  This is plausible: it’s hard to ignore the shocking pun of the phrase ‘news bulletin’ in relation to her death.  It’s a subsequent meeting, between Sheil and two of the men working for WXLT-TV news at the time, that galvanises Robert Greene’s narrative.  The WXLT-TV video footage of the self-shooting has never become publicly available.  One of the two men featured here, although he says he knows that a recording still exists, points up the irony of its continuing concealment:  Christine Chubbuck obliged viewers to see something they’d never seen before and which has never been seen since.  This same witness is candid too about the morbid, ‘blood and guts’ hook of what Chubbuck did.  He forced this viewer to admit this was one of the things that drew him to see Greene’s film and Christine at the London Film Festival.

    This man’s brief contribution upstages what’s meant to be the climax to proceedings, in which Kate Lyn Sheil repeatedly tries and fails to enact Christine’s suicide on camera.  Before she eventually ‘succeeds’, Sheil looks straight at us and summarises the issues that Kate Plays Christine has raised for her and which she feels, as an actress, she has failed to resolve.  Both the acted suicide and this moment of confrontation with the audience (and perhaps, from Sheil’s point of view, with Robert Greene) feel forced and are anti-climactic – but one thing Kate Lyn Sheil says in the finale is striking.  She tells us there’s no satisfying meaning to be found in Christine Chubbuck’s death – that Christine was just a sad individual.  It’s ironic that this is what one infers from watching Christine but that Kate Plays Christine, chiefly through what that WXLT-TV man had to say, hints at something more.

    12 October 2016

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