Film review

  • Christine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Antonio Campos (2016)

    Christine Chubbuck was a TV news reporter, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, worked for a succession of regional news channels.  The last of these was WXLT-TV, based in Sarasota, Florida.  On 15 July 1974, Chubbuck was reading a morning news bulletin when a film reel – showing footage of a shooting incident in a local restaurant – jammed.   Chubbuck paused then said to camera:

    ‘In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in “blood and guts”, and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.’

    She produced a gun from the bag she had under the desk and shot herself in the head.  She died in hospital fourteen hours later, a few weeks short of her thirtieth birthday.  More than four decades on, two films about Chubbuck have appeared almost simultaneously.  Both were screened for the first time in January 2016 at Sundance; both featured in the programme for this year’s London Film Festival[1].  Antonio Campos’s Christine is a biographical drama, with Rebecca Hall in the title role.  Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine is a documentary of sorts, in which the actress Kate Lyn Sheil prepares to portray Chubbuck in a screen dramatisation of her life and death.

    ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, is the journalistic motto of the WXLT-TV newsroom boss Mike Nelson (Tracy Letts) in Christine.  You might think Chubbuck’s television first – with the reinforcement of her ‘blood and guts’ comment – was intended partly as a statement about the queasy symbiosis between broadcast news media menus and the public appetites that they feed.  Chubbuck’s act is alleged to have inspired elements of, and the most famous line in, Paddy Chayefsky’s script for Network (1976), when the news anchor Howard Beale yells, ‘I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’  But I don’t think I’d heard of Christine Chubbuck before this year and I’m not sure how widely she’s regarded as some kind of moral exemplar, rather than as an unhappy and unlucky individual.  If she’s only the latter, is she a big enough subject for a biopic?  Antonio Campos and the screenwriter Craig Shilowich, while suggesting that aspects of her professional life contributed to Christine’s decision to end her life, barely pursue the idea that the manner of her death exposed shocking truths about the world in which she worked.   Her personal miseries entirely dominate the story.  I heard someone remark, as we came out of the LFF screening, ‘Well, she was obviously depressed’.  That sounds like a very limited and obvious message to carry away from a drama in which the protagonist commits suicide but it’s fair enough:  it isn’t clear what else Campos’s movie means to say.

    The last weeks of Chubbuck’s life coincided with the climax to Watergate (Richard Nixon resigned about three weeks after her death).  The film starts with a technical studio test, during which Christine pretends she’s conducting an interview with Nixon; near the end of the movie, a reference to his paranoia is made to imply that, in this respect at least, the President and Christine Chubbuck were somewhat kindred spirits.  Even so, you feel Watergate is, for Campos and Shilowich, little more than a handy suggestive motif.  The connections between the sexual politics of WXLT-TV and Christine’s personal life are more substantial.   The newsroom is largely a man’s world:  when the long-serving anchor George Ryan (Michael C Hall) gets a better job, at a station in Baltimore, the transfer package also includes his WXLT-TV colleague Andrea (Kim Shaw), described as ‘a little firecracker’.  Christine, on the other hand, has a forbidding, witchy look (images of the real Christine Chubbuck make clear that Rachel Hall’s Morticia hair, eyebrows and pallor are hardly an exaggeration).  She’s frightened and isolated – concerned about her gynaecological health, her inability to form relationships, her virginity.  There’s one sequence – perhaps the most memorable in Christine – in which the boundary between her private and public lives is blurred imaginatively.  As she prepares to leave the restaurant where she’s been dining alone, Christine approaches two other diners, a young man and woman.  ‘You seem very much in love’, she tells the politely puzzled couple.  Her tone is that of a professionally interested journalist.  What impels her towards their table is something more personally urgent:  Christine needs to know how on earth it’s possible to have this kind of easy intimacy.

    Few other scenes in Christine compare although one or two turn out better in the event than in the conception.  George persuades Christine to go out for the evening:  after dinner, he takes her along to a meeting of the transactional analysis therapy group he regularly attends.  It’s an improbable climax to a date, comically reminiscent of the ‘Rhythm of Life’ sequence in Sweet Charity and used for some facile satire of the therapy group and of George’s self-serving moral compass.  The stated principles of transactional analysis – manage your expectations in order to manage your life – run counter to what George said in his cups to Christine at a Fourth of July party, and to the news of his promotion, which he breaks to her as he drops her off at the end of their evening out.  Even so, the exchange of questions between Christine and one of the regulars at the therapy group gets over powerfully the heroine’s preoccupations and the impasse in which she finds herself.   Straight after her outing with George, Christine visits Bob Andersen (John Cullum), who owns WXLT-TV and other stations, and begs him to send her to Baltimore too (he tells that Andrea is already on the ticket).  I may have misunderstood but I found this episode confusingly staged.  It seems George has dropped Christine off right outside Andersen’s place without her asking him to do so; then it appears she’s in such disarray that she knocks on the front door without knowing who lives inside.

    With her increasingly stiff carriage and formidable internal force, Rebecca Hall does extraordinary work as Christine.  The difficulty with the performance is that the thin script and sketchy. direction of Christine make it too much of a showcase.  Christine’s mother Peg (J Smith-Cameron) is worried the mental illness from which her daughter suffered a few years back ‘in Boston’ (it gets to sound a bit like Chinatown) is returning.  Hall makes Christine’s psychological problems so salient that her behaviour, particularly in her exchanges with her boss, does seem unreasonable – and it’s therefore hard to see her as a victim of male chauvinism.  The most poignant moments of Rebecca Hall’s portrait come when Christine appears normal enough for people not to realise how far away she is from feeling it.  The contrasts between Christine and the pliant, sexually relaxed and active Peg, with whom she shares her home, are nothing if not obvious.  In her first scene, as Peg waits in a café for her daughter to arrive, J Smith-Cameron looks as if she’s getting ready to start acting.  This is likely the result of inattentive editing on Antonio Campos’s part rather than the fault of Smith-Cameron:  something similar happens at the Fourth of July party when Michael C Hall seems to be winding up for a prepared big moment.  Both these actors are physically convincing, however, and increasingly persuasive.

    As in Wiener-Dog, Tracy Letts makes a two-dimensional character one-dimensional but Maria Dizzia is good as Jean Reed, who also works at WXLT-TV and who tries unavailingly to befriend Christine.  When Jean’s feeling unhappy, she tells Christine, she eats ice cream and listens to cheerful songs – the kind of remark that immediately strikes you as likely to come in useful at a later stage, as this one does.  Antonio Campos’s choice of contemporary songs for the soundtrack is mostly appropriate without being jarringly so (‘Rock Your Baby’, ‘Annie’s Song’, ‘Everything I Own,’ ‘Love is All Around’) but he goes off-key in the sequence that leads into the film’s closing titles.  After Christine’s death, Jean comes back to her apartment and gets some ice cream from the freezer.  She turns on the television and switches channels to avoid news of Christine:  we hear the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show (‘You’re Gonna Make It After All’).  This was the first American sitcom to feature as the central character an unmarried, independent professional woman – Mary Richards, who works at a Minneapolis TV news station.  As if that wasn’t enough, we also hear the standard voiceover ‘This show was recorded in front of a live audience.’  The ironic aptness is not only crude but unconvincing in relation to the sensitive Jean Reed, who would have been aware of and oppressed by it.  She would have switched channels again.

    10 October 2016

    [1] The screenings of Christine and Kate Plays Christine that I went to were both at the Vue Cinema in Leicester Square, where I experienced what is nowadays, for me, a very rare difficulty.  The dialogue was super-audible – resoundingly, almost oppressively so early on in Christine (and to a lesser extent in Kate Plays Christine).  I so often complain about the reverse problem that I felt bad resenting this.  I got used to it after a while but Vue does seem to have an unusually powerful sound system …

  • Souvenir

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bavo Defurne (2016)

    The woman introducing the Belgian film-maker Bavo Defurne at BFI praised Souvenir as a fusion of queer cinema, social realism and something else I immediately forgot.   Defurne is an established name in queer cinema and Liliane, the heroine of Souvenir, once sang in the Eurovision Song Contest, which has for years now been celebrated as a camp extravaganza.  It isn’t presented as such in Souvenir, though:  I couldn’t see anything queer about the movie.  It sure as hell isn’t social (or any other kind of) realism.  Maybe Souvenir is the something else it was claimed to be in the intro but I’m doubtful.  I think you just have to up the auteur when you welcome him to the stage at the London Film Festival.

    Liliane works in a pâté factory.  When she leaves work, she goes back to the apartment where she lives alone, and spends her evenings watching television and knocking back alcohol.  Jean, a young man who comes to work temporarily at the factory, strikes up a conversation with Liliane.  He says he recognises her as ‘Laura’, a young singer who once represented Belgium in Eurovision.  Liliane denies it but Jean is certain:  although Laura long since vanished into obscurity, Jean’s father is such a loyal fan that he still plays her records and watches her performances on VHS.  Jean is an aspiring (lightweight) boxer.  Once he’s got Liliane to admit to her secret past, he asks if she’ll do a special performance of her old Eurovision number at an upcoming social do at his boxing club.   She says no, insisting that she’s retired completely.  Then she says yes, provided there’s no publicity.  She gives the performance and gets a warm reception – especially from Jean’s father.  The next day, a television crew descends on the pâté factory.  This causes a brief rift between Liliane and Jean but they’re soon in a relationship together.  Then Jean loses a fight, decides to give up boxing, persuades Liliane to make a career comeback and becomes her manager.   He’s not much better at this than he was at the boxing so Liliane renews contact with the man who was once her manager and her husband.  She contests a preliminary heat to decide the Belgian entry for the next Eurovision Song Contest and wins – she’s through to the national final.  She wins that as well but her drink dependency has also been making a comeback, as things between her and Jean have gone from good to bad to worse.  She totters back on stage to reprise her winning song, keels over and ends up in hospital.  In the final moments of Souvenir, Liliane stumbles from her bed, wires trailing, to find Jean waiting for her at the other end of a hospital corridor.

    I booked for Souvenir for two reasons:  first, because Liliane is played by Isabelle Huppert and I was attracted to the idea of seeing her do something lighter than usual; second, because I’m fond of Eurovision, especially the Eurovision of several decades past.  As a factory hand, albeit one with a celebrity backstory, Huppert is more plausible than Catherine Deneuve was as Björk’s shop-floor pal in Dancer in the Dark.  Even so, the fine-boned Liliane still seems, and to fancy herself as, a cut above the rest:  on the bus ride from the factory, her co-workers chatter together while she sits alone, reading Marilyn French.   In his words to the audience before the film, Bavo Defurne said Isabelle Huppert was ideal for the role because she can ‘create a layered character’.  Defurne certainly needs an actress creative to this extent:  he and his co-scenarists, Yves Verbraeken and Jacques Boon, haven’t written a layered character.  But the longer Souvenir went on (it’s ninety minutes all told: along with an elegant opening titles sequence, brevity is its main plus point), the more I felt Huppert made matters worse.   Although the story is feeble and the protagonist’s situation daft, Huppert’s ability to present the semblance of reality, regardless of the unreality of her surroundings, makes you occasionally distressed by Liliane’s unhappiness.  It’s the worst of both worlds that Isabelle Huppert is less equipped to communicate the character’s appetite for, or pleasure in, singing to an audience.  You can believe Huppert’s Liliane can still get into the dress she wore for Eurovision.  At the boxing club event, her competent but tentative voice and her hand movements, unchanged from the ones Laura did years ago, are mildly touching.  Once Liliane has embarked on remaking a career, however, we’re watching a fine actress doing an impersonation of an ex-songbird that’s accomplished but impersonal.

    When Jean (the eager, rather inane Kévin Azaïs) first says he knows who Liliane is, he describes her alter ego Laura as ‘like ABBA but not as successful’.  Needless to say, she’s not remotely like ABBA but it turns out that Laura was runner-up the year they won.  That was ‘thirty years ago’, which means Souvenir is taking place in 2004 – although to infer that may be to take the film too literally:  Bavo Defurne clearly isn’t interested in precision.  The real disappointment is that he’s no more attentive to larger changes in Eurovision Song Contest ethos and fashion.  The two MOR numbers that Liliane sings, decades apart, belong to the same Eurovision vintage – 1960s or maybe 1970s.  The vagueness of my dating reflects the fact that you can be pretty flexible with Eurovision fare, which always took longer to change than music in the real pop world.  But if Liliane re-emerged as a fifty-something in the 2000s, singing the Jean-inspired ‘Joli garçon’, she’d get to represent her country in Eurovision largely through being a camp-comical anachronism.   Instead, we watch her performing the song to a mysteriously middle-aged-to-elderly studio audience, who bob along to the catchy rhythm, as they might have done at a mid-twentieth-century Eurovision eliminator.  Perhaps the most annoying thing about ‘Joli garçon’ is that it is catchy.  The morning after seeing the film, I couldn’t get it out of my head until I discovered an ideal antidote:  ‘My Lovely Horse’, from the great Father Ted episode, ‘A Song for Europe.’   The woman who introduced Souvenir at the LFF screening might well describe ‘A Song for Europe’ as a searing exposé of potential political duplicity in a specifically Eurovisionary context.

    Bavo Defurne virtually ignores the very large age difference between Liliane and Jean.  One of the few promising comic possibilities in the story is for Jean’s father to be jealous of his son’s having an affair with the father’s longstanding pin-up girl but nothing is made of this either:  Dad laps it all up.  Neither he nor his wife expresses any feelings about Jean giving up boxing.  Back at the pâté factory, there’s not much more interest shown in Liliane’s renaissance as a star:  you feel they’d at least resent the success of someone stuck up enough to read a posh book on the bus.  In the early stages, the causes of delays to Liliane and Jean’s getting it together are weak even by romcom standards – this was the second LFF film I saw in the space of three days where the principals owned mobile phones but didn’t always know how to use them (see also La La Land).  The most puzzling thing Bavo Defurne said at the start was that Souvenir was the story of ‘an optimist and a pessimist’.  I’m still not sure which was which but my friends and I didn’t hang around for the post-screening Q and A to find out.

    10 October 2016

Posts navigation