Film review

  • The Fencer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vehkleja

    Klaus Härö (2015)

    During the Second World War, Estonia was occupied first by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union.  The Nazis drafted Estonian men of fighting age into the German army; the Russians considered these men to be, like other German soldiers, criminals.  Estonia became de facto part of the USSR (although most Western countries never legally recognised it as such):  in the early post-war years, against a background of continuing insurgency against Soviet rule, upwards of 20,000 Estonians were deported either to labour camps or to Siberia.  Some of this history is summarised in a written prologue to the Finnish-Estonian film The Fencer (Vehkleja is its Estonian title – the Finnish one is Miekkailija).  Set in the early 1950s, it tells the story of Endel Nelis, one of those young Estonians conscripted into the German army.

    With his life as a fencing coach in Leningrad increasingly precarious, Endel leaves the city to escape the attention of the Soviet authorities and takes refuge in Haapsalu, a small Estonian coastal town.  He starts work there as a sports instructor in the local school and begins teaching fencing to a group of the children – with improvised foils until one of Endel’s friends, still in Leningrad, sends proper equipment for them to use.  Endel also starts a relationship with Kadri, one of the women teachers on the staff.   The school principal soon becomes suspicious about Endel’s past and gets a sidekick, one of the male teachers, to do some detective work.  The Haapsalu kids read in the newspaper about a fencing competition for youth teams from across the Soviet Union, which is to be held in Leningrad.  They’re desperate to take part.  Endel is naturally nervous about the location; Kadri urges him not go to there but he feels he can’t let the kids down.  The Haapsalu minnows eventually defeat the fencing big fish of Moscow, Leningrad etc.  At the moment of their victory, Endel is escorted from the building by the military police.  In the last sequence of The Fencer, Endel – as he did at the start of the film – steps down from a train onto the platform at Haapsalu station.  He has been released from labour camp (as many Estonians were following the death of Stalin in 1953).  Kadri is there to greet him, along with the youngsters whose lives he changed.

    Closing legends explain that Endel Nelis was a real person, that he lived to see Estonia regain its independence (Nelis died in 1993) and that the fencing club he started in Haapsalu is still going strong today.  But The Fencer, like many a true story of the screen, is sometimes hard to believe, thanks to its clichéd narrative apparatus.   Endel Nelis, as conceived in Anna Heinämaa’s screenplay, is a combination of types – inspirational teacher and man on the run.  The drama depends on the moral dilemma and heroic self-sacrifice that result from the tension between the two types – and, for its climax, on a David-vs-Goliath(s) sporting competition.  The clichés are there in the details of individual episodes, as well as the overall framework.  Endel’s initial reticence with Kadri and temporary fallings out with Jaan and Marta, the two key members of his fencing team, are par for the course.  The Soviet-toady principal proposes, to a meeting of parents, an end to ‘feudal’ fencing at the school and takes a show of hands; those in favour of fencing take so long to raise their hands that the sequence plays as a comic parody of this kind of pivotal-moment-scene.  On arrival at the competition in Leningrad, the Haapsalu team looks set to be disqualified from taking part because their equipment isn’t up to scratch:  Endel’s desperate requests to borrow kit from their competitors are rebuffed until another team coach steps forward, in the nick of time, to save the day.  Up on a balcony, the Soviet authorities watch the competition, smirking balefully, with the treacherous principal at their side, cheering on his school.  Endel’s team has three members and one reserve (Marta) – who, of course, delivers the final decisive hit.  Their coach  isn’t there to celebrate his team’s victory – even though he hasn’t made a getaway, this brings to mind the suddenly vanished von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, when they’re announced the winners of first prize at the Salzburg festival.  The figure-glimpsed-through-train-smoke on the railway platform at the end of The Fencer could easily be mistaken for the returning father in The Railway Children.

    Klaus Härö scores higher marks for casting than he does for directing (most of) his actors.  The principal (Hendrik Toompere), his creepy acolyte (Jaak Prints) and Marta (the extraordinarily pale blonde Liisa Koppel) are striking to look at but their acting – especially their reacting – is mostly too deliberate. Yet, in spite of all this, I loved The Fencer – it gradually turned into the most thoroughly affecting new picture I’ve seen this year.  (As a result, the revelation that Endel Nelis really existed was exceptionally heartwarming.)  The emotional effect was so strong that I came out of Curzon Bloomsbury feeling thankful to Klaus Härö not just for the film he’d made but for reassuring me that it’s worth spending hours each week in the cinema because there’s always the possibility of experiencing something like this.  How come?   The answer’s simple, I think:  The Fencer shows what can be achieved with a fundamentally involving human story and a good actor in a dominant leading role.

    As Endel, Märt Avandi holds the camera with remarkable sensitivity:  Endel never gives a lot away but Avandi does a fine, subtle job of distinguishing between the different registers of his reserve.  At first, Endel keeps himself to himself because he needs to conceal his past identity; as his love for Kadri (Ursula Ratasepp) and for the kids strengthens, he has new emotions to contain.  Märt Avandi’s playing creates such a pressure that, when the character does occasionally show more emotion, the impact is powerful – for example, the wonderful, choked laugh of disbelieving gratitude, when Endel opens the crates of fencing equipment his friend in Leningrad has sent to the school.  Avandi gives Endel a moving combination of anxiety and nobility, and uses his body as expressively as his face – the shape of his fencing positions, Endel’s nervously excited hand movements, as he encourages his team in Leningrad.  In the supporting roles, the best work comes from Joonas Koff as Jaan and, especially, Lembit Ulfsak, as Jaan’s grandfather. Klaus Härö exploits essential features of fencing to convey – obviously but effectively – the hero’s situation:  a faceless but unignorable opponent continuously threatens to penetrate Endel’s guard.   With the help of his cinematographer Tuomo Hutri, Härö also creates some impressively melancholy landscapes.  A sparse, sensitive piano score is just what you’d expect in a piece like The Fencer; Gert Wilden Jr’s sparse, sensitive piano score works, even so.  (There’s a bit of it that echoes one of the best-known phrases in Pictures at an Exhibition.)  By hinting at what the protagonist is feeling, the music complements Märt Avandi’s beautiful performance.

    5 October 2016

  • The First Monday in May

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Rossi (2016)

    New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is open every day of the year except four.  The exceptions are Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the first Monday in May, when the annual benefit gala of the Met’s Costume Institute takes place.  Andrew Rossi’s documentary is about preparations for the 2015 gala, and a whole lot else besides.  The gala launched the Met’s ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ show, curated by Andrew Bolton, and The First Monday in May follows that show’s development over a period of several months.  The film also includes pronouncements (rather than debate) about fashion as art and, as if R J Cutler’s The September Issue (2009) were not enough, describes the power and personality of Anna Wintour.  Chair of the Met gala committee since 1995, Wintour is considered chiefly responsible for the event’s huge and sustained success as a fund-raiser:  the Costume Institute resides in what is now the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

    A prologue tells us that ‘Savage Beauty’, the Costume Institute’s 2011 show in celebration of the recently deceased Alexander McQueen, changed critical perceptions about the status of fashion as an art form.  A postscript to the film explains that ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ became one of the most popular exhibitions ever mounted by the Met:  by the end of August 2015, the show had attracted some 670,000 visitors, breaking the record, set by ‘Savage Beauty’, for a Costume Institute show.  Between the prologue and the postscript, there are several reminders, from Anna Wintour and others, that fashion is driven by the imperatives of both art and commerce.  The implication is that this combination is peculiar to fashion and one contributor says that its commercial aspect – its ‘impurity’ – is why fashion struggles for acceptance as art.  Neither suggestion is convincing.  The tension between creative freedom and commercial considerations clearly isn’t unique to fashion – cinema is just the most obvious other example.  A picture’s high selling price in the upper reaches of the art world is unlikely to detract from its artistic reputation.  The talking heads in The First Monday in May keep straining for the cultural high ground yet it’s commercial outcome that repeatedly registers as, in their eyes, the final proof of value.  This is striking:  you wouldn’t get people in an artistically pretentious documentary about a movie-maker justifying her or him as an auteur on the basis of box-office takings.

    The film’s contributors are often at pains to present themselves as conscientious but their consciences don’t put up much of a fight.  We learn that the top people in the Costume Institute agonised over whether, little more than a year after Alexander McQueen’s suicide, it was too soon for ‘Savage Beauty’.   (The show opened at the Met on 4 May 2011 so must have gone into development well before the first anniversary of McQueen’s death in February 2010.)  It seems the organisers’ minds were put at rest by the record-breaking ticket sales (there’s no suggestion that any of those tickets could have been bought by ghouls).  When the celebrity guests arrive for the 2015 Met gala, one of the talking heads admits to having worried that some might turn up in tasteless travesties of Chinese costume – and to relief that his fears have proved unfounded.  In the event, he says, the stars whose designers have opted for chinoiserie have been sensitively creative – though it’s hard to imagine, looking at some of the outfits, what would count as a tasteless travesty if these don’t.  The logic seems to be that, if a costume photographs well for the pages of fashion or society magazines, it’s morally irreproachable.  By the end of The First Monday in May, the man behind the camera appears to judge worth in the same way as the people in front of the camera.  The legend that Andrew Rossi puts on the screen about visitor numbers for ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ has the force of a succinct, complete vindication of the show.

    When Sally and I went to see ‘Savage Beauty’ at the V&A in 2015, I was struck by the fact that Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary creations weren’t allowed to speak for themselves.  Each display was supplemented by the late designer’s words – explanations of how his work reflected his views about anthropology, ecology, politics and so on.  It was as if, in order to take McQueen seriously as an artist, we needed to believe he was an intellectual too (in spite of his humble beginnings, which were also stressed).  McQueen’s statements were sometimes self-contradictory and nearly always surplus to requirements.  I don’t see enough exhibitions in art galleries to know if this kind of verbiage – from the creator of the work rather than the curator of the exhibition – is unusual but I was often reminded of it watching The First Monday in May.  Karl Lagerfeld’s description of his work as applied art is, in the context of the film as a whole, unusually convincing: the insistence by others on fashion’s artistic credentials is more anxious than persuasive.  Harold Koda, Curator-in-Chief of the Costume Institute at the time the film was being made, claims that the coming together of high fashion and celebrity at the Met gala results in ‘something bigger than both … it’s transcendent’.  You naturally want Koda to tell us what he means by this but words fail him.  ‘Fashion,’ according to Anna Wintour, ‘is able to touch us and move us – what more could you want from art?’  Well, you might, for example, want art to make you think or to challenge the way you see the world.  For Wintour, though, that may be beside the point:  she probably feels she’s done the necessary by (again) putting the words ‘fashion’ and ‘art’ into the same sentence.  The motto of the people Andrew Rossi shows us – right through to a young man who, over the closing credits, exclaims OMG-ishly about the images of the previous night’s gala on his computer screen – might be summarised as ‘Only assert’.

    For me, the urgent yet hollow but-is-it-art aspect of The First Monday in May upstaged its other elements, the Anna Wintour phenomenon included.  As she enters the Met, armed with a comically grande coffee, the camera catches Wintour against a poster for an exhibition entitled ‘Death Becomes Her’:  this isn’t the only moment when she verges on channelling Meryl Streep channelling Anna Wintour.  An interviewer asks her thoughts on Lauren Weisberger, who wrote The Devil Wears Prada after working as Wintour’s assistant.  Wintour’s careful response is entirely consistent with the all-publicity-is-good-publicity ethos of her world but I didn’t understand why Andrew Rossi included this, or footage of Wintour analysing her famous decisiveness and telling staff off for the look of new offices that Vogue is moving to.  None of these things is immediately relevant to preparations for the Met gala, or shows Anna Wintour in anything approaching a new light.  (They do confirm, though, the impression I got from the recent BBC documentary series Absolutely Fashion, that Alexandra Shulman, Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, is a more interesting character than she is.)  Wintour’s painstaking participation in the details of the gala is occasionally more engaging – she’s hands-on to the extent of fractionally adjusting the position of chairs at the dinner tables.

    The curator Andrew Bolton, who grew up in a small town in Lancashire, is amusing when he recounts a careers adviser visiting his secondary school and asking Bolton what he wanted to be when he grew up:  the answer was curator of the Met’s Costume Institute.  (The what-happened-next legends at the end of The First Monday in May explain that, in September 2015, it was announced that Bolton would succeed Harold Koda as the Institute’s Curator-in-Chief.)   Bolton is more predictable in what he has to say as ‘Through the Looking Glass’ takes shape, although this impression is probably created as much by Andrew Rossi’s shallow approach as by Bolton himself.  The Met’s head of Asian art expresses discreet but definite concerns that artefacts from the collection are liable to be used as, in effect, stage props for the clothes on display in ‘Through the Looking Glass’.  This tension isn’t investigated:  the polite Asian art man confirms that the final exhibition is fine by him, even though it’s far from clear how his concerns have been addressed.  The show explores the influence of Chinese design on Western fashion over a period of several centuries.  Wong Kar Wai is recruited as an adviser largely, it seems, because of Andrew Bolton’s enthusiasm for the costume designs in In the Mood for Love but at least Bolton takes heed of Wong’s quietly trenchant advice against putting an image of Mao in the middle of a display of Buddha sculptures.   There are some prickly exchanges when Bolton and Wintour visit China and talk with journalists there about the show, and a few sharp comments about the state of (under)development of modern Chinese aesthetics.  Rossi’s coverage of the final preparations for ‘Through the Looking Glass’ is conventional down-to-the-wire stuff, familiar from countless television programmes about completing a project on schedule and, like all those programmes, resulting in emphatic triumph.  The costume exhibits themselves are remarkable and often beautiful.  Seeing them on film was, for this viewer, much preferable to traipsing round a museum.

    4 October 2016

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