Film review

  • Saltburn

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Emerald Fennell (2023)

    Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, confirms a nearly infallible rule of cinema-going:  beware any film praised as ‘deliciously dark’ (by Deadline in this case – others may well follow).  The same applies to plenty more review clichés – ‘wise, warm and wryly amusing’ comes immediately to mind, although no one’s likely to use those words about Fennell’s second feature, perhaps least of all the writer-director herself.  She has said (according to Gold Derby) that her main aim in making the film was for ‘everyone to, you know, hate it, love it, be turned on, be freaked out…whatever it makes you feel.  I want people to feel something’.  Not a sky-high ambition but there’s no denying Saltburn is quite a combination.  It’s both offensive and silly, and the two things rarely get in each other’s way.

    The story, set in the mid-noughties, begins at the start of Oxford University’s academic year, though at a college with a made-up name.  Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), from Merseyside, is an English scholar, a fresher and a misfit.  Upper crust students in the quad are tickled to see him wearing subfusc, collar and tie, even the college scarf.  At his first tutorial Oliver astounds his professor (Reece Shearsmith) with the news that he has already read everything on the reading list; his fellow tutee – a languid, lofty African American called Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) – arrives fashionably late for the tutorial, where he oozes scorn for Oliver’s earnest articulacy.  In the college dining hall, Oliver finds himself sitting opposite Michael Gavey (Ewan Mitchell), a half-demented maths whizz and seemingly the only other non-posh student at the college.  Unlike Oliver, Michael is noisily rancorous about the contempt in which he’s held by the ruling-class majority.

    Things don’t improve socially for Oliver over the course of his first year except, and crucially, in the lithe shape of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).  (A short prologue, with Oliver addressing the camera, has already made clear that Felix will be an important character and come to a bad end.)  He and Oliver bump into each other when Felix’s cycle has a puncture; Oliver offers the loan of his bike so that Felix can get to a lecture in time.  Felix doesn’t forget the kindness.  In a pub around Christmas time, he comes to the rescue when vile Farleigh pressures Oliver into buying a round that’s way beyond his slender means.  Oliver confides in Felix about his unhappy background – he’s an only child, virtually estranged from his alcoholic and/or drug-addicted parents; midway through exams, he announces, in some distress, that his father has died suddenly.  Patrician Felix invites his pleb friend to spend the summer vacation at his family’s country estate.  Oliver accepts the invitation.

    Saltburn is named not for the real seaside town in North Yorkshire but for the Catton family’s stately home (actually Drayton House in Northamptonshire).  The household includes few surprises.  Oliver is admitted by an officious, ghoulish butler (Paul Rhys).  Felix’s father Sir James (Richard E Grant) is, most of the time, a familiar eccentric aristocrat:  reading out bits of the morning paper at the family breakfast table, he seems to be talking to himself.  His much younger wife Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), an ex-model, is fragrant, charming and verbally ruthless.  She’s much relieved when ‘poor dear’ Pamela (Carey Mulligan), a drugged-up-to-the-eyeballs house guest, eventually takes her leave of Saltburn; when her death is reported a couple of scenes later, Elspeth scoffs that Pamela will do anything for attention.  The younger generation includes Venetia (Alison Oliver), the Cattons’ nubile, unstable daughter, as well as Felix and Farleigh, who turns out to be a poor relation of the Cattons, subsidised by Sir James.

    Like, for instance, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the title denotes, as well as a physical location, a state of mind which is eventually vindicated in that location.  Oliver’s state of mind is one of obsessive, envious desire; the Cattons’ pile is almost the objective correlative of the desire and certainly the stage on which it plays out.  Fennell’s set-up may be inspired by Brideshead Revisited and The Go-Between but Saltburn has a distinctive tone, announced even in the opening title sequence.  The credits, in red Gothic script, are accompanied by Handel’s Zadok the Priest, with its clarion connotations (especially in 2023) of king-making.  This introduction – jokily extravagant, more than faintly macabre – prepares the ground for a social-comedy-cum-vampire-story.  Early on, it’s doubly easy to root for Barry Keoghan’s Oliver because nearly every other character at Oxford is abominable or overplayed or both.  (Jacob Elordi’s Felix is neither but this Adonis figure is – from the outset – an image seen through Oliver’s eyes rather than an independent personality.)  Once Oliver is over the threshold at Saltburn, the good acting extends beyond Keoghan’s – thanks to Rosamund Pike’s stylish delivery and Carey Mulligan, zonked yet vivid – but it’s too soon obvious that Oliver has an agenda and what that agenda is.

    This Oliver is Quick rather than Twist but there are suggestions of his Victorian precursor beyond the shared forename.  Dickens subtitled his novel The Parish Boy’s Progress and Saltburn might be ‘The Scholarship Boy’s Progress’:  Oliver Quick keeps asking for more, and getting it.  The L P Hartley and Evelyn Waugh influences are more salient, though – in the case of Waugh so salient that Fennell acknowledges them:  when Felix tells him about bad blood and black sheep in the Catton family, Oliver thinks that ‘It sounds like an Evelyn Waugh novel’; Felix replies that Waugh based most of his characters on earlier generations of Cattons and their kin.  Vague remarks but the Brideshead echoes in Saltburn are hard to ignore:  a male friendship born at Oxford; one boy from a dismal background, the other the glamorous, doomed scion of an aristocratic family; the former fascinated by the latter’s house and kin, and what they signify.  At Felix’s funeral, there’s even a teddy bear atop the coffin.  The Go-Between connections are relatively minor in terms of theme but not in terms of scenario.  The two boys in Hartley’s novel are younger – at boarding school rather than university – but the cleverer, poorer boy’s stay at the rich boy’s family’s country home during summer holidays, generates the main plot.  The climactic events in The Go-Between take place on the visitor’s birthday, as they do here.  Unfortunately, though, these events aren’t nearly the end of Fennell’s film.  Like the ill-fated Pamela, Saltburn overstays its welcome and you end up thinking it will do anything for attention.   

    Promising Young Woman (2020), her first feature, had serious weaknesses but left no doubt about Emerald Fennell’s wit, flair and what might be termed her zeitgeist-alertness.  The same qualities are in evidence in Saltburn to much less satisfying effect.  Fennell has a facility for writing acerbic one-liners.  She knows it and, in this film, over-indulges it – the clever writing makes the same social points ad nauseam.  She also has a talent for sexual imagery which goes further than expected, and so is more startling.  At Saltburn, through a bathroom door keyhole, Oliver watches Felix masturbating in the bath; once Felix has left the bathroom, Oliver leans into the bath and laps up fluid left round the plughole.  He and Venetia have sex while she’s menstruating, which suits bloodsucker Oliver just fine.  In this department too, though, Fennell keeps upping the ante until the shock tactics pay diminishing returns.  After Felix’s funeral and the departure of the other mourners, Oliver has an erection and prostrates himself over Felix’s grave; you don’t feel much about this quasi-necrophilia except that the director is showing off.

    Zeitgeist-alertness in Saltburn is skewed and stymied by, I suspect, Fennell’s own background.  The film taps into the received idea that social status and affluence still carry excessive weight in England, restricting the best educational and career opportunities to the privileged few:  products of the top public schools are over-represented in government, in the Oxbridge student population, even at the top of the acting profession.  There’s truth, of course, in all three contentions.  The last has gained a new prominence in recent years and Fennell’s casting of Barry Keoghan in Saltburn might therefore seem irreproachable.  This young Dublin-born actor was raised by a mother who struggled with drug addiction.  She died when he was twelve; Barry and his brother spent the next seven years in foster care.  Keoghan has made it without the benefit of money or nepotism or conventional good looks.  He has built a successful film career playing variously bizarre and/or disadvantaged characters in supporting roles – in Dunkirk (2017), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), American Animals (2018), culminating in his BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).  He’s an oddball again in Saltburn but he has the starring role in a big-name cast.  And Oliver becomes, if not quite a romantic lead, at least a sexually not-to-be-sneezed-at figure.

    Unfortunately for Keoghan, he’s playing a character who, even in the flamboyantly non-naturalistic setting of Saltburn, is less than plausible – and deplorably conceived.  Emerald Fennell was an Oxford student in the noughties, at Greyfriars, then a ‘permanent private hall’ of the University[1].  Prior to that, she was privately educated, at Marlborough College.  She knows her story’s Oxford context from personal experience; her protagonist’s personal context may be another matter.  Fennell makes an immediate point having the posh students in the quad snigger at Oliver for looking his awkward best.  It surprised this viewer they even bothered to notice him but maybe Fennell herself was once struck by the spectacle of an Oxford new boy so ill at ease with the place that he thought wearing his grown-up’s school uniform was the done thing – maybe she wondered what on earth such a boy’s background could be.  Oliver’s invention of his background is exposed when Felix, as a birthday surprise, drives him to Merseyside to the home of his recently widowed mother.  (Not sure how Felix got hold of the address but let that pass.)  It turns out she’s neither a widow nor by any stretch of the imagination a drug user or alcoholic.  Oliver’s mother (Dorothy Atkinson) and father (Shaun Dooley) both seem thoroughly respectable.  They live in a pleasant, modest, suburban house.  They’re delighted to welcome Oliver on his birthday and with such a nice new friend – they’re only sorry they don’t see more of their son or even hear from him.

    Oliver may be an accomplished and, until this point, a successful liar but it seems he wasn’t making things up when he told Felix he had no friends at school:  his parents confirm this to Felix.  Why should that be?  Fennell appears to assume that in the state system anyone brainy must have been considered a freak and isolated accordingly.  She also implies that English class structures are so pernicious and compelling that the likes of Oliver are bound to be driven by furious, thwarted materialism – a thesis hardly more edifying than a right-wing press editorial decrying ‘the politics of envy’.   If she’s not suggesting this and regards her anti-hero not as representative but as a sociopathic anomaly, what’s the point of her story – and why make Oliver the socio-economic inferior of everyone else in it?  I might be more ready to give Fennell the benefit of the doubt about this if I didn’t think she preferred her super-rich characters.  She’s too clever to say so explicitly.  As she told Vanity Fair recently:

    ‘My favorite thing in general is sympathy for the devil … The sorts of people that we can’t stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrent—if we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that’s just such an interesting dynamic.’

    This still smacks of seeing the Cattons as irresistible monsters – as, because of their lifestyle and ‘values’, so much more fun than hoi-polloi.

    It will be clear from a few paragraphs back that Oliver is determined to screw, in one way or another, the members of the Catton family.  There are occasional unwelcome interruptions to his progress, such as the birthday drive to his parents’ home; for the most part, though, he plots his takeover as capably as the have-nots in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019).  Fennell’s most effective reveal comes in a flashback that shows Oliver letting down Felix’s bicycle tyre before the ‘chance’ fateful encounter that starts things between them.  This does more than disclose that Oliver had a plan from a very early stage.  It also reminds us that – long ago in the narrative – we were led to think that a romantic impulse, rather than cupidity, drove Oliver to cultivate Felix.  Saltburn might have been a much better film if Fennell had been able to sustain an idea  of mixed motives on Oliver’s part for longer.  Instead, she gets to using his sexual behaviour as a lurid expression of material covetousness.

    Given its subject, Saltburn needs to look expensive and there’s no denying it does although this too sometimes seems OTT.  For Oliver’s birthday, Elspeth arranges a cast-of-thousands gathering in the grounds of Saltburn; this comes across, even allowing for the event’s tragic climax, as a spectacular set piece for the sake of it.  The best part of the birthday evening is smaller scale:  a karaoke episode inside the house, where Oliver is made to sing to Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Rent’, does so lamely then resourcefully makes Farleigh take over the microphone:  as Oliver says, the lyric applies equally to him.  The moment is charged partly because ‘Rent’ is just such a great song but it also chimes nicely with the pair’s first tutorial at Oxford; even then, Oliver was prepared to stand up to Farleigh’s sarcasm.

    It’s striking that Emerald Fennell’s words to Vanity Fair include ‘if we can love them, if we can fall in love with [them] …’  She has Oliver, in the prologue to Saltburn and when this is reprised at the other end of the film, say of Felix that ‘I loved him – but was I in love with him?’  That’s a potentially tantalising distinction.  In contrast, Oliver’s closing speech is a letdown:  he tells us once more that he loved Felix but that ‘I also hated him’.  You don’t say.  Barry Keoghan’s acting holds up tenaciously but in the last part of the film Fennell runs out of ideas of things for him to do, except behave garishly.  In the final scene, with the grand house emptied of its former occupants and Oliver alone and in charge there, Keoghan is required to prance naked round the place, to the accompaniment of ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’.  This continues even through part of the closing credits.  Saltburn is offensive and silly to the last.

    5 October 2023

    [1] Oxford’s PPHs (says Wikipedia) ‘principally differ from colleges in the sense that the latter are governed by the fellows of the college, whereas the governance of a PPH fully or partially rests with the corresponding Christian denomination’; even so, ‘Students at PPHs are members of the University of Oxford and have full access to the university’s facilities and activities’.

     

  • Past Lives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Celine Song (2023)

    Writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature starts with three people – a woman and two men – sitting at a bar in New York City.  They’re facing not only the camera but unseen observers whose voices speculate on the trio’s relationships to each other:  one voice suggests the Asian man and woman are tourists and ‘the white guy’ is their guide?  What’s most conspicuous about the threesome is that the Asians are giving each other rapt attention with the other man on the sidelines of their mutual absorption.  Then the woman stares directly, and mournfully, into the camera lens.  The next hour or so of Past Lives tells the story of how she comes to look so sad.

    The main narrative begins with an extended flashback to Seoul, twenty-four years earlier; a girl and boy walk home from school.  She is Na Young (Seung Ah Moon); he is Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim).  They’re twelve years old, friends but also rivals at school:  Na Young is tearful because Hae Sung has come top and she second in their class’s latest maths test – we gather from their conversation it’s usually the other way round.  The two always walk to and from school together and have even been on a date (in a playground), arranged by their mothers, but Na Young is soon to emigrate to Canada with her parents and sister.  Although the children are sorry to part, their leave-taking isn’t overtly emotional.  They say a polite goodbye and literally go their separate ways.  She climbs a flight of steps to her home.  He walks at street level into the distance.

    That the two kids grew up to be the Asian woman and man in the New York bar is quickly confirmed as Celine Song moves the action forward by twelve years.  Na Young is now Nora Moon (Greta Lee), an aspiring writer living in NYC.  Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is just completing his military service in South Korea and about to resume engineering degree studies.  Nora discovers on Facebook that Hae Sung has been trying to track her down under her former name.  She makes contact with him; they start to Skype and enjoy talking together.  But Hae Sung isn’t in a position to travel to New York for at least eighteen months and Nora isn’t keen to return to Korea – to (as she sees it) backtrack to a past she’s moved on from.  At her suggestion, they stop Skyping.  Hae Sung is hurt by this but gets himself a girlfriend, though little is shown of their relationship.  At a writers’ retreat, Nora meets novelist Arthur (John Magaro) and it’s love at first sight.  Another ’12 years passes’, as the text on screen has it.  Nora is married to Arthur.  And Hae Sung is finally coming to New York to visit her.

    Celine Song was born in South Korea in 1988, emigrated with her parents to Canada when she was twelve, obtained her MFA in play writing from Colombia University in New York fourteen years later.  It’s no surprise to read that Past Lives is at least somewhat autobiographical but that doesn’t guarantee convincing plotting and Song doesn’t supply this as far as the twelve-year interruptions are concerned.  They may be crucial to Song’s heartstring-pulling purposes – the protagonists are not just Seoul mates but soulmates, meant to be, yet not, together – but the gaps in contact don’t otherwise make much sense.  The first separation is relatively plausible because it occurs in a pre-Facebook (though not a pre-email) era – never mind that Na Young and Hae Sung strike you as the kind of likeably diligent children who would ensure they had at least each other’s postal address before they parted company.  As for the hiatus between c 2010 and the present day, I just didn’t get why the pair stopped communicating in any way – or how dialogue had recently resumed.

    The thirty-something Nora looked to me quite a bit older than Hae Sung.  Appearances can be deceptive – Greta Lee is actually two years younger than Teo Yoo – but this particular deception is dramatically effective (even if unintended).  It strengthens the implication that Hae Sung is more attached than Nora to what happened between them in childhood.  Other elements reinforce that idea.  Before she discovers Hae Sung on Facebook, Nora needs her mother to remind her of the name of the boy she was so friendly with in Seoul.  Discussing him with her husband, she wonders if Hae Sung means a lot to her not because of his individual qualities but because, as a link to her childhood, he’s invested with nostalgic power.  These details ring true – as does the unresolved tension between Nora and Hae Sung when they’re first reunited in the flesh and spend an afternoon together in New York.  The conversation is tentative and stop-start.  Most of us probably have had an experience like this:  a long looked forward to opportunity to spend time with someone important finally arrives, and you’re determined not to waste it.  The determination – combined with the realisation that what you’ve often imagined is now actually happening – ties the tongue.

    And most of us internet users will recognise the impulse to try finding out what happened to childhood friends with whom we’ve lost touch.  Celine Song, though, has something higher-toned in mind:  the concept in Korean Buddhism of in-yeon – the idea that fate brings people together, and relationships between them develop, over the course of several lifetimes.  Nora first mentions this to Arthur at the writers’ retreat but we hear more and more about it during Hae Sung’s climactic visit to New York:  as a result, the impression we’ve gained that Hae Sung is keener on Nora than she is on him – which is one of the stronger aspects of Past Lives – is increasingly diluted.  Song relies on what she seems to believe is the emotive power of in-yeon, and on her lead actors, to pump up a rather undernourished script.  Nora is a writer in the vaguest terms.  When other kids at school ask why her family is emigrating, Na Young replies that ‘Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature’; in answers to questions from Hae Sung in later years, she jokes that she has adjusted her ambitions to winning a Pulitzer, later a Tony.  She drops the names of major awards more often than she talks about her writing.  It’s essentially the same with Arthur – Song proves he’s a novelist by showing him at a book-signing.  Writers these days are unlikely to pound the keys of manual typewriters or chain-smoke as they do so; film-makers are evidently struggling to come up with replacement clichés anything like as good.

    On the same evening that he leaves New York, Hae Sung goes to Nora’s apartment and meets Arthur for the first time.  The three of them go out to eat and eventually we get back to the bar scene that opened Past Lives.  Up to this point, halting conversations have been the order of the day – between Nora and Arthur (to signal that their marriage is uneasy), as well as between her and Hae Sung.  Suddenly, at the bar, the Koreans are in full flow:  Nora and Hae Sung don’t even wait for Arthur to disappear to the loo before starting their heart to heart – which is conducted, in order that ‘the white guy’ is thoroughly excluded, in Korean (even though we’ve also just heard that Arthur knows a bit of the language).  Back at the apartment afterwards, Hae Sung invites the couple to visit him in South Korea some time and phones for an Uber.  Nora goes out to wait with him on the street.  They stare longingly at each other before speculating whether they may be experiencing a past life or what their future lives together may hold.  I was relieved when the car arrived.

    Greta Lee’s beauty and presence certainly impose themselves on the film but that deliberate gaze which concludes Song’s prologue isn’t the only time that Lee is very aware of the camera; I preferred Teo Yoo’s more subtly expressive work.  As in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), John Magaro comes over as a capable naturalistic actor but a dull one.  In the screen version of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2015), the heroine, Eilis, who has returned temporarily to her native Ireland, must choose between resuming married life in New York and staying put, between forsaking her devoted Italian-American husband and disappointing her sensitive, better-off Irish suitor, who also loves her.  Eilis is fond of both men and the actors concerned, under John Crowley’s skilful direction, make you care about all three characters:  whatever Eilis decides, it’s bound to make for a poignant ending.  So it does, yet you leave the cinema exhilarated because of how well and engagingly the story has been told.  Past Lives is being widely praised but for this viewer it had almost exactly the reverse effect of Brooklyn.  I didn’t get much out of spending time with Celine Song’s principals.  I emerged from the film in rather low spirits – indifferent to what happened to Nora, Hae Sung or Arthur, in this life or the next.

    3 October 2023

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