Film review

  • The Club

    Old YorkerFilm review

    El club

    Pablo Larraín (2015)

    The Club gets off to a fine start.  It would be even better in the unlikely event that you didn’t already know what the film was about.  Five people – four men and a woman, middle-aged or elderly, none of them remarkable to look at – are training a greyhound on a windswept beach.  Then the dog takes part in a race – it’s a low-key affair, with the traps set on a piece of common land and the race watched by a straggle of spectators.  The anonymity of these social rituals is oddly absorbing and must increase the impact of finding out who the greyhound’s owners are, if you’ve not heard about Pablo Larraín’s latest before seeing it.  There’s an early hint, though, that the film’s title may not refer to a community of dog-racing fans.   Larraín puts up on the screen at the start Genesis 1:4:

    ‘And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’

    The setting of The Club is La Boca, a small Chilean beach town.  The four men with the greyhound are retired Catholic priests.  The woman is their housekeeper and an ex-nun.  The group live in a ‘safe house’, provided by the Catholic church, and their exile in La Boca is the result of the crimes they committed during their working lives.  The settled domestic routine is interrupted by two related events.  A fifth priest, Father Lazcano, joins the household.  He has been followed throughout his career, and now to La Boca, by a vagrant man who, as a child, was sexually abused by Lazcano.  This man, whose name is Sandokan, stands outside the priests’ house and describes, in a loud voice and distressing detail, the abuse that he suffered.  Lazcano puts a gun to his own head and fires it.  In the light of this suicide, Father García, a senior priest from the archdiocese in Santiago, arrives.  It’s not immediately clear whether García is a crisis counsellor or if his mission is less benign but his advent fundamentally unsettles the ménage à cinq, as does Sandokan’s continuing presence in the town.

    The use of the verse from Genesis comes to seem ironic.  In visual terms, dividing the light from the darkness is just what Pablo Larraín doesn’t do.  The Club is shot in glum, muted colours and the film has a grainy look.  (The cinematography is by Sergio Armstrong and the art director was Estefanía Larraín.)  The muddy visual scheme is morally suggestive too – of the limbo or netherworld that the priests inhabit.  In an interview in this month’s Sight & Sound, Larraín explains that:  ‘We tried to find a space where none of what you are seeing is clear’.  He goes on to rail against the increasing hegemony of high-definition imagery in contemporary cinema and to make a plea for there to be ‘a different look to each film’.  Larraín undoubtedly achieves a different look in The Club, as he did in his previous movie No, but the effect of this is increasingly frustrating.  Moral opacity is one thing.  Seeing the characters, in simple visual terms, through a glass darkly is another.

    There are interesting complexities in The Club.  The household is resentfully resistant to the prospect of change:  from their interviews with Father García, we get the impression that the priests feel they should also have been left alone to carry on with their earlier, criminal lives.  One of the most startling aspects of Sandokan’s revelations is his idée fixe that a priest’s word is divinely sanctioned, his instructions no less ordained by God when the priest is indulging his paedophilia.  Father Vidal – who adores his greyhound, extols homosexual love and is disgusted by women – is a challenging personality:  Alfredo Castro, behind a pair of spectacles, invests Vidal with a perfectly complementary greyness.  Marcelo Alonso’s García has a good enigmatic quality – it’s hard to tell if he’s deeply holy or wholly foxy.  But some of these elements don’t play out convincingly.  If Sandokan (Roberto Farías) holds benighted beliefs about the sanctity of the priesthood, why does he accuse Father Lazcano from the rooftops?  The pretext for this is that the drug-addict Sandokan is mentally disturbed but he shows relative self-control during most of what follows, until another outburst is needed by the plot:  Sandokan’s symbolic voice, calling the priests to account, violates the prevailing realism of the film’s setting and tone.  Why does Father Vidal think he can get a couple of cheerfully godless young surfers to take out the troublesome García (it’s clear by now he’s planning to close down the safe house)?  The answer seems to be so that these lads can eventually beat up Vidal, when they find out he’s a priest.

    This is part of a sudden onslaught of violent acts.  It’s more shocking because displays of violence have been absent from what’s gone before – even though physical abuse has developed as essential to the texture of the film, both through Sandokan’s descriptions of being abused and his grim anal penetration of a prostitute (Paola Lattus).  The outright violence includes the killing of all the town’s greyhounds and an assault on Sandokan, who’s suspected of responsibility for this.  I found this climax as puzzling as it’s distressing to watch.  It’s as if the priests’ wrongdoings are so heinous that Pablo Larraín needs an expression of appalling mayhem to match or purge them.  The priests haven’t all done the same wrong, though.  Father Ortega (Alejandro Goic) oversaw baby-snatching from unwed mothers, with the babies given to more affluent married women who wanted but couldn’t have children of their own.  The weirdly smiling housekeeper, Sister Mónica (Antonia Zegers), beat an African child whom she’d adopted.  While these things may be in the same league as Laczano’s exploitation of Sandokan, the priests’ complicity with the Pinochet regime, however unlovely that may be, isn’t viscerally outraging in the same way.  I don’t get the killing of the dogs, which is organised by García.  Tony Rayns’s admiring review of The Club in Sight & Sound is mostly cogent but he too is difficult to understand on this point.  Rayns describes what García does both as a response to Mónica’s threat to go to the press about the safe house and as ‘a berserk idea … simply to snatch away the pleasure the priests take in dog-racing’.  Wouldn’t the local press be interested in the canine slaughter?  Can’t the residents of La Boca – and, indeed, the priests – get replacement dogs?

    The Club is a serious-minded but unsatisfying film.  The priests and Mónica eventually succeed in preserving the status quo, to the extent that they continue living in the safe house.  There is, however, an important new resident.  Before taking his leave, García moves in Sandokan.  The latter warns there’ll be trouble if anyone interferes with his complicated regimen of drugs.  Tony Rayns describes the enlarged household as ‘a perfect huis clos that will damn everyone in it to lifelong torment’.  This ending is metaphorically apt – the priests must share their home with the living evidence of their misdeeds – but its force is undercut by other aspects of the screenplay (which Pablo Larraín wrote with Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos).  Why will Sandokan, in view of the insecurity of his life and his terrible delusions, hate having a roof over his head and co-habiting with men of God?   Sandokan may not be an ideal house guest but, from the secretive priests’ point of view, he may be less of a threat indoors than in the outside world.  Since a main point of the story is that they show no contrition for their past misdemeanours, why will his continuing presence torment them?  What’s to stop the priests, once García has returned to Santiago, from getting back into much of their old routine?

    The soundtrack includes music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.  There were many typos in the English subtitles.

    4 April 2016

  • Made in Dagenham

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nigel Cole (2010)

    The sewing machinists who went on strike at Ford’s in Dagenham in the summer of 1968 are a part of political history.  These women gave considerable impetus to the move towards equal pay legislation.  But I was dreading this dramatisation of their campaign, which is being promoted as the latest in a tradition of socially conscious feelgood British pictures.  The film’s structure is predictable and the direction unimaginative – an extraordinary story is made to seem generic, to derive not from actual and particular events but from a movie formula originally associated with Ealing Studios and popular in a debased form in films like The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Calendar Girls (also directed by Nigel Cole) and, most recently, The Boat That Rocked.  The motor of these pictures is the team spirit of a motley collection of canny underdogs which thwarts establishment forces of some kind.  I found myself getting impatient halfway through:  you know it’s a matter of the filmmakers working their way through an agenda of standard scenes and crises.  Yet I enjoyed Made in Dagenham much more than I expected, thanks to some of the actors.

    The surprising, unassuming leader of the machinists is a thirtyish housewife called Rita O’Grady, whose husband Eddie also works at Ford’s.  Rita steps in at the encouragement of Albert, a union man who is also the women’s mentor, largely because the energies of Connie, the long-serving shop steward, are devoted to her ailing husband.  (Rita O’Grady wasn’t a real person and I assume that all the characters in Billy Ivory’s screenplay, except for the politicians involved, are inventions.)  It was obvious from Happy-Go-Lucky that Sally Hawkins was capable of more depth and variety than the character of Poppy – or, at least, the way Mike Leigh encouraged Hawkins to play Poppy – allowed her to show.  She proves it here as Rita.   When the machinists are eventually summoned to a meeting with Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Rita asks Lisa, a middle-class woman who teaches at Rita’s son’s school, if she can borrow the red dress from Biba that Rita so admired when the pair first met[1].  (It makes no sense since Rosamund Pike, who plays Lisa, is much taller than Sally Hawkins, but let that pass.  The costume enables an amusing exchange between Rita and Barbara Castle as they prepare to face the cameras and Mrs Castle explains that she favours C&A.)  This is the dress Hawkins is wearing on the posters for Made in Dagenham, where she looks too soignée.  But that isn’t a problem in the film itself.  Her careworn prettiness is just right for Rita and she gives the character a lovely blend of strength and fragility, of diffidence and determination.  Her looks and her line readings are true, often funny, and delicately expressive.   We sense from Hawkins that Rita never quite believes it’s possible that she’s doing what she’s doing, yet she’s credibly driven too.

    The growing tensions between Rita and Eddie are obviously constructed but Ivory has written some good dialogue for these scenes between the couple and Hawkins is very well partnered by Daniel Mays, who plays Eddie empathetically and, although the odds are stacked against him, makes him individual.  It’s disappointing that, having created a convincing family life for the O’Gradys, Cole and Ivory do very little to show the effects of Rita’s political activity on her children – and it’s frustrating that Sally Hawkins is denied the opportunity to show what this means to Rita.  Her speech at the TUC conference at Eastbourne doesn’t work.  What she says is far too personal and intimate – an audience of senior TUC men of the 1960s would more likely have been embarrassed than spellbound.  Cole virtually admits his mistake by cutting away from the conference hall so that we don’t see the delegates applauding:  we know only that they vote to support the Dagenham women’s action. (This whole episode is presumably a fiction:  the strike was over by the time of the political conference season of 1968.)

    After an uncertain start, Miranda Richardson is enjoyable as Barbara Castle.  Once she’s got through a particularly stupid sequence of bawling out her inept officials in Whitehall (the wicked queen in pantomime turning on her acolytes), Richardson seems to relax and start enjoying herself.  That chimes with one’s memories of the public persona of Barbara Castle.  Richardson is too po-faced at first; Castle often used a smile to turn the knife.   Although it’s a wretched role, Rosamund Pike is charming as Lisa – she’s a lovely, witty, emotionally fluid presence.  There are actors too in Made in Dagenham whom I usually find over-deliberate but who give strong, likeable performances here – Geraldine James as Connie, Bob Hoskins as Albert.  It comes as no surprise that Kenneth Cranham is effective as a leathery, rulebound union official who’s as anxious as the bosses to maintain the status quo.

    Made in Dagenham is so dramatically clichéd that a threatened departure from the clichés is disorienting.  Connie’s husband George (Roger Lloyd Pack) is having a nervous breakdown and on the edge of violence.  You think he might hit his wife as she prepares to go out to a political meeting but he’s calm and their parting words to each other are conclusively affectionate:  you know from this exchange that Connie will never again see her husband alive.  Cut to Connie, walking along, chatting happily with Rita:  for a moment, I thought this was happening next day and that I was wrong:  it was almost a relief when I realised it was later on the same evening and Connie is returning home, to find that George has hanged himself.  The film’s conclusion is surprisingly perfunctory, almost careless.  Because the goodies and baddies are crudely conceived, it’s something of a relief to avoid a rundown of how everyone ends up but the way the Bob Hoskins character is dropped is frustrating.  Albert’s commitment to sexual equality in the workplace – the legacy of watching his mother work hard and earn little as she kept the family together – is so striking in a man of his class and time that his disappearance from the conclusion is a real omission.

    You notice from the news film which accompanies the closing credits that the actual Dagenham women were an older group than their movie counterparts.  This is an odd reshaping of the facts.  It doesn’t only obscure the social truth of the situation; the filmmakers also deprive themselves of the chance to create some easily distinct roles and make use of middle-aged character actresses.  Instead, younger performers are asked to do parts that seem to be cut from the same cloth:  Andrea Riseborough, for example, plays the cheerfully profane Brenda perfectly well but the character is so thinly written that she makes little impression.  Interspersed with the archive footage are snatches of interviews with the Dagenham women as they are now.  These women must have been young in 1968 but there’s no suggestion that they led the campaign.  (Nigel Cole uses news film well at both ends of the picture:  there are inserts from an information film at the start which neatly supply the facts about the Ford operation in Britain at the time.)

    Billy Ivory’s script barely hints at tensions among the women as the going gets tough.  When Connie’s husband commits suicide his widow has one of those obligatory, rarely believable home-truths-telling outbursts at the funeral but her anger with Rita hasn’t that much to do with the industrial action.  Only Sandra (Jaime Winstone), the blonde dolly bird who thinks that press attention to the walkout could be her passport to a modelling contract, complains about the measly strike pay in her wage packet and verges on betrayal of the others.  (Jaime Winston’s brassiness is rather affecting:  her features have  a coarseness that emphasises the distance between Sandra and Twiggy, whom she dreams of emulating.)  Cole and Ivory don’t treat Lisa much better than her chauvinist husband does:  the character is on the receiving end of the most weakly contrived bit of plotting in Made in Dagenham.  It turns out that Lisa is married to one of the Ford bosses (Rupert Graves, who seems ready at first to avoid caricature but quite soon has to fall back on it).  Lisa organises her own campaign to get one of the teaching staff – a corporal punisher (Andrew Lincoln – he has one scene only but that’s enough) – removed.  Lisa tells Rita that she’s a Cambridge graduate, trapped in a humiliating marriage:  she want to see the machinists’ fight succeed.  Of course you can see the points that Cole and Ivory are making but they don’t add up.  It would be easy enough to accept this if Lisa was a purely decorative wife – but why would a beautiful, clever young woman like her, in the late 1960s, feel she was trapped in a marriage (especially since she’s self-confident enough to make waves by righting wrongs at the school)?

    The men in the movie are mostly contemptible – and mostly cartoons, without the liveliness that might redeem the crudeness.  It’s just embarrassing to watch the actors playing Barbara Castle’s civil servants or to hear an American voice (did I see Danny Glover’s name on the credits?) yelling expletives down the phone from headquarters across the Atlantic, although Richard Schiff does respectably as the Ford company’s envoy to London.  John Sessions’s Harold Wilson is improbably complacent (like him or not, Wilson was too paranoid for that) – presumably for the sake of presenting him as condescending towards the star woman in his cabinet and as in thrall to Ford’s economic muscle.

    The film, photographed by John de Borman, looks hideous – and the cramped, toneless visuals don’t amount to any kind of style or social commentary:  they’re the same in all settings.  There’s the usual chronological precision (the action starts on a specific date in 1968) followed by carelessness:  the television in Rita’s home is showing the anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square which didn’t happen until the autumn of the same year.  The pop soundtrack is agreeable but the choice of songs is too obvious (‘The Israelites’ as the women cycle to work over the opening titles, ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ at the business end of proceedings).   One of the two women who came out of the theatre just ahead of me was deriding, bitterly and not unreasonably, the implication of Made in Dagenham that the Ford machinists sealed the equal pay deal for British women.  But, as the closing legends tell us, the Equal Pay Act did complete its passage through parliament in May 1970 – just a few weeks before the Wilson government left office.  (This was the same ‘failed’ government that also oversaw the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, and the creation of the OU.)

    5 October 2010

    [1] This note was written when I first saw the film in 2010.  I don’t normally edit these notes on second thoughts or after another viewing but, as I discovered from watching Made in Dagenham a second time (on television), this is such a bad error that I have to admit it.  Lisa isn’t a teacher but the mother of another boy in the school.  (It appears to be a fee-paying school with a few scholarship places for bright working-class kids, of whom Rita’s son is one.)  Lisa got a first in history from Cambridge.  Since the film presents her as frustrated by the uselessness of her life I’m not sure why I thought she was a secondary school teacher (which plenty of Cambridge graduates, male as well as female, were at the time).

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