Film review

  • Finally, Sunday!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vivement Dimanche!

    François Truffaut (1983)

    I doubt there are many good films with an exclamation mark in the title.  Anyway, this isn’t one of them.   (The awkward English title reads like a translation:  the picture was released in the US as Confidentially Yours.)  Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumour in the year that Finally, Sunday! was released and he died in the following year.  For a while, I felt guilty disliking the film because it was the last one he completed.    By the end, it had become so annoying that irritation had eclipsed guilt.  The film certainly moves quickly and fluently but to like it you need not only to love the crime thriller genre and Hitchcock’s work in particular but also to want nothing more from two hours in the cinema than spotting references to other movies and chuckling at familiar crime-caper machinery.  (The source material is an American novel, The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams.  Truffaut did the adaptation with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel.)

    Finally, Sunday! is the story of how Barbara Becker, after losing her job as secretary to estate agent Julien Vercel, turns private investigator to try and prove him innocent of the murders for which he’s suspected.  The basic plot obviously has some connection to The Wrong Man, The 39 Steps and others in the Hitchcock canon.  (The couple’s bickering before they fall in love also recalls the Robert Donat-Madeleine Carroll routines in The 39 Steps.)  The boss-secretary relationship is a reminder of Psycho and there’s a scene of Barbara driving alone – in the dark, in lashing rain – that evokes Marion Crane on the way to Bates Motel.  Barbara is a brunette:  her disappointment that Vercel prefers blondes must be a nod to Hitchcock’s own preferences.  But neither The 39 Steps nor Psycho (I’ve not seen The Wrong Man) has the self-consciousness of Finally, Sunday!  This is a relentlessly sprightly jeu d’esprit and a mostly empty exercise in style.  (The sleek black-and-white photography is by Nestor Almendros.)

    The film’s first two sequences may also be its best.  Fanny Ardant as Barbara makes a great entrance, as we see her walking down the street of the provincial French town where the story is set, giving an amiable brush-off to a young man who likes the look of her.  Truffaut then cuts to Jean-Louis Trintignant, as Vercel, out shooting wild birds from across a lake.  The death of one of the other shooters there, in which Vercel appears to be implicated, is staged expertly and startlingly.  The partnership between Ardant and Trintignant works well enough throughout – there’s a good connection between them, although she is very self-aware.  Ardant is tall and has an intrepid spirit (she’s like a less eccentric Geena Davis).  She moves with such exuberance that she’s almost intimidating.  At one point, Barbara is in costume, a tunic and high boots, for rehearsals of an amateur production of a Victor Hugo play, and Ardant looks great in this outfit.  (It made me realise the principal boy quality in her movement.)   Trintignant’s shifty, ratty look is invaluable.  His Vercel, in hiding at the back of his office, is always witty but rarely likeable:  it would come as no surprise if he turned out to be guilty of the murders he’s wanted for, and he keeps us (and Barbara) wondering.  Trintignant’s shrunken quality makes you wonder if Vercel’s body is caving in under the weight of a guilty conscience.

    There’s a happy, matrimonial ending.  One of the last and one of the few genuinely playful images is of the feet of children in the church choir kicking about the camera cap dropped by the wedding photographer.   But even this sequence’s charm is too underlined by the music on the soundtrack.   (Georges Delerue’s score is perfect for Truffaut’s purposes, hardly a compliment.)  The film was being shown at BFI in conjunction with the ‘Jacques Audiard and the French crime thriller’ season but it has a kind of civilised jocoseness that I’m relieved not to have noticed in any of the Audiard films I’ve so far seen.  Finally, Sunday! is so deliberately light-hearted that it’s oppressive.

    28 January 2010

  • Filth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jon S Baird (2013)

    Two things surprised me about Filth, adapted by Jon S Baird from Irvine Welsh’s 1998 novel (which I’ve not read).  The first surprise was James McAvoy.  Some of the praise for his performance as the malignant protagonist, the Edinburgh detective Bruce Robertson, is a familiar reaction to an actor cast against type.  Even so, McAvoy in Filth goes well beyond anything I’ve seen him do before.  The second surprise – I’d expected a satirically amoral revel – is that Bruce Robertson is revealed to be not a simply nasty piece of work:  he’s traumatised by guilt about the death during their childhood of the kid brother of whom he was jealous – a death which Bruce caused.  At home, Bruce, when he’s not watching porn, is usually making dirty phone calls to the wife of a supposed friend but, later in the film, he tearfully watches a video of the wife who’s left him and the daughter she’s denying him access to.  When a man collapses with a heart attack in Grassmarket, Bruce is the only person to respond to the man’s wife’s screams for help, trying but failing to revive her husband.  Bruce sees the face of his lifeless brother as he works furiously to resuscitate the man.  Later on, under the influence of various drugs and drink, he experiences more grotesque and scary hallucinations.  It’s the residue of good nature in him that eventually kills Bruce, though:  he hangs himself with the Hearts scarf that the grateful Grassmarket widow has knitted for him.

    There’s a kind of echo here of Trainspotting.  In Danny Boyle’s film of Welsh’s book, you had a persistent (but not obvious) sense, throughout the mayhem, that the Ewan McGregor character had the capacity for a stable, respectable life:  it was right that’s what he ended up in.  And Bruce Robertson’s vulnerability does offer some relief.  Filth depends to a considerable extent on a viewer’s enjoying the outrageous behaviour of this misogynist, homophobe and misanthrope – self-serving, back-stabbing, manipulative, abusive in various ways.  But the possibility of his getting what he wants – specifically, a promotion to detective inspector – is unnerving and most of the audience is unlikely to want to see evil run rampant.  The effect of explaining Bruce’s pathological personality and behaviour is almost sentimental, however – even though Jon Baird and James McAvoy provide an effective final sequence.  Bruce’s vividly malevolent spark returns as he grins to camera, kicks away a chair to end his life and there’s a rapid cut to the closing credits (under a good animated sequence, designed by Frater).  What’s more, because Filth turns into an exposure of what’s wrong with Bruce personally, any idea that he’s a paradigm of his time, place and line of work is increasingly obscured.  The first half of the film looks to be describing the rottenness of both the job and the ethos of the Lothian Constabulary.  By the end, Bruce Robertson appears to be the only rotten apple in the barrow and even he has good reason to be screwed up.  It’s as if Jon Baird is anxious to show that, like his main character, he has a heart (although, in doing so, Baird may be reflecting Welsh’s novel faithfully).

    I expected likeable, lightweight James McAvoy as Bruce to be a case of Dr Johnson’s women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs.  Bruce’s voiceover at the very start didn’t entirely dispel my prejudice; throughout the movie, you’re less shaken by McAvoy’s Bruce than aware of the actor’s intelligence and understanding of how to play him.  But there’s real depth to the characterisation and McAvoy has much more vocal roughness and variety than I expected.  Good as he is, though, his casting naturally reinforces the film’s reassuring tendency and he’s a shade too eager to show Bruce’s emotional misery.  That has the effect of reassuring you further.   Jon Baird and his cinematographer Matthew Jensen have managed to create a visual equivalent of (what I assume to be) the shocking vibrancy of Irvine Welsh’s prose.  The film has plenty of style – enough to give the viewer a slight distance from the violence and vileness on display.  Although it’s not as sophisticated as A Clockwork Orange, this quality of Filth reminded me occasionally of the Kubrick movie – perhaps also because the subway murder by a gang of a Japanese tourist which triggers the main plotline here brings to mind the Droogs’ killing of the tramp. (At the same time, the familiarity of some of the Edinburgh locations – I saw Filth just twenty-four hours after Sunshine on Leith – anchored it in a real world.)  There’s an excellent choice of pop songs on the soundtrack.   Bruce’s wife has a thing about David Soul (you glimpse a framed photograph of him in the family home):  of all the sequences involving Bruce’s fantasies about the departed wife, her life as a prostitute and his tranvestism, wearing her prostitute clothes, the one featuring the now very portly Soul, as one of Bruce’s wife’s punters and singing along to his own ‘Silver Lady’, may be the most bizarre.

    Baird orchestrates the cast very well – they mostly achieve a heightened, somewhat gruelling believability.   Bruce’s male competitors for the DI job, each with his own Achilles heel, are well played by Gary Lewis, Brian McCardie, Emun Elliott and, especially, Jamie Bell.   Imogen Poots is the one and (to Bruce) alarmingly determined female DS in the group and John Sessions is, for once, OK, and appropriately porcine, as the police chief.   Jim Broadbent is exuberantly eccentric as Bruce’s GP/psychiatrist/guilty conscience.  For the second time in a few weeks (after Southcliffe on television) Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson play husband and wife.  This time Marsan is a short-sighted – in every sense – accountant whom Bruce knows from the local masonic lodge.  (I assume Bruce’s otherwise puzzling membership of a lodge is meant to underline his professional ambition.)   Henderson is the recipient of the lewd calls which Bruce is making and which he’s then asked to investigate:  as a policeman, he advises playing along with the caller rather than hanging up on him.  Shirley Henderson has a very funny scene in which she obeys instructions and finds that she’s enjoying it.  Also with Joanne Froggatt as the knitting widow, Kate Dickie as one of the other cops’ wives who’s having it off with Bruce, and Shauna Macdonald as Mrs Robertson.

    15 October 2013

     

     

     

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