Film review

  • Everlasting Moments

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick

    Jan Troell (2008)

    According to Wikipedia, the germ of this Swedish film was a series of interviews which Jan Troell’s wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, conducted in 1986 with Maja Larsson, the daughter of Ulfsäter-Troell’s father’s cousin, Maria.  Maja is the narrator of Everlasting Moments, which is set in the first years of the twentieth century and tells the story of Maria Larsson, a working-class wife and mother, who wins a camera as a lottery prize and starts taking photographs.  The setting is Malmö, Jan Troell’s home town, although the real Maria Larsson lived in Gothenburg.  This is very clearly a personal film for Troell and his wife, who worked together on the screenplay with Niklas Rådström – and the material has an inherent meaning to them that the narrative structure doesn’t fully express.  Maja is a quiet observer of her family’s life (and Nellie Almgren, who plays her as a child before handing over to Callin Öhrvall for Maja’s teenage years, is particularly good).  Even so, the she-is-a-camera perspective is a limited device.  There are many scenes that don’t involve Maja and you don’t get a strong sense of how her personality and attitudes were influenced by her parents or siblings.  Everlasting Moments is, nevertheless, a lovely and affecting paean to the camera and, by extension, the movie camera.  Troell’s love of moving images is conveyed particularly in sequences involving an early video recording and the public screening of a Chaplin movie.  Troell and Mischa Gavrjusjov are jointly credited as the cinematographers and the quality of light in the film is extraordinary (even as a recording from television, which is what I watched):  Troell recreates the past in a way that is both literally and metaphorically illuminating.  The wonderment you feel from this chimes with what the characters in the story, especially Maria, experience through their discovery of the miracles that a camera can achieve.

    The two main relationships in the film are the conscientious, resilient Maria’s marriage to volatile, alcoholic, womanising Sigfrid (Sigge) and her friendship with an older man – the courteous, benign, unobtrusively dapper Sebastian Pedersen, who runs a local photographic business.  Everlasting Moments is more effective in dramatising the personal details of the characters’ lives than in realising their social and political context on a larger scale.  The description of industrial action in the Malmö dockyards, where Sigge finds employment as often as he can, is workmanlike rather than imaginative.  Jan Troell is, however, acutely insightful about the heroine and her circumstances:  we learn that, in spite of her passion for photography, Maria simply puts away her camera for several years as a result of the family’s moving house and two more children being born to her.  Although the character doesn’t develop much, Mikael Persbrandt imparts very well both Sigge’s capacity for easy enjoyment, which Maria doesn’t share, and his brittleness.  There’s the occasional frustrating omission – it would have been good to see, for example, the reaction of the husband when one of the children contracts polio – but a subplot in which Sigge takes care of a horse, out of a combination of natural fondness for the animal and pride in its becoming his private property, is persuasive.  The eventual reconciliation of Maria and Sigge seems too pat but both the actors concerned are excellent throughout in hinting at the couple’s original feelings for each other:  Maria Heiskanen indicates economically but incisively what once attracted Maria to Sigge, even though she now finds him, more often than not, offensively exasperating.

    The Great War, in the words of Maja’s narration (voiced by Birte Heribertsson), goes ‘on and on’, and so does Sigge’s domestic tyranny.  Some will find Maria’s long-suffering nature and self-denial vexing but this, again, is a credible comment on the situation of women of her time and class – a comment animated through Maria Heiskanen’s skilful individualisation of Maria.  Jan Troell means us to feel both frustration with Maria and admiration for her.  He achieves this successfully and not manipulatively.  The best scenes in Everlasting Moments, however, are those between Maria and Jesper Christensen’s Pedersen.  (Pedersen is, like the actor playing him, a Dane; Maria Heiskanen is a Finn and Maria Larsson was from Finnish stock.)  Christensen’s acting is beautiful.  There’s sadness and humour in Pedersen’s face:  the sadness is held in check and the humour allowed full extrovert expression only when Pedersen is playing a musical accompaniment, on his fiddle, to the Chaplin film.  Christensen limns these qualities of melancholy and amusement in a perfectly natural way and makes Pedersen’s neat, precise gestures wonderfully eloquent.  He suggests a life lived long before the camera started rolling.  (One event in the relationship between Maria and Pedersen seemed to me misplaced, though – I didn’t understand why it was so long after she’d taken a photograph of Pedersen that Maria gave it to him.)  Compared with the finely-shaped lead performances, some of the actors in smaller roles are too eager to make the most of their relatively slender opportunities.  Creditable exceptions include Richard Ulfsäter (Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell’s nephew) and Maria Lundqvist as assistants in Pedersen’s shop and studio.

    2 April 2015

     

  • Taking Woodstock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ang Lee (2009)

    Ang Lee has been quoted in interviews as saying that he was attracted to this project partly to break a sequence of demanding dramas.  Since he moved to America in the mid-1990s Lee has made seven films:  Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Lust, Caution (2007).  Not of all them would seem to qualify as wrenching or heavyweight but you see what Lee means.  Taking Woodstock is the (true) story of how, in August 1969, a young man called Elliot Tiber offered his family’s rundown motel in White Lake, in the small town of Bethel, New York, as the base for the organisers of Woodstock  (The concert took place on nearby farmland.)   It may be facile to say so but Lee looks to have decided that one way of recreating the zeitgeist is not to think incisively:  the picture is a vague mess.  And perhaps he’s not a natural director of comedy.  The script, by his long-time collaborator James Schamus (based on a book by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte), may be the root of the problem but Lee hasn’t orchestrated the performances – as if there were no need for discipline in a piece that’s essentially light-hearted.

    The first half of the film describes the machinations of various interested parties in White Lake and their motives for promoting or opposing the Woodstock Festival:  the material is designed for laughs but delivers next to none.  The smaller parts tend to be written and performed as if for sketches.  These characters don’t come over as enjoyably incidental and passing through the action – they rather perform their piece then disappear.  After an hour or so, Elliot, his father and a transvestite security guard called Vilma are talking by the side of a lake full of happily nude bathers and hear the sounds of the concert in the distance.  The father tells his son to go there and enjoy himself and at this point Taking Woodstock lurches abruptly into a life-changing-experience story.  By the end, Schamus is dropping lead weight ironies into the script:  the concert organiser Michael Lang tells Elliot that he and his pals are now off to plan an even greater happening – in California, with the Rolling Stones.  Altamont, which took place in December 1969, was marred by violence and murder.  The final shots of clearing up after the show at Woodstock has ended are bathed in a golden glow – the sun setting on an age of innocence.

    There are promising elements in the screenplay but they tend to backfire.  Making this a ‘backstage’ story, rather than relying on footage from the actual concert, is a brave idea – but without anything providing a centre instead of the music that made Woodstock a legendary event, and without any engaging characters (Woodstock is a long way from Nashville), the courage counts for nothing.  (Danny Elfman’s pleasant score is not enough to ward off increasing frustration that you’re not hearing any of the actual Woodstock performers.)  The logistics of the production must have been challenging and the slow progress of human traffic and a jam of cars en route to the concert is well staged.  As he proved in the memorable scene in Brokeback Mountain in which the two men on horseback and the sheep they’re herding travel uphill, Lee has a real talent for showing things slowly on the move.  Here, Eric Gautier’s camera moves along a procession of different people and vehicles and placards and buildings.  The sequence is flowing and natural (so unlike, say, the display of the Dunkirk set design and decoration in Atonement).  But things keep fizzling out in Taking Woodstock – without their inconsequentiality or obliqueness itself giving pleasure.   We’re introduced early on to a local theatre group who perform naked.  When they launch (clothed) into their adaptation of Three Sisters, it’s obvious what will happen so you expect some kind of amusing twist.  The group’s confrontational prologue addressed to their audience – ‘You are the watched, we will judge you’ – is fine as a comical evocation of contemporary ‘radical’ theatre.  But when they then strip off all that happens is a bit of perfunctory frenetic action, with a few members of the audience joining in and no one else appearing to care one way or the other.

    The generation gap between the characters seems to be established by performance style.  Most of the young actors are either indefinite (Demetri Martin as Elliot) or overemphatic (Emile Hirsch as Elliot’s high school contemporary, Billy) or both (Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang, although his face – that of a calculating flower child – is ideal).  Martin, whom I’d not seen before and who is best known as a stand-up comic, is too dry at the start and lacks the strength of personality needed to shoulder Elliot’s coming of age in the second half.  Young Elliot is the President of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce.  If Demetri Martin had suggested some kind of commercial appetite as the story was being set up that might at least have given Elliot the scope for entertaining metamorphosis once he’s imbibed the hippie ethos.  The senior actors are over the top – partly as a result of the wan presence of the youngsters, partly because James Schamus has written them as ethnic stereotypes:  Elliot’s parents are Russian Jewish immigrants and the script has no qualms about showing his mother as abrasively money-grubbing.  I felt sorry for Imelda Staunton in the role:  her playing isn’t crude but it’s so theatrically detailed and energetic that, with a lot of limp characterisation going on around her, Staunton becomes effortful.  As her husband, Henry Goodman is surprisingly subdued in the early stages but it’s only a matter of time before normal service is resumed and he starts overdoing the old man’s arthritic movement and Ashkenazy emotionalism.  You laugh when you first see this pair smooching after they’ve eaten ‘hash brownies’ but not for as long as their doped routine goes on. (One good thing about seeing Staunton and Goodman together, though, is that it recalls their happy partnership as Miss Adelaide and Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s Guys and Dolls in the 1990s.)   There are some compensations in the cast, particularly Liev Schreiber as the transvestite Vilma, who is easily empathetic and comically focused.  Paul Dano and Kelli Garner, the couple with whom Elliott shares his first acid trip, pair up well; Dano seems like a pleasantly dazed cherub.  Eugene Levy is the affably mercenary owner of the dairy farm where the concert takes place.  As Lang’s assistant, Mamie Gummer does pretty well with an uninspired ‘kook’ role.  She has a little of her mother’s edge and this gives a tension to Gummer’s scenes that’s a welcome contrast to the prevailing insipidness.

    In an interview in The Big Issue, Lee talked about his own memories of Woodstock as a fourteen-year-old in Taiwan.  While the long hair of Western youngsters was, to a Taiwanese teenager, unthinkably liberated, Lee remembers being puzzled by the significance of Eastern religions, elements of the cultural establishment in his part of the world, as expressions of the counterculture in America.  Imparting something of his personal memories of Woodstock into this film may well have been easier said than done; but the vaguely reminiscent texture that Lee has created amounts to a forced connection with the Woodstock Festival that doesn’t exist for him.  Elliot’s acid trip is one of the best bits in Taking Woodstock because you sense Lee at a distance from it, trying to imagine what it was like – as a result, he puts himself into the sequence more expressively.  When he resorts, as he regularly does, to split-screen shots, he seems less to be capturing the spirit of the age than merely replicating what became one of the more tedious conventions of American cinema of the decade.

    I remember having a not dissimilar feeling when I watched The Ice Storm – a feeling that Lee was remaking a type of early 1970s movie about an American family whose dysfunction was meant to reflect something in the national psyche of the time.  Brokeback Mountain was a very different matter and a much more individual story, in which the treatment of the characters qua American film types had a subversive edge.  Lee does seem to have a continuing affinity with homosexual feelings.  It’s striking how Taking Woodstock sharpens focus in the couple of moments that suggest that Elliot is gay (at other moments he comes over as borderline asexual).  I’m not saying that Lee needs this as a subject to express himself as an artist but his lack of conflicted feelings in this latest picture certainly amounts to a serious loss of energy.  Taking a break from anguish perhaps doesn’t suit Ang Lee.  Some filmmakers just aren’t themselves when they’re not under the emotional cosh.

    16 November 2009

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