Category: Comedies
Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shi nan nu, Taiwan-US 1994)
The ritual of the family Sunday meal
Eat Drink Man Woman is the third film in the loose trilogy of features that form the first stage in Ang Lee’s directorial career. Although made in Taiwan and presented in Mandarin, it feels like a ‘transnational film’, a traditional Chinese (family) melodrama filtered through an American sense of international cinema. It’s co-scripted by Lee’s long-time contributor James Schamus and Taiwanese writer Wang Hui-Ling (who would go to script Lee’s other Chinese films). I can’t quite put my finger on why this Taiwanese film might have faint American feel – other than Lee and Schamus sharing time together in the US. Immediately after this production Lee directed his first English language film and tackled an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility – not perhaps an enormous leap from a Taiwanese family drama.
The middle daughter Jia-Chen (Wu Chien-Lien) is the business high-flyer
There is a useful overview of Ang Lee’s early career by David Minnihan on Senses of Cinema in its ‘Great Directors’ section. He discusses Lee’s move to the US for his education and his subsequent early production career. Minnihan takes an auteurist approach in which he sees Lee’s early work, especially the ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy of Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) as an expression of Lee’s difficult relationship with his own father. The same actor, Lung Sihung, plays the father in each of these otherwise unrelated family comedy-dramas (as IMDb lists them). Each of the three is a Taiwan-US production. I haven’t seen the first two films but they both appear to deal with Taiwanese migrants in the US. Coming at Eat Drink Man Woman from a slightly different angle my first question concerns Lee’s Taiwanese background and why he doesn’t seem to be more closely concerned with the work of the Taiwanese directors who comprised the ‘New Taiwanese Cinema’ (NTC) of the 1980s. Lee was born in 1954 making him around seven years younger than the two most prominent directors of NTC, Hou Hsaio-Hsen and Edward Yang. Lee would have been in America finishing his Film MA when Hou and Yang began making their first NTC films. He wouldn’t make his own Taiwan-set film until Eat Drink Man Woman and he was surprised at the changes in Taipei when he returned. In some ways, Eat Drink Man Woman is similar to Yang’s masterpeice Yi Yi (Taiwan-Japan 2000) but Lee had not spent twenty years exploring the social history of Taiwan since 1945 like Hou and Yang.
The youngest daughter Jia-Ning (Wang Yu-Wen) is a ‘modern’ teenager
The family at the centre of the film comprises the father on the brink of retirement and his three grown-up daughters. Father is the joint top chef of a prestigious restaurant. He has a well-equipped kitchen at home with everything he needs to create a feast and every Sunday he cooks an enormously elaborate meal which has become the setting for the weekly family meeting. Important announcements will be made at this meal but much of the time the four family members don’t really communicate. Lee spends a great deal of time (and expense) showing the father making such a lunch and I was pained to see how little of it was actually eaten. A similar amount of care goes into a long tracking shot which follows the chef through the restaurant and into the kitchens when he is summoned in an emergency. It’s tempting to see this as Lee trying out the kind of long-take style demonstrated via a similar shot in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (US 1990). Something similar, though in a very different location, occurs in the large high school where the eldest daughter teaches. The camera follows the teacher down the open walkways around the large playground where volleyball is being played. This combines a long shot and long take approach. Lee also employs a long shot of a Taipei crossroads with heavy traffic much like a ‘pillow shot’ in an Ozu film.
The eldest daughter Jia-Jen (Yang Kuei-Mei) is a teacher – stuck in a rut?
The eldest daughter is introduced as a kind of ‘old maid’ character who was jilted by a lover at university and has now converted to Christianity and adopted a subdued approach to life. The middle daughter is in some ways the key character. In Minnihan’s terms she is the character who embodies Lee’s own feelings. As a teenager she had shown the most interest in cooking and wanted to be a chef or a restaurateur only to be discouraged by her father and urged to continue her education. Now she is the high-flyer, working for an airline in a senior position and wondering whether to stay in Taiwan or work abroad. The youngest daughter (whose story seems to get the least attention) works in a fast-food outlet and is seeking her independence. Her father seems less concerned about her ‘challenge’ to his love of fine cooking.
New visitors at the table and father is still entertaining
Each of the family members has a story and the narrative moves between the four stories, bringing them together at the Sunday meal. As I’ve indicated, the main story for me is that of daughter No 2 played by Wu Chien-Lien. There are also other significant characters like the other top chef ‘Old Wen’ whose actions provide a contrast (or a warning?) for the father. I did find the introduction of another set of characters quite confusing. I think these are ‘returnees’ from a previous migration and a failed marriage who are invited to stay in the family house. Lian Jin-Rong and her mother knew the chef’s family when Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang) was a girl who played with the three daughters. Now she has a child of her own and needs to re-start her life. Her predicament and that of her mother has a bearing on what will happen to the father/chef in perhaps surprising ways.
My overall view is that Eat Drink Man Woman is a carefully scripted, very well-acted film narrative skilfully constructed by Ang Lee and his crew. I watched it on my TV via MUBI in two or three parts which isn’t ideal and therefore I’m not sure if I’m being fair in suggesting that the film doesn’t in the end ‘lift off’ to become something really distinctive and that’s perhaps what suggests a kind of ‘internationalism’ about it – as if it doesn’t quite have the confidence to be a ‘contemporary Taiwanese’ story. It explores migration, education and other familiar issues but it doesn’t ‘feel’ like other Taiwanese films I’ve watched. I’ve tended to think that Ang Lee’s best films have been based on acclaimed novels/short stories, e.g. The Life of Pi or Brokeback Mountain. On the other hand it could be that there are too many central characters and not enough time to explore them all in detail? In a family melodrama like this the central conflict needs a strong focus and here the youngest daughter seems like a peripheral character. Even so, I feel like I’ve learned more about Ang Lee’s work and I’m primed to watch some other Taiwanese melodramas in my unwatched piles of DVDs.
BlacKkKlansman (US 2018)
Adam Driver as Flip and John David Washington as Ron contemplating the KKK membership card in Ron’s name
It’s very exciting to see a Spike Lee film back in wide release in UK cinemas. BlacKkKlansman just scrapes in as a wide release with 217 cinemas but these had the highest average audience numbers of any film in UK cinemas last weekend. I have a great deal of time for Spike Lee as a filmmaker with passion, creativity and political intelligence to go with a deep knowledge of cinema and the skills to make memorable films. Having said that it’s also the case that he makes a wide range of features, shorts, documentaries and other types of moving image work and sometimes he chooses projects that puzzle me. Too often he falls foul of UK distribution companies and their notorious reluctance to release African-American films. All of this means that I hadn’t actually seen a Spike Lee ‘joint’ since I managed to import a US DVD of The Miracle at St. Anna in 2009. After all the build-up to the release of BlacKkKlansman and its Cannes Grand Prix I did worry that it could be a let-down, but it isn’t. This is Spike returning to the form that produced Do the Right Thing (1989) and Bamboozled (2000), the former universally acclaimed, the latter larger ignored – but both important films.
David Duke (Topher Grace) develops a telephone dialogue with the Klan’s new recruit
The first point to make about BlacKkKlansman is that it is packed with a great deal of material and ideas and I found that the 135 minutes flew by. I think it will take several more viewings to properly ‘read’ the film and come to any sensible conclusion about what it might mean to different audiences. Spike Lee at his best is always provocative and attempting to build a polemic using humour as well as political insight is often rejected by audiences looking for clear resolutions. My feeling at the moment is that BlacKkKlansman makes important political statements. It certainly made me think about strategies and ways to articulate arguments and it made me question some of my assumptions and ways of thinking about politics in the UK as well as the US and indeed universally. I did also wonder at moments whether Spike gets the balance right and whether his satire works – but in the circumstances I think that is inevitable.
I recommend the Sight and Sound (September) interview with Spike Lee (I have some arguments with the rather negative review of the film in the same print issue but the online piece by Sophie Monks Kaufman is also very good). Queried by Sight and Sound interviewer Kaleem Aftab about how much of the film is actually based on the real events described by Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth, Lee simply re-iterates “[the film] is based on a true story”. It’s a reasonable question – and response. Some aspects of the narrative seem so fantastical that it is hard to believe that they ever happened, but at other moments the narrative seems only too ‘real’. Ron Stallworth (played with bravura by John David Washington, son of Lee regular Denzel Washington) was the first African-American to join the Colorado Springs force in 1972 as a cadet. It wasn’t until several years later that as an undercover cop he answered an advertisement for applications to join the Ku Klux Klan. Establishing himself on the phone as a ‘white supremacist’, it then required a white officer to physically attend KKK meetings posing as ‘Ron Stallworth’. This was ‘Flip’ Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Lee and his co-writers decided to compress the story so that the events seem to take place over a few months in 1973/4. Apart from a familiar strategy to speed up the pace of the narrative, this also allows Lee to highlight questions around black identity at the time of the ‘Blaxpoitation’ cycle of films in the early 1970s alongside the fashions, the music and the ‘Black Power’ iconography.
Ron meets student leader Patrice (Laura Harrier) on his first undercover job
The wonderful Afros on display, the clothes and the music and the discussion of Shaft and Superfly and Pam Grier (complete with on-screen film posters) provide a rich mise en scène which allows Lee to explore issues within African-American culture. Ron’s first undercover job was to ‘infiltrate’ a student-organised event at which Kwame Ture (aka Stokeley Carmichael, played by Corey Hawkins) makes an impassioned plea to the students to prepare for revolution. That evening Ron meets Patrice (Laura Harrier) the student president and begins a relationship. This relationship is an invention which In genre terms allows Lee to explore a romance-thriller narrative thread. We worry about Patrice, although she is generally quite capable of looking after herself and her fellow students. But as Herb Boyd in Cineaste (Fall 2018) points out, we learn relatively little about Patrice and, apart from two or three key moments, the relationship between Ron and Flip is much more important. It is Flip who is in the most danger. The script emphasises how much the Klan are anti-semitic and Flip is someone who has never really thought about his own Jewish identity. This danger (of exposure) is an element of the romance thriller that also generates the possibility of comedy and it is these scenes (i.e. Flip among the Klan members) that test Lee’s ability to balance humour and anger. He’s helped by wonderful performances all round and especially by Jasper Pääkkönen as the most suspicious Klansman and Topher Grace as David Duke, the Klan ‘Grand Wizard’. These two are chilling and completely absurd at the same time.
Jasper Pääkkönen as Felix represents both the absurdist and the most horrific aspects of the Klan
While much of the film narrative remains within the familiar mode of ‘Hollywood realism’, Spike explores the legacy of racism in Hollywood through extracts from Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). I don’t want to spoil the impact of how he does this, but the appearance of Harry Belafonte is thrilling for anyone old enough to remember one of the great figures of the Civil Rights movement. Alec Baldwin’s appearance might be more puzzling for some audiences outside North America, although I guess his YouTube appearances as ‘Donald Trump’ are easily accessible around the world. The crucial question is how does Spike Lee end his narrative? We know Ron Stallworth survived his involvement with the Klan because he wrote his memoir in 2014. But it would be dangerous to leave us laughing and feeling good about victory. In fact, I think there is a narrative thread running throughout which keeps us querying Ron’s actions and his motivations. When the final section comes I think it works very well and I hope that BlacKkKlansman will become a classic ‘joint’ like Do The Right Thing.
BlacKkKlansman took £1.2 million on its first UK weekend and it looks set to be one of Spike’s biggest hits. I’ve failed to mention the initiative of Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele who initially brought the project to Lee and also Blumhouse Productions the company which made Get Out. Peele and Blumhouse are both part of the production background for BlacKkKlansman, demonstrating that Spike Lee is very much still part of the cutting edge of African-American cinema. Terence Blanchard, Lee’s long-time collaborator is still on board composing a fine score and including an array of great 1970s tracks. Cinematographer Chayse Irvin is new to me but Spike Lee has a strong track record in working with exciting camera people and Irvin’s work contributes a great deal to the look of the film. I want to finish by urging you to see this film. I also want to emphasise that there is much, much more to say about it so I hope some of you will add your comments.
Édouard et Caroline (France 1951)
Italian movie poster (from: http://www.benitomovieposter.com/catalog/edouard-e-caroline-p-78641.html)
Director Jacques Becker (1906-1960) was at his peak as a filmmaker in the late 1940s and 1950s, having spent much of the 1930s as an assistant to Jean Renoir. In the late 1940s and early 50s he directed a series of ‘social comedies’. Édouard et Caroline is one of these. The denouncement of the so-called ‘Quality Cinema’ or the ‘Cinéma du Papa’ (as François Truffaut called it) by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma spared Becker’s work. In her introduction to this film on the Studio Canal DVD, Professor Ginette Vincendeau describes Becker as being ‘in between’ the reviled quality film directors and la nouvelle vague directors. This was partly because of Becker’s association with Renoir and partly because the young critics recognised both the skill involved in Becker’s work and the stamp of a ‘personal vision’ similar to that which the Cahiers critics celebrated in the work of Hollywood directors such as a Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock.
Édouard et Caroline is almost like a theatrical stage production in that all the action takes place in two contrasting flats/apartments in central Paris (but in different arrondissements?) with only an opening and closing street shot and a few glimpses of staircases. Yet it is also highly cinematic with Robert Lefebvre’s fluidly roving camera. The dialogue and collaboration on the script is the responsibility of Annette Wademant who went on to also wrote significant films for Max Ophüls. She was much younger than Becker and this might have aided the sense of vitality in the interchanges between the central couple. With the camera movement and dialogue, the editing by Marguerite Renoir also helped keep the narrative moving. Because Becker was considered too ‘difficult’ and demanding and because the script in this case was so sparse, he had difficulty finding backers. Consequently the film had a small budget and a strict 30 day shooting schedule with penalties for over-runs.
An early stage in dressing when Caroline asks which shoes to wear
The titular characters are a young woman from a wealthy family (played by Ann Vernon) recently married to a young man from a poorer background (Daniel Gélin) who is a talented (and properly trained) pianist. They have little money and are living in a one room flat. All the action takes place over a few hours on the night when they have been invited to a party given by Caroline’s wealthy and well-connected Uncle Claude (Jean Galland). He has rented a grand piano and offered Édouard the chance to play for his special guests, some of whom may be able to help him get work and build a career. But Édouard is nervous about the opportunity and feels uncomfortable at the prospect of mixing with the haute bourgeoisie. Claude’s son Alain (Jacques Francis) presents another irritation with his snobbery towards Édouard and designs on his attractive cousin Caroline.
In genre terms, this film mixes elements from Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s with the sharp social observation of Jean Renoir and the sophisticated comedy of a Billy Wilder. As the dreaded party developed in Claude’s salon, I also caught a whiff of later Buñuel (Exterminating Angel (Mexico 1962)). Others have suggested the comedies of Lubitsch and Preston Sturges. I don’t mean to suggest that the film is a mish-mash of styles. Instead it is a coherent social comedy with some darker moments and a developing satire of wealthy Parisians. The plot is simple but the characterisation is strong. The young married couple, brilliantly played by Vernon and Gélin, clearly love each other but the social stress of the party creates divisions between them that get blown up to dramatic proportions. I haven’t mentioned the careful set dressing and costume design as part of the mise en scène. Costume offers the twin drivers of the narrative. Edouard has that familiar split reaction to entering ‘high society’. He despises the flummery of evening dress but feels he must have the correct attire or people will look down on him. The whole thing is disturbing him and when he can’t find his waistcoat, he gets angry. Has Caroline misplaced it? She has her own problem. She feels a different version of the same unease, thinking her pretty dress is now out of fashion and then attacking it with a pair of scissors to make it more like a current couture outfit. Becker and Wademant are able to use these two concerns to drive a wedge between the couple and to disrupt the party and Édouard’s eventual piano playing.
The wealthy guests gather for a song and a dance after Édouard’s playing.
I’d like to say more about the music Édouard does actually play (or rather ‘act’) since a professional musician’s hands double for him. I’m not knowledgeable enough about classical music to comment (I believe it is Chopin) but I do know that Becker himself was a jazz fan and he uses musical taste as one of his weapons in skewering the wealthy patrons here. They listen to Édouard’s playing politely and applaud appropriately but later we see them dancing enthusiastically to the kind of dance music Édouard (and Becker) despise. To add further indignity Becker introduces an American played by William Tubbs. Tubbs was an actor in several French and Italian films in this period. Here he speaks French with a terrible accent but proves to be much more perceptive about Edouard’s talent than the others.
I enjoyed this film very much, particularly the playing of the two leads and the fluidity and choreography of the camera work and direction. The DVD (I think there is also a Blu-ray) has two other extras as well as Ginette Vincendeau’s excellent introduction. One is a long and detailed interview with Annette Wademant, Ann Vernon and Daniel Gélin much later from French TV. The interview, full of details about the production was part of a TV broadcast of the film. What a marvellous idea. Why have we never had such detailed coverage of film in the UK? Finally there is an interview with Becker himself in which he talks about his love of jazz and discusses his satire on those who don’t understand the music. I was prompted to watch the film after watching Bertrand Tavernier’s A Journey Through French Cinema (France 2016). Tavernier tells us that the first film he remembers seeing as a child was by Becker and that several years later as a teenager in the 1950s he began to realise that Becker was one of the greatest French directors. Tavernier’s analysis of Becker’s work is fascinating and has encouraged me to search out more of Becker’s work. He emphasises that Becker was one of the first French male directors to present women as central characters in their own write – something Ginette also discusses, suggesting that Édouard et Caroline suffered in the eyes of critics, partly because its mix of comedy and romance was taken less seriously than ‘masculine’ genre films.
Here’s a very short trail for the film from French TV which allows you to meet William Tubbs and to see Caroline’s dress after her modifications:
Head Over Heels (UK 1937)
Jeanne (Jessie Matthews) in her dance mode in the nightclub gardens
In 1937 Jessie Matthews was one of the most popular stars in British cinema. Her musicals/romantic comedies had started to build a profile in North America where she was known as ‘The Dancing Divinity’. Stories persisted about a possible move to the US and a partnership with Fred Astaire. That possibility is one of the potential elements of this film directed by her husband Sonnie Hale. Hale had taken over directing his wife’s films from Victor Saville who had moved from Gaumont-British to work for Alexander Korda at Denham. Saville did go to Hollywood eventually.
Compared to their Hollywood equivalents, the musicals made at G-B’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush were low-budget affairs but didn’t lack creativity. Head Over Heels is designed by the great Alfred Junge and photographed by Glen MacWilliams, a Hollywood cinematographer who had already shot three previous Matthews movies. Head Over Heels is an adaptation of a French play, Pierre ou Jack, by Francis de Croisset whose plays Arsene Lupin and A Woman’s Face were adapted more than once and became Hollywood ‘A’ pictures.
The plot is quite simple. Jeanne Colbert (Jessie Matthews) is a nightclub entertainer in Paris and shopping in the market one day she meets Pierre (Robert Flemyng), a slightly eccentric character (who seems more English than French). Pierre is an inventor and earns a living as a sound engineer in a radio station. He falls immediately in love with Jeanne but doesn’t know how to woo her. When he visits the club where she sings and dances, he sees that she is quite taken with her partner Marcel (Louis Borell) and despairs. Marcel is a ‘cad’ who drops Jeanne when a Hollywood glamour queen Norma Langtry (Whitney Bourne) appears and invites him to America. Pierre sees his chance and eventually gets Jeanne a job in the radio studio but Marcel is destined to return and a struggle between the two men over Jeanne is inevitable.
Jeanne sings some advertising jingles thought up by Pierre in an attempt to persuade the radio station boss to hire her
Fanmail for ‘The Lady in Blue’ pours in – one of the images from ‘the radio montage’
The radio angle of the film is very interesting. During the 1930s radio was fast becoming the major medium of entertainment for the mass audience. In the UK it was a BBC monopoly and the Director-General John Reith had firm control over its broadcasting policy. Already in the 1930s many Brits turned to continental radio stations for popular music, including Radio Luxembourg which broadcast in English and featured sponsorship of programming like American radio. Pierre sells the idea of Jeanne as ‘The Woman in Blue’ to his radio bosses. She sings advertising jingles and becomes a star. The filmmakers present this in a montage of radio-related images which I found striking. Another interesting technique is the superimposition of Jeanne’s face over footage of Pierre’s hopeless trudging around the nighttime Paris streets in search of her after a break-up. Techniques like this inject some visual excitement into a film which is otherwise limited to three main locations – the nightclub, the radio studio and the dingy apartment Pierre shares with his friend Matty. The nightclub with its outdoor garden for performances is the setting for the dancing in the film, though there is less than in most musicals. There are a number of notable songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, the best of which is ‘There’s That Look in Your Eyes Again’. All the songs are sung by Ms Matthews.
Pierre searches for Jeanne in this expressionistic sequence
If you’ve never seen Jessie Matthews before, you may be surprised by her cut-glass accent which now sounds way over the top. The irony is that Jessie was a working-class girl from Berwick Street, famous for its fruit and veg market in Soho. She was the seventh of eleven children and a genuine Cockney who felt compelled to change her accent dramatically to suit the middle-class voices of 1930s British stage and cinema screen. Her forced identity shift is the mirror opposite of the middle-class young women who had to find voices to play working-class girls. Why did she do it? Possibly because she was headed for the London stage while her musical rival (as a singer only) Gracie Fields didn’t suffer from keeping her Lancashire accent.
Confrontation at the radio station when Jeanne objects to Marcel and Norma Langtry singing the song that originally belonged to Jeanne and Marcel
In this film the focus is on Jessie as actor and singer and she accomplishes both well. Her Jeanne is a rounded figure, assertive and assured but also vulnerable. But she certainly isn’t prepared to put up with nonsense and her fightback in the too brief final reel is very enjoyable. Part of Jeanne’s trouble is that by breaking her contract (because of the action of Marcel) on two occasions she is barred from working in Paris for three months each time which seems a heavy penalty. All film actors were treated badly by studios and impresarios but independent women seemed to suffer more than most.
Jeanne at the radio mike in typical enthusiastic and engaged mode
It’s a long time since I read a biography of Ms Matthews but her marriage to the comedian Sonnie Hale was difficult and at this stage of her career she began to experience stress and various problems that would affect her career. Hale pressurised her and she wasn’t convinced of his directorial qualities. Some of the ideas discussed above may have come from the experienced crew rather than Hale. I must do some more research before any other Matthews posts. Head Over Heels is on Volume 3 of The Jessie Matthews Revue DVD from Network.
In the clip below Jeanne sings “Head Over Heels’ in her act until she sees her partner Marcel betraying her with the Hollywood star.
La femme de l’aviateur (The Aviator’s Wife, France 1981)
Anne (Marie Rivière) and François (Philippe Marlaud)
This is the first offering in Éric Rohmer’s ‘Comedies and Proverbs’ series of six films in the 1980s. There is a second title for the film, ‘On ne saurait penser à rien’. I find French quite difficult to translate and presumably this refers to the proverb. Wikipedia suggests, ‘It is impossible to think about nothing’ and this is certainly expressed in one of the film’s long dialogue exchanges. Rohmer’s films often revolve around triangles of relationships in which one character chooses between two possible lovers. Here ‘the aviator’ Christian is part of a triangle seemingly pivoting on Anne, a young office worker in her her mid-twenties living in a tiny apartment in Central Paris. Her current boyfriend is François, a 20 year-old student who works occasional night shifts in a mail sorting office to finance his studies. Early one morning, attempting to deliver a note to Anne before she wakes, he is surprised to see her leaving her apartment block with Christian. Later that day, having met Anne at lunchtime, François sees Christian with another woman and decides to follow the couple. His amateur sleuthing leads him into an encounter with Lucie, a bubbly 15 year-old student attempting to do her German language revision outdoors. After a while we realise that there is a second triangle which pivots on François who spends most of the film in dialogue with Anne, Lucie and then Anne again. Christian is in effect a MacGuffin – a character whose importance is in what he prompts as action in other characters. This is the case with François but less so with Anne.
François (on the right of the screen, behind a car) watches Christian and the mystery woman as they leave the station)
In these later films Rohmer often uses less well-known or non-professional actors. That’s certainly true for the lead here. Philippe Marlaud as François had only appeared in one film before, but that was for Maurice Pialat, one of the major directors of the 1980s, in a leading role. Tragically Marlaud died from burns received in a campsite fire shortly after the film was released. Some of the reviewers describe him as ‘plain’ but I think he looks fine and is very good in the part. Marie Rivière (Anne) and Mathieu Carrière (Christian) are still working as actors with long careers. Rivière worked again with Rohmer and Carrière, born in Germany has worked extensively in both German and French industries. Anne-Laure Meury (Lucie) is the real mystery. She was active in TV and cinema from 1975 to 1989 after which time IMDb has no more entries. She too worked again for Rohmer. The two inexperienced actors stole the show for me. Anne-Laure Meury is so lively and mischievous. I’ve rarely seen an actor make such an impression. Marie Rivière has the most difficult role as Anne. She is terribly thin and Rohmer emphasises this by having her dressed in only a camisole and bikini style knickers (she has been resting in bed) when François arrives at her apartment the second time (see image below). She then has a long conversation with him, constantly covering and exposing herself in a very animated way. If it seems unfair to comment on costume and body movements, bear in mind that Rohmer’s camera style (Bernard Lutic is the cinematographer) tends to frame long dialogues as two shots or if shooting shot/reverse shot, still avoids close-ups to show a character almost in long-shot (i.e. with the whole body in shot). Rivière became one of Rohmer’s ‘stock company’ actors, so she was presumably happy with the scenes (though given all the #MeToo comments recently we can’t be sure).
Anne opens the door to François and invites him in.
Rohmer’s style is unique, though some critics have tried to link it to the later style of Richard Linklater’s trilogy of films about the meeting of characters played by Julie Delpy ad Ethan Hawke. I can see that, but I think Linklater imbues his narratives with more dramatic tension and also plays with his stars’ screen presence. From the several reviews of The Aviator’s Wife that I’ve seen I would agree with one who makes a reference to Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, Baisers volés (1968) and Domicile conjugal (1970). I find myself identifying with François who is treated very badly by Anne and teased in a friendly way by Lucie. As with Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel the women are dominant characters and François is unsure and sometimes bungling in his attempt to engage with them. Anne seems like a rather cruel creation by Rohmer, though if we consider her situation and her view on life, it isn’t all that unreasonable. In many ways she is the most modern character. By contrast, Lucie is a young man’s dream – bright, bubbly and fun. She’s very attractive and seemingly full of energy and initiative. On the other hand, her general demeanour and maturity seem unusual for a 15 year-old, so she is plausibly a ‘romantic’ creation.
Anne is annoyed when François finds her at lunch-time and tries to brush him off.
Lucie is bright, bubbly and fun
Rohmer, in retrospect, seems ‘out of time’ in the French cinema of the 1980s. I wonder what contemporary young audiences would make of his stories of love and romance set in the context of ‘Comedies and Proverbs’. Would they find them unbearably slow? Would they be baffled by a world which revolves around postcards and public telephones and notes pushed under a door? I suspect that rather than ‘out of time’, Rohmer’s tales are timeless. This one is currently on MUBI. I have a couple more on disc/tape somewhere, perhaps I’ll go back to them. If nothing else, his films offer an almost documentary take on Parisian streets, buses and the Metro. The trailer below (no subs) gives an idea of how the two stills above were worked into scenes.
Saloon Bar (UK 1940)
Someone’s come into the bar and caused consternation. From left: Jim (Gordon James), Sally (Joyce Barbour) Ivy (Anna Kostam), Wickers (Mervyn Johns) and Joe (Gordon Harker)
Saloon Bar is available on another of Network’s ‘Ealing Rareties’ DVDs, this time Vol 10. It’s an interesting film for several reasons. Michael Balcon had returned to ATP and had changed the studio’s brand to ‘Ealing Studios’ from November 1938. Saloon Bar was released in October 1940 as the 14th ‘Ealing’ film. The film is generally dismissed by both George Perry and Charles Barr, though its IMDb entry suggests that it works quite well for modern viewers and David Quinlan scores it highly. Barr situates Saloon Bar as “the last Ealing film to belong completely, in both form and content, to the old order, an unambitious stage adaptation . . .” Perry argues it suffers from a “verbose script and a pedestrian pace”. One score I can agree with Barr – the film doesn’t seem in any way connected to the Ealing films that respond to wartime Britain even though the war was over a year old and the previous two films, George Formby’s Let George Do It and Pen Tennyson’s Convoy are both set in wartime. In that sense it seems out of place, set as it is in December 1938 according to the Execution Order. On the other hand, the stage play by Frank Harvey Jr. was adapted by Angus McPhail and John Dighton, who would go on to write many of the better-known Ealing films of later years. Saloon Bar is photographed by Ronald Neame who had worked at ATP before Balcon’s return and would become a successful director, writer and producer during the 1950s. It is directed by Walter Forde who had a long history with Balcon and made four Ealing pictures before leaving for America. One of these was Cheer Boys, Cheer (1939) which Charles Barr identifies as a ‘proto Ealing comedy’ – prefiguring the set up of the late 1940s comedies.
Queenie (Elizabeth Allan) is the senior barmaid and the fiancée of the condemned man. Here she is comforted in a show of sisterly support by Sally and Ivy
The Perry criticism doesn’t stand up in my view. Yes, there is a lot of dialogue but is generally snappily delivered and I didn’t find the pace pedestrian at all. The film is only 76 mins long with a hectic finale. The main plot idea is that a young man is falsely accused of murdering his landlady and is then convicted. Despite a petition to the Home Secretary, the minister refuses a stay of execution and the young man is due to hang early next morning. The pub (in Soho?) where the young man’s fiancée is a barmaid, bemoans his fate, but one regular, a bookmaker (a ‘turf accountant’) returning from a tour of racetracks, decides to do some sleuthing of his own. Can he find out the truth in time to stop the execution? This character, Joe, is played by Gordon Harker, a well-known figure in 1930s British Cinema who often played in comedy thrillers, exploiting his cockney charm. He had previously played the role on stage. Other well-known names in the cast include Mervyn Johns, Felix Aylmer and Cyril Raymond. This is a traditional crime thriller/whodunit with comedy elements. It also features flashbacks for the events leading up to the crime.
A noirish shot of the surrounding streets as the chase is about to get underway
The story is set just before Christmas and the landlord of the pub is an expectant father. His wife, never seen, is upstairs, close to delivering number seven. This is the comedy sub-plot which also provides the ‘humanity’ of the Christmas story – a young man might hang at the same time that a child is born. The other Christmas touches include a gaggle of children carol singing and a couple in the bar sat by the window, oblivious to anything else but each other. The stage origins are obvious since most of the action takes place in the bar itself. But the streets outside do figure at various points and Ronald Neame provides some interesting expressionist shots of alleyways in a style which later would be called film noir. For American viewers I should point out that the ‘Saloon’ was the more salubrious of the various rooms of large pubs in England at the time, where middle-class patrons gathered – and where a waiter might bring drinks to your table. The ‘Public’ tended to be rowdier and the ‘Snug’ was usually the haunt of those who didn’t want to ‘mingle’ (particularly women) and were willing to pay higher prices. The pub in question is a traditional ‘local’ which is emphasised when an ‘outsider’ comes up to the bar and is ‘frozen out’ because everyone else is busy discussing the murder. At one point, Joe goes to the pub’s rival establishment, a place that has been tarted up with chrome and art deco interiors. This modernity means in Ealing terms we should be suspicious about it. One of the pub regulars is Sally, a woman who is ‘mother’ to the chorus girls in the theatre across the road – which may be a reference to the Windmill Theatre where static nudes were a big hit in the late 1930s.
The narrative’s unlikely hero, Joe. (Screengrab by ‘Rank and File: A British Cinema Blog’) Note that Wickers hasn’t moved from his perch.
Barr and others tend to suggest that 1930s British films featured older men and occasional younger women, a mainly middle-class milieu and a general sense of tradition triumphing over any sense of modernity. Saloon Bar certainly features many of these elements, but it also has, for me, a vitality that prepares us for the Ealing films to come over the next few years during the war. Keith Johnson from UEA offers an interesting analysis of the film as part of his trawl through Ealing’s entire output. The pub is remarkable as a studio set. For those of a certain age, the ‘Watneys’ brand of beer will cause a sharp intake of breath. In the late 1960s this was the brewery which seemed hell-bent on destroying ‘real ale’ with its keg beer ‘Red Barrel’. I was intrigued that the bar boasted a pinball machine. I only remember pinball machines in cafés, coffee bars and arcades – though they were quite common in Student Union bars! (Intriguingly there are two pinball machines in the rival, ‘modern’ pub.)The other intriguing cultural reference is to cycle-racing at Herne Hill velodrome. Joe claims that cycling there gave him powerful legs and he shows them off in the bar. The ensemble cast is very good with a nice turn by Mervyn Johns as Wickers, the owner of a ‘wireless shop’ (he sells radios). Wickers perches on his special seat by the bar, never moving and downing glasses of ‘Special Ale’. He talks using exaggerated language delivered deadpan and confusing for barmaid Ivy. These touches reveal an attempt to represent a recognisable ‘local’, albeit in the centre of London and the film ends with everyone coming together to celebrate the freed man, the new baby and Christmas round the corner – with a ‘lock-in’ which includes the local bobby.
Audition (Kdyby ty muziky nebyly/Konkurs, Czechoslovakia 1963)
Vera Kresadlova as one of the young women auditioning
MUBI celebrated the achievements of Milos Forman, who died in April this year, by streaming two of his earliest films. The first, completed in 1963, comprises two short films put together ‘after the event’ since separately they would have less chance of being programmed. Kdyby ty muziky nebyly or If there were no music concerns an annual celebration (that started in 1961) in the town of Kolin honouring the memory of a famous 19th century composer František Kmoch who was born close to the town in Bohemia where he opened a music school. (Forman was himself from Bohemia.) Two local brass bands are scheduled to perform at the ceremony. The bands are mainly made up of older amateur musicians but also include some young men. The film’s main plot device is a motorcycle race that takes place on the local streets at the same time as the concert. One young man in each band daydreams about riding a motor bike and absents himself from the performance in order to watch the race. Both are dismissed by their bands but then sign up for the other band. IMDb categorises this film as a documentary but it isn’t. Although the majority of the band members are non-professionals, there are professionals from what would later be recognised as Forman’s ‘stock company’ in leading roles. Just 33 minutes long, the film was shot on 35mm equipment borrowed from the Barrandov Studio.
Jan Vostrcil as the band conductor in If there were no music
Konkurs (Audition) (47 minutes) was the first of the two films to be completed and was a more ‘personal’ project for Forman which was expanded from an initial idea for a 15 minute film shot on 16mm using Forman’s own camera (operated by the great Miroslav Ondricek). The link with the brass band film is the attempt to prepare musicians but this time it’s a talent show for girl singers (and their accompanists) auditioning at the Semafor Theatre in Prague. Again, as in the first film, the near-documentary coverage of the audition is provided with a fictional second narrative in which two young women are picked out from the group and given their own (separate) back stories. One of these two, Vera Kresadlova (just 18 at the time), later became Forman’s second wife. She’s shown singing successfully in a group with a rock ‘n roll band, but then finds it impossible to perform on her own for the audition. The other young woman lies to her boss at a beauty salon to get time off to sing with her guitar with accompaniment from a young man also on an acoustic guitar.
There are several online sources for detailed reviews/analyses of Auditions. One is by Darragh O’Donoghue on ‘Senses of Cinema’. Another is on Second Run’s site for its DVD release. There is no point in me repeating what is laid out on these sites. Instead I’ll make my own personal response. I like these two short films very much. Watching them makes me very nostalgic for a variety of reasons. I was a young teenager around this time and I recognised all these young people – and the older ones too. Some of the reviews are quite snotty about the music and the question of the ‘generation gap’. It is all very familiar from the UK in the 1960s, especially the pop music. When the Beatles first appeared in the UK at the end of 1962/early in 1963 we had much the same mix of musical styles – rock ‘n roll, the R & B bands, folk music, trad jazz and even the hangover of skiffle. The local bands were a long way from the polished, orchestrated soft pop we saw on TV. I recognised many of the tunes – though the Czech language songs had very different lyrics. Brass bands were a major part of the lives of workers and their families across much of industrial Northern England and the culture clash of the brass band v. TV features in A Kind of Loving (UK 1962). I can see why Forman wants to poke fun at the bandleader in If there were no music played by Jan Vostrcil but I think he still has some feeling for the traditions of the band. The audition montage in Konkurs is repeated in Forman’s first American film, Taking Off (US 1971), a film I really enjoyed on its circuit release in 1971.
It’s good to see films from the Czech New Wave – so influential on later British cinema – and it’s worth remembering the 50th anniversary of the ‘Prague Spring’ that ended with Russian tanks taking control of the city and leading to Forman’s decision to move permanently to America. I haven’t seen all his American films, partly I think because I was slightly disappointed by his embrace of American culture. He tended to see Taking Off as a failure, blaming himself for making a European art film in America. I saw it the other way round with him showing American filmmakers how to make more interesting films. A Blonde in Love (1965) was the other MUBI screening and a review will be posted soon.
Jeune femme (France-Belgium 2017)
Paula (Laetitia Dosch) with Muchacha in a cheap hotel room
This is quite a difficult film for an aged male writer. Paula, the protagonist of Jeune femme (also known as Montparnasse Bienvenüe) is not introduced to us with any background. She’s more or less literally thrown at us, headbutting the door of a Paris apartment, whose resident doesn’t want to let her in. Taken to A&E to have her forehead stitched, she angrily dismisses the doctor on duty, steals a coat and discharges herself. Taking a cat, ‘Muchacha’, which we later discover belongs to the owner of the apartment, she begins a tour of Paris looking for a place to kip and a means of earning money. At this point I was seriously worrying whether I could cope with another 90 minutes of this. I was reminded of a British film from last year, Daphne, also about a 30-something woman, but this time in London. After writing about that film, I decided not to post a review since I didn’t really like the film. In the case of Jeune femme, however, I stuck with Paula and eventually began to warm to her character and by the last third I began to really enjoy the film.
Paula with Yuki (Léonie Simaga) who she meets on the Metro
Jeune femme is a first feature for Léonor Serraille who co-wrote the film with Clémence Carré and Bastien Daret, both similarly inexperienced writers for features. Paula is played by Laetitia Dosch who has significantly more experience as a leading actor. I think some of the positives (and perhaps some of the negatives) come from the script and direction. The performance by Dosch is very good but sometimes the plotting becomes quite weak. The basis for the narrative is the idea that Paula, now having broken up with a former partner, is partly looking for the basics – some money, a job, somewhere to live – but also looking to ‘find herself’. The narrative therefore becomes that of the ‘picaresque’ or almost like a road movie set in Paris as she moves from one situation to another. sometimes it feels like a series of sitcom sketches. Eventually we realise that Paula has got to 31 without having gone through many of the experiences of her contemporaries. She’s spent ten years with an older man who was her teacher at first but then used her as his ‘muse’, photographing her and exhibiting his work. This comes home to Paula when she realises that unlike the other young women she meets working at a ‘knicker bar’ in a shopping centre, she has no postgraduate degree to complete and no ambitions for the future.
Ousmane (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye) and Paula (Laetitia Dosch) on a meal break
Female film critics and fans of the film have made connections with the UK TV series Fleabag and the US series Girls as well as films such as the Greta Gerwig starrer Frances Ha. Hannah McGill in Sight and Sound (June 2018) focuses on the central issue when she asks if the emphasis in these types of female narratives on the ‘messiness’ of the central characters’ lives is “feminist or quite the reverse”. Paula is needy but is this to be read as something for others to respond to and to understand as a product of a patriarchal society – or does she instead need a lesson in developing some ‘adult life skills’ and a plan about what to do next? In McGill’s terms, “this is the line along which Jeune femme wobbles in terms of Paula’s neediness”. Part of the problem is that the women Paula meets are either very critical or very forgiving. Only the women workers at the knicker bar talk to her sensibly about practical things. She meets few men and most are abominable. The exception is the security guard at the knicker bar, Ousmane (played by Souleymane Seye Ndiaye – the lead in La pirogue (France-Senegal 2012)). When I reflected on the film it struck me that Paula (and therefore the whole narrative) changes when she meets Ousmane. Ousmane reminded me of similar characters in A Season in France (2017) by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (still sadly unreleased in the UK). I hope that African migrants will eventually be treated as just another character with good or bad points. I don’t want to see them typed as ‘noble’ or ‘savage’. I don’t think that Jeune femme falls into that trap but we need more diversity in casting generally. The cat seems to think Ousmane is OK as well and I was relieved to see it being looked after by him. Paula’s initial treatment of the cat certainly didn’t make me warm to her.
Lila (Lila-Rose Gilberti), Paula’s young charge as a nanny, comes to see Paula as a friend
Ousmane’s humanity seems to infect everyone, but particularly Paula and as the film moves towards its climactic sequence with the ex-boyfriend it does seem like the narrative will have a conventional resolution. But in the end it doesn’t, seeing the now ‘sorted’ Paula ready to face whatever is coming next. The film has plenty of music, mostly by Julie Roué, but the Gil Evans jazz number ‘Las Vegas Tango’ is particularly significant according to writer-director Léonor Serraille. In the Press Notes she offers some interesting background to the production and the decisions she made along the way. She tells us that initially the script was 140 pages and was then cut down to make the 97 minute film (which might explain the gaps in the plotting). She comments on her use of a clip from Sirk’s Imitation of Life (US 1959) – her relationship with her own mother is important as it is in Sirk’s melodrama – and also comments on the various films and actors’ performances which have inspired her. She makes this interesting statement:
Jeune Femme, which is Montparnasse Bienvenüe’s French title, could have been called ‘Young Women‘ as the entire crew is made up of women: cinematographer, sound engineer, editor, sound editor, production designer, music composer, producer . . .
I’m glad that I did eventually get on board with Paula and her struggle. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it and I hope it is a big success in the UK.
