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Contents February 2018
32

FEATURES
20
COVER FEATURE
The needle and the damage done
Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie
outside the US is a gothic romance set in
50s London. Here he talks about the rigid
world of haute couture, the English class
system and working with Daniel Day-
Lewis on the actor’s last film. By James Bell

32
Small wonder
Alexander Payne’s ingenious Downsizing
imagines a world where people can opt to
be shrunk to help tackle overpopulation.
He explains the film’s slow gestation
and why he’s so gloomy about the
future of the planet. By Philip Horne

36
Bergman: keeping the faith
As a major London retrospective launches
to mark Ingmar Bergman’s centenary,
is our new age of uncertainty a fitting
moment for audiences to reconnect
with the fearsome visions of spiritual
longing and loss found in the director’s
Faith Trilogy? By Catherine Wheatley
PLUS from the S&S archive, Peter Cowie
visits the set of Fanny and Alexander

26 42
The awful truth
Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which
Park life explores the Pentagon Papers exposé of
In Aardman’s Early Man, cavemen in a remote forest challenge US government duplicity in Vietnam,
tries hard to stir the democratic impulse
invaders to a football match to win their freedom. It’s Nick in the era of Trump – but the track record
Park’s first directing job in almost a decade. By Nick Bradshaw of crusading true-story sagas leaving a
mark in the national consciousness has
never been great. By Michael Atkinson
REGULARS
5 Editorial Category error Wide Angle
14 Point of View: Thomas McMullan is
Rushes living in the season of the glitch
6 2018 Preview: Nick James picks 16 Primal Screen: Pamela Hutchinson
highlights of the year to come reports on a new approach to
8 Interview: Philip Concannon talks to lost films: making them again
Pat Collins, director of Song of Granite 19 Festival: Tony Rayns at Tokyo FILMeX
9 The Numbers: Charles Gant
tots up 2017’s box office 95 Letters
10 Interview: Philip Horne meets Richard
Linklater, whose Last Flag Flying is Endings
a sort of sequel to The Last Detail 96 Adam Scovell basks in the rare
13 Dispatches: Mark Cousins imagines a optimism that closes Ingmar 20
sublime 24-hour movie made of clips Bergman’s Wild Strawberries
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 1
 EDITORIAL
Editor
Nick James
Editorial Nick James
Deputy editor
Kieron Corless
Features editor
James Bell
Web editor
Nick Bradshaw
Production editor
Isabel Stevens

CATEGORY ERROR
Chief sub-editor
Jamie McLeish
Sub-editors
Robert Hanks
Jane Lamacraft
Researcher
Mar Diestro-Dópido
Credits supervisor
Patrick Fahy “You don’t get to make a ‘media exception’ just
Credits associates because it’s Lynch.” This comment on Twitter (from
Kevin Lyons
Pieter Sonke @jmittell) was typical of many huffy responses to
James Piers Taylor
Design and art direction
our Best Films of 2017 poll last month. David Lynch
chrisbrawndesign.com and Mark Frost’s 18-hour television series Twin Peaks:
Origination
Rhapsody
The Return coming second in a film poll sparked
Printer a turf war over which side of the thinning divide
Wyndeham Group
between fiction film and television drama such a
BUSINESS series should fall. We can’t pretend we anticipated
Publisher
Rob Winter
the spat, but it helped focus attention on what
Publishing coordinator the results meant. Lynch himself has called Twin
Natalie Griffith
Advertising consultant
Peaks: The Return a film, though it was financed and
Ronnie Hackston broadcast as a series; and the fact that the writer gets
T: 020 7957 8916
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E: ronnie.hackston@bfi.org.uk from film industry procedures. So telephiles
Newsstand distribution saw our listing as theft of their subject matter, or
Seymour
T: 020 7429 4000 invasion of their domestic turf, while cinephiles Telephiles saw our listing of ‘Twin
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Bookshop distribution
objected snobbishly to its inclusion in a ‘film’ list. Peaks’ in our best films poll as theft of
We say that both attitudes are mistaken. People have
Central Books
T: 020 8525 8800 been talking about the convergence of the various their subject matter, while cinephiles
E: contactus@centralbooks.com
moving-image media for years, but lately reality has objected to its inclusion in a ‘film’ list
Sight & Sound is a member of the
Independent Press Standards
moved closer to the proposition. Televisions used
Organisation (which regulates the UK’s to be small devices offering inferior moving image deeply people feel connected to the specialness of
magazine and newspaper industry).
We abide by the Editors’ Code of reproduction and the programmes made for them their turf. Film criticism and television criticism
Practice and are committed to
upholding the highest standards of tended to concentrate on keeping things simple and have entirely separate traditions, and one thing this
journalism. If you think that we have
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make a complaint please contact
rob.winter@bfi.org.uk. If we are unable
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to resolve your complaint, or if you TV dramas are now shot to a standard very similar changing nature of how we watch films and TV.
would like more information about IPSO
or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on to most films, using the same cameras. Furthermore, Writing about television has traditionally been
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Sight & Sound (ISSN 0037-4806)
the more auteurist film directors often now prefer done in round-up columns. Writers of these were and
is published monthly by British Film to work in television, where there’s arguably more are expected to be witty up front and analytical under
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Periodicals Postage Paid at South best writing about the best work being done in New Yorker is queen of the form. Both are brilliant –
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Copyright © BFI, 2017

not, in fact, a deliberate act of reclamation, merely as, say, the theatrical release of foreign-language
The views and opinions expressed
in the pages of this magazine or on an oversight, but it clearly touched a raw nerve. cinema. The consequence is that films and television
its website are those of the author(s)
and are not necessarily those of the
Here’s a flavour of the kinds of things said: “It is not series will be seen increasingly to be in the same
BFI or its employees. The contents
of this magazine may not be used
[a] movie, it is clearly shaped as a TV show. It has cold leaky boat, whether their fans like it or not.
or reproduced without the written openings, it has intro credits in each episode, it even P.S. The issue you’re reading is my 250th as editor. Last
permission of the Publisher.
The BFI is a charity, (registration
ends each episode with a concert,” complained @ April’s issue marked my 20 years in the role. I am proud
number 287780), registered at agentdostoi. “I’m not convinced by ‘best moving art of these mileposts and of what we’ve produced for your
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works’. It’s too broad. It’s like making a best novel list to enjoyment. I want to thank all variants of the S&S team
include anything with words in it,” said @swansonian. over the years, every contributor, and most of all you,
What’s interesting about these comments is how the readers, for sticking with us. Happy New Year!

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 5


Rushes
2018 PREVIEW
SPOILT FOR CHOICE
The gang’s all here: Aml Ameen stars in Idris Elba’s directorial debut Yardie
Comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-
comical, historical-pastoral… Nick
James outlines a dizzying variety
of visual treats in the year ahead
In the making
A new meaning to the phrase ‘dressed to kill’
seems to have inspired Peter Strickland’s
upcoming ghost story In Fabric, which stars
Marianne Jean-Baptiste and involves the passing
around of a fatal dress. Meanwhile Abel Ferrara
has secured funding for Siberia, “a subjective
and objective journey into the subconscious”
which will star Isabelle Huppert, Nicolas Cage
and Willem Dafoe (who by then will have also
played Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At
Eternity’s Gate). Joanna Hogg has been shooting
The Souvenir, about a 1980s age-gap romance,
under the aegis of executive producer Martin
Scorsese. Getting us equally excited is the
possibility of a new film from Michelangelo
Frammartino, director of the near-perfect essay
film Le quattro volte (2010) – the new one is called
6 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
NEWS AND VIEWS
Il buco/The Hole). Sticking with Italian directors,
the next film by Luca Guadagnino, deservedly
fêted for his recent Call Me by Your Name, will
be his remake of Dario Argento’s horror classic
Suspiria, about a young student arriving to train at
a ballet school which houses a disturbing secret.
It stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Tilda Swinton.
On the arthouse schedule
Some things we mentioned last year are still
to be released, so they’re worth reflagging:
Lucrecia Martel’s magnificent Zama is on for
the spring, as is Claire Denis’s Juliette Binoche-
led anatomisation of romance Let the Sunshine
In (Denis’s intriguing-looking sci-fi High Life
should emerge at a festival later this year). Lynne
Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here should arrive
in March, as should Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or
winner The Square, but there’s still no sign of Ilya
Khrzhanovsky’s notorious experimental project
Dau. Of the newer upcoming works, pride of
place goes to Steve McQueen’s film reshaping of
Widows, the 1980s TV series about female bank
robbers. A double helping of Sebastián Lelio
brings us both his transgender grief drama A
Fantastic Woman and his understated adaptation
of Naomi Alderman’s memoir of sex in an
Orthodox Jewish context, Disobedience. Wes
Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will open the Berlinale
in February; Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack
Built comes later in the year. And hard on the
heels of his Last Flag Flying (see page 10), Richard
Linklater has an adaptation of Maria Semple’s
comic novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
Home forces
A more bizarre pairing of Brit talents than director
Carol Morley and author Martin Amis is hard to
imagine, but that’s what’s promised by Out of Blue,
Morley’s adaptation of Amis’s novel Night Train,
which stars the wonderful Patricia Clarkson.
For political bite, we’re expecting much that’s
rousing from Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, his drama
about the 19th-century massacre of Mancunian
protestors by sabre-wielding cavalry. The long-
awaited adaptation of Victor Headley’s seminal
novel Yardie finds Idris Elba at the helm and will
be in Sundance, as will Wash Westmoreland’s
literary biopic Colette. And Andrew Haigh’s
evocative Pacific Northwest tale of a young
Explosive: The Deminer
boy and the ageing racehorse he loves, Lean On
Pete, will be released probably in late spring.
Hollywood hustlers
Quentin Tarantino’s untitled next film, set in
the 1960s and 70s and called for convenience #9,
has landed with Sony in the wake of the Harvey
Weinstein revelations. This will precede the much-
talked-about Star Trek movie QT is also down
to direct. The superhero movies that promise
the most are Ryan Coogler’s take on Marvel’s
Black Panther and Ruben Fleischer’s evocation
of Venom, which stars Tom Hardy and Michelle
Williams. Most awaited of the blockbusters is
Ava DuVernay’s interpretation of Madeleine
L’Engle’s much-loved SF novel A Wrinkle in Time.
Damien ‘La La Land’ Chazelle and his star Ryan
Gosling have tasked themselves with making the
Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. There’s much
curiosity to see what Shane Black does with the
revived Predator, while the Mission: Impossible
sequels will reach the potentially confusing title
MI:6. But for all these possibly thrilling spectacles,
Guillermo del Toro’s dazzling The Shape of Water,
coming soon, has set the bar extremely high.
On the box
The British series most likely to make an impact
this year are A Very English Scandal, directed by
The reign down in Africa: Chadwick Bose (centre) as King T’Challa of Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther
Un-Orthodox: Disobedience
Stephen Frears, written by Russell T. Davies and
starring Hugh Grant as Liberal leader Jeremy
Thorpe, who was accused of conspiring to
murder his (male) lover, and ITV’s new seven-
part adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Mike
Bartlett follows up Doctor Foster with Trauma,
concerning a father’s revenge on a surgeon
for a botched operation on his son. For a more
experimental approach to TV, the best bet is
Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic, a multi-strand murder
mystery starring Sharon Stone that’s being shown
over five consecutive nights in the US. In a nifty
twist, viewers watching via an iPhone app will be
able to choose the order in which they experience
the story by selecting different narrative threads.
Just as The Twilight Zone is being brought back
to viewers in a new series, so the long-running 60s
US space opera Lost in Space is being rebooted for
a 10-episode run. Another surprise comeback is a
new series of Roseanne, last seen in the late 1990s,
with the original cast. Taboo, Ozark and Harlots all
get their second seasons underway, and TV series
developments of the films Heathers and Snowpiercer
are on the way. The true crime yen sparked by
Making a Murderer not only sees that programme
renewed for season two, but the advent of some
rivals, including Law & Order: True Crime – The
Menendez Murders. The main drama-doc attraction
looks to be Osama bin Laden saga The Looming
Thorpe-provoking: A Very English Scandal
Tower, which stars Tahar Rahim and Alec Baldwin,
but next in line is probably Waco, about the
Branch Davidian sect’s 1993 stand-off with the
FBI, which resulted in more than 70 deaths.
At the docs
Many of the year’s top documentaries will be
making their first impressions on the world
at January’s Sundance Film Festival. But titles
already scheduled for release that we can
recommend include Hogir Hirori’s gripping
portrait of a DIY Iraqi army mine-clearer The
Deminer, and Talal Derki’s revelation of Syrian
life under Isis, Of Fathers and Sons. Veteran
Agnès Varda is on form with Faces Places, a
portrait of rural France co-directed with the
artist JR. More speculatively, we may see the
unveiling of Asif Kapadia’s tantalising latest
young-prodigy archive doc Maradona; Michael
Moore’s anti-Trump screed Fahrenheit 11/9;
Kevin Macdonald’s untitled Whitney Houston
Documentary; Todd Haynes’s untitled Lou
Reed/Velvet Underground Project; Ken Burns’s
Muhammad Ali; and Tim Travers Hawkins’s
Laura Poitras-produced Chelsea Manning doc
XY Chelsea. But the most exciting prospect is
Viktor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela, a globe-trotting
nonfiction paean to water in the style of his
last solo feature, 2011’s ¡Vivan las Antípodas!.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 7
 RUSHES INTERVIEW
SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE
Places in the heart: while many Irish filmmakers steer away from the subject of Irish identity, Pat Collins puts it at the very centre of his work
Song of Granite, Pat Collins’s
moving portrait of the life of an
Irish folksinger, offers a subtle
portrait of a lost culture
By Philip Concannon
There are many words you could use to describe
Song of Granite – just don’t call it a biopic. “The
thing with biopics is that I just don’t like them
as a genre,” Pat Collins told me when the term
came up in our conversation. “I can’t think of
many that I really liked. I think Roger Ebert
said something to the effect that biopics make
every life the same and no matter whether it’s a
singer, an actor, a president or whatever, every
life comes out the same in a biopic. I suppose I
wanted to avoid that, and I wouldn’t have started
it if I’d felt I had to use standard biopic setups.”
So if Song of Granite isn’t a biopic, what is it?
Collins’s film is a portrait of Joe Heaney, the man
widely regarded as the greatest practitioner of
sean-nòs, a form of traditional unaccompanied
Irish singing. He was said to be able to remember
a repertoire of more than 500 songs, and he
became a star in the American folk music revival
of the 1960s, first at the Newport Folk Festival and
then in various cities across the country, where
he performed to sold-out crowds and was fêted
by avant-garde composers such as John Cage.
Filmed in atmospheric black and white by
Richard Kendrick, Song of Granite gives us a
snapshot of various stages in this unpredictable
8 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
life. The film unfolds in three distinct acts, first
presenting Heaney as a child in Connemara in
the 1930s before skipping ahead to his travels
through the UK and US in the 1960s, and then
catching up with him as an elderly man in
America, reflecting on his past and his legacy.
We get a sense of the overall shape of Heaney’s
life by the end of the film, but how much have
we really learned about him? Beyond the bare
biographical details, Heaney has long been
an elusive, enigmatic figure, and while some
filmmakers might have been tempted to try to
fill in the blanks, Collins felt it was important
to stay true to this aspect of his character.
“There have been two books written about
him, a documentary and now a feature film, but
I can’t say that anybody really knows anything
about him,” Collins says. “We know certain
facts – he moved to New York, he worked as
a doorman in Manhattan, he taught at the
University of Washington – but we don’t know
how he felt about any of that. There are some
small revelations in his letters to people, but
I don’t know if he spoke to anybody about
his wife and family, for example, because it
was actually a shock to a lot of people that he
was even married or had kids. I don’t think I’d
Heaney has long been an elusive,
enigmatic figure, and Collins felt
it was important to stay true to
this aspect of his character
presume to know what’s going on inside his
head so I just couldn’t go down that route.”
Instead, Collins says he took the opportunity
to use Heaney as a kind of Trojan horse,
allowing him to dig into a wider set of ideas
and themes that had long fascinated him.
Song of Granite is in some ways reminiscent
of Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1976)
and Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four
Chapters (1985), two films that take a bold and
imaginative approach to presenting an artist’s
life and work, but also explore the society and
culture that shaped them; a culture that, in
Heaney’s case, has been lost in many ways.
“He might be one of the last people to make
that leap from, say, a peasant society, which
had this rich oral tradition,” Collins says. “The
place where he came from, Carna, somebody
said there were more unrecorded stories and
songs there than in any other part of Europe.
I think there was a neighbour of Joe Heaney’s,
or an uncle, who had 220 songs, and this is
without writing them down; I suppose they had
a lot less junk in their heads than we have. So I
think the place he came from was unique and
special, and that lasted longer in Ireland and
in Connemara than it would have in the north
of England or wherever. The whole industrial
revolution in England and Scotland would have
finished off that tradition to a certain extent.”
The fact that the environment surrounding
Heaney is given just as much emphasis as
Heaney himself should be no surprise to anyone
familiar with Collins’s work. As a documentarian

he has frequently examined the relationship
between communities, landscape and history
in rural Ireland – most notably in his 2002 film
Tory Island – and his first fiction feature Silence
(2011) followed a sound recordist (Collins’s
frequent collaborator Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhride)
as he travelled through the west of Ireland in
search of places free from man-made sound.
“A lot of filmmakers back off from landscape,
because they think it’s over-romanticised or
they think it doesn’t really relate to life, but
for me landscape is a central part of life,” he
says. “Every time I go outside my front door
I see the landscape, so why would I not try
to include it in the films that I make?”
This engagement with the land is one of
the key attributes that distinguishes Collins’s
work from his contemporaries. Over the
course of the past decade a number of talented
filmmakers have emerged in Irish cinema, but
while their films may take place in Ireland,
they often contain genre elements or an in-built
crossover appeal, whereas Irishness itself seems
to be the central theme of Collins’ work.
“I do think a lot of Irish filmmakers steer away
from themes of being Irish or what might be Irish
identity, because they feel there’s a bigger world
out there and because they want to make a film
that’s more marketable in the States,” he says. “I
suppose I start from a point where I don’t think
about that at all, it doesn’t matter to me. There’s a
Patrick Kavanagh line about it taking a lifetime to
know one field, and just in the little areas I know I
could keep working in them for the next 20 years
and I don’t think I’d exhaust it. Now maybe the
audience would be exhausted and the funders
would be exhausted, but all I’ve got is my view of
the world, and what is the point in me making
a film that somebody else would make? But I
think Song of Granite is as much about humanity
as it is about Irish identity. It’s using what I know
and making it about singing universally.”
In perhaps his riskiest filmmaking decision,
Collins tested the boundaries of that universality
by choosing not to subtitle any of the film’s
Gaelic songs. Instead of following the lyrics, Song
of Granite asks us to listen to each performance,
to feel it, to follow the emotional arc of the
song and to hear the specific tones introduced
by the singer, and the results can be incredibly
rewarding. Collins has been on tour with this film
at a number of international festivals and he has
encountered viewers who have been moved to
tears by the songs without understanding a word.
“The film is about singing and it tries to
capture singing in a live context and in a kind
of meditative way, and if people were reading
the subtitles they wouldn’t be getting lost in
the aliveness of it,” he explains. “People are
really responding to that. It’s not a mainstream
film by any means, but I think people are more
receptive to it than I could have expected in lots
of ways. I suppose it’s the way they hold the notes
and inhabit the song, there’s such a musicality
in each voice and such emotion. Everybody
who listens to Joe Heaney talks about the raw
emotion in his voice, and again, I think that’s the
kind of thing that transcends any borders.”
Song of Granite is released in UK cinemas
i on 15 December and is reviewed on page 73
THE NUMBERS
REVIEW OF THE YEAR
By Charles Gant
While the US suffered a torrid year at the
2017 ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTHOUSE/
box office, with a series of franchise pictures CROSSOVER FILMS AT UK BOX OFFICE
underperforming in the marketplace, in UK
cinemas it was very much business as usual. Film Gross
In fact, for the year to the end of November,
UK box office was 4 per cent up on the
Dunkirk £56,650,292*
equivalent period from 2016, with a torrent of La La Land £30,419,348
cash from The Last Jedi yet to be factored in.
Encouragingly, the good news was not Blade Runner 2049 £19,041,252*
confined to the Hollywood mainstream. At
Curzon, for example – which programmes T2 Trainspotting £16,955,161
a mix of foreign language, British and US
indie, and the occasional quality blockbuster
Baby Driver £12,940,939
– box office is up an organic 10 per cent Lion £11,831,603
on 2016, excluding the contribution of
new venues at Aldgate, next door to Get Out £10,339,962
the City of London, and in Oxford.
Curzon benefited from a profusion of Victoria & Abdul £9,949,123*
commercially potent titles that fitted its
programming profile. Those included the
Hidden Figures £6,308,314
chain’s top performer La La Land – the Hacksaw Ridge £5,687,724
eighth-biggest box-office hit of the year at
UK cinemas overall, with £30.4 million – and The Death of Stalin £4,993,186*
summer smash Dunkirk, which surprised
analysts by overtaking The Dark Knight Rises Moonlight £4,312,681
(2012) to become Christopher Nolan’s biggest
Viceroy’s House £4,112,257
ever UK hit, with £56.7 million. In addition to La
La Land, awards season threw up a number of Their Finest £4,052,726
other strong performers, notably Lion, Hidden
Figures, Hacksaw Ridge and Moonlight. Titles Manchester by the Sea £3,623,386
including Get Out, Baby Driver and The Death
of Stalin successfully straddled plexes and Logan Lucky £3,391,161
indie venues, while Blade Runner 2049, only
Goodbye Christopher £2,880,282*
the 21st biggest hit at UK cinemas overall in
2017, ranked seventh for the year at Curzon. Robin
The year’s top foreign-language title
Detroit £2,604,511
proved – rather surprisingly – to be Park
Chan-wook’s Korean lesbian period thriller My Cousin Rachel £2,564,487
The Handmaiden. Usually we would have to
qualify such a claim with the words ‘excluding mother! £2,344,069
Bollywood titles’. There’s no need to do so Grosses to December 17; *still on release
for 2017, since the top Indian film, Raees, fell
below The Handmaiden’s box office, which
totalled a hefty £1.35 million. It was the
highest figure for a non-Bollywood foreign- FOREIGN-LANGUAGE ARTHOUSE
language film since Untouchable in 2012. FILMS AT THE UK BOX OFFICE IN 2017
Overall in foreign language, 2017 delivered
an untypical polarity of winners and losers, Film Gross
with The Handmaiden, rape revenge drama Elle
and the near-three-hour German comedy Toni The Handmaiden £1,353,246
Erdmann surging ahead of the pack, and no
other title even managing to hit £300,000 – Elle £863,440
although Happy End should get there. In 2016, Toni Erdmann £592,520
six films reached the £300,000 threshold. One
notable 2017 trend was the underperformance Happy End £293,167*
of middlebrow French fare, which in past years
has proved reliably popular. Top performer in The Other Side £273,342
this field was The Midwife, starring Catherine of Hope
Deneuve, which Curzon Artificial Eye released
in July: it limped home to £107,000. In contrast, The Salesman £268,192
the year’s top performing titles all
differentiated themselves with strong hooks,
Frantz £249,578
cultural talking points and transgressive Raw £204,878
content. Ben Luxford, head of the BFI Audience
Fund, comments: “The familiarity and cosiness Kedi £197,170
of those titles that littered the landscape a few
years ago, they’ve run out of relevance in the My Life as a Courgette £186,639
marketplace now. Cinema audiences like to
feel like they’re discovering something.”
Excludes Bollywood and Polish films
Grosses to December 19; *still on release
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 9
 RUSHES INTERVIEW
IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A VET
Coming home: Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston and Steve Carell as Vietnam vets in Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying
follows three former comrades-in-
arms on an American odyssey, in a
loose follow-up to The Last Detail
By Philip Horne
Spoiler alert: this interview reveals a plot twist
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying isn’t exactly a
sequel to Hal Ashby’s bleak 1973 comedy drama
The Last Detail, starring Jack Nicholson. It’s a free
adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel of the
same title, which is a sequel partly to that film
and partly to his own 1970 novel, which was
adapted for the screen by Robert Towne. Like the
original film – which followed a pair of career
Navy men, Billy ‘Badass’ Buddusky (played by
Nicholson) and Richard Mulhall (Otis Young),
showing young sailor Larry Meadows (Randy
Quaid) a last good time before they deliver him to
a naval prison to serve an eight-year stretch – the
new film follows a trio of military men on an
episodic American journey. In Linklater’s film, the
three are Vietnam veterans – with the Buddusky
character becoming Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston),
Mulhall becoming Richard Mueller (Laurence
Fishburne) and Quaid’s character becoming Larry
‘Doc’ Shepherd (Steve Carell) – who are reunited
after many years and travel to the funeral of
Larry’s soldier son, who has been killed in Iraq.
I met Linklater when he visited the UK for
the BFI London Film Festival in October.
Philip Horne: I’m interested in how you
went about adapting the novel.
Richard Linklater: Darryl [Ponicsan] says it’s one
10 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
of the more faithful adaptations, even though
we changed things, because it adheres to the
structure of the book, whereas The Last Detail
film kind of stopped [before the end of the
novel]. Even though we create a whole different
backstory – Vietnam, which is not in The Last
Detail – and we do so many things differently.
PH: How did you first get involved?
RL: The book was kind of floating around. Darryl
felt that he had a lot to say and that those three
guys were speaking to him, even beyond the grave
in Billy’s case. So that book, Last Flag Flying, was a
bit of a purge – a lot of humour, passion and anger. I
responded to that. There was a lot of anger, and that
was exactly how I was feeling. Darryl liked what
I was doing. He was a good partner all the way.
PH: Was the fact that Jack Nicholson
passed on the project liberating?
RL: Put it like this, I’m glad the way it all worked
out. I worked on the adaptation and had all
these ideas and we just couldn’t get it off the
ground. The open wound of that war [in Iraq]
around ten years ago – no one wanted to deal
with it. But I told Darryl, “This isn’t going away:
we’re gonna make this film some day.”
PH: Is this movie unique, in that the sequel novel
only exists because the original movie changed
the ending and allowed Billy to survive? It is a bit
of a fudge, at the beginning of the second novel.
RL: Yeah, like, “I thought you were
dead!” – “No, I got a plate in my head!” It’s
great not to have to deal with that.
PH: So the novel Last Flag Flying is like
a sequel to the original movie rather
than the original novel – or…
RL: Somewhere in between.
PH: You usually do a certain amount of
rewriting at the rehearsal stage.
RL: They always accuse me of improvising,
but that’s the phase where I improvise. Not
on set, but in rehearsal, and not like acting
exercise improv. It’s just talking, finding new
thoughts, and a lot of humour comes out of
that process. Reworking the material, and
trying to involve the actors, just trying to get
the right pitch, the right words, the timing.
PH: So the actors are like co-writers?
RL: Yeah, we’re sitting around, pens in hand,
talking. “Let’s hear it again, let’s read through
it.” It feels more writerly than actorly. But
it’s not real till you start hearing it, because
words on a page are pretty abstract. It’s
so funny, films are completely judged as
scripts, but to me that’s just nothing.
PH: So working with the actors is
the primary experience?
RL: Yeah, I’m always trying to figure out what
the film wants to be. The vibe will be defined
by how my cast gets along, interacts, what
their strengths and weaknesses are. Certain
things won’t be achieved based on what’s there,
but that will be more than replaced by what
is there that couldn’t have been anticipated.
I’ve got my antennae up the whole time,
going, like, “Oh! That’s an interesting thing
you do. What if we do that?” It’s wonderful
fun and the most alive thing. A lot of directors
would say they like editing the most, but
I like rehearsing and shooting the most,
because to me that’s where it’s happening.
PH: That bond of friendship from Vietnam
in the movie is a thing you could only
have because it’s not a sequel. In The Last
Detail they’re only together travelling
from Virginia to New Hampshire for that
short period. They’ve never met before
and they never meet again afterwards.
RL: And they’re just thrown together. It was
the freedom we were granted by adapting,
to actually add something that would bond
those people – you’re bonded for life. The
thing is so much about friendship, about
these guys who were generous with each
other. They just see each other’s humanity
and find humour in the oddest places.
PH: It’s interesting the way you feed us
bits about what happened in Vietnam.
RL: It was important in this to give them actual
Vietnam experience. What went on there is still
not big – it’s not like the My Lai massacre – it’s
pretty typical. They’d lost some friends and they
were fucked up on drugs, and in the big scheme
of things you would say, “It’s not that big a
thing” – but to the individual psyche it’s huge.
PH: And what we learn about the incident
that haunts them is fragmentary.
RL: We give bits and pieces, and I wanted
to dole it out, because guys who’ve been
through that don’t usually talk about it much.
They talk in half-thoughts and sentences,
so it was a challenge to communicate, to
let the viewer put together that something
happened but not say 100 per cent what.
PH: You’ve said a lot of your films are
explorations of ideas you want to come to terms
with, and that it’s the story that gets you first.
RL: Yeah, it’s like, “Why are you grabbed by this
story? Is it these three guys, or this war backdrop:
the mixed feelings?” The film ultimately is a
picture of the love-hate relationship a lot of
people end up with. You get this particularly
with service members. Anyone who’s trapped
in this big bureaucracy often ends up at odds
with it. But you can love it at the same time,
like Sal’s character: truly, he felt like those were
the best years. He’s one of those guys who liked
the regimen of it all; Mueller, not so much.
PH: Cranston and Fishburne give wonderful
performances, yet there are quite a few
big unexpected close-ups on Steve Carell.
You’ve said this is really Doc’s story. He’s a
quiet character, but essentially he’s sort of
the audience for a lot of what’s going on.
RL: Yeah. He’s the one getting pulled through.
It’s this nightmare narrative that he has to live
through. Time is probably moving at a different
rate for him. Just the last two days of his life
have felt like an eternity. Finding out about his
son’s death, and then deciding what to do, he
feels like he’s just walking in this nightmare.
But these guys pull him back into some reality.
Before even deciding to do the movie, Steve
asked me, “Why do you think Doc goes and
looks these guys up? They have that history,
but why?” And I was like, “You know, I’m not
really sure.” [Laughs] There’s a kind of actor
who would run away when the director
doesn’t have the answer, but Steve liked that.
He said, “Yeah, Doc just doesn’t know why he’s
doing anything.” He’s following an impulse
he can’t consciously intellectualise, so it’s
a pure emotional, instinctual journey.
Life of Bryan: Richard Linklater on set with Cranston
PH: It’s a great moment when they
arrive at the Arlington Cemetery and
realise Doc has just been confused.
RL: They’re in the wrong state! Yeah, my
editor was like, “Can’t we just cut that?”
and I said, “No, that’s kind of great, just that
you’ve gone the wrong way.” Those subtle
looks that Sal and Mueller gave each other,
like, “Doc is not okay. He’s not all here.
What have we gotten ourselves into?”
PH: But then they’re quite gentle with him…
RL: Well, he’s a gentle soul himself. Steve gives
this really beautiful interior performance.
His dad had fought in World War II and
never talked about it. He had a certain
stoicism, and Steve was really playing that.
PH: Your next film is another novel adaptation,
Where’d You Go, Bernadette, about a
teenager trying to track down her missing
mother. Have you shot that already?
RL: Yeah, I’m editing. We only wrapped two and
a half weeks ago, so I’m still recovering. The
Russian vessel we were in got caught in an Arctic
hurricane! Suffice to say we got it – barely. It was
pretty rigorous. The film has an epic structure;
we cover a lot of ground. I’m excited about it.
Cate Blanchett is Bernadette, and Kristen Wiig
plays Audrey the neighbour. It’s a wonderful
cast. Billy Crudup is the husband. Laurence
Fishburne plays the architect friend… a lot of
great people. It’s set in Seattle, and we shot a little
there. We only shot second unit in Antarctica,
because right now it’s winter there, or was when
we were shooting, so we went up to the North
Pole. That’s where we got caught, because they
have icebergs. Everything but penguins – you
gotta put those in. So it was a good experience.
And it’s sort of like Last Flag – it’s got that
middle-age thing. It’s a woman’s movie but
it echoes a certain way – how time changes
Though the film depicts very
different people – in race, beliefs
and choices – they get along.
So maybe it has a uniting feel
you. Are you who you are in relation to
who you were as a younger person?
PH: Which makes me ask how Jesse and Celine
[from the director’s Before… trilogy] are doing,
because with the nine-year gaps between
each previous film, that time is coming up.
RL: I don’t know! We’re about the five-year mark.
This is usually around the time we have an idea.
But it hasn’t happened yet. We’ve got four more
years. We were joking it takes us about five years
to recover from those. They’re pretty rigorous.
But yeah, if at age fiftyish Jesse and Celine have
something to say, we’ll do it. I don’t want to do
it just to do it, unless there’s something we feel
compelled to share. Again, I’m not going to force it.
PH: Although Last Flag Flying is set in 2003,
it could be about the people who voted for
Trump – they feel betrayed by the government
and their politics are up for grabs.
RL: It’s an interesting dynamic that’s played out
in the American Right. In the last election, in the
debates, they would ask, “How many of you think
that the last Iraq War was a mistake?” and they all
raised their hands. So that’s when I knew times
had changed. I was like, “Okay, Last Flag is ready.”
PH: America today seems incredibly divided.
RL: I can’t tell you who my characters voted for.
I’m pretty sure Mueller didn’t vote for Trump,
but I can’t tell you that Sal didn’t vote for Trump.
Sal might have voted for Trump. So this film is
showing guys that are pretty far apart in their
belief systems, obviously you have a pretty sworn
atheist, and a man of the cloth. But it kind of
shows how – because they’re old friends – they
can joke about things, and find humour in their
humanity. They don’t hate each other. There’s a
certain love and camaraderie. That really stems
from a long time ago, so they’re bonded there,
which is kind of beautiful. But there’s a kind
of understanding, or healing. And though the
film depicts very different people – in Mueller
and Sal’s case, there’s different race, beliefs and
choices – they get along. So maybe the film has a
uniting feel. They can all unite in their frustration
with the Man, when the Man is wrong.
Last Flag Flying is released in UK cinemas
i on 26 January and is reviewed on page 66
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 11
 presents December 2017

A selection of our limited edition Blu-rays from 2017:

Some of our forthcoming limited edition Blu-rays for 2018:

Buy direct from powerhousefilms.co.uk

 RUSHES DISPATCHES

THE 24-HOUR SUBLIME

For a change, let’s imagine that
this column isn’t a column at
all, but a great series of moving,
exciting and funny film clips
By Mark Cousins
When critics recently
voted Twin Peaks:
The Return, which
was shown on TV,
as the second-best
film of 2017 in Sight
& Sound, there were complaints on social
media. It was medium-inappropriate.
Well, how’s this for medium-inappropriate?
I’d like to put a film in this magazine column.
I’ve done film on the radio, but so have many.
Let’s push it further. Let’s imagine that these
900 words aren’t 900 words, but a film.
Why? I recently rewatched Caroline Leaf’s
short animation The Owl Who Married a Goose:
An Eskimo Legend. As I did so, the following
thought appeared in my head: “If I ever made
‘The 24-Hour Sublime’, this film would be in
it.” I’ve never heard the phrase ‘The 24-Hour
Sublime’ before, but there it was in my head,
fully formed and insistent. It’s shocking when
you have a thought without precedent. But let’s
work out what The 24-Hour Sublime might be,
and ‘make’ it. Essay films and video essays are
everywhere these days – what would this one
be? Twenty-four hours of great film clips?
Let’s start: David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ video;
Norman McLaren’s The Flicker Film (black-and-
white frames intercut fast – almost never shown
because it could induce a seizure); Scottish
director Margaret Tait’s A Portrait of Ga (1952),
a short home movie about her mother; that story in this list? My boss at Sight & Sound agreed shot in Chantal Akerman’s D’est (1993); Sammy
YouTube video of a full-sized lion running and to my idea for this column, but said, “Don’t just Davis Jr singing Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’
hugging its owner, who saved it as a cub; Gene make it a list.” Was she right to say that? I’ve (he didn’t, but could CGI make it work?); Oum
Kelly in the film Summer Stock (1950) doing noticed that I can spend hours on YouTube, Kalthoum singing ‘Enta Omri (You Are My Life)’;
his dance routine on stage with two bits of zig-zagging from film clips to music videos the café scene at the end of Moonlight (2016).
paper; Claudia Cardinale arriving on the train and archive footage, without getting remotely At this stage you might be thinking – this is
in Once upon a Time in the West (1968), as the bored, yet a 90-minute fiction film with an actual fun, but inconsequential, or un-sequential. I’m
music soars; Bill Clinton’s eulogy at Sinn Féin plot intending to keep me interested, can have enjoying it, but the non-list bits – ie, paragraphs
politician Martin McGuinness’s funeral. me nodding off. When the BBC does one of its like this – are engaging me more. Maybe we’re
How’s it going so far? Lots of good choices, I good music video compilations – which might just killing time here. Maybe you’ve started
think, but are you frustrated yet that you can’t cut from Nina Simone to Neneh Cherry – I’m reading my politics, nationality, aesthetics or
see the extracts? Before the internet and when hooked. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) sexuality in the list? That’s fine. The list is a raw
I didn’t live near an arts cinema, I read about was ridiculously watchable, and had zero plot. thing. I’ve chosen things that move or excite
films without being able to see them. I loved So are story and argument all they’re cracked me or make me laugh, but am not saying why.
doing so. I loved the deferral, the pleasure of up to be? And if not, can we plunge in again? They need to speak for themselves, like a film
seeing through and past the words, into the The title song in Cabaret (1972); the seaborne speaks for itself. I walked around Glasgow today,
images they were describing. Can you admit ending of Imamura Shohei’s Profound Desires in stormy weather, battered by rain. My walk
to some pleasure in being able to picture of the Gods (1968); Vertigo Sea (2015) by John had no content, no meaning, no consequence,
these moments, even if you haven’t seen all Akomfrah; The Slave’s Lament by Graham yet it made me feel incredibly alive, alive in the
of them before? If so, can we proceed? Fagen, Sally Beamish, Ghetto Priest and Robert way that art aims for but doesn’t always achieve.
Mary Robinson’s speech when she became Burns; all of the tracking shots in Agnès Varda’s Again, there was no story in the walk. There
the first female president of Ireland in 1990; Vagabond (1985); NASA’s ‘Earthrise’ footage; the was just me and my fears and excitements.
the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck moment of the explosion in Peter Watkins’s And, so, in violation of the norm that an
Soup (1933); the sex scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s The War Game (1965); the long train tracking article should conclude with a conclusion,
Under the Skin (2013); all the songs Marlene here’s my non-conclusion: the ‘Remember My
Dietrich sings in films; Godley and Creme’s Can you admit to some pleasure Forgotten Man’ number in Gold Diggers of 1933
ILLUSTRATION BY NATE KITCH

‘Cry’ video; the buddy song ‘Yeh Dosti Hum
Nahi Todenge’ from Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay
(1975); Missy Elliot’s ‘The Rain’ video; the
ending of Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987).
Are you bored yet, by the lack of thread or
in being able to picture these
moments, even if you haven’t
seen all of them before?
(1933); the funeral of suffragette Emily Wilding
Davison; the Young Fathers’ ‘Shame’ video;
Picasso drawing a chicken; Marilyn Monroe and
Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators doing
‘Running Wild’ in Some Like It Hot (1959).

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 13


Wide Angle
POINT OF VIEW
ALL SHOOK UP
When we see the world through
screens, the digital glitch becomes
a powerful symbol of all that’s
wrong with reality – if it is reality
By Thomas McMullan
There is a scene in Blade Runner 2049 in which
our hero, Ryan Gosling’s K, and yesterday’s
hero, Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, meet in a
subterranean night club. The light is dim. The
tension is concrete, spectacularly ruptured
as an enormous hologram of Elvis Presley
begins to sing. And then he stops. And then
he starts again. And then he stops again.
The scene judders forward at the pace of
a glitch. The holographic performers are
on the blink. What could easily become a
high-stakes punch-out framed by facsimiles
becomes a contortion of false starts. Instead of
an anachronistic soundtrack, we are treated to
a quivering rendition of ‘Su/s/picio/us m/in/
ds’. The warm swells of the music crack into
silence, only to start up again without warning.
It’s an unsettling moment, undermining the safe
stronghold of a familiar song, splitting it apart.
This scene is not one that could have appeared
in Ridley Scott’s original film. Technical
possibilities aside, it is not one that Blade Runner
(1982) would have imagined because this
rhythm – that of the digital glitch – was not yet
an everyday experience. The anxiety, the anarchy
Viva Las Vegas: Ryan Gosling’s K encounters a holographic Elvis in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049
14 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
and the underlying horror of the digital glitch are
contemporary phenomena. In the 21st century
we know one when we see it: when the screens
we carry in our pockets splutter the wrong
textures; or the screens in our office throw up
mangled lines; or the games consoles in our living
rooms create strange walls and stranger voices.
That’s not to say glitches were born with
computers. Since the 19th century there have
been slurred crackles on telephone lines. Since
the 1950s there have been woozy pictures on
videotapes. In the dark spaces of cinemas, celluloid
has long been breaking down. Indeed, there are
directors who have made this happen on purpose.
The great experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage,
for example, would physically scratch film stock,
as in Reflections on Black (1955), when the blind
protagonist’s eyes are lacerated with white cuts.
The 1990 film Gremlins 2: The New Batch – to
take a very different example – has a remarkable
sequence in which the film itself slows down
and burns out, destroyed by pesky Gremlins who
have taken over the projector and are only made
to behave after a scolding from Hulk Hogan.
Gremlins are themselves an embodiment
of pre-digital glitches, bugs in the machinery.
You can imagine that, for a cinema audience in
the 1990s, seeing their evening entertainment
crash would have been a disorientating hiccup,
at least until the celebrity wrestler turns up.
“The collapse of celluloid was maybe used by a
handful of popular artists,” says Rosa Menkman,
artist and author of the Glitch Studies Manifesto,
a meditation and celebration of the glitch
as a political and creative tool. “Much more
common was the actual burning of celluloid,
back in the days of nitrate, so I think this event
of staged collapse might have been received
with actual surprise, and maybe shock.
“On the other hand, when walking through
a city today you really don’t have to look more
than three metres ahead to see some kind of
digital interface,” she adds. “We, audience and
makers, have developed language skills in terms
of digital media, and are aware now of collapse
also being a metaphor for something else.”
As Menkman suggests, a visual language of
glitching screens is of a different order when
garbled text and images don’t represent Gremlins
in the projector room, but a collapse of your
social profile, your smart home, your work
documents, your dating profile, your bank
account. When something glitches on your
computer or phone it is unsettling – perhaps
exciting, even liberating – because it reminds us
for a brief second that so much of our lives are
held online, and that the seemingly permanent
systems which hold it all together can, much like
Blade Runner 2049’s holographic Elvis, fall apart.
The glitch, as a sickness or as
a superpower, pulls back the
curtain of our infrastructure
and hints at fires within
Sickness and superpowers
Video games are arguably the most common
sites for the glitch-in-the-wild. If you had an early
Game Boy you’ll likely remember loading a dusty
cartridge to be faced with a garbled Nintendo
screen. US artist Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario
Movie (2005) takes this idea and runs with it.
Programmed on to an actual Super Mario Bros
Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge,
the 15-minute film sees the plumber lost in
a corrupted landscape. Textures that usually
come together to form levels of blocks and fluffy
clouds are distorted into seasick abstractions. “As
a video game grows old its content and internal
logic deteriorate,” a wall of text explains at the
beginning of the film. “For a character caught in
this breakdown problems affect every area of life.”
The breakdown of Mario’s scenery has a
lot in common with Bill Morrison’s hypnotic,
nightmarish Decasia (2002), made up of
decomposing segments of film in which
cowboys and comedians and the like dance
around growing splotches in the fabric of
their existence. There’s a reminder, too, of the
fourth-wall disintegration in Chuck Jones’s
1951 Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck, in
which the apparatus of Daffy Duck’s world and
body is stripped and teased by an omniscient
animator. Like Daffy’s self-referential plight,
the corruption of Mario’s code comes across
as a sickness. Something is wrong with the
characters: out of whack with their world, spilling
across the circumference of their stage. Like the
estranged family of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play
Six Characters in Search of an Author they have
glitched out of their own fictions; liberated, yes,
but dangerous by virtue of being unmoored.
In 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph – set across the
multiple universes of arcade machines – the
character Vanellope von Schweetz is ostracised
as a glitch, exiled from the cutesy Mario Kart-
esque society as if she were a leper. Her sickness
manifests itself as a fluttering pixellation of her
body, broken down and teleported from place
to place. In the film’s climax, she learns to use
this ability to her advantage, win a race and save
the lumbering Ralph. The glitch, and its power
to disturb, are flipped into a superpower. The
2017 teen thriller iBoy treads similar territory
with the story of a London teenager who
suffers brain damage and is subsequently able
to visualise digital signals. He becomes a glitch
in the real world, liberated from its invisible
tethers, given control of the reins, capable of
making phones and computers explode.
This power fantasy clearly expresses our
anxieties about how much control we actually
wield over the vast, obscure networks that carry
our online lives. The glitch, both as a sickness
and as a superpower, pulls back the curtain of our
global infrastructure and hints at fires within.
“Glitches at their natural best are ways the
system betrays itself, betrays its pretensions
to perfection, and its attempt to exclude
not only the natural noise of the world but
the noise of its own operation,” says Sean
Cubitt, professor of film and television at
Goldsmiths College. “The risk is always this:
glitches can produce unexpected beauty
through accidental means; but the risk of the
Inner visions: Nae Yuuki as the eyeless Naido in Twin Peaks (2017)
unexpected accident is always that it might be
catastrophic. This may be the uncanny threshold
where the horror [of the] glitch operates.”
Ghosts in the machines
Towards the beginning of David Lynch’s 2017
TV series Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a scene
in which FBI agent Dale Cooper finds an eyeless
woman in a room above a purple sea. The
sequence spasms like a streaming malfunction. If
the original series’ backwards-talking phantasms
were a nightmare tailored for spools of videotape
in a VCR, this scene has the unnerving anti-
rhythm of a digital corruption. Something begins
to bang on the door. A strange panel that looks
Gremlins take over the projector in Gremlins 2
like it belongs in a nuclear reactor emits hums
and clicks. All the while, the camera is convulsing,
interfered with by some unseen malevolence.
Lynch’s scene is haunted by the mysterious
rhythm of unknown interference, expressed
through the glitchy grammar of contemporary
technology. It feels modern, but it also harks
back to pre-digital ideas of distortion caused by
non-human forces. “Somewhere deep in the
archaeology of these forms is the belief that ghosts
and extra-terrestrials haunt the electromagnetic
spectrum,” Cubitt explains. “The stutters and
crackles of late-night recordings became for
researchers the traces of posthumous apparitions,
the voices of the dead, or messages from distant
stars – a thesis still powering SETI [search for
extraterrestrial intelligence] projects today.”
In 1986 the Russian filmmaker Vladimir
Shevchenko was given permission to fly over
the site of the Chernobyl disaster. The film reel
he brought back was pockmarked and carried
large amounts of static. He thought at first that
the stock was defective, but then realised the
glitches were created by the radiation. “It was
not a representation of catastrophe but an actual
toxic event in which a lethal dose of radiation was
ingrained within the molecules of each and every
silver halide particle,” wrote Susan Schuppli in
her essay ‘The Most Dangerous Film in the World’.
Shevchenko’s film was literally corrupted.
The unseen interference in this case was deadly
radiation. Its glitch was contagious. When you
watch the scene in Twin Peaks, it’s hard not to feel
a similar sensation – as if the sickness of which
the medium’s stutter is a symptom is spreading
into your screen. The haunting of static has given
way to a possession of the networks. Perhaps
the glitch is unsettling because it makes us, the
viewer, feel infected. When a holographic version
of Elvis stops and starts to sing, or when an FBI
agent flits back and forth in a room, the fear is
that their collapse will spread into our eyes, into
our brains, into our networks. Whether that
corruption is an affliction or a liberation, it is an
interruption that jolts us out of the everyday, out
of our stability, out of our bodily and social order,
into something altogether less sure of itself.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 15
 WIDE ANGLE PRIMAL SCREEN
PARADISE REMADE
When a film is lost forever, the only
way to see it may be to make it all
over again – and who knows what
we might learn in the process?
By Pamela Hutchinson
Remakes may be a sensitive subject, but in the
silent era they were sometimes a necessity. When
a film became popular, multiple copies were
printed, and the negative could wear out: the only
solution was to shoot the film again. Famously,
Cecil Hepworth’s company remade its 1905 British
hit Rescued by Rover twice over to satisfy demand.
Then again, there were always unscrupulous
producers who might ‘borrow’ a successful idea
from another territory for their own local market.
Several decades after the coming of sound,
remaking silent films sounds like a good idea
once more – not just any silents, but the massive
majority of films from the era that are now
considered lost. If we have no reasonable chance
of seeing the originals again, but we do have cast
lists, cue sheets, publicity materials, reviews,
even screenplays or stills, these films seem ripe
for a remake. As with extant films, the remake
shouldn’t replace the originals, but add to their
legacy. Every remake differs from the original,
even Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot rerun of Psycho
(1998). What’s exciting about this process is
that it is creative – the filmmakers inevitably
have very little to copy, so must approach the
material in some ways as if it is brand new.
Perhaps, also, the process of recreating a lost work
could tell us something about the original.
Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen (The Happiest
Day in the Life of Olli Mäki) and producer Otto
Kylmälä had both made their own original silent
shorts before they decided to tackle a lost film
Finns ain’t what they used to be: the 2017 remake of the lost 1907 Finnish film The Moonshiners
16 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
The Blind Girl, part of Guy Maddin’s Seances
that was key to their country’s cinematic history.
The Moonshiners (Salaviinanpolttajat, 1907) was
the first fiction film ever made in Finland, but no
copies exist. Kylmälä approached Kuosmanen
(“He has a wonderful understanding of film
history and a movingly humane touch”) to
remake the film for its 110th anniversary, and
the 100th anniversary of Finnish independence.
All the filmmakers had to go on, says Kylmälä,
was a synopsis, “a rough plot description
published in a newspaper at the time of the
film’s premiere”. The description was vague, but
that gave Kuosmanen and his team scope to use
their imagination and invent a short comedy
from the barest details: two hooch hawkers
who encounter a card sharp and a policeman.
There was no auteur influence to guide the
style of the film either, which Kylmälä describes
A lost film is a narrative
with no known final resting
place, doomed to wander the
landscape of film history
as the first crowdsourced movie. The original film
came out of a competition – the writer submitted
his idea anonymously and didn’t include any
contact details. “It’s obviously a shame,” Kylmälä
says, “but at the same time a blessing, because it
gave us freedom to take the material in whatever
direction we wanted.” Reminiscences by the
crew suggest the original film ran to 20 minutes,
but the threadbare plot led Kuosmanen and
Kylmälä to believe it was closer to half that.
The completed remake is a hoot, a comic
caper about a pair of middle-aged scruffs making
a killing selling moonshine to the locals in the
snow-covered Finnish countryside, then suffering
from the effects of their own product when they
try to multiply their profits at the card table. The
film was shot in black and white on 16mm film
using a Bolex camera – which gives it the texture
of an older work without any digital distressing. It
has been screened several times at festivals, with
live musical accompaniment and foley effects.
The Canadian director Guy Maddin has long
nursed an interest in lost film: “I’ve always
considered a lost film as a narrative with no
known final resting place,” he has said, “doomed
to wander the landscape of film history, sad,
miserable and unable to project itself to the
people who might love it.” To address this loss,
Maddin staged his Seances project in Paris and
Montreal, beginning in 2012. Every day, in a
public place, he gathered a group of actors on a
small set to shoot swift remakes of lost or never
completed movies. I went to the Pompidou
Centre in Paris to see a cast that included Udo Kier,
the writer Kim Morgan and Geraldine Chaplin
enacting the scenarios of 1921’s The Blue Mountain
Mystery, an Australian silent (I was lucky enough
to witness a brutal murder), and Erich von
Stroheim’s 1933 talkie script Poto-Poto. The shoots
were streamed live online, and although the
finished, edited films are not available as complete
movies, much of the resulting footage was edited
into Maddin’s 2015 feature The Forbidden Room.
Perhaps acknowledging that every decision made
on set or in the editing room took the completed
remake away from the source or the original
directors’ intentions, Maddin has now presented
the Seances films in an interactive form, in
museum installations or online (seances.nfb.ca).
Seemingly randomised and remixed, the films
are true one-offs, presentations of the Seances
material in fleeting form, never to be repeated.
A project that began with remaking resists the
idea of replacing previous texts, and in fact
creates new “lost films” – a warning card before
each short advises: “This film will disappear.”
Projects such as these add to rather than
supersede the originals. Kylmälä says that so few
ILLUSTRATION BY MICK BROWNFIELD WWW.MICKBROWNFIELD.COM
early Finnish films survive that if the original
Moonshiners was ever discovered it would be “a
massive victory for Finnish film and our cultural
history … [but] while we wait, at least now Finland
has one version of its first film.” We could extend
the logic: since we may never find the original of
Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927) or
Murnau’s Four Devils (1928) or Hitchcock’s The
Mountain Eagle (1926), why not remake them?
Remakes could become an opportunity to engage
creatively with film history and raise its ghosts –
not an exercise in leveraging brand recognition.
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WIDE ANGLE FESTIVAL
POWERS OF OBSERVATION
Panoptic nerve: Dragonfly Eyes edits a narrative out of thousands of hours of surveillance-camera footage
The main prize at Tokyo FILMeX
was shared by two Indonesian
directors – but their work was
overshadowed by another film
By Tony Rayns
Most critics and festival jurors haven’t yet noticed,
but Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (Qingting zhi Yan) was
the most exciting and innovative film of 2017.
It was certainly the towering highlight of the
Tokyo FILMeX festival in November, although the
jury chose to reward two richly imagined films
by young Indonesian women directors instead.
Xu Bing, some readers will know, is a star of the
contemporary Chinese art scene – a major one-
man retrospective of his work plays in the city of
Wuhan until the end of spring – and Dragonfly
Eyes is his first film. A project that took four years
to finesse, it may turn out to be his only film,
although he said in Tokyo that he’s enjoyed his
exposure to the world of cinema in the Locarno
and Busan festivals and would like to make
another one. Full disclosure: Xu asked me to do
his English subtitles, but my enthusiasm for the
film goes way beyond this marginal involvement.
The project started from an intuition that the
vast and ever-increasing amount of surveillance-
camera footage out there might yield something
more intriguing than the old ‘Who watches
the watchmen?’ conundrum. It took off when
numerous websites in China began live-
streaming from surveillance cameras and other
websites began anthologising striking footage
caught by such cameras; this happened in sync
with the proliferation of hosted ‘Make me a star’
websites. Xu and his team captured literally
thousands of hours of online footage and came
up with a fictional storyline which carefully
chosen images could be used to tell. Apparently
there was a symbiotic relationship between
the soundtrack (performed by professional
actors) and the images: Xu looked for images
to illustrate the script but also allowed found
images to shape revisions to the storyline.
A young woman named Qingting (‘Dragonfly’)
grows disillusioned by the commercialism of
the Buddhist temple where she is training to be
a nun; she decides to drop out and explore the
secular world outside. Her first job is at a highly
mechanised dairy farm, where a technician
named Ke Fan falls for her and liberates one
cow in an attempt to please her. Both of them
are fired. Qingting moves to a big city and finds
a job in a dry-cleaning shop; Ke Fan follows and
keeps intervening in her life, especially after she’s
victimised by a nouveau riche customer. Ke Fan’s
aggressive behaviour lands him in jail. When
he comes out he can find no trace of Qingting
– until he stumbles on evidence that she may
have had plastic surgery and become an online
micro-celebrity under a new name. After suffering
several setbacks, Ke Fan decides to ‘restore’ the
missing Qingting by becoming her himself…
The story unfolds in a chaotic universe: natural
disasters and mechanical hazards lurk on every
road and highway and outside every shop. Human
identity becomes as malleable and indistinct
as the motives of apparent suicides caught on
surveillance cameras. Of course, dozens of young
women and men appear on screen as Qingting
and Ke Fan, but the film offsets the flow of
everyday routines and incidents with a Buddhist
sense that ‘reality’ is illusory and impermanent,
The film offsets the flow
of everyday routines and
incidents with a Buddhist
sense that ‘reality’ is illusory
which makes the ‘drama’ engrossing and
oddly credible. And an insidious, haunting
electronic score by the Japanese composer
Hanno Yoshihiro helps to tease out unexpected
emotional nuances in the material; beyond the
elements of social satire, there are moments
of keenly felt pathos, rage and even horror.
There is one objective voice in the film,
belonging to a mechanical entity which calls
itself Dragonfly: it speaks (in English) on the
soundtrack in what Xu calls a mixture of Tang
dynasty poetry and modern computer-speak,
and classifies the elements in surveillance
images by boxing and analysing them. Pitched
somewhere between sci-fi soap opera and
conceptual fable, this remarkable film has
no obvious precedent in world cinema.
No space left to give the two Indonesian
prize-winners their due, so here are thumbnail
sketches. Kamila Andini’s highly original The
Seen and Unseen centres on a young girl trying to
come to terms with her twin brother’s impending
death in hospital. Nearly half the film comprises
ten-year-old Tantri’s fantasies (some of them
could be fantasticated memories) of playing
with her brother Tantra, inspired by wayang
shadow-puppets and Balinese animist dances.
The title cuts two ways: the ‘unseen’ could be
Tantri’s dreams, but it could equally refer to the
complex feelings which the film intimates but
cannot show. Either way, the film is a feat of non-
narrative storytelling. Mouly Surya’s Marlina the
Murderer in Four Acts (Marlina si Pembunuh dalam
Empat Babak) is the polar opposite, a powerful
narrative set on Sumba Island, balanced between
pop-genre (especially Italian western) rhetoric
and modern Asian ‘slow cinema’ style. The
newly widowed Marlina takes violent revenge
on a gang of men who try to rape her, latterly
helped by a very pregnant friend. In more than
one sense, a victory for Indonesian women.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 19
 TAILOR TINKERS
Vicky Krieps as Alma
and Daniel Day-Lewis as
Reynolds Woodcock in
Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Phantom Thread

20 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

 Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread’, his
first movie outside the US, is a gothic romance
set in 1950s London. Here he talks about the
rigid world of haute couture, the English class
system and working with Daniel Day-Lewis
on what the actor says will be his last film
By James Bell
The ‘phantom thread’ in the title of Paul Thomas Ander-
son’s eighth feature, it’s said, refers to a term that seam-
stresses working in the East End of Victorian London
used to describe the sensation they felt after emerging
from long, repetitive hours in the workshop. After re-
turning home exhausted, the women would find their
hands moving involuntarily, their fingers clasped as
though sewing invisible, ‘phantom’ threads.
It’s a title that offers hints of the gothic undercurrents
that drive Anderson’s film, the first the California-native
has made outside the US. Phantom Thread is a claustro-
phobic chamber drama about the high-wire balance
between giving and taking, conceding and resisting in
relationships, and one as singularly unconventional
as any he has made since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love sig-
nalled his move away from the dazzlingly orchestrated
Scorsese/Altman-isms of Boogie Nights (1997) and Magno-
lia (1999) to the more distinctive signature felt in There
Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice
(2014). The film introduces the forbidding, immaculate-
ly presented figure of Reynolds Woodcock, a punishingly
obsessive, unwaveringly perfectionist couturier in fash-
ionable mid-1950s London, played by Daniel Day-Lewis
in what the actor has said will be his final performance.
Woodcock lives and works in an elegant Georgian town-
house in Mayfair, the ‘House of Woodcock’, as it’s known,
where royalty and ladies of high society come to be fitted
for bespoke dresses each new season, and where a team
of backroom seamstresses toil under the watchful eye of
Reynolds’s implacably loyal sister Cyril – his very own
Mrs Danvers (Rebecca was a key influence) – played with
relishably purse-lipped disdain by Lesley Manville.
Everything is ‘just so’ in this world, precisely ordered to
facilitate the unencumbered creativity of the great man
at its centre. “It’s right because it’s right,” as Reynolds says.
Romances with women only last while they’re useful
for the work – once the muse is used up, Cyril steps in
to usher the ladies out the door (“What do you want to
do about Johanna?” Cyril asks Reynolds over breakfast
early in the film. “She’s lovely, but the time has
come”). The bodies of Bluebeard’s former wives

THE NEEDLE
AND THE
DAMAGE DONE February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 21
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON PHANTOM THREAD
I would keep were locked away in the forbidden room in the old
fable, but Reynolds’s women simply vanish from
seeing pictures the house once they are no longer needed, living on only
of these couture as phantoms in the exquisite dresses they once inspired
and wore.
houses, and it was That is until, as with Bluebeard’s eighth wife, Reynolds
always a man meets a woman who can’t be cast aside so easily, and who
may prove to be a match for him – an orphaned Eastern
with dozens of European immigrant named Alma (Vicky Krieps) whom
women behind he meets when she’s working as a waitress in a seaside
hotel, seduces (over breakfast) with the promise of glam-
him, in lab coats, our and high society, and who is soon living in the May-
doing his work. fair house and spending weekends in his country manor
(a family inheritance with more than a passing resem-
That lent itself to blance to a modest Manderley). Like the heroines of so
a gothic story many gothic romances, from Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights to those of the films made in the genre’s heyday in
1940s Hollywood, such as Gaslight (1944), Experiment Per-
ilous (1944) Dragonwyck (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door
(1947) – not to mention any number of other Hitchcock
heroines imperilled by potentially murderous spouses –
Alma finds Reynolds’s initial seductive interest gives way
to a chilling distance. However, Alma refuses simply to
bend to Reynolds’s will as so many of her predecessors
have. As she tells him on their first evening together, with
a portent that he can’t know at the time: “If you want to
have a staring contest with me, you’ll lose.” When later
Reynolds is seized suddenly by a mysterious, violent sick-
ness, it’s he who becomes the vulnerable one.
“The idea of doing something in the genre of the gothic
romance had interested me for a long time,” says a very
jet-lagged Anderson when I meet him a few days before
Christmas, coincidentally in the same Covent Garden
hotel room in which he, Day-Lewis and Krieps had their
only brief meeting together before shooting began. “I had
an idea to do a story of a man and a woman based upon
a character who, unless he is ill, is unable to show how
much he needs someone.” Anderson has spoken of how
one moment of inspiration came when he was laid up
sick in bed, his wife tending to him with loving patience,
but the theme is of course one that reaches back into the
tradition of the gothic romance – in Jane Eyre, it’s only
when Rochester is blinded and maimed that he and Jane
finally marry. Love is brutal in these stories.
22 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
There was also the desire to work again with Day-
Lewis, after their Oscar-winning collaboration on There
Will Be Blood, and to bring the actor back to England. As
Anderson describes the process of writing and conceiv-
ing the film, he unfailingly refers to “we” or “us”, and it’s
clear that the collaboration was unusually close, even to
the point of co-authorship. Was this a new way of work-
ing for him? “I had worked a bit in that way with Phil
[Seymour Hoffman] on The Master,” Anderson says. “But
yes, this was really from the ground up. I had less than
I had ever had before when coming to Daniel, which I
found to be a really good way of working, actually. We
had the seed of the story and the character, but it had to
grow. I’m never very strict on outlines going in. There’s
a central premise, on which we can hang things as we
discover them.”
That hanging of details accelerated as Anderson
became increasingly interested in fashion, and mid-cen-
tury haute couture in particular – in part prompted when
composer and Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood,
who has scored each of Anderson’s features since There
Will Be Blood, including Phantom Thread, complimented
him on a suit: “He said something sarcastic to the effect of
‘Look at you, Beau Brummell’,” Anderson says. “I had to
look the name up, then wanted to know more.
“I discovered [Spanish designer] Cristóbal Balenciaga,
and just became fascinated by his life and his work,”
he continues. “As I looked at other designers, I would
keep seeing pictures of these couture houses, and it was
always a man with dozens of women behind him, in lab
coats, doing his work. That lent itself to a gothic story, I
felt. There was also something so cinematic about stair-
cases and doors and workspaces leading into other work-
spaces, with women in those gowns and dresses. It all fit.”
That period of research led Anderson and Day-Lewis,
as well as costume designer Mark Bridges, to English
designers of the period – men like Norman Hartnell
(designer of Elizabeth II’s 1947 wedding gown, as well
as her 1953 Coronation dress), Hardy Amies (who also
designed dresses for Elizabeth) and Charles James, all ex-
acting and brilliant men who were drawn upon during
the creation of the character of Reynolds Woodcock.
Paris and London were twin centres of European dress-
making in the 50s, but the latter appealed for the way it
COUTURE SHOCK
Krieps and Day-Lewis (left);
Lesley Manville as Reynolds’s
sister Cyril (right); V&A
volunteers Joan Brown and
Sue Clark as seamstresses
Nana and Biddy with Daniel
Day-Lewis (far right)
cleaved to a formal tradition, tied in to the rituals and oc-
casions of upper-class society, as opposed to the fashion-
able ‘New Look’ developed over the channel by the likes
of Christian Dior (at one point, Reynolds spits invective
in disgust on hearing a client use the word ‘chic’ – “Fuck-
ing ‘chic’. Whoever invented that should be spanked in
public. I don’t even know what that little word means!”).
The bringing together of the obsessive world of couture
with the stifling rules governing manners and behaviour
in fashionable English society of the period, where poli-
tesse might barely mask barbed hostility, revealed itself
as prime gothic terrain. “That, and being from America.
There’s always that old Anglo-fascination,” says Ander-
son. “I’d always loved the idea of post-war London, prob-
ably from all those movies I love: David Lean’s Brief En-
counter [1945] and The Passionate Friends [1949], Michael
Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going! [1945]. These are food
and drink to me. The Passionate Friends always seems to
suffer in comparison to Brief Encounter, but I love it.”
Less celebrated it may be, but The Passionate Friends
feels a particularly key reference, dealing as it does with
explosive secrets and emotional duplicity between three
figures (in Lean’s film it’s Ann Todd, Trevor Howard as
her former love, and Claude Rains as her mistrustful
husband). More obviously still, it also has a scene set at
a raucous New Year’s Eve party at the infamous Chelsea
Arts Club Ball, as well as showing its characters holiday-
ing in Switzerland – both also found in Phantom Thread.
“A straight lift!” laughs Anderson. “No. Whether it’s
a wholesale steal from The Passionate Friends or not, I
don’t know. Most of those kind of details came through
the historical research. Switzerland was where soci-
ety figures used to vacation at that time – Balenciaga,
for example – so it fits that they would go there in The
Passionate Friends.
“We were pulling from everywhere,” he continues.
“Here we really counted on old Pathé footage. I found
amazing material shot at the Chelsea Arts Club Ball,
footage of fashion shows from the 50s, news footage of
[American heiress] Barbara Hutton’s marriage to [Puerto
Rican diplomat and renowned playboy] Porfirio Rubi-
rosa, which we have paralleled in our film [with a story
involving the House of Woodcock’s wealthy American
investor Barbara Rose, played by Harriet Sansom Harris,
Powell and marrying a Dominican businessman; Reynolds has to
hold his nose and attend the wedding]. You can go on
Pressburger to YouTube and watch Pathé reports of the Chelsea Arts
films were a Club balls between 1947 to ’57. They were so much more
violent and scandalous than we portray them in the film.
great reminder It’s following those paths. So, the dressing of the Belgian
of the need to put princess [in the film] was inspired by a real story of Balen-
ciaga dressing a Belgian princess – but it’s a story from
theatrics in – the the 60s that we’ve transplanted to the 50s. Historians will
rituals of walking wag their fingers, but all those inspirations get pooled.”
Nonetheless, he did look to contemporary fiction and
into the house, of cinema for tone. I ask him if he looked at Jacques Becker’s
walking up the 1945 film Falbalas, a story about, yes, an obsessive, wom-
anising designer in Paris whose ways are disrupted by an
stairs to meet affair – the scenes of seamstresses at work feel very remi-
the great man niscent of Phantom Thread. Anderson says, “Yes. It’s not
one of Becker’s best at all. I thought it would be a gold-
mine to steal from but it turned out just OK. The gowns
are by Marcel Rochas if I’m not mistaken, who was a
famous designer at the time and quite a ladies’ man. But
we were well on our way with the idea and of course,
started searching for anything that might inform or pres-
ent us with a problem of the ‘it’s been done before’ kind.”
An especially key influence on conveying the claustro-
phobic atmosphere of London’s grand houses of the time,
and the somewhat scathing, darkly comic tone the film
takes towards them, were the sharply observed short
stories by the writer and heiress to the Guinness fortune
Lady Caroline Blackwood, a celebrated muse and fixture
in bohemian London circles in the 50s, when she was
married to artist Lucian Freud. Blackwood’s third hus-
band, the poet Robert Lowell, memorably described her
as “a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded
lovers” – an image that feels perfectly of a piece with
Phantom Thread.
And in British cinema of the period, as well as Lean,
he inevitably looked to The Archers: “Powell and Press-
burger films were a great reminder to me of the need to
put theatrics in,” he says. “For instance, the theatrics that
come with a fashion house like that – the grand entranc-
es, the rituals of walking into such a house, of walking up
the stairs to meet the great man… trying to film that with
a bravura theatricality. Ramping it all up, certainly
with the music, because that must have been the
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 23
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON PHANTOM THREAD

impression they all wanted to give – that display

of power. ‘I’ll let you walk up the stairs to me, and
I’ll greet you from above.’ And that hasn’t changed today.”
The Red Shoes (1948) was a particular touchstone, its
tale of an obsessively committed man at the head of a
creative enterprise – and the exploration of the personal
and emotional toll of that commitment – an obvious
parallel. Day-Lewis also borrows unmistakably from the
look and poise of Anton Walbrook’s ballet director Boris
Lermontov for Reynolds, and just as Lermontov calls the
ambitious young composer Julian Craster to a meeting
over breakfast, Phantom Thread is punctuated by several
excruciatingly funny breakfast-table scenes, with Reyn-
olds showing mounting irritation as his invaluable think-
ing time is disrupted by the simply unbearable clink of a
teaspoon against a cup, or the intolerable sound of a knife
buttering toast. As Cyril tells Alma: “If breakfast isn’t right
it’s very hard for him to recover for the rest of the day.”
Was Anderson lampooning the scenes of the great man
at breakfast familiar from earlier films? (In Rebecca too,
Olivier’s Maxim de Winter is at breakfast when he sud-
denly proposes to Joan Fontaine’s “little fool”, instructing
her that he has “two lumps of sugar in my coffee – now
don’t forget!”) “Actually I come to it from a very personal
place,” Anderson laughs. “Daniel has teased me about my
obsession with breakfast. When we were getting together
to make There Will Be Blood he would always point out
that I was ordering five times the normal amount.”
If this is really to be Day-Lewis’s final role, it’s anoth-
er entirely distinctive performance on which to bow
out. Not as obviously bravura as, say, his turns as Bill Daniel and I That sense of his own uniqueness and disdain for the
the Butcher in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2000), or entitlement of the idle upper classes is something that ul-
his oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, his always imagined timately he shares with Alma. We’re given little direct in-
Reynolds Woodcock is still every bit as memorable as that Reynolds formation about Alma’s background (of the fact that she
his character’s name demands. Despite his reputation shares her name with Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville, An-
among royalty and London’s elite, he’s a brusque, fabu- would be a derson says, “I promise you, it was a complete accident.
lously rude figure (“Didn’t I tell you to fuck off?” he says person who ran I probably would have avoided it if I had thought of it”),
at one point to the young doctor who examined him other than that she is an orphan (material showing her
during his sudden sickness, and with whom Alma has in his own lane with her brother was cut from the final edit of the film);
a tentative flirtation; on another that he “doesn’t give a – he wouldn’t but we’re given clues, such as her reaction to a scene in
tinker’s fucking curse” whether or not a client is satisfied which a Daily Mail reporter asks Woodcock benefactor
with her dress). Reynolds doesn’t really fit at all in high socialise with Barbara Rose at the press conference to mark her wed-
society, which he views with a scathing disregard – all anyone else who ding to playboy Rubio Gurrerro, about rumours of him
those entitled, useless people lacking in the grand talent selling visas to Jews during the war. The camera holds
and purpose only he possesses. He’s an odd, self-centred did what he did on her expression as she reacts, and the line echoes in
man with a fixation on his dead mother (he keeps a lock her ears – are we to read that she’s a Jewish war orphan?
of her hair sewn into the lining of his jackets, just above “Yes. I would say so,” Anderson says. “We tried to point it
his breast “to keep her close to me always... I try to never in that direction. We actually wanted several things to
be without her”), and trusts no one but Cyril. “Daniel and be captured in her expression in that scene: her disgust
I always imagined that Reynolds would be a person who that Reynolds’s beautiful dress is being worn at such an
ran in his own lane – he wouldn’t socialise with anyone occasion; visas and Jews – this is triggering a lot in her.
else who did what he did,” says Anderson. “He would And also, if this is what love is meant to look like [a cyni-
have had a belief that he was the only real designer in cal, financial arrangement], she doesn’t want a piece of it.
England. I always found myself wondering what Reyn- It’s the classic thing, you get to a point in editing where
olds would have made of someone like Norman Hartnell. you decide that you’ve retained material that points to a
He probably would have been slightly dismissive – he backstory, and if the audience are swift they will catch it,
would have said that Hartnell used too many gemstones but if they don’t, it’s not important for their enjoyment.”
or something. We talked about the fact that Reynolds’s Gradually, Alma emerges as someone as complex and
mother would have been an immigrant, an outsider her- difficult as Reynolds, her initial exasperation that he
self – like Alma. With a character like Reynolds there’s so resists her attempts at a more conventional intimacy
often a preoccupation with his mother, and Reynolds’s giving way to a sense of almost conspiratorial under-
mother would have made sure that her child’s feet never standing of his difficult nature – something abetted by
touched the ground; he was the golden child, whose gift Cyril, who comes to see Alma as an ally. In her first major
for sewing was cultivated, at the expense of Cyril.” English-language role, Luxembourg-born actor Vicky

24 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Krieps is a revelation, and more than holds her own
alongside Day-Lewis. I ask Anderson if he was concerned
that working with Day-Lewis could be intimidating, and
if he used that to impact on the film: “I’ve no doubt that
Daniel is aware of it. But he is very good about putting
people at ease, even if there is supposed to be an uneasy
relationship in the film. I would hesitate to say that I
used it to help any performances. He even came to me
two weeks into the shoot to say he was nervous at just
how good Vicky was, and that he was on the back foot.”
The fact that Reynolds and Alma are both outsiders is
a detail Anderson uses to probe the snobberies and ugly
prejudices of the English upper class. “I was fascinated by
the rules of the British class system,” Anderson says. “But
I relied on Daniel to guide me in that area.” Most of the
film is set in the claustrophobic confines of the House of
Woodcock, or away at the weekend house in the country,
or occasionally at dinner in the same restaurant – a world
within the wider world of London society of the period.
But there is a telling sequence of Alma and Reynolds out
at a party hosted by Lady Baltimore (played by Julia Davis
– “She’s a national treasure. I love Nighty Night, Camping,
Jam and all that Chris Morris stuff, and especially Human
Remains”), whose snobbery towards Alma is vicious – a
comment on the well-documented anti-Semitism of
much of the English aristocracy of the time? “Yes,” says
Anderson. “Julia Davis said of Lady Baltimore that she
was the type of person who might say, ‘I don’t mean to
be racist, but…’ As her character says of Alma: ‘Is she up
there stealing things, or attacking people, or howling at
the moon?’”
The film was all shot on location – a seaside town near
Whitby in Yorkshire standing in for the seaside village
where Reynolds meets Alma, a large Elizabethan cottage
in the Cotswolds for his weekend retreat, and an elegant
Georgian terrace on Fitzroy Square in central London
for the House of Woodcock. The decision brought chal-
lenges, but Anderson wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“The idea of going to a set seemed like I could have just
stayed in Burbank, which would have been wrong. I look
at London as a tourist, it all seems so cinematic to me.
Daniel came to
me two weeks into
the shoot to say
he was nervous
at just how good
Vicky Krieps was,
and that he was
on the back foot
ROLE MODELS
(Clockwise from below left)
Joan Fontaine and Judith
Anderson in Rebecca (1940);
Jacques Becker’s Falbalas
(1945); Anton Walbrook
in The Red Shoes (1948);
Ann Todd, Claude Rains
and Trevor Howard in The
Passionate Friends (1949)
It can be frustrating shooting a period piece on location,
you sometimes have to resort to digital effects to take
things out or put things in. But I try to avoid it.”
Similarly, all the main dresses seen in the film were
designed and made bespoke by costume designer Mark
Bridges, rather than bought in from museum collections.
“That was an idea early on, but they’re museum pieces,
they can’t go out. Plus they’re 70 years old now, and we
needed them to be brand new. Also, it just would have
been wrong to make a film about a dressmaker and not
build the dresses. That said, there are many dresses in the
background that are vintage, and to make all of them
would have been way beyond the scope of what we could
afford. So you focus on the ones that are really front and
centre.”
That sense of authenticity is stitched into the film in
other, more surprising ways too. Bridges accompanied
Anderson and Day-Lewis on research trips to London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum, where they happened to
meet two long-time volunteers, Joan Brown and Sue
Clark, who were so helpful they ended up not only being
creative advisers on set, but also appearing in the film as
seamstresses Biddy and Nana. “Joan had even worked for
Hardy Amies for many, many years from the 1950s, so
working with them was one of the great, great pleasures
of making this,” says Anderson.
In formal terms, what’s striking about Phantom Thread
is not the ostentatious stylistic audacity that character-
ised Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and led to wild claims
of Anderson as a new Kubrick (though many will note
the way the filming of Reynolds and Alma’s high-speed
night-time drive through country lanes recalls a simi-
lar scene in A Clockwork Orange); nor even the daring
choices of later films like There Will Be Blood, whose first
20 minutes took place entirely without dialogue. Instead
there’s a restrained classicism to the look and editing of
the film (which Anderson shot himself – no cinematog-
rapher is credited) that is appropriate to the theme.
There’s also a trust in the power of transitions between
scenes to affect the uneasy disquiet that is the heart of the
story – elisions that express what is not necessarily seen
or verbalised. Subtle dissolves to a new scene manage to
indicate a change in the emotional temperature in the
house; a cut to a new morning bringing with it the reali-
sation that the balance of power in the relationship has
shifted almost imperceptibly overnight in Alma’s favour.
Anderson credits editor Dylan Tichenor with much of
the crafting of that effect, and also Jonny Greenwood’s
score, which winds around pieces by Nelson Riddle,
Oscar Peterson, Debussy, Schubert, Brahms and others
and wonderfully suggests the ebbing and flowing of oth-
erwise disguised emotions.
Did Anderson have notes for Greenwood on the
music? “I actually showed Jonny The Passionate Friends,”
he says. “Interestingly, Richard Addinsell, the composer
of that score, was the lover of Victor Stiebel, a popular
couture designer in London, so again there were those
unexpected connections. Jonny would say that he would
write music he imagined Reynolds would listen to. ‘Ro-
mance’ was my only direction to him.” Swooning ro-
mance? Or romance of the dangerous, masochistic kind?
“Well… in the end, what’s the difference?”
Phantom Thread is released in UK cinemas
i on 2 February and is reviewed on page 69
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 25
 SPEAR OF DESTINY
In Nick Park’s Early Man
Eddie Redmayne voices the
simpleton hero Dug, while
his not-so-wild boar sidekick
Hognob is grunted by the
director himself

26 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

PARK
LIFE
A group of cavemen cut off in a remote forest
are forced to challenge their Bronze Age
invaders to a football match to win back their
freedom, in Aardman’s ‘Early Man’, Nick
Park’s first directing job in almost a decade
By Nick Bradshaw
aw

In a converted factory north of Bristol, a woolly mammoth

is risen from the clay, fearsome and dressed for combat.
Nearby are its handlers – soldiers of the Bronze Age, a
bustling and expansive society of inventors, traders and
officials who, like the Romans and others, are bonded in
both military imperialism and the rituals of competitive
sport. And around another corner, on a two-floor set bor-
dered by green-screen walls, is their secular temple – a sta-
dium of football, apparently designed with a mix of Meso-
potamian, Egyptian and Saxon influences (plus a wink to
Shakespeare’s Globe in London), and detailed with native
motifs of square-horned helmets and footballing coins.
This is Aardman, the studio built by Morph, Wallace
and Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep – though the building
itself was acquired in 1997 on DreamWorks boss Jeffrey
Katzenberg’s advice, to shoot Chicken Run, the team’s
first feature. It’s late September 2017, and the studio is a
year into the filming of Early Man, its first non-franchise
feature since co-founder Peter Lord’s The Pirates! In an Ad-
venture with Scientists! in 2012, and its first fully original
feature concept since Chicken Run, released in 2000. It’s
also Nick Park’s own first directing job since 2008’s Wal-
lace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, and his
first time making a feature as the sole director, having
co-directed Chicken Run with Lord, and The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit (2005) with Steve Box.
The sophisticates of the Bronze Age are the an-
tagonists of Early Man, which focuses on a small

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 27

AARDMAN EARLY MAN

band of simpletons who time forgot – cavemen

and women who know only the tyrannical nature
of the volcanic ‘Badlands’ beyond their forest idyll and
hold out, Asterix-like, against the outside world. Merlin
Crossingham, one of the film’s two animation directors,
talks us through the cast list: the tribe leader is Bobnar,
“avuncular and warm” and voiced by Timothy Spall
– “He’s quite old, he’s nearly 32”. His hunter-gatherer
charges, generally two sticks short of a fire, include
Selina Griffiths’s rough-and-tumble northerner Magma,
Johnny Vegas’s Asbo, Richard Ayoade’s Treebor (“a tiny
man stuck in a big man’s body”), Simon Greenall’s in-
comprehensible Geordie Eemak and Mark Williams’s
simplest-of-all Barry, whose best friend, Mr Rock, is a
rock. But there’s also Eddie Redmayne’s hero Dug, “an op-
timist”, and his not-so-wild boar sidekick Hognob (grunt-
ed by Park himself), who leads the adventure when the
Bronze Age comes crashing into their world, led by the
greedy and rapacious Lord Nooth (a French-accented
Tom Hiddleston). To win back his tribe’s freedom, Dug
challenges the Bronze Age to a football contest on their
home turf: his Stone Age football novices pitted against
the might of Real Bronzio FC. Dug has one ally: Maisie
Williams’s plucky Goona, a football wannabe stymied
by the sexism of the Bronze Age’s sporting strictures.
Behind the scenes, Early Man continues Aardman’s
new production/distribution partnership with Euro-
pean conglomerate StudioCanal, following truncated
Hollywood collaborations with first DreamWorks and
then Sony. (A sequel to 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie is
also slated for 2019 and, what with the success of its Pad- The whole film of mouth shapes required. There are robotic arms for
dington films and the riches of the Studio Ghibli back cata- programmable camera moves, and a hydraulic skeleton
logue, StudioCanal has emphatically established itself as was a challenge: inside the mammoth, and motorised spinning orange-
a family-cinema powerhouse.) Stop-motion remains un- it’s not terraced painted jam jars which spin around lights for an added
avoidably time- and money-intensive: Aardman averages sense of movement. But my favourite prop is the studio’s
four or five seconds of production per animator per week. houses and cosy very physical production timetable, a series of wall-sized
I’ve been brought to Bristol with a handful of fellow ob- living rooms grid boards criss-crossed with string, indicating which of
servers from the press – and iTunes! – to catch a glimpse the 37 sets and scenes each animator is assigned to for
of the studio ratcheted to its highest gear. Shooting began any more, it’s every day of the shoot. It’s a system Aardman developed
in September 2016 but ramped up in May 2017, with 33 a prehistoric for Chicken Run, and has seen no reason to change since.
animators working across 37 sets and nearly 45 produc- Finally, we’re ushered into a back office, and Park him-
tion units through till the end of October, for a late Janu- universe; it’s self is brought in for a 20-minute interview.
ary release deadline. (Because the actual shoot is the cul- definitely a nod to Nick Bradshaw: What was the germ of the idea? The clash
mination of huge numbers of preparatory sketches and of civilisations?
tests, the studio aims to do much of its editing in-camera, one of my heroes, Nick Park: No, not really; it was cavemen, really. Cavemen
hence the tight editing timeline – though there are still Ray Harryhausen and clubs and weapons. It came from the attraction of the
backgrounds and effects to add, and seams and scaffolds medium and the earthiness of it all – clay figures, primitive
to remove, in computer-generated post-production. Park people expressing themselves; that seemed to suit the
says he saw ‘2011’ on some script notes the other day tactile nature of the medium. Then I was playing around
– but the company was press-releasing a ‘Nick Park un- with the fact that they had clubs: what if they had a go at
titled movie’ as long ago as 2007.) sport – at rounders or baseball or something? Somehow
There are 273 puppets in total, made by 22 modelmak- it arrived at football: what if they had to put down their
ers over 30 months, typically with fivee or six itera- weapons and use thetheir feet? And it expanded from there:
tions of each model for simultaneous use on mul- how would a bunch of lunkhead cavemen deal
ontinuity
tiple stages, or to be sent back to the continuity with having
havi to play a game, a more disciplined
department for cleaning and maintenance. nce. There exercise, instead of fighting?
are fully 18 different Dugs, each with h his own NB: Wha
What was the hardest sequence to realise?
till rising).
box of 23 different mouth shapes (and still NP: Th
The whole film was a challenge: it’s
We’re shown the models’ armatures, and the cy- not ter
terraced houses and cosy living rooms
teriors; the
lindrical moulds for their plasticine exteriors; m
any more, it’s a prehistoric universe. The
ng’ effect of
treatment of their fur to limit the ‘boiling’ look of the opening in the Badlands,
wild fuzz movement between shots; how ow the ed- th highly volcanic and volatile
this
iting department breaks down dialogue ue w
world with prehistoric creatures, is
into syllables to calculate the sequencee e
exciting; it’s definitely a nod to one

28 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen [the legendary late stop-
motion effects animator behind the 1966 Raquel Welch
dinosaur/cavemen fantasy One Million Years B.C.] – we
have a dinosaur called Ray and another called Harry.
NB: How did you cast the voices?
NP: The voice casting is always a big [judgement call],
both for me and for Aardman. I have to believe it coming
from the characters, so that you can literally model the
characters around the voices and make the models own
their voices. I do a lot of scouting in my head – YouTube’s
quite handy for looking around, watching all sorts of
clips. We do it as we’re starting to shoot the characters,
putting the sound of Tom Hiddleston or Eddie Redmayne
from another film next to the character and seeing how
it plays. So it’s a question of finding them as a similar
character. I saw Eddie Redmayne in something called
Black Death [2010], in which he’s a sort of dishevelled
teenager, a novice monk, and liked the way he was quite
vulnerable and not clear – in a good way.
Tom Hiddleston I’d met a couple of times, and knew
his work. But I saw him on Graham Norton mimicking
voices – and I was after someone who could do a funny
French voice, really, so I went to him, and he was up for it.
NB: Why are the Bronze Age characters French?
NP: Well, only Lord Nooth is, actually… The backstory
was about this group of cavemen who in their past had
invented football and then lost it – they’d kicked it over
the channel, and the Europeans had developed it better
than they had. So a British parallel started to emerge…
but it’s not really about England or Britain or the UK; it’s
more a universal story. All the Bronze Age characters have
different European accents; some even have English ac-
cents. Nooth just happens to be French. We tried it differ-
ent ways, and it was the one that happens to be funniest.
GOING FULL BOAR A HEAD FOR FIGURES
A fortnight later, Park is out on day release at Soho’s latest A pair of Aardman animators
working on the sets for
swanky media hotel to screen a handful of scene assem- the opening prehistoric
blies and join Hiddleston and Maisie Williams on stage sequence in Early Man
for a press call. The scenes are fun – the tribe’s foibles as (opposite); Nick Park (above)
making adjustments to the
they try to catch a rabbit; Dug’s introduction to Bronze evil Lord Nooth, voiced by
Age urbanity; some excellent Parkian techno-farce as Tom Hiddleston, and one
Lord Nooth is delivered a voice recording from Miriam of his courtiers; and Barry
and his best friend Mr Rock
Margolyes’s Queen Oofeefa via Rob Brydon’s mimetic (opposite, bottom)
Message Bird; and a set piece seven weeks in the shoot-
ing, intercutting Dug’s nocturnal raid on the stadium’s
football stockroom with a bathtime harp recital and then
massage that a wrong-time-wrong-place Hognob has to
give the unwitting Lord Nooth (“Not so ham-fisted!”, etc).
On stage, compliments are exchanged, the actors both
nod to childhoods under the influence of Park’s work
(does any British actor nowadays turn down a call to
work with him?), and there’s further description of the
iterative process of finessing animation voices across 18
months’ worth of recording sessions. Park professes his
admiration for actors who, sans sets or costumes, can
colour a vocal performance using just their imagina-
tion. Williams, who grew up in Bristol and made model
animations with her friends, says she found a young
Norwegian YouTube host to base Goona on; she talks of
the learning experience of not having to get a vocal per-
formance ‘right’ so much as experiment and play, to give
the animators options – “Until you put it with the action,
you don’t know which take will slot in perfectly.” And
she hails Park’s willingness – in unusual contrast to live-
action directing protocol – to give a line reading. “I found
that really useful,” she says.
Hiddleston remembers how Aardman first sent
him a script and little sketch of Nooth as “this
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 29
AARDMAN EARLY MAN
I realised while overweight, frustrated middle-manager… with
small hands.” He mimics the grinning thumbs-up
making this that he’d get from Park across the recording glass when he
in features you nailed a take. “Nick would say, ‘Do it a bit more pomp-
ous.’ So I’d do it more pompous and he’d say, ‘…And a
have to be truthful bit more irritated.’ And so I’d do it irritated and he’d say,
and dramatic; ‘That was really good on the irritation but sort of lost
the pompous.’ And I’d do it pompous and irritated and
it can’t just be he’d say, ‘…And a bit more French.’ And then it would be
spoofy. There had irritated, pompous, French, and you’d get this [grinning
thumbs-up].” Park – who we’d already seen, during the
to be a genuine studio tour, in video sketches dancing around on set in
emotion to it; at proto-costume – also embodied Hognob for the purpos-
es of authenticating the sounds of the massage scene.
the same time not “It was oddly more physical than I expected it to be,”
relent on the gags muses Hiddleston.
“I think I volunteered, actually,” says Park.
“I’d seen the sketch of Nooth sitting in the bath, spread
out… and just thought it would be funny to have all those
awkward noises. Because he thinks he’s with [his servant]
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY Stefano, but he’s with a pig,” Hiddleston explains.
Dug (above) on the – literal “It was a funny feeling, massaging Tom Hiddleston’s
– zebra crossing during his
first visit to the big city; and shoulders, and thinking how many people would pay to
aspiring footballer Goona, do this,” chuckles Park.
voiced by Maisie Williams Later, as I wait for another interview slot with the direc-
(below), held back by Stone
Age sexism tor, I see Hiddleston take his leave from Park, job all done.
“I’ll look you up when I need another massage,” he quips.
Nick Bradshaw: You were just telling us about seeing a gap
in the market for ‘underdog prehistoric sports movies’. What
other films did you look at?
Nick Park: There are definitely nods to [this] and influ-
ences of [that], but in a funny way I feel like this is more
its own thing. Coming from the short-film tradition, it’s
easy to reference other films because you don’t feel like
you are one yourself, so you’re always spoofing a bit. I re-
alised while making this that [in features] you have to be
truthful and dramatic; it can’t just be spoofy. Also there
tends to be a lack of emotion if you’re just spoofing. So
there had to be a genuine truth and emotion to it; at the
same time not relent on the gags.
I don’t always know I’m doing it, but I do find I’m
constantly referring to those films I’ve loved over the
years. I looked at all the underdog sports movies – The
Mighty Ducks [1992], The Bad News Bears [1976], Miracle
[2004], with Kurt Russell against the Russians at the 1980
Olympics. And not just sports underdog movies, but The
30 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
Full Monty [1997], Brassed Off [1996]: the group that gets
together to do something extraordinary… Most underdog
sports movies are about that – the group that goes on the
road to learn a great lesson about who they are. Here the
stakes are higher, though. And of course Die Hard [1988]
fed into the bit when they grab the toilet roll as they jump
out of the window. They didn’t really have hosepipes in
the Bronze Age. Not that they had toilet paper either…
NB: Hognob seems to echo Gromit in his capacity for great
double-takes. The smarter animal familiar seems to be a
mainstay of your comedy?
NP: It happened more inevitably than consciously… I
didn’t set out to do Gromit in a pig costume. He started
as much more of a pet than Gromit is – kind of a lively
puppy, really, who’s supportive and loves his master
and their home, and is ever-enthusiastic. And I suppose
situations arose where we needed a reaction, or he’s the
smarter one. It’s never been rationalised, but there is
definitely that Gromity thing. Maybe I just can’t avoid it.
NB: It looks to me like there’ll be less irony around Dug than
there is with Wallace. He’s not so lost in his own nuttiness.
NP: Dug’s slightly more aware. But he does compare with
all those old Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd characters
I seem to gravitate to – the fool triumphant. Somehow
they always land on their feet. We’ve struggled for ages
with the question of ‘What is Dug’s journey?’ And with
the fool triumphant, he doesn’t really change, or need to;
it’s the world that changes around him. With Gromit,
the only thematic character development was in Were-
Rabbit, where he learns that he shouldn’t try to change
Wallace, who’s always going to be this way.
Dug is more of a can-do caveman, as we call him.
He’s an exuberant, over-enthusiastic guy who’s always
reaching higher, and if he has a flaw it’s that he’s over-
hasty and doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom, which
gets him in trouble but he wins out in the end. It’s Bobnar,
the chief, who really learns the lesson – because he has
a low view of his tribe. They’re all low-ambition except
Dug, who doesn’t see the conventional restrictions that
Bobnar does. His eagerness or ambition is what sets him
apart – that’s what it’s about, really.
NB: Part of the joy of your films is their gags about particular
aspects of British culture. Is there any thought in the studio,
during production, about how those travel abroad? Did
DreamWorks used to raise them as issues?
NP: They did – more often with the verbal jokes. The
written ones are just there; if you notice them then that’s
good. But there were issues with the verbal gags: wheth-
er you can tell what they’re saying; what that means… I
guess it was the Carry On influence in Were-Rabbit: one
of the villagers saying, “That beast has been at my wife’s
brassicas in the night,” which we had to take out of the
American version, because they didn’t know what bras-
sicas were but it sounded rude.
StudioCanal and Lionsgate don’t seem to worry about
that kind of thing. They get concerned tonally, if we go
too dark, but generally haven’t commented an awful lot.
They’ve given notes, quite strong ones, but they’ve been
helpful more than anything, getting us there so it works
emotionally. What I’ve learnt over the years is to befriend
criticism: it can help. You get so close that you can’t really
see where it’s not quite landing in certain places.
Early Man is released in UK cinemas on
i 26 January and will be reviewed in our next issue
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SMALL
WONDER

32 | Sight&Sound | February 2018


Alexander Payne’s ingenious ‘Downsizing’
imagines a world where people can opt to be
shrunk to help tackle overpopulation and
climate change. Here he explains the film’s
political ambitions, its slow gestation and why
he’s so gloomy about the future of the planet
By Philip Horne
Admirers of Alexander Payne’s films have had a long,
anxious wait since Nebraska (2013), his bleak, beautiful,
drily funny picture of the post-industrial Midwest and
sad, haunted lives. Four years on, Payne, who still lives in
his native Omaha, has made a grand and astonishingly
daring movie – a satirical fable, or blackly comic science
fiction epic, or unexpected love story. It’s all these things
and more.
There’s a serious, even tragic, side to the film, but its
main premise is treated with such visual and verbal
inventiveness that we get jolts of pleasure at the imagi-
native scope of its makers’ conceptions. Scientists con-
cerned with ‘human scale and sustainability’ develop an
absurd technology for reducing the size of the human
population, making them five inches high. It looks like a
giant microwave, and even pings when the transforma-
tion is complete. This low-tech-seeming process – invent-
ed by idealistic Norwegians to produce a “self-sustainable
community of the small” – is then commercialised and
normalised in familiar ways by global/American capital-
ism, sold to punters as a time-share-style heaven called
‘Leisureland’, which is “like winning the lottery every
day”. This is because a modest nest egg of $152,000
when transferred (unshrunk) to its newly tiny owner’s
account in a ‘small city’ translates as the equivalent of
$22,500,000: it’s an American dream. In this brave new
world, Omaha occupational therapist Paul Safranek
(Matt Damon), our Candide-like hero, is the traditional
‘little man’ literalised.
Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor insinuate a sharp-
edged political satire here: the full-size economic system,
with luxurious bourgeois lives supported by legions of
immigrant workers, turns out to be replicated on the
small scale (so mainly Hispanic slums lurk beyond what
seems the very Trumpian wall of Leisureland). Down-
sizing technology is abused by oppressive regimes, so
a Vietnamese dissident, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), is
shrunk against her will and barely survives her escape
to America as a stowaway in a TV box. She ends up as
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
In Alexander Payne’s
Downsizing, Kristen Wiig
plays Audrey and Matt
Damon plays her husband
Paul Safranek (opposite,
centre), a Candide-like hero
who is the traditional ‘little
man’ literalised
a drudging member of the ancillary class. As Safranek’s
neighbour, the small, charming but semi-despicable Eu-
rotrash mogul Dusan (Christoph Waltz), says of Tran,
“She almost died so now she can clean my house. Ameri-
ca! Big land of opportunity.” Paul is gradually sucked into
Tran’s orbit – which changes him, and changes the film,
in a thrilling way.
When I met Payne at a hotel on the day of the film’s
screening at the BFI London Film Festival, he was, as ever,
urbane and alert.
Philip Horne: So what was the genesis of Downsizing?
Alexander Payne: It took some time to grow. The urge
came when Jim Taylor and I had had some modicum
of success with Sideways, in 04 and bleeding into 05.
Around that time Bush the Second was re-elected – we
have Trump now, but even 13 years ago we thought
things were bad – and I had within me the urge to make
a political film. But you can’t make a literal one, it has to
have some kind of metaphor.
I was on a plane, and thought, “What about that idea
of Jim and his brother’s?” [The brothers had discussed the
shrinking idea for years.] We would treat it very earnestly,
as a solution to the problem of overpopulation and cli-
mate change. And then the narrative dominoes started to
fall in my mind: “Oh well, it could touch on this and this.”
And it started a chain reaction of ‘What ifs?’. I proposed
that to Jim and we just started writing.
It took us a long time to come up with a dramatic
premise: a central character who guides us through a bit
of an episodic structure – through a world in which this
is happening. And if the story, in touching on, let’s say,
political aspects, doesn’t have extremely sharp teeth, at
least we’re acknowledging a lot of things.
PH: Why did it take so long?
AP: In essence we were writing an eight-hour miniseries.
But we still wanted to make it as a movie. So how do we
corral that screenplay? And life was intervening… and we
were having trouble finding financing, and then I made
a TV pilot [Hung, 2009] and two features [The Descendants,
2011; and Nebraska]… And then finally after Nebraska it
came together – and fell apart – and then came together,
and then I was able to make it.
In hindsight you can see benefits. We waited so damn
long, but now, with Trump in power, there are certain
images in the film that have more potency than they
might… None of the elements of the film is new, but a
couple of them, particularly the idea of Mexicans living
behind a wall, have a certain resonance that they
might not have had previously.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 33
ALEXANDER PAYNE DOWNSIZING
And the other benefit I see to having shot now is
having found this remarkable actress Hong Chau,
who, to my mind, steals the movie. In a way the whole
movie, up until her arrival, is like a prologue.
PH: It’s an extraordinary performance. How did you find
her?
AP: I knew she had to be Vietnamese. I had thrown out a
casting net to Vietnam, to Paris, to Canada, and it turned
out she was right in Los Angeles. She was born at a refu-
gee camp of Vietnamese people in Thailand and then
they emigrated to Louisiana. I had only seen her in Paul
Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice [2014], but she knocked
me out in the test. She understood the rhythm, the poi-
gnancy and the comedy.
PH: Dusan also shifts interestingly through the film – from
loathsome and despicable to quite sympathetic – in a way
that helps hold the film together.
AP: It’s Han Solo. Luke Skywalker with Han Solo and
Princess Leia, all over again.
PH: Was anything lost in the editing?
AP: The one element I made the decision to lose, which I
very much liked, is that the entire story is being told by a
tiny storyteller 5,000 years in the future. All of this world
as we know it did end, and those Norwegians down the
hole did end up being thee only ones who survive, and
epopulate the planet, and an
eventually emerge and repopulate
old storyteller, clutching a gnarled staff, tells children,
“You know, aeons ago, the world was ruled by giants.”
“Ohhhh!” “But they chopped ped down all the forests,
and fished all the seas, andd their breaths and fires
made the land unbearably y hot…” “Ohhh!” “Well,
one of the giants…” It was a voiceover film, with
a lovely narrative structurere throughout, and I
nning long, and there
miss it. But the film was running
were commercial concerns ns – because it was an
expensive picture.
inguist named Bren-
We had a wonderful linguist
agnificent job of
dan Gunn, who did a magnificent
alf-Norwegian,
inventing a language – half-Norwegian,
half-English – as might be spoken
5,000 years from now. So o it was a
subtitled voiceover picturere and,
just maybe, for a commercialrcial
audience distinguishing ng
34 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
8
between ‘Norwenglish’ and Norwegian and English was,
sadly, asking a tincture too much. But it’s a device that
we can still use if we ever do anything else with the idea
in the future.
PH: Were there any models you had in mind – an obvious
connection for me was Gulliver’s Travels?
AP: Not really – no previous film about small people at
any rate. I’ve never seen Honey, I Shrunk the Kids [1989].
But when you make a film, different influences drift by
from time to time. The episodic nature of the screenplay
– not to compare this film to those great films – relates to
the way that in Fellini films you see a central character
going through a series of often very unrelated episodes,
and then coming out at the end with a close-up on that
character’s face. Maybe there’s been some shift. So I
thought about that. With an idea of ultimately striv-
ing for some kind of tough compassion toward others,
I always very much liked Kurosawa’s Red Beard [1965].
Those are great films, this is whatever it is. Still we see
the great films and we think, “Oh, that’s a nice notion.”
Climate change? PH: There’s a building in the film called ‘Transitions’, which
reminded me of your interest in transitions between scenes.
What is there AP: Considerations of transitions are what separates the
to be optimistic wheat from the chaff among filmmakers. It means the
structure is there, and you’ve thought about it. So, in this
about? I see film, it’s like, “We want the film to have this element, and
nothing. Things this element, and this element,” and I trust in the fact
that it’s all being filtered through me and that it will have
look grim. And some sense of unity, even if it has disparate elements. You
now with this don’t always succeed, but you hope.
Incidentally, [editor] Kevin Tent and I do one thing
asshole in the that many contemporary filmmakers do not, and I do
White House… not understand why: dissolves. We love dissolves, and
long dissolves.
PH: The movement of the film might look as if it’s following
a classic Hollywood character arc, like Close Encounters of
the Third Kind [1977] or The Terminator [1984], so that Paul,
needing to choose whether to go underground forever with
the colony of Norwegian little people, has a speech near
the end where he lists all the things that have happened to
him and says, “I’m obviously meant to go down this hole.”
But then the film rejects that, and offers a different sense
of purpose.
AP: Yes, and what’s wrong with the screenplay is that
some element of that aspiration to something larger than
himself should ideally
ide have been articulated
An in fact it was, when we
in act one. And
had the voivoiceover character telling
us about Paul Safranek – in fact
his name had become Safrapool:
“Safrapool
“Safrapoo wished” – you know,
when he’s iin the middle of the night
with his calculator,
cal trying to pay his
“Saf
taxes – “Safrapool wanted nothing
more than to please his wife, but found
frustration and he wished for a life
only frustration,
greater than he had.” Something that’s
ri about the screenplay
not quite right
tha urge, which has maybe
is that that
ta or latent throughout, is
been tacit
articul
articulated a bit too late.
PH: Bu
But, in the movie’s defence,
Paul tthroughout is alive to the
relatio
relation between one’s own pain
and other people’s. “Lots of people are in pain, Mom,” he
says when she moans about her fibromyalgia. In Sideways,
the sad-sack hero Miles has spent years caring for his sick
father; in Nebraska David [Will Forte] is looking out for his
father [Bruce Dern]; here Paul too gives up a medical career
to be a good son. In all those cases your heroes are doing
this altruistic thing but they feel depressed and…
AP: …plagued by it [laughs].
PH: They’re doing good but feeling bad, and in a sense that
impulse is what comes out at the end, isn’t it? He’s helping
people. Isn’t that last shot, which is quite low-key, of Paul
watching the old Hispanic man just eating his meal, and not
looking fantastically grateful or happy, a sort of downsizing
of his expectations?
AP: Or, he is at long last falling back into himself. Like
so many of us, he has gone around the world to come
home again. The other idea that no one has asked me
about, which is an interesting one, is Tran’s line as they’re
heading back to Leisureland. She says, “When you know
death is coming soon you look at things more closely.”
And that very much relates to an idea in the film about
global warming and climate change, which is that only
when you accept that you will die are you then armed
with the tools – perhaps – to defeat them.
PH: The film seems very gloomy about climate change.
AP: Gloomy? What is there to be optimistic about? I see
nothing. The only good thing going on right now is that
it’s a little warmer. But, yeah, things look grim. And now
with this asshole in the White House…
PH: Even so, at the end of the film the emphasis falls on the THE PLEASURES OF PAYNE
present and how you have to get on with life. Matt Damon as Paul
Safranek and Christoph
AP: Well, yes, and we have to care for each other. Sorry to Waltz as Eurotrash mogul
be so corny-sounding. But I certainly believe what Dr As- Dusan (above); and Damon
bjørnsen [the Norwegian scientist in the film] says – it’s with Hong Chau (opposite,
bottom), who, according to
now an actuarial certainty, we don’t know if it’s going to director Alexander Payne
be in ten years, or 200 years, but it’s coming. (opposite, top), steals
PH: Do you see yourself as an ironist? the movie as Vietnamese
dissident Ngoc Lan Tran
AP: There are different forms of irony. There’s an irony
which is deathly afraid of anything emotional. But then
there’s Buñuelian irony, you know, or Mario Monicelli
irony, or Wilder irony or Kubrick, which is where you
see they’re using irony to say we’re not living in the
best of all possible worlds, and can’t we care for each
other? They may not admit to it, but you know… Like
Chekhov: his early sketches were verbal caricatures of
others, but over time it deepened. He never lost that
sense of irony, the sense of humanity widened, and his
net grew wider.
PH: You once mentioned your wish to make a film about the
many Hispanic workers in Nebraska.
AP: I still think about it. This film scratched that itch
a little bit. I still want to do something with a more
genuinely documentary feel rather than have everyone
play those people. I’d like to make a film in Nebraska
largely in Spanish, using non-actors. That would be quite
interesting.
Downsizing is released in UK cinemas
i on 19 January and is reviewed on page 58
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 35
BERGMAN
KEEPING THE FAITH
As a major London retrospective launches to mark Ingmar Bergman’s centenary, is our new age of uncertainty a fitting
moment for audiences to reconnect with the fearsome visions of spiritual longing and loss found in the director’s Faith Trilogy?
By Catherine Wheatley
There’s a terrific skit by French and Saunders, made some
time around the mid-1990s. Shot in black and white, it
opens with the sea full of dead bodies and Death waiting
on the rocks. There’s a crack in the wallpaper; a “bloody
great huge” spider dressed as Christ. Jennifer clutches her
head in an apparent crisis of faith; Dawn has fleshly inter-
course with the Evil One. “Another one of those Bergman
sort of days,” Jennifer sighs. “Never mind. We can pretend
to understand it and read a book about it later.”
French and Saunders’s images are torn straight from
the pages of Bergman’s screenplays for films such as The
Seventh Seal (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960) and Through
a Glass Darkly (1961), films that have, of late, fallen out of
fashion. Indeed today they might be considered so wil-
fully opaque and mired in symbolism as to be past the
point of parody. Bergman’s oeuvre epitomises a type of
art cinema that marries philosophical conceits with ex-
plicit treatments of sexuality, a type that was very much
of its time. In 1958 the journalist Leslie Mallory could
write: “No director, British or foreign, has ever been
honoured in this country as Bergman has. No director
in history has had three of his pictures included in the
36 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
best ten of the year, as he has! You can get tickets for ‘My THE MAGICIAN
Fair Lady’ more easily than for the summer-long season ‘When I show a film, I am
guilty of deceit,’ wrote
of Bergman’s films now running at the National Film Ingmar Bergman (opposite,
Theatre.” It’s hard to imagine that the forthcoming BFI in 1964). ‘I use an apparatus
season marking Bergman’s centenary will be outselling with which I can sway
my audience in a highly
Hamilton. Still, it’s possible that contemporary audiences emotional manner – make
might find a poignancy in Bergman’s idiosyncratic brand them laugh, scream, smile,
of existentialism, and in particular its concern with what believe in fairy stories,
become indignant, feel
to believe in after the death of God. shocked, charmed, moved’
Matters of faith and doubt have long pervaded film.
From Epstein and Dreyer, Bazin and Bresson through Tar-
kovsky and Kieslowski to von Trier and Scorsese: a line
of canonical directors has used cinema to investigate the
meaning of life – and culture – in a godless world. None,
EDOUARD BOUBAT/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES
though, did so quite as zealously Bergman, a filmmaker
who described himself as a “conjurer”: a sophisticated,
technologically savvy magician whose raw material
is nothing other than our “incredible need to believe”.
“When I show a film, I am guilty of deceit,” he wrote in
‘Why I make movies’, the essay he issued as an introduc-
tion to the published screenplay of The Seventh
Seal. “I use an apparatus which is constructed to
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 37
INGMAR BERGMAN THE FAITH TRILOGY
take advantage of a certain weakness, an appara-
tus with which I can sway my audience in a highly
emotional manner – make them laugh, scream with
fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant,
feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved.”
More than any other filmmaker, it is Bergman who im-
planted the idea of director as God. In Jane Magnusson
and Hynek Pallas’s 2013 documentary Trespassing Berg-
man, for example, in which a steady stream of great direc-
tors makes pilgrimage to Bergman’s home on the island
of Farö, Alejandro González Iñárritu exclaims upon en-
tering the hallowed rooms: “If cinema was a religion, this
would be Mecca, the Vatican… the centre of it all.”
Bergman’s work is intensely personal, intimate. Yet the
director’s distinct sense of humility stands at ironic odds
with his reputation as the quintessential auteur. For Berg-
man, art had to be part of something else – something
deeper, grander, more ancient; a larger human project.
The artist, meanwhile, must transcend himself, leave his
ego at the cinema door. He wrote: “It is my opinion that
art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was sepa-
rated from worship. In former days the artist remained
unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived
and died without being more or less important than other
artisans; ‘eternal values’, ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’
were terms not applicable to his case. The ability to create
was a gift.” Asked what he wanted the general purpose of
38 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
For Bergman, art his films to be, he replied: “I want to be one of the artists in
the cathedral on the great plain…. Regardless of whether
had to be part of I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would
something else – play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.”
Although he described himself as an agnostic, religion
something deeper, – or at least its loss – was a longstanding concern of Berg-
grander, more man’s. It became the main focus for his films in the late
1950s and early 1960s. While works such as The Seventh
ancient: ‘It is my Seal and The Magician (aka The Face, 1958) are critical of
opinion that art institutional religion, they nevertheless float the pos-
sibility of spiritual connection. ‘Grace’ isn’t a word that
lost its creative fits easily into Bergman’s vocabulary, but something
drive the moment like it can be found in the moments of human commu-
nion dotted throughout these films. Such glad moments
it was separated begin to fade in the first pair of films that make up Berg-
from worship’ man’s Faith Trilogy, though: Through a Glass Darkly and
Winter Light (1962); by the time of the concluding part,
The Silence (1963), they have disappeared altogether, re-
placed by a dystopic vision of humanity abandoned by
God. Gradually, it becomes clear these are films not about
faith, but about the crisis of faith that haunts modern life.
Bergman described the trajectory of the three films
as moving from “certainty achieved” to “certainty un-
masked” to “God’s silence – the negative impression”.
But any certainty offered by Through a Glass Darkly – the
tale of a young schizophrenic woman, Karin, haunted
by visions while on holiday with her family on a remote
island – is ultimately undermined. The vision of God
that Karin – a woman who seduces her own brother –
sees creeping out of the cracks in the wallpaper takes the
shape of a spider; moments later a helicopter arrives to
cart her off to an asylum. In the wake of this nightmare,
her feckless father David’s efforts to reassure his long-
neglected 17-year-old son Minus that “God is love” ring
horribly hollow. And Minus’s damp-eyed declaration,
following this discussion, that finally, “Papa talked to me”
is a cliché that closes the film on a false note.
Bergman claimed that doubts about the ending of
Through a Glass Darkly caused him to write Winter Light
as a ‘sequel’ of sorts, rejecting David’s self-protecting God
of love. The film turns around the dwindling faith and
shrinking congregation of a pastor, Tomas Ericsson – a
character who is a mix of both Bergman and his father,
Erik, a Lutheran minister and later chaplain to the King of
Sweden; Ericsson is both ‘Eric’ and ‘Eric’s son’ – who reach-
es crisis point after a communicant, Jonas, reveals that his
despair of the world and fear of China’s atom bomb has
led him to consider suicide. Far from offering reassuring
platitudes, Tomas confesses that his participation in the
Spanish Civil War and the death of his wife have turned
his loving God “into a spider God”. Jonas duly kills himself,
and Tomas wonders if there is no God at all. As his lover
Märta – an atheist, the sanest person in the three films and
Tomas’s only real hope at redemptive love – puts it, “God
doesn’t speak. God hasn’t ever spoken, because he doesn’t
exist. It’s all unreservedly, horribly simple.”
The question of God’s silence permeates Winter Light’s
close-ups of the characters’ tortured faces, its long, stark
shots of the woodland where Jonas’s body is found and
its taut, clipped conversations. At the film’s end, one
character suggests to Tomas that far worse than Christ’s
physical suffering was the pain he must have endured on
realising that his disciples, during the course of his minis-
try, had “simply not grasped what he meant. Not a word.
They abandoned him… And he was left alone.” Worse
still is the thought – Christ’s thought on the cross – that
God had forsaken him. “Everything he’d been preaching
was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized
with a great doubt. Surely that must have been his most
monstrous suffering of all.”
In The Silence Bergman took this monstrosity to its logi-
cal extreme, not only avoiding all mention of God but
reducing the role of language almost to an irrelevance. Its
action takes place in an unidentified city where the citi-
zens speak an unidentified and untranslated language.
Here, two sisters – one of whom, Ester, is in the throes of
a painful illness – hole up in a sinister hotel, inhabited
by weird carnivalesque performers. Anna’s ten-year-old
son Johan wanders aimlessly through hotel corridors; his
mother has a disaffected sexual encounter. Ester seems
to recover, then relapses into agonising convulsions. An
army tank makes its ominous way through empty streets.
The atmosphere is sickly, static. The clock ticks; nothing
moves forward. Not even art offers solace: the film ends
abruptly, unresolved. The film is haunted by the meta-
physical fallout of the end of Western values. The crisis
of language is the mirror of the larger one faced by the
modern world. If the other films float the possibility of ni-
hilism, The Silence is nothing short of a gaze into the abyss.
How far removed are such questions of love, of despair,
from today’s culture? The god discussed within Bergman’s
films is, after all, a Christian one, and as Nick Pinkerton
put it in an article in this magazine (‘Mystical magery
tour’, S&S, April 2017), Christianity is still something of a
dirty word among liberal elites. Hence perhaps the critical
opprobrium surrounding Scorsese’s Silence last year, and
the outright contempt for the crowd-pleasing schmaltz of
films such as Miracles from Heaven (2016). Still, religiosity
survives, albeit in disguised forms. Filmmakers such as
Terrence Malick, Eugène Green and the Dardenne broth-
ers continue to make films shot through with a kind of FAITH NO MORE
amorphous spirituality, what Pinkerton calls “new mystic Max von Sydow and Harriet
Andersson in Through a
cinema”; while John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2013) Glass Darkly (1961, opposite,
and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2014) seem to be direct hom- top); Gunnar Björnstrand
ages to Bergman. Churches may be empty but religion has as Pastor Ericsson and
Ingrid Thulin as Märta in
found other, subtler outlets. Forms of philanthropy, trans- Winter Light (1962, opposite,
humanism, yoga, clean-eating (“my body is a temple”) and bottom); and Thulin, Gunnel
even environmentalism could be considered spiritual ex- Lindblom and Jörgen
Lindström in The Silence
periences. After the hedonistic, capitalist self-interest of (1963, above)
the late 20th century, a vocabulary of care, responsibility
and love has seeped back into our language. So too has a
sense of abandonment. Witness the disoriented millen-
nials of TBS’s TV series Search Party: a brilliant satire about
the lengths that a group of young New Yorkers will go to
imbue their otherwise banal lives with significance.
It’s possible that such existentialist crises are the privi-
lege of mostly white moneyed classes, as the makers of
Search Party suggest. But a quick look at Sight & Sound’s
best films of 2017 shows a series of works unconnected
by nation, race or subject matter, yet all displaying a deep-
seated anxiety about our loss of connection with one an-
other, our inability to make sense of the past or present,
our abandonment by – and of – any purpose higher than
ourselves. With the age of irony withering, could Berg-
man’s kind of earnestness have a renewed resonance? It’s
just possible. Bergman believed that even though God
may not exist, our worship of him has cast a long shadow
on the history of humankind. Films such as Get Out, Zama,
Western, Loveless – as well as the exercise in symbolism that
is Twin Peaks: The Return – stand in that shadow, making
clear, just as the trilogy does, that an absent god shapes our
history quite as effectively as a present one would do.
The Faith Trilogy is screening at BFI Southbank,
i London, as part of ‘Ingmar Bergman: A Definitive
Film Season’, which runs until March. A selection of
the director’s key films plays at cinemas nationwide
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 39
INGMAR BERGMAN FANNY AND ALEXANDER
‘IT CAN NEVER
BE MORE FUN’
In this account of a visit to the set
of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Fanny and
Alexander’ in 1982, from the ‘Sight
& Sound’ archive, our critic found the
director in an ebullient mood
By Peter Cowie
Comforting, on one’s first visit to a Bergman
film set, to encounter Death in the corridor.
Not the late lamented Bengt Ekerot from The
Seventh Seal (1957), but a lanky extra adjusting
his grisly mask and fondling his scythe prior
to entering Stages 1 and 2 of the studios in
the basement of the Swedish Film Institute.
Nearby, a dishevelled man-at-arms tucks
his chin into his breastplate and dozes on
a bench. An imperious woman strolls past,
her breasts slashed with scarlet make-up.
Two harlequins are playing a desultory game
of gin rummy. A bell shrills, and everyone
springs into life. Scores of extras, barefoot
and clothed in ragged fustian, troop into the
well-lit sound stage. Harriet Andersson, long
a denizen of Bergman’s world, waits patiently
as more paint is applied to the stigmata in
her palms. Dressed in a long black robe,
with hair drawn up in a bun and turn-of-the-
century spectacles, she looks formidable,
straight out of a dream by Strindberg.
Bergman is home. After five years of self-
imposed exile in Munich, he has directed
what he claims will be his last Swedish film,
Fanny and Alexander. Bergman has mellowed
over the years. The strain of the upheaval
that followed the trumped-up tax scandal of
1976 shows in his face and figure. Suddenly,
he looks his 63 years. The hair, once sleek and
black, is grey and wispy; the shoulders stooped.
Yet there is something grand about the way
he orchestrates these dream sequences. The
pale, curvilinear walls of the set assume the
contours of a metaphorical desert, across
which the wind and sand whirl in the face
of the peasants and dancers who caper their
way towards the camera, Death bringing tip
the rear. “Come on, come on!” cries Bergman.
He seems enveloped by the host of extras, but
remains atop the camera dolly, hair tossed
by the blast from a wind machine. Then, the
take completed, there is a quick consultation
with Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s veteran
cinematographer (28 films in partnership).
As the extras shuffle back to the baseline, the
hush descends once more, cathedral-like.
Minutes later, it is the turn of the
flagellants, dancers trained to contort their
bodies and lash at one another without
actually making contact. They keen and
40 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
wail, thrash and groan, while a monk with
a drum beats out a menacing rhythm. After
three takes, the air thick with smoke from
the censers, Bergman laughs with the others
as one frenzied flagellant goes on screaming
after her colleagues have stopped. “It’s a
quote from The Seventh Seal,” he says with a
grin. Then, rather more seriously: “I first saw
these flagellants as a child; my grandmother
had a marvellous edition of the works of Sir
Walter Scott, and there they were, and all that
imagery made a huge impression on me.”
Beside him stands Daniel Bell, a jocular
expatriate Scot who will be responsible for
the music in Fanny and Alexander. He listens
to the strange incantations and casts about
for inspiration. “I’ve got to strike a contrast
with the terrible poverty and humiliation
that religion has brought to these flagellants,”
he says. “The score will have to summon
up the ideological vision of Christianity,
angels and all that.” Meanwhile, Bergman is
addressing the crowd: “Beat harder!” he urges
the flagellants. “Flick with your wrists. No
limp movements. Sometimes it’s obvious that
you’re faking.” Then, as the assistant director
Peter Schildt shepherds them back, Bergman
strolls off on his own, whistling quietly.
It is an economic miracle that Fanny
and Alexander has reached this stage at all.
After the success of Autumn Sonata (1978),
Bergman’s unlikely patron Lord Grade
was eager to establish a long-term artistic
relationship with the Swedish director. Two
hammer blows descended on this marriage
of convenience. First, From the Life of the
Marionettes (1980) opened to mixed reviews
and total public apathy. Second, Bergman’s
screenplay for Fanny and Alexander ran
to several hundred pages. Grade and his
associate Martin Starger were aghast, and
scarcely mollified by Bergman’s cheerful
suggestion that he make a five-hour film
for television and a separate cinema version
The puppetmaster: Fanny and Alexander’s lead, played by 12-year-old Bertil Guve
of about 2 hours 45 minutes. Grade and
Starger insisted on a maximum length
of 2 hours 15 minutes for the theatrical
release; Bergman demurred. “The marriage,”
he says, “was dead and cold, and we had
no backer for Fanny and Alexander.”
Enter Jörn Donner. Having read the script
with mounting enthusiasm Donner, with
characteristic audacity, invited Bergman
to make the film in Stockholm, using the
studios of the Swedish Film Institute (of
which he was then managing director).
Donner, having extended this invitation
without consulting his board, was faced with
the task of raising some 30 million crowns
(approximately £2,850,000) in the year before
shooting was to begin, in September 1981. For
a Swedish production, the logistics appeared
insuperable: 1,200 extras, 140 characters, at
least 60 speaking roles, a 25-week schedule...
But Donner went to work with a will.
German television, in the shape of ZDF
in Mainz, was prevailed upon to invest
heavily in the project, thanks in part to the
intervention of Horst Wendlandt, a long-time
admirer of Bergman who had shared with
Dino De Laurentiis the production credit
on The Serpent’s Egg (1977). Then Gaumont,
the most powerful conglomerate in French
cinema, and with a president, Daniel Toscan
du Plantier, who had long been known as a
devotee of Pantheon directors, as well as an
astute businessman, stepped in with more
production guarantees. Bergman’s own
company in Munich, Personafilm, joined the
investment roster, and Donner drew upon an
impressive network of international contacts
to sell Fanny and Alexander in advance to
certain key territories – the BBC, for example,
have purchased rights to the TV series.
Donner feels it unlikely that ever again
can such an expensive Swedish production
be mounted. In spite of his mustering of
outside capital, Donner became the target
of ferocious attacks in the Swedish press for
his alleged damage to the Film Institute’s
economy. He maintains that the Swedes
are getting good value for their share of the
budget – a five- or six-part TV series, plus
a major cinema release. Not to mention
employment for scores of technicians during
more than half a year, and the sense of the
Institute’s studios being tested to the limit.
Bergman himself was sceptical about the
technical resources of the Film Institute.
Working at the Bavaria Studios outside
Munich, he had been reminded of the
halcyon days of Svensk Filmindustri, when
so many gifted designers and wardrobe
experts had been on the staff out at Solna.
“I was convinced it was not possible to film
Fanny and Alexander in Sweden,” he admits,
“and I have been delightfully surprised.”
Four sound stages were brought into play,
two at the Film Institute and two at Europa
Film in Bromma. Even then, the production
designers, led by Anna Asp, had to perform
miracles of improvisation and compression.
Marik Vos-Lundh supervised a team of 17
costumiers and seamstresses. There were 260
leading costumes to be made, each of which
had to be tested and approved by Bergman,
working with his still photographer, Arne
Carlsson. “Then we needed 400 for the
big funeral sequence,” says Vos-Lundh,
“and 350 more for the theatre scenes.”
The reconciliation with Sweden was
unexpectedly warm. Early location
excursions for Fanny and Alexander had the
air of a public fête, with Bergman being ogled
and applauded like royalty as he supervised
scenes in the streets of Uppsala. “He is so
much more at ease here at home than he
was making From the Life of the Marionettes
in Munich,” says his wife Ingrid. “Directing
in German was extremely taxing.”
Bergman was brought up in Uppsala, living
at the home of his maternal grandmother.
This university town is the setting for Fanny
and Alexander, which depicts Swedish high
society at the close of the last century and
in the first years of the 20th. The Ekdahl
family rules the roost, owning the town’s
much valued theatre, and coming into
gradual conflict with the fire and brimstone
Bishop, Edvard Vergerus. One of the movie’s
high points will be the bishop’s death by
immolation, expiring in flames after his bed
has been set alight (“We damned near burned
down the entire studio!” recalls Bergman).
Alexander, played by Bertil Guve, is 12,
and his young sister Fanny is ten, and clearly
there is an autobiographical tinge to the
scenes of their discovering the delights of
a magic lantern and the mysteries of their
grandmother’s home. Bergman’s sister
Margareta – an author in her own right – is
in fact four years younger than him, and
Bergman on the set of Fanny and Alexander with his titular protagonists Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve
Bergman was taken to task
by a friend for producing grim
pictures so he decided to show the
world he too liked entertainment
confirms that she helped him build his first
toy theatre. Bergman prefers to site himself
elsewhere in the film: “There’s a lot of me
in the bishop, rather than in Alexander.
He’s haunted by his own devils.” And to
reinforce the family atmosphere, the film’s
vast credit list is speckled with Bergmans
– Anna, Ingmar’s daughter, as the ingenue
Hanna Schwartz; Mats, his son, as Aron;
Kabi Laretei, a former wife, as Aunt Anna;
Daniel, their son, as grip; and his present wife,
Ingrid, helping with production matters.
Contractual difficulties have led to the
absence from Fanny and Alexander of several
archetypal Bergman names: Max von Sydow,
who might well have played the Bishop,
and Liv Ullmann, who might have appeared
in the coveted role of Emilie Ekdahl, now
taken by Sweden’s most lauded actress
of the moment, Ewa Froling. But Erland
Josephson is back, as the antique dealer,
Isak Jacobi. So too are Gunnar Björnstrand,
as the doyen among actors at the theatre,
and Jarl Kulle, as Gustav Adolf Ekdahl.
Fanny and Alexander, part comedy, part
tragedy, part farce and part horror show, will
be much less claustrophobic and intense than
Bergman’s recent films. “It’s not so much a
chronicle,” he says, “as a Gobelin tapestry,
from which you can pick the images and the
incidents and the characters that fascinate
you.” The film was conceived as Bergman
was pondering on a conversation he had
had with his friend Kjell Grede (director of
Hugo and Josephine, 1967). Grede had taken
Bergman gently to task for producing grim
and depressing pictures when in private he
patently relished life and found parts of it
so amusing. Bergman decided to show the
world that he too liked entertainment. The
dichotomy between his genial personality
and his anguished work appears to stem
from childhood. While Guve kicks a ball
around the set during takes, Bergman sits on
an upturned drum and remembers: “There
was a very twisted atmosphere in my home.
Sometimes it was happy, very amusing, we
liked to play games, play theatre, play music.
When my father was in a good mood, he
was a wonderful man. But when he had his
depressions, then the mood was certainly very
heavy. As children we could never understand
the abruptness of these changes. Fanny and
Alexander is not about my childhood, but
parts of my childhood are lodged within it.”
Towards the end of last year, the Swedish
newspaper Aftonbladet pounced on a remark
Bergman had made about retiring from the
cinema. When one asks him directly about
the rumours, however, Bergman attests to
their accuracy: “I will do some 50-minute TV
plays, and perhaps another opera like The
Magic Flute, but I prefer to leave filmmaking
to younger people. In earlier days, when I
made those pronouncements about each film
being my last, I said so with quite a different
emphasis. I was a financial catastrophe, and
I never knew when I would be forced to
quit the industry. But now I need too much
energy,” and he gestures vaguely at the huge
studio and the milling figures amid the
glaring klieg lights. “Besides,” he adds, “it
can never be more fun than it is now.”
This essay originally appeared in
i Sight & Sound, Summer 1982
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 41

THE
AWFUL
TRUTH
On at least a few epidermic levels, Steven Spielberg’s new
film The Post makes a rousing bid for relevance, for its own
historical particularities and for its righteous subgenre:
the defiant journalism docudrama. Here we have, 45
years after the fact, a scrupulous and power-engineered
retelling of the tale of the Pentagon Papers – a secret
study of US involvement in Vietnam commissioned
by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967 and
leaked four years later by federal whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg – which presented history with the stone-cold
evidence of government duplicity, illegal espionage and
propaganda engineering behind the waging of the war.
What could be more pungent, more magnifying, in this
our bloodshot year of caveman power grabs, alternative
facts and renewed media relevance?
It was the first major top-secret government leak,
requiring thick currents of courage at every step, from
smuggling the documents out of the Pentagon to pub-
lishing them and putting them on every American
breakfast table. Spielberg, humankind’s most passion-
ate marketeer of chest-swelling heroic nerve, somehow
resisted focusing entirely on the skulking risks taken
by rogue fed worker Ellsberg, and instead homes in on
the dilemma posed to the Washington Post in publishing
them, in violation of a federal court order. Hard-bitten
42 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Post’, which explores the Pentagon Papers exposé
of US government duplicity in Vietnam, tries hard to stir the democratic
impulse in the era of Trump – but the track record of crusading true-story
sagas leaving a mark in the national consciousness has never been great
By Michael Atkinson
editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) drives his staff
through the gruntwork of secretly organising and read-
PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED
Steven Spielberg’s The
Post weighs the legal and
ing through the thousands of pages, while Post publisher financial repercussions
– and family friend of McNamara – Katharine Graham faced during the Pentagon
(Meryl Streep) weighs legal and financial repercussions Papers saga by Washington
Post editor-in chief Ben
against the ethical imperative of journalism’s role in de- Bradlee (Tom Hanks, above)
mocracy. As we know, the courageous risk paid off – the and publisher Katharine
Papers, or news of them, were splashed across every news Graham (Meryl Streep,
above and opposite), against
outlet in the country, and were written into history. their ethical obligations as
Or were they? The war would last another four years, members of the press
in an already rising climate of rage and protest, and Nixon
would fall as a result of an entirely different newspaper-
reported scandal. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis,
while still only a trust-busting lawyer, famously claimed
that sunlight is “the best of disinfectants”, but we could
hardly be blamed for wishing, alongside Spielberg, that
the publication of the Papers mattered much more in
the real world than it actually did. The ultimate salience
of Spielberg’s film, much as the Papers themselves, may
depend upon whatever impact it might or might not
have, on audiences, and what public spirit arises from
that impact. Or, it’s just a newspaper film, which is to say,
one of movies’ most beloved if unsung genres, a school
of ethical narrative tropes literally constructed
around democratic ideals.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 43
STEVEN SPIELBERG
Is ‘The Post’ just as naive as we all were those many decades ago, thinking that publishing something in the
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
(Above, from left) Power of
the Press (1943), Citizen
Kane (1941), Jake Gyllenhaal
in Nightcrawler (2014) and
WIlliam Hurt in Broadcast
News (1987)
44 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
THE POST
It’s a genre about work, the hard existential
work of truth in a civil society. Dramas concocted
around Edward R. Murrow, Hannah Arendt, Bob Wood-
ward and Carl Bernstein, and the Boston Globe’s Spotlight
staff, whatever else they may be, have a genuine baked-in
heroism, contingent upon labouring with facts and lan-
guage, for the sake of a public’s almighty right to know. In
movies, of course, the ‘truth’ is a slippery quantity, and a
journalist saga telling a factual story confronts a Lady from
Shanghai–style shootout between truth and politics, and
truth and movieness. The Post, being a Spielberg movie,
is pure fantasy in its form and tone, even as its facts are
straight. It’s a forgivable nostalgic swoon, expressing our
near universal longing now for journalism’s 20th-century
heyday, as newspapers today face the financial cliff, and
the entire world suddenly seems as badly in need of hard-
core reporting and printed defiance as it ever has.
The tradition of newspaper movies has always tem-
pered the ideals of journalism with the savvy urban bit-
terness of the reporter – an original trickster figure for
the modern era. This dynamic appeared first during the
Depression, and with the advent of talkies. Reporters had
driven stories before, but in the sound era they drove
them with their mouths, adopting a kind of comic, slang-
clotted tough-guy delivery originated on the stage but
borrowed equally from the city streets, which teemed
with the first generation of Americans born of millions
of European immigrants. Whatever kind of public dis-
course we had before, now we had throngs of Irish, Ital-
ian and Eastern European urchins and workers, relent-
lessly reinventing the American vernacular and defining
the dog-eat-dog modern metropolis as a distinct chunk of
space-time, where wealth and success awaited the quick
and merciless, and speed was the name of the game.
What better milieu in which to make talkies? Watch-
ing an actor such as Lee Tracy execute a patch of scripted
dialogue is like watching a spider spin a web in fast-
motion. How did audiences keep up? They did, that’s all,
and therein lurks the real wonderment to be had before
the spectacle of Hollywood product like The Front Page
(1931), Blessed Event (1932) or Power of the Press (1943) –
these were mass-produced narrative entertainments
composed almost entirely of dialogue, cataracts of
human discourse, stories told densely with tongues and
lungs. Today, an exchange of dialogue, even in The Post,
that surpasses one lone minute and features more than
four swapped lines is an aberration – a taxing irritant
amid the swooshing tides of digital noise and body-fluid
pratfall and silent brooding. Back in the day, dialogue
would stretch our for four, eight, even 12 minutes at a
stretch, the movie’s actors yammering away like pet-
shop macaws and fleshing out their characters by way of
what is said, what isn’t said, how fast they talk, how com-
fortable they feel speaking in their particular situation,
how they react at length with the other characters, all of
it arising from the texture of the scene organically, with-
out ‘emphasis’ and visual cues. (Long, mute close-ups
were unheard of – unless you were Garbo or Dietrich.)
Audiences of all ages brought an attention and acumen
to moviewatching that verged on the capacities that we
all bring – or should bring – to bear on conversations
with real, live people.
There was the electric sense in 30s films of talking itself
being an outrageous novelty, to be indulged in like whis-
key by teenagers, and the newspaper picture in general
required throats like Tracy’s because it is uniquely con-
tingent on language and information, even as far along
as Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), which is
really no more than a series of Q&As, however riveting.
Westerns and films noirs were also rooted in a newborn
Americana, but the newspaper movie, with its boundless
cynicism and keep-it-moving pace and narrative need to
know what happened, captures an ambivalent sense of
the national character – its restless confrontationalism,
its queasy balance between crowd identity and hungry
solipsism. This is one of the thematic faces of Citizen Kane
(1941), in many ways the ne plus ultra newspaper film,
and yet one in which journalism is a means, not an end,
to building a fortune and destroying your soul.
Obviously, the heroism of journalism has had its
countercharge, from the self-serving skullduggery of
Walter Burns in every version of The Front Page from 1931
onward, to the slipshod reportage at the core of Sydney
Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981). Between them, noir ex-
plored the moral vacuum that could easily evolve from
modern journalism’s faith in story at any cost, notably
newspaper would change the abuses of state power all by itself, instead of needing us to act on the information?
Billy Wilder’s acidic Ace in the Hole (1951), Fritz Lang’s
dark-hearted While the City Sleeps (1956), and Alexan-
der Mackendrick’s septic Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
What’s interesting is how the reporter, without being
criminal, has often functioned in noir as an active agent
of darkness, not merely another lost pawn criss-crossing
the genre’s endlessly expressive alleys and hallways
and night streets, alongside the luckless war vets, petty
crooks and devious femmes. The newspaperman’s cyni-
cal ambition swaps out the genre’s more generalised
sense of capitalistic doom, and the pessimism becomes
personal, a fact of private corruption spiralling outward.
Again, the journalistic enterprise runs on uniquely high-
octane ethical stakes, with the heart of the American
project weighed as meat set for roasting. If the press is the
conscience of the country, then in noir its fate was already
sealed by the mid-50s.
Of course, idealism fought its fight, too; in Richard
Brooks’s Deadline – U.S.A. (1952), for example, the cru-
sading journo paradigm of The Post was alive and thriv-
ing in a noir-shadowed world. The coming of TV news
only deepened our wells of cynicism, as quite sud-
denly any acceptable scale between what’s appropriate
versus what’s sensational is summarily destroyed by
the medium itself – the appalled point of both Haskell
Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Paddy Chayefsky and
Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), not to mention Brooks’s
second-to-last film, the underrated fake-news tale Wrong
Is Right (1982). Something about TV – about the simple
narcotic effect of its illuminated and illuminating status
as a semi-human presence in our homes, endlessly gen-
erating news and images even when it’s not turned on
– inspires our deepest qualms, even as we never question
our own addiction to it. Even James L. Brooks’s Broadcast
News (1987), about as gentle a massaging as mass media
has ever received, ends up interrogating its own glib ma-
nipulation of on-air journalism, while Michael Mann’s
The Insider (1999); Dan Gilroy’s Medium Cool for the selfie
generation, Nightcrawler (2014); and James Vanderbilt’s
Truth (2015) are all as ruthless in their probing of moral
failure as The Post, among its ilk, is dogged in its pursuit
of moral triumph. What other genre so teeters back and
forth on a fulcrum of genuine ethical equivocation?
The Post virtually bites its lip in tearful pride about HEROES AND VILLAINS
what it thinks it achieves, but the track record of crusad- (Above, from left) Kirk
Douglas and Richard
ing true-story sagas leaving a thumbprint in the nation- Benedict in Ace in the Hole
al consciousness is not great. The only fallout, after all, (1951), Dustin Hoffman and
from the ‘Woodstein’ coverage of Watergate, much less Robert Redford in All the
President’s Men (1976) and
Pakula’s film version of it a few years later, was an abrupt Sally Field in Absence of
change in presidents, an oddball Democrat elected the Malice (1981)
next term, and, in 1980, a full return to regularly sched-
uled skullduggery and Republican power abuse. Also,
we got to enjoy the lingering figure of Nixon as a low
limbo bar no elected official should bow down to beat, a
standard that has been thoroughly obliterated in recent
months and for the foreseeable future. All the President’s
Men, like The Post, has the jaw-dropping indignity of his-
torical revelation, dramatised at full throttle and widely
seen. But the awareness it offered did not help deter the
Reagan-Bush administrations that followed, and the ac-
companying covert wars, campaign monstrosities, inter-
national scandals, top-secret crimes, and our own sleep-
walking acceptance of whatever lies the government fed
to the media.
Assume if you will that Spielberg had intended to
stir up a traumatised public under Trump, and foment
a revitalised outrage over the malevolent shredding
of governmental principles and structures, in a litany
we numbly shrug off as daily news noise. Maybe – or is
Spielberg looking to shame us, with how little we bother
to change things, and how little the Pentagon Papers
changed American minds, despite all that fierce newspa-
per excavation and First Amendment idealising? Is Spiel-
berg’s emphatic visual palette and swelling music and
inspirational cant ironically intended? Or is the film just
as naive as we all were those many decades ago, think-
ing that publishing something in the newspaper would
change the abuses of state power all by itself, instead of
needing us to understand and then to act on the informa-
tion as a citizenry? Look around us: the troglodytes have
found the complacently vulnerable gaps in our rampart,
and the seizure has begun. Real journalism in the time of
Trump has never been more necessary, but if it ever had
a chance of changing history, would we be here now?
The Post is released in UK cinemas on
i 19 January, and is reviewed on page 70
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 45
I AM NOT
A W I TC H
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY RUNGANO NYONI

OUT NOW ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

TM

WHILE STOCKS LAST

74 Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
Director Rian Johnson leavens political high seriousness and
fan-service tear-jerking with enough charm and humour
to prevent ‘The Last Jedi’ becoming the biggest downer ever
delivered at Christmas by the Walt Disney Company

48 Films of the Month 54 Films 80 Home Cinema 90 Books

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 47
FILMS OF THE MONTH
In the name of the father: Eric Caravaca as philosophy lecturer Gilles and Esther Garrel as his troubled daughter Jeanne
Lover for a Day
France 2016
Director: Philippe Garrel
Certificate 15 75m 58s
Reviewed by Cristina Alvarez
López and Adrian Martin
Twenty years ago it would have seemed vulgar
– or simply unlikely – to imagine directors of
lofty, artistic intent such as Terrence Malick or
Philippe Garrel getting ‘on a roll’ and pumping
out multiple films in (for them) rapid succession.
Yet what Malick has recently achieved in terms
of productivity, with the aid of big stars and
generous budgets, Garrel has managed within
a much more constrained production set-up.
Garrel seized the opportunity enabled by
producer Saïd Ben Saïd to make a loose trilogy
of films – Jealousy (2013), In the Shadow of Women
(2015) and now Lover for a Day – that are all in
widescreen black and white, with only a few
central actors, clocking in at not much more than
70 minutes each. As he told Cahiers du cinéma: “A
quarter hour less is a quarter hour less to produce.”
Of course, there is more to it than simple
low-budget efficiency. The trilogy takes
up familiar features of Garrel’s cinema
– the melancholic mood, the focus on
48 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
intimate relationships, signature motifs turned up at her father’s home following the
such as walking, dancing or sleeping – and break-up of her own relationship, interrupts
compresses them into a storytelling mode her cruel tirade against his girlfriend Ariane
that is both cinematic and ‘novelistic’. (“You’re not so amazing – you’re less beautiful
Garrel has arrived at a new level of respect than my mother”) with the apology that
for intricately constructed screenplays – this she is just talking trash. But is she, in fact,
one, a four-hander, was fastidiously rehearsed spontaneously exploiting her own lovelorn
with the cast over a one-year period. Garrel even grief as an excuse to vent her true feelings?
allowed himself what he calls a ‘Hitchcockian’ In the last third of the film, Jeanne (brilliantly
element of ongoing intrigue: a voiceover played by Esther Garrel, who is the standout in
narration (spoken by Laëtitia Spigarelli) that this ensemble) introduces Ariane to her friend
fills in for us, at special moments, what each Stéphane, a casual seducer to whom Jeanne
character knows, doesn’t know or is not saying. has never succumbed. The plot that Jeanne
What is Lover for a Day about? In Garrel’s engineers here – if, indeed, she is consciously
films, this common-or-garden question of
interpretation frequently springs a trap for
viewers and critics alike. Garrel began by
pondering the Electra complex: flipping
the traditionally masculine Oedipus tale so
that a daughter (Jeanne) symbolically kills
the mother-figure (Ariane) in order to solely
possess the father (Gilles). But, judging by the
end result, that template really only offered
Garrel a pretext. Lover for a Day traces a tight
triangle of interrelationships in which virtually
every act is ambiguous. What people say is not
necessarily what they believe; and what they
allow to happen is not necessarily what they
intend or consciously desire. Jeanne, who has Louise Chevillotte as Ariane, with Garrel
 ‘Lover for a Day’ is a film of (Jeanne trying to delete a compromising
photo of Ariane from her phone) are retained
Freudian inspiration, and its in the final cut, and extraneous characters

FILMS OF THE MONTH

scheming – is, once again, mysterious: Ariane’s
subsequent affair with Stéphane is both (as
the voiceover narration suggests) a way for
Jeanne to enjoy him by proxy and her means
to catalyse Gilles’s ultimate rejection of Ariane.
And yet, in one of the film’s best moments, once
this house of cards collapses, a tearful Jeanne
tries to “plead Ariane’s cause” to her father.
Even more centrally, Gilles and Ariane’s
relationship as a couple rests on a verbal pact
that is meant to ensure peace but only wreaks
havoc. Gilles, shaken by the evidence of
Ariane’s impulsive one-day trysts (“You’re a Don
Juan,” he comments), asks her to agree to this
condition: they can both have affairs, as long as
they don’t declare them to each other. But the
very utterance of this plan introduces doubt,
distance and eventually disenchantment into
the relationship: Ariane goes in a split second
(the space of an edit) from contemplating a
lifetime with Gilles to forecasting its end; he
flirts with another young woman but suddenly,
as if completely destabilised, withdraws
from the seduction game he has initiated.
Lover for a Day is, as Garrel has declared, a
film of Freudian inspiration, and its chosen
terrain is the unconscious. This is in itself
nothing new in his work: at least since the
early 1980s, his characters have seemingly
terrain is the unconscious – Garrel
even directed the performers to
‘act as if you are in a dream’
been sleepwalking in and out of their own
dreams. According to Louise Chevillotte
(impressive as Ariane, in her first screen role),
this approach informs even his direction of
the performers: “Act as if you are in a dream.”
In this dreamlike framework, it is perhaps
better to approach the trio of Jeanne, Ariane
and Gilles less as realistically discrete, flesh-
and-blood characters than as unstable – and
frequently interchangeable – packets of
emotions, moods and drives. The film traces
an arc of reversibility. In the opening scenes,
Garrel vividly contrasts Ariane’s orgasmic
jouissance with Jeanne’s hysterical, suicidal
depression. By the end, the positions of the two
women will have swapped almost exactly.
In fact, much of Lover for a Day is built on
rhyming schemes that permutate different
arrangements of characters into the same type of
situation: side-by-side conversations framed in
close two-shot; people walking and talking in the
street; even certain sex positions recur. One can
detect here the influence of Chantal Akerman,
particularly her triangular romance Night and
Day (1991), with its serenely serial ‘eternal
return’ of particular spoken phrases and physical
gestures. Indeed, Garrel recalls the ‘lesson’
imparted to him by his late friend: “Everything
must be rendered flat – on the same level.” In
this spirit, even the dream sequences in Lover
for a Day (there are two, according to Garrel)
are depicted like any other part of the story.
Gone are the days (particularly of the 1980s)
when Garrel made a Godardian show of violent
disjuncture between the various levels of the
narrative. Now everything is smoother, more
fluid and coherent in terms of traditional
movie craft. Yet odd events still intrude into
the fabric (such as an amusing moment when,
in the street, Gilles is drenched by somebody
watering plants above his head – a practice
he decries as “bourgeois”), fumbled actions
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Original Music France Cinéma
Saïd Ben Saïd Jean-Louis Aubert co-production
Michel Merkt Sound Recordists With the participation
Screenplay/ François Musy of Arte France and
Dialogue Guillaume Sciamma Centre National
Arlette Langmann Gabriel Hafner du Cinéma et de
Jean-Claude Carrière Key Costumer l’Image Animée
Caroline Deruas Justine Pearce With the support of
Philippe Garrel Procirep, Angoa
Director of ©SBS Films, Arte In association with
Photography France Cinéma Soficinéma 13
Renato Berta Production With the support
Editor Companies of Soficinéma 11
François Gedigier Saïd Ben Saïd and Développement,
Art Director Michel Merkt present Cinémage 10
Manu de Chauvigny an SBS Films, Arte Développement
Paris, present day. Jeanne has left her boyfriend Mateo,
and arrives in despair at her father Gilles’s home. Gilles,
a philosophy teacher, is in a secret relationship with
former student Ariane. After a rocky start, the two
women gradually become friends. Still obsessed with
Mateo, Jeanne fakes phone calls to the apartment,
supposedly from him. Ariane saves Jeanne from a suicide
attempt, and agrees not to tell Gilles. The women go
out dancing together. At a group dinner organised by
glimpsed only once deliver grave speeches
(a bar proprietor declares that, while wholly
sympathetic to Algerians during the ‘nameless
war’ of 1954-62, he still loyally fought against
them on the French side when conscripted).
Loyalty, or fidélité, is another recurring
and fully ambiguous theme woven into the
film. It is discussed as a philosophical issue
between father and daughter: “One can
be faithful to memories, details,” observes
Gilles, but he adds, “I don’t know what I’m
faithful to, or who.” A fellow teacher, his head
spinning from the many attractive young
students, asks Gilles about his marriage:
“Fidelity, how did that go?” – to which Gilles
blandly replies, “Badly.” Like Godard, Garrel
is fascinated by the complicated, sometimes
fatal interplay between political loyalties,
intellectual ideals and relationship codes.
Issues of gender representation have rarely
been so pointed in the director’s career as they
are in Lover for a Day. More than ever, Garrel
insists in interviews on his essentially feminist
viewpoint, and on the creative means he
employs to ensure gender equality on screen:
men write the male roles, women the female
roles. In practice, this obliterates neither Garrel’s
penchant for gender dualism – the characters
endlessly discuss the supposedly universal
differences in behaviour and outlook between
men and women – nor the evident trace of
male fantasy. How could a film in which the
director’s own daughter plays the Electra figure,
where both she and the rival are student age
in relation to a teacher-father, be anything
but suffused with an aura of erotic reverie?
Although this is, for Garrel, a surprisingly
sexual film, Lover for a Day keeps a tight lid on
such disquieting insinuations. All the films in
Garrel’s ‘Freudian trilogy’ arrive at an enigmatic
but satisfying equilibrium for their faithful
viewers – a Mozartian sense of optimism,
second chances balancing out the catastrophic
mistakes that every character inevitably makes.
If Lover for a Day, like Godard’s Le Mépris (1963),
is about the mysterious process by which a
relationship unravels, it also shows – to borrow
one of Garrel’s own titles – the rebirth of love.
A co-production Stéphane In Black & White
of Fresnoy, Studio Michel Charrel [2.35:1]
National des Arts bar owner Subtitles
Contemporains Nicolas Bridet
teacher Distributor
Marie Sergeant MUBI
Cast Yentel
Eric Caravaca Raphaël Naasz French theatrical title
Gilles young man smoking L’Amant d’un jour
Esther Garrel a cigarette
Jeanne Justine Bachelet
Louise Chevillotte friend in restaurant
Ariane Christian Bouillette
Paul Toucang drunkard
Mateo Laëtitia Spigarelli
Félix Kysyl narrator
Gilles, Ariane is courted by another student, with whom
she subsequently has a one-day affair. Gilles and Ariane
agree to maintain an ‘open’ relationship. At a kiosk,
Jeanne spies a nude photo of Ariane in a porno magazine;
she promises to keep it a secret from Gilles. Jeanne
introduces Ariane to her friend Stéphane, leading to a
sexual liaison that Gilles witnesses. Gilles and Ariane
break up. Three months later, Jeanne announces to her
father that she has reconciled with Mateo.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 49


The Nothing Factory
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Portugal 2017
Director: Pedro Pinho
Reviewed by Erika Balsom
Cinema begins with the end of work. In 1895’s
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, the mostly
female employees of the Lumière brothers’
factory in Lyon pour through the gates. This
image opens the cinema but forecloses the
representation of industrial labour itself,
establishing a preference for depictions of leisure
and white-collar work from which film history
has seldom deviated. There are, however, notable
exceptions: figures such as Jean-Luc Godard
and Harun Farocki have sought to redress this
absence with reflections on the factory as a site
of sociality and struggle, skill and exploitation,
while last year saw the very welcome restoration
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t
Make a Day (1972), a captivating television
miniseries exploring working-class life on and
off the factory floor. To this eminent list one
must add Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory, an
entrancing and inventive film about the fate of
a suburban Lisbon elevator manufacturer in our
era of deindustrialisation and economic crisis.
Shot on beautifully grainy 16mm and
featuring a cast comprising overwhelmingly non-
professional actors, some of whom are factory
workers in real life, The Nothing Factory traffics
heavily in the conventions of social realism,
at times adopting a documentary feel perhaps
informed by Pinho’s background as a nonfiction
filmmaker. When the Fataleva company runs
into financial difficulties, the management sells
off machinery in the middle of the night and
attempts to cajole employees into taking lump-
sum payouts. Some do, but the remaining workers
band together to occupy the factory in an effort to
protect their jobs. When they visit the head office
and find it abandoned, presumably owing to the
company’s insolvency, they discuss the possibility
of continuing to work on a self-organised basis – a
theme also central to Fassbinder’s miniseries.
The film’s narrative, partially adapted from a
1997 play of the same name by Judith Herzberg,
consists of little more than this; it is skeletal,
especially given its running time of nearly
three hours, but this is not to be construed as a
deficiency. The Nothing Factory is less a matter of
story than it is a naturalistic immersion into a
milieu, with substantial screen time given over
to capturing the subtleties of group dynamics
and the lived environments within which
they occur. Extensive scenes of the workers
arguing over the best path forward, developed
out of improvisation exercises with the cast,
are punctuated by Straubian travelling shots of
industrial landscapes and episodes from the home
life of Zé, a worker who lives with his immigrant
girlfriend and her son. The film renders its
characters and environments in tremendous
detail over a protracted duration, carefully
attending to the complexities of interpersonal
relationships, the strain of collective decision-
making and the affective weight of precarity.
The factory features as the central node in a
network of social relations that extends beyond
its walls to encompass commuter trains, nail
salons, dark bars and cramped apartments.
Yet The Nothing Factory is by no means a
straightforwardly realist work. A great measure
50 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
of the film’s originality and interest stems from its
internal probing of the stakes and limitations of
the very strategies it deploys to such great effect.
When grappling with social themes, there is a
strong and longstanding tendency for a particular
kind of cinema to aspire to heart-wrenching
authenticity, to romanticise precarity as a form of
exotic otherness and package it for consumption
by middle-class viewers. Faced with such images,
audiences feel good about themselves for feeling
bad, reassured as they are of their progressiveness
and empathy for just a few hours before returning
to their comfortable homes. Such is one problem
with a certain vein of the realist enterprise. In
the late 1960s, Cahiers du cinéma’s contributors
articulated another: the illusionist picturing
of political subjects fails to acknowledge that
representation is never a neutral act, but a process
imbued with power relations. In order for a film
to be truly effective, the argument went, it must
be political not only in content but also in form.
As if to respond to and pre-empt both critiques,
The Nothing Factory introduces the character
of the filmmaker Daniele, played by Italian
documentarian Daniele Incalcaterra. He is the
catalyst for the film’s reflexive self-questioning,
a diegetic proxy for Pinho himself, who pulls the
film away from its realist ground and enables a
consistent interrogation of issues that have long
haunted leftist discourse: how to conceptualise
the fraught relationship between the intellectual
and the worker; how filmmakers of class privilege
and avant-gardist inclinations might best
approach the representation of the proletariat.
When we first see him, Daniele is driving
through terrains vagues left in the wake of
failed industry, providing the occasion for
a ponderous female voiceover: “A spectre is
haunting Europe. The spectre of its ending.”
It is an echo of Marx and Engels, devoid of the
conviction that a communist future is imminent.
Something is certainly ending – not only Europe,
but industry, stable employment, organised
labour – and better futures are difficult to
imagine. Quotations follow from To Our Friends,
a 2014 book by the Invisible Committee, an
anonymous French anarchist collective who
describe the current state of capitalism as one of A matter of lifts and death: The Nothing Factory
“lasting apocalypse”. Throughout The Nothing
Factory, such snippets of theoretical discourse In To Our Friends, the Invisible Committee
periodically appear, puncturing the film’s proposes that a utopia of self-organisation
realism with moments of Brechtian rupture that should be achieved through revolution, but it
recall the political modernism of the 1960s. is not so clear that The Nothing Factory shares
On receiving their first order, the workers such convictions. To be sure, the film is a
break into a choreographed musical number cacophony of contradictory voices, making it
exalting the “3,000 tilting modules” they have difficult to assign to it any singular position;
been asked to produce. After the song-and- this is indeed one of its strengths. Nonetheless,
dance has concluded, it is revealed that the any radical remaking of society seems out of the
spectacle has been orchestrated by Daniele for question. The factory workers do not constitute
the benefit of the film he is making, as was the a unified historical subject poised to overthrow
order that prompted it. Zé pushes back against
these manipulations: “We’re going to be what,
characters in your neorealist musical?” The
gesture is one that resonates as much as an
interpersonal and interclass conflict within
the narrative as it does as a film-historical jab
at modes of representation from which The
Nothing Factory is keen to depart. The film
confronts head-on the problems inherent in the
intelligentsia’s romanticisation of the working
class, yet its task is not one of self-flagellation.
Despite its thorough reflexivity, it never loses
sight of its primary concern with capturing a
reality; after all, the play of the signifier doesn’t
mean much when one needs food and housing. Non-professionals make up the bulk of the cast
 FILMS OF THE MONTH
capitalism, but an internally fractured group Credits and Synopsis
comprising diverging attitudes and priorities.
When Zé’s father raises the possibility of
revolutionary violence, digging up machine
Produced by original idea by João Gazua Cast Fernando Lopes Isabel do Carmo
João Matos Jorge Silva Melo Choreographer José Smith Vargas Sandra Calhau Roger Claustre
guns buried since the fall of the dictatorship Susana Nobre Based on the play Joana Pupo Zé Ricardo Gonçalves Sara Pinto
Producers De Nietsfabriek by Carla Galvão Dinis Gomes
four decades ago, the episode is presented João Gusmão Judith Herzberg Production Carla Helena Cavacas In Colour
farcically, as the useless fantasies of an old man. Joana Bravo Excerpts from the Companies Njamy Sebastião Veríssimo [1.85:1]
João Matos text À nos amis by Terratreme presents ‘Mowgli’ Carlos Garrido Subtitles
Self-organisation figures not as utopia, but as a Susana Nobre Comité Invisível a film by João Matos, Daniele Incalcaterra Santos
project of questionable viability. The tone is one Leonor Noivo Director of Leonor Noivo, Luisa Daniele Américo Silva Distributor
Luisa Homem Photography Homem, Pedro Pinho, J. Bichana Martins Vasconcelos ICA Films
of humiliation, stagnation and uncertainty. Tiago Hespanha Vasco Viana Tiago Hespanha Hermínio Amaro António Rocha
And yet factory production does resume, with Pedro Pinho Editors Produced by João Santos Lopes Pereira Portuguese
Screenplay Cláudia Oliveira Terratreme Filmes Paulo Vitorino Tristão Soares theatrical title
management nowhere in sight. The Lumières Pedro Pinho Edgar Feldman Financial support: Rui Ruivo Nuno Vieira A Fábrica de Nada
begin when work ends; Pinho ends when work Leonor Noivo Luisa Homem Instituto do Cinema e António Cajado João Barbosa
Luisa Homem Art Director do Audiovisual, RTP Santos David Pereira Bastos
begins anew, with workers clocking in to try Tiago Hespanha Luísa Homem Executive Producers Zé Pedro Paulo Ganhão
their hand at existing on their own terms. Fredric Script Collaborators Music Directors João Matos Arlindo Miguel Anselm Jappe
João Rosas Pedro Rodrigues Susana Nobre Boris Martins Nunes Matilde Gago
Jameson was right when he wrote that “it is Telmo Churro José Smith Vargas Euclides Furtado da Silva
easier to imagine the end of the world than to Based on an Sound Recordist Toni
imagine the end of capitalism”. The seemingly
Portugal, present day. In the middle of the night, Zé, a the workers, filming – and shaping – their discussions
ceaseless proliferation of disaster movies in worker at an elevator factory, receives a telephone call. about the best path forward. He arranges for the
our young neoliberal century is evidence of the Something is wrong at the factory. On arriving there, factory to receive an order from Argentina, without
seduction of the first option. The Nothing Factory Zé finds that machinery is being taken away owing to disclosing his role in this to the group. After some initial
is a rare film that opts for the more arduous path the company’s financial difficulties. The next day, the enthusiasm, expressed in a musical number staged by
precisely to acknowledge it as such. It confronts workers are offered payouts to quit, and some accept. the filmmaker, the workers debate whether to accept
this impasse, yet insists that we must continue The others decide to occupy the factory in an effort to the order and how they might organise themselves.
keep their jobs, but when they visit the head office, they As the film ends, the workers clock in and production
to search for better ways of working and living find it deserted. A filmmaker starts to spend time with resumes.
together within this lasting apocalypse.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 51

FILMS OF THE MONTH
A quiet passion: Judith Chemla as Jeanne in Stéphane Brizé’s delicate portrait of a 19th-century noblewoman trapped by patriarchy and her own passivity
A Woman’s Life
France/Belgium 2016
Director: Stéphane Brizé
Certificate 12A 119m 13s
Reviewed by Catherine Wheatley
Stéphane Brizé is something of a stealth auteur.
For nearly 20 years he has been making slim,
muscular films whose tone has shifted from
the gentle comedy of Le Bleu des villes (1999)
and Not Here to Be Loved (2005), through the
minor-key melodrama of Mademoiselle Chambon
(2009) and A Few Hours of Spring (2012), to the
political critique of 2015’s Cannes Competition
entry The Measure of a Man. Throughout, his
style – intense, sensuous, low on dialogue and
heavy on detail – has remained consistent. But
52 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
so too has his treatment of women. While he
deploys his male actors – in particular three-time
collaborator Vincent Lindon – with sensitivity
and heft, his female characters have rarely been
developed beyond sketches. The eponymous
Mademoiselle Chambon, for example, was
given neither backstory nor motivation for
her aleatory lifestyle. In The Measure of a Man,
the protagonist’s wife hardly had a name.
A Woman’s Life, set in the early 19th century
and based on a novel by Guy de Maupassant,
turns a weakness into a strength by making
female passivity its central theme. The woman in
question is Jeanne, beloved daughter of Baron and
Baroness Le Perthuis des Vauds (an adorable Jean-
Pierre Darroussin and Yolande Moreau). The life
is little to speak of. The film opens with 18-year-
old Jeanne returning to the family chateau after
convent school, and ends a quarter of a century
later in the same place. In between, Jeanne marries
local nobleman Julien de Lamare, who, having no
fortune of his own, moves into her parents’ home.
She bears a child, Paul. The husband is miserly and
cheats on her with her two closest confidantes.
The son is sent away to school and later spends
his adult years frittering away the family fortune.
These are the events that make up the film’s
narrative. In the face of them, Jeanne says little and
does less. She grieves for her faithless husband, for
her feckless child, for the friends who betray her,
for the parents who, with the best of intentions,
sell her down the river. The film minutely details
the various ways in which women are persuaded
to acquiesce in their subjugation: motherhood,
marriage, friendship, filial duty, forgiveness.
Sometimes, Jeanne demurs: she does not want
her son to be apart from her; does not want to
wear the crimson dress her friend tells her will
suit her so well; does not want, it seems, to have

FILMS OF THE MONTH

sex with her husband, judging by the small silent
tear and whispered “stop” that he ignores. No one
takes heed. The one time she does stand up for
herself – to a bullying priest – it ends in tragedy.
If Jeanne’s lot is to give and give and receive
little by way of return, even the film itself seems
to mine what energies she has to sculpt itself
from. When she is happy, the world is burnished
with sunlight, the fields surrounding the family
chateau red-gold and rosy. In her melancholy,
the sky becomes grey, overcast. At her lowest
ebb, when she discovers that Julien (a weaselly
Swann Arlaud) has been sleeping with her maid
Rosalie, the screen is plunged into darkness; we
can only just make out two blurry figures in
white nightclothes, one howling, one pleading.
This pathetic fallacy might seem a little
on-the-nose, but Brizé grounds the shifting
colours in economic circumstances as much
as emotional devastation: miserly Julien won’t
allow Jeanne to waste money on wood for fires
or candle wax for reading; later, Paul (played
as an adult by Finnegan Oldfield) has depleted
her financial reserves to such a point that she Couple in a hole: Swann Arlaud as Viscount Julien de Lamare, the husband of Chemla’s Jeanne
has nothing left to waste. In this much there’s a
timeliness to the narrative that makes it a kind The film details the ways in a classical melodramatic heroine, an antecedent
of companion piece to The Measure of a Man, in of Letter from an Unknown Woman’s Lisa: Stefan
which Lindon’s beleaguered everyman struggled which women are persuaded to Zweig, from whose novella that 1948 film was
with the economic hardship and multiple adapted, was a vocal admirer of Maupassant.
indignities that come with being unemployed. acquiesce in their subjugation: It is another film, though, another small life,
Indeed, the two films feel of a piece: despite
the period setting, the camerawork here is
motherhood, marriage, that Brizé’s picture most potently calls to mind,
that of George Bailey in Frank Capra’s classic
naturalistic, the performances modern. A friendship, filial duty, forgiveness It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). A Woman’s Life is
Woman’s Life is shot in Academy ratio by effectively that indelible shot of Jimmy Stewart’s
Antoine Héberlé; the squarer format literally meanwhile elides the film’s terrible central twist reaction to the news that he’ll be staying in
boxes Jeanne in. Hers is a small world. The into three stunning seconds-long shots. We don’t Bedford Falls, stretched out over two hours. Like
camerawork is composed almost exclusively see the ensuing devastation, but Brizé (writing George, Jeanne almost succumbs to despair.
of close-ups or medium shots, with only one or in collaboration with Florence Vignon) makes But not quite. Her hope is a thing with feathers,
two establishing shots. The tiniest gestures and clear the long-term ramifications. Jeanne, like perched always in her soul. And since this isn’t
sounds are amplified. A touch. A breath. The turn her fortunes, is not floored by a single blow but Hollywood but 19th-century France, Jeanne’s isn’t,
of a head. The scratch of pencil lead on paper. by a ceaseless erosion, a chipping away at her ultimately, a wonderful life. It’s just a life – one
Yet while Jeanne herself is in almost every shot, reserves. Her fate is inexorable. In this much she is that’s neither as good nor as bad as she thinks.
she is hardly visible (I don’t think she is ever shot
head-on). Judith Chemla has won plaudits for her Credits and Synopsis
performance, but it hardly seems a fitting word
to describe the act of self-erasure that takes place.
Produced by Supervising F comme Film, et de l’Audiovisuel Baron Simon-Jacques Lucette Beudin
How complicit is Jeanne in her own fate? Miléna Poylo Sound Editor CN5 Productions de la Féderation le Perthuis des Vauds Ludivine, servant
Certainly, she tries her Pollyanna-ish best to Gilles Sacuto Hervé Guyader With the participation Wallonie-Bruxelles Yolande Moreau
Screenplay Costume Designer of Canal+, France With the support Baroness Adélaïde le In Colour
be blind to any unpleasantness. She burns the Stéphane Brizé Madeline Fontaine Télévisions, Ciné+, of Tax Shelter du Perthuis des Vauds [1.33:1]
posthumous evidence of her mother’s affair, for Florence Vignon Centre National du Gouvernement Swann Arlaud Subtitles
Based on the novel ©TS Productions, Cinéma et de l’Image Fédéral Belge and Viscount Julien
example, preferring to maintain the illusion of [Une vie] by Guy France 3 Cinéma, Animée, Région Inver Invest de Lamare Distributor
her parents’ perfect marriage. We linger over de Maupassant Versus Production, Haute-Normandie, In co-production Nina Meurisse Arrow Films
Director of F comme Film, Procirep and Angoa with VOO and Be tv Rosalie
companionable scenes with her best friend Photography CN5 Productions in association Olivier Perrier French theatrical title
and parents, but quicksilver images of Julien Antoine Héberlé Production with Indéfilms 4, Father Picot Une vie
and his lover surface unbidden. Indeed, while Film Editor Companies Eurimages and Cast Clotilde Hesme
Anne Klotz TS Productions Programme MEDIA de Judith Chemla Gilberte de Fourville
the film takes a loosely chronological path, it Art Director presents a co- l’Union Européenne Jeanne le Perthuis Alain Beigel
skitters between good times and bad without Valérie Saradjian production with Produced with des Vauds Georges de Fourville
Original Music France 3 Cinéma, the assistance of Jean-Pierre Finnegan Oldfield
warning or reason, until it comes to resemble Olivier Baumont Versus Production, Centre du Cinéma Darroussin Paul aged 20
a battle between the version of the life Jeanne
wants to believe in and the one that she most Normandy, France, 1819. Jeanne lives an idyllic Julien is having an affair with her best friend, Madame
existence with her parents, Baron and Baroness Le de Fourville. Jeanne confides in her priest; he tells
fears. The laconic, clipped storytelling reminded Perthuis des Vauds, at their ancestral home. When she Madame de Fourville’s husband, who shoots his wife
me, oddly, of Brady Corbet’s The Childhood of is wooed by Vicomte Julien de Lamare, her parents and Julien before killing himself.
a Leader (2015), another film in which it is all encourage her to marry him for love. Julien has sold Years pass. Paul is miserable at school and, as a
too clear that a refusal to heed the portents of his assets to pay off his father’s gambling debts, so young man, runs up huge debts, then absconds with his
what is to come can only lead to disaster. after the pair marry they move into Jeanne’s family lover. Jeanne’s parents die. Rosalie returns to work for
residence, while the older couple move out. Jeanne her. Jeanne’s fortune is depleted by Paul’s increasing
Although the film turns around key moments
is smitten, though Julien is mean with money and demands for money. She is forced to sell off most of
and crises – marriage, birth, death, bankruptcy – unforgiving towards their unmarried maid Rosalie the family land and becomes depressed. When a letter
these events appear as almost throwaway details. when she reveals that she is pregnant. Jeanne is arrives from Paul, asking for money to care for his
Neither Jeanne’s wedding to Julien nor Paul’s birth distraught when she catches Julien in bed with Rosalie daughter, Rosalie suspects that he is lying and travels
is shown. The deaths of the baron and baroness and realises that the baby is his. She forgives him, to Paris to find him. She returns with Jeanne’s infant
are marked only by the actors’ abrupt absence and soon gives birth to a son of her own, Paul. But her granddaughter, and the news that Paul will join them
happiness is shattered again when she discovers that shortly.
from the screen. Anne Klotz’s excellent editing

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 53

 The Bachelors
USA 2016
Director: Kurt Voelker
Reviewed by Nikki Baughan
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
The use of female characters as nothing more
REVIEWS
than a dramatic catalyst for the men around
them is an unfortunate mainstay of cinema. Dead
women have a particular emotional potency in
this regard; even more so if they happen to have
been wholesome wives and mothers. So it is in
the The Bachelors, which succumbs to this (and
almost every other) melodramatic cliché in its
exploration of the impact of grief on a father
and son. Writer/director Kurt Voelker’s ability to
mine some brutal truths at key points in the story
does, however, prevent the film from dissolving
entirely into movie-of-the-week schmaltz.
Voelker also owes a great deal to lead actor J.K.
Simmons, who brings gravitas and authenticity
to the role of Bill Palet, a fiftysomething man
struggling to cope after the death of his wife
of 20-plus years. Finding it impossible to stay
in the family home, he takes himself and teen
son Wes (Josh Wiggins) to Los Angeles, where
he pulls in a favour from an old friend and
takes a teaching job at a local private school.
Enrolling in the same school, Wes encounters
the standard hierarchical set-up of bullies, jocks
and outsiders, eventually befriending a pair of
geeks and taking up cross-country running.
Thanks to well-meaning French teacher Carine
(Julie Delpy), he crosses paths with Lacy (Lady
Bird’s Odeya Rush), a beautiful student from
the nearby girls’ academy to whom he must
offer French tuition. While Lacy is initially
standoffish, it transpires that she has some
serious issues of her own, and the pair find in
each other a kindred – albeit damaged – spirit.
When it’s concentrating on Wes’s experiences,
The Bachelors plays like an unoriginal, surface-
level teen drama, in which Wes gazes wistfully
at home videos of his mother on his phone,
admires the female students bussed in from the
neighbouring convent school (on what one of
his friends delightfully terms “the muff truck”),
takes on the school bully who slut-shames
Lacy, and acts as de facto therapist when he
discovers that Lacy cuts herself. Of course.
It’s with Bill’s storyline, however, that the
film delivers moments of genuine insight
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Richard Sherman Capital presents
Matthew Baer Original Music a Windowseat
Joseph McKelheer Joel P. West Entertainment/Matt
Bill Kiely Production Baer Films production
George Parra Sound Mixer Executive Producers
Written by Matthew Sanchez Leo Kiely
Kurt Voelker Costume Designer Ryan Dorff
Director of Camille Benda Jennifer Kelly
Photography
Antonio Riestra ©Firebird Films, LLC
Edited by Production Cast
Anita Brandt Companies J.K. Simmons
Burgoyne Peregrine Bill Palet
Production Designer Entertainment Josh Wiggins
The US, present day. After the death of his beloved wife,
fiftysomething teacher Bill Palet moves with his teen
son Wes to California, where he takes a job in a private
school. Enrolling in the same school, Wes crosses
paths with Lacy, a student from the neighbouring
girls’ academy, after French teacher Carine asks him
to give her extra tuition. As Wes and Lacy bond over
their respective family traumas, Bill embarks on a
54 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
Truly madly Delpy: Julie Delpy, J.K. Simmons
and feeling. Although he initially hides his
grief behind an ‘I’m fine’ facade, psychological
cracks begin to widen and his grief descends
into a depression that no amount of therapy,
medication and electroconvulsive treatment
can touch. Empathetic cinematography from
Antonio Riestra, usually associated with
genre works such as Mama (2013), Last Knights
(2015) and Eloise (2017), underscores Bill’s
psychological battles, the warming brights
of the golden Californian landscapes at odds
with the darkness that’s consuming him.
It’s no surprise that Bill embarks on a tentative
courtship with Carine, but instead of being a
too-easy balm, these halting attempts at intimacy
only split him further apart, causing a breakdown
that seriously threatens his relationship with
Wes. An explosive dinner-table confrontation
between father and son is the best sequence in the
film – a desperate, visceral conversation laying
bare the insidious nature of depression not only
on the sufferer but also on those around them.
Within the next few minutes, however, a hasty
concluding montage sees Bill emerge from bed,
sort through his late wife’s belongings and have
them taken away – all in the time it takes Wes
to win his first major cross-country event. Bill
makes it to the finish line, where the two share
a hug, then embark on a trip for ice cream with
Lacy and Carine. It’s a woefully pat ending to
Bill’s challenging journey and proof that, despite
the kernels of truth studded throughout its
narrative, The Bachelors is content to be nothing
more than a sweet, palatable confection.
Wes Palet Jae Head Michael McGlone
Odeya Rush Gober Coach Keyes
Lacy Westman Kitana Turnbull
Kevin Dunn Annabelle Westman In Colour
Paul Abernac Charlie Depew [2.35:1]
Julie Delpy Mason
Carine Roussel Spencer List Distributor
Harold Perrineau Taber Bulldog Film
Dr Rollens Niko Guardado Distribution
Kimberley Crandall Rios
Jeanie Palet Jean Louisa Kelly
Tyrel Jackson Barbara Westman
Williams Tom Amandes
Rafi Davis Westman
tentative relationship with Carine. While Wes begins
to move on from his grief, however, Bill descends into
depression. His relationship with Wes breaks down,
leading to an explosive confrontation. Following the
outburst, Wes competes in a school cross-country run,
while Bill finally clears out his wife’s belongings. Wes
wins the race. Bill arrives at the finish line and the pair
hug, then head out for ice cream with Lacy and Carine.
Brad’s Status
USA 2017
Director: Mike White
Certificate 15 102m 7s
Reviewed by Leigh Singer
One way to examine Brad’s Status is through
Ben’s status. The film’s lead, Ben Stiller, has long
been the figurehead for Hollywood comedy’s
man-child obsession, his roles ranging from
outré characters such as the clueless male
model of Zoolander to the mild-mannered but
still permanently harried, largely passive-
aggressive victims of misfortune in the Meet
the Parents franchise. All of Stiller’s emotionally
fragile stooges inevitably reach a point of
humiliation that causes an explosion of
self-loathing angst, allowing Stiller’s manic-
comic stylings free reign. And for years, to
paraphrase Derek Zoolander, it was generally
a really, really ridiculously good look for him.
Mid-period Stiller continues to probe the
downtrodden, dissatisfied essence of such
characters, but he’s also been trying out some
welcome muted variations on that theme.
Recent collaborations with writer-director
Noah Baumbach, including 2014’s While We’re
Young and this year’s The Meyerowitz Stories
(New and Selected), engage a darker tragicomic
persona, forcing the actor to do more – more
introspection, more self-awareness – with less.
In Brad’s Status, Stiller is rarely off screen, often
shot in close-up as he articulates out loud or
through (overused) voiceover his inferiority
complex. That he’s now so adept at playing
a man more likely to implode than explode
under pressure shows an actor increasingly
comfortable at internalising discomfort.
The performances, then – notably from
Stiller and also from impressive young
Austin Abrams as his endearingly diffident
yet quietly switched-on son Troy – largely
make writer-director Mike White’s modest,
empathetic story work. White’s speciality,
whether scripting effervescent mainstream
comedy (School of Rock), squirm-worthy
indies (Chuck & Buck, Beatriz at Dinner) or
his own underrated HBO Laura Dern-starrer
Enlightened, is the frustrated, borderline deluded
loners grappling with a world unwilling to
acknowledge their talents or their terrors.
Yet in making his protagonist here a
middle-aged, middle-class white male whose
life is falling short only when considered
next to the success of his one-percenter
friends, White is well aware that – as Troy’s
Indian-American college friend chides Brad
– he’s dealing with first-world problems.
The result, for all its compassionate probing
of Brad’s status, is a sweet, self-effacing film
that almost apologises for its own existence:
a mission statement and mea culpa politely
circling each other into stalemate.
This reticence extends to all the other
characters bar Troy, even though they’re
largely envisioned as projections of Brad’s
neuroses. His high-powered college friends –
cameos from Luke Wilson, Jemaine Clement
and White, hilariously imagining himself
as a flamboyant Hollywood hack director –
remain marginalised. Even fantasy scenes of
their idealised lives feel muted, as if White
were wary of accusations of aping another
recent Stiller midlife-crisis vehicle, 2013’s
CGI-heavy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’s
 Brigsby Bear
USA/Hong Kong 2017
Director: Dave McCary
Certificate 15 97m 2s

a shame, because arguably the film’s best Reviewed by Anton Bitel

scene is an actual confrontation between Brad Meet Brigsby: an ursine interdimensional
and a former friend, the excellent Michael adventurer whose endless cosmic clashes with

REVIEWS
Sheen’s breezily conceited media pundit. the villainous Sun Snatcher – and accompanying
More problematic, however, is the sidelining lessons in maths, hygiene and ethics – are
of Brad’s upbeat, loyal wife Melanie. The the subject of the TV show that James (Kyle
opening scene of Brad’s insomnia only Mooney) has been watching obsessively on
gradually reveals that she’s sleeping in the VHS for as long as he can remember. Now in
same bed. It’s a neat visualisation of his his mid-twenties but somewhat arrested in his
solipsism, but perhaps confirms all too development, James is the ultimate fanboy, his
easily, even inadvertently, Brad’s theory that bedroom festooned with Brigsby paraphernalia
Melanie’s contentment undermines his own and his every online conversation (on his ancient
ambition. And as the story doesn’t really end computer) devoted to speculations about the
up reintegrating her, it’s an impression the more arcane intricacies of the show’s plotting.
film never really shakes off. Amid White’s Cheesily derivative and hilariously didactic,
generous, honest approach, aided by Mark this 80s-style kids’ serial is a formative fantasy
Mothersbaugh’s twinkly score, it’s a rare twice over: first, it has shaped housebound James’s Bunker mentality: Kyle Mooney
moment of unquestioned narcissism: Brad’s education and character over the two and a half
status set to ‘single’ when he’s clearly in decades he has spent with parents Ted (Mark misguided fools rather than exploitative abusers.
a mutually beneficial relationship. Hamill) and April (Jane Adams), bunkered in Brigsby Bear is so much a part of James that his
the desert to protect him from the apocalyptic quest to find a place for himself in the world
Credits and Synopsis toxins outside; second, it is, much like James’s naturally involves him creating his own home-
life, a fiction, painstakingly – lovingly, even made Brigsby movie, with help from Aubrey’s
– crafted each week by Ted for James alone, as friends, from Greg Kinnear’s friendly police
Produced by Entertainment Adam Capriolo
Dede Gardner production Chris Kanew are the interlocutors on the Brigsby Bear forum detective (and actor manqué), and eventually
Jeremy Kleiner A film by Mike White Felicia Shulman with whom James chats daily. All this is designed from his own family. The DIY sci-fi epic that
David Bernad Executive Cherie Parkinson
Sidney Kimmel Producers to keep James engaged and distracted from – if results is a way for James to bring a seemingly
Written by Brad Pitt In Colour incurious about – the fact that Ted and April never-ending chapter in his life to a close and to
Mike White Carla Hacken [2.35:1]
Director of John Penotti
are not in fact his parents but his long-term forge new connections and a new universe for
Photography Mark Kamine Distributor abductors, and that everything in his hermetic himself – and it also reflects the kind of home
Xavier Grobet Sarah Esberg Vertigo Films
Editor Bruce Toll
little universe is a big lie. One FBI raid later, movies that Mooney, Costello and first-time
Heather Persons though, and our naive hero is reintroduced to his feature director Dave McCary (all Saturday Night
Production parents Greg (Matt Walsh) and Louise (Michaela Live veterans) have been making together since
Designer Cast
Richard Hoover Ben Stiller Watkins), his teen sister Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins) their teens. This view of filmmaking as both
Music Brad Sloan and the real world of contemporary America. communal experience and means to creative
Mark Mothersbaugh Austin Abrams
Soundman Troy Sloan If the set-up here is familiar from the captive self-expression evokes the Capra-esque spirit
Simon Poudrette Jenna Fischer horrors of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), of Be Kind Rewind (2008), transforming James’s
Costume Designer Melanie Sloan
Alex Bovaird Luke Wilson
Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Dogtooth (2009), Miss peculiar adventures into something genuinely
Jason Hatfield Violence (2013) and Room (2015), the screenplay affectionate and sweetly humane. Oddball James
©Amazon Studios Michael Sheen
LLC and Kimmel Craig Fisher
by Mooney and Kevin Costello is so good-natured may stand out, but by emerging, bleary-eyed,
Distribution, LLC Jemaine Clement and generous towards all its characters that into an age where nerdishness and nostalgia rule,
Production Billy Wearslter even James’s captors are depicted as lovably he also fits right in – and is hard not to love.
Companies Shazi Raja
Amazon Studios Ananya
and Sidney Kimmel Luisa Lee Credits and Synopsis
Entertainment Maya
present a Mike White
Sidney Kimmel Nick Pascale
Entertainment Xavier Grobet Produced by 3311 Productions and Merideth US, present day. James lives in a desert bunker with
and Plan B Xavier Andy Samberg YL Pictures present in Jorge Lendeborg his father Ted and mother April, and obsessively
Jorma Taccone association with The Spencer
Akiva Schaffer Lonely Island and LM Ryan Simpkins watches episodes of children’s sci-fi adventure
Sacramento, present day. Brad Sloan is 47, running Billy Rosenberg Executive Producers Aubrey Pope ‘Brigsby Bear’, delivered weekly on VHS. FBI agents
a small non-profit organisation, living with wife Phil Lord Phil Hoelting Chance Crimin raid the house and arrest Ted and April, who are not
Melanie and teenage son Troy, and wrestling with Christopher Miller Lian Hua Logan in fact James’s parents, but the couple who abducted
feelings of disappointment and inadequacy. He Will Allegra P. Jennifer Dana
him as a baby. Ted made ‘Brigsby Bear’ to entertain,
Mark Roberts Ross Jacobson In Colour
constantly compares himself to his former college Al Di educate and brainwash James, recruiting local
friends, now all financially successful and publicly Screenplay Distributor waitress Whitney to play characters in the show.
admired, and projects idealised fantasies on to Kevin Costello Cast Sony Pictures Helped by Detective Vogel and psychiatrist Emily,
them. He accompanies Troy, a musical prodigy, to Kyle Mooney Kyle Mooney Releasing UK James moves in with his real parents, Greg and Louise,
visit prospective New England colleges. Troy misses Story James Pope
Kyle Mooney Jane Adams and teen sister Aubrey. He meets Aubrey’s friend
his interview date at Harvard University. One of Director of April Mitchum Spencer at a party, and the two agree to make a film
Brad’s old friends, Craig Fisher, is now a famous Photography Claire Danes that will complete Brigsby’s adventures. Soon they are
political pundit and part-time Harvard lecturer; Christian Sprenger Dr Emily Larson joined by Aubrey’s other friends Merideth and Logan,
desperate to help Troy, Brad calls Craig, who Editor Mark Hamill
Jacob Craycroft
and even Aubrey begins to warm to James – but when
Ted Mitchum
manages to arrange another interview for the boy. Production Designer Greg Kinnear an exploding prop attracts police attention, James’s
Brad and Troy have dinner with Troy’s friends, Brandon Tonner- Detective Vogel parents grow concerned that the Brigsby film is not
including fellow musician Ananya. Later, while Connolly Andy Samberg helping him adjust to his new life. James steals their
Troy sleeps, Brad meets Ananya at a local bar and Music Eric car and heads out to the bunker, meeting Whitney
confesses his jaded idealism and unhappiness; David Wingo Matt Walsh
Sound Mixer Greg Pope on the way back. He is arrested and sent to a mental
she tells him that he’s exaggerating his problems. Jonathon Earl Stein Michaela Watkins institution. Spencer shows Greg and Louise footage
Troy’s interview seems to go well. Brad meets Craig Costume Designer Louise Pope that convinces them of James’s pleasure in making
for dinner, and gets a more realistic picture of Sarah Mae Burton Kate Lyn Sheil the film. Helped by inmate Eric, James escapes the
his friends’ lives; frustrated at Craig’s arrogance, Whitney, ‘Arielle
©Kablamo: Tokyo Smiles’/’Nina Smiles’
institution; returning home, he finds his family and
however, he walks out. He joins Troy at a classical Drift, LLC Beck Bennett friends transforming the garage into a film set for
concert where Troy’s friends are performing, Production Deputy Bander him. James asks Ted (in prison) to record Brigsby’s
and seems to find some sense of peace. Companies Alexa Demie voice for the film. The premiere is a success.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 55

 Coco The Commuter
USA 2017 France/USA/United Kingdom 2018
Director: Lee Unkrich Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Certificate 15 104m 26s

Reviewed by Violet Lucca musician husband, and her skills – and hatred Reviewed by Matthew Taylor
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist of music – have been passed down through the A slick, riveting, agreeably ludicrous thriller
Requiring audiences to do more emotional generations. But Miguel secretly plays guitar played out in near real time on New York’s scenic
REVIEWS

work than they would for four live-action Oscar- and idolises Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Hudson Metro-North line, The Commuter is a
bait films combined, Pixar’s Coco is a beautiful Bratt), a Pedro Infante-like star who was once fourth pulpy collaboration for Catalan director
testament to the power (and pains) of family. Mexico’s most famous musician – and who, it Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson,
It also deconstructs myths around fame and so happens, came from Miguel’s hometown. following the identity-theft shenanigans of
celebrates Mexican culture, from street food to an On the Day of the Dead, Miguel attempts to Unknown (2011), the aerial potboiler Non-Stop
array of musical genres on the soundtrack. Given play in a talent contest rather than honour his (2014) and the underworld odyssey Run All Night
that most Hollywood films and TV shows set in ancestors, and his grandmother responds by (2015), in which Neeson played, respectively, a top
Mexico are about drug dealers or louche spring- angrily smashing his guitar. But when Miguel biochemist, a US air marshal and a retired Mob
break romps, Coco’s tender and accurate depiction spots what he thinks is de la Cruz’s guitar in an enforcer. Here, his titular office drone – albeit one
of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos is long overdue. old photograph of Imelda, he decides that his hero with a distant past life as a detective – is every
These achievements are set against the must also have been his great-great-grandfather. inch the Hitchcockian everyman snared in a
sumptuous and complex background of the Miguel runs to de la Cruz’s crypt and takes the nebulous scheme. As with Non-Stop and his spry
Dia de Muertos – the Day of the Dead. Although guitar that’s lying there – only to be transported survival yarn The Shallows (2016), Collet-Serra
the festival is celebrated in many countries to the land of the dead, a bustling city that presents a character up against the clock in a
throughout Central and South America, it’s echoes the incredible architecture of Mexico constrained space, and he exploits the ins and
Mexico’s version – a mix of Spanish and Aztec City. Stuck between life and death, the only outs of his single location with resourceful glee.
traditions, incorporating the iconography of way Miguel can return to the land of the living In a typically offhand technical flourish,
artists such as José Posada – that is the best known is with the blessing of his deceased relatives. Collet-Serra chops up the regimented morning
worldwide: families gather to honour their However, they refuse to pander to his ambitions, routine of Neeson’s Michael MacCauley into
ancestors by putting their favourite foods on an and make it a condition of the blessing that he a subliminally cut multitude of near-identical
altar and cleaning and decorating their graves. will never play music again. So instead, Miguel moments from different days, the only giveaway
Coco blends these traditions with a bit of Pixar goes off with Héctor (Gael García Bernal), who being changes of clothing and weather. Sixty,
magic, as the borders between the realms of the is on the verge of being totally forgotten and and happily married to a barely seen Elizabeth
living and the dead become mutable and a young therefore banished to the ‘final death’. Héctor, McGovern, Michael has been flogging life
boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) finds also a musician, claims to know de la Cruz, insurance in the city since leaving the force ten
himself trapped in the afterlife. Frida Kahlo, the and promises to help Miguel provided the boy years prior. Yet the family’s finances are strained,
masked luchador El Santo and Edward James agrees to take his photograph back to the land and when he’s abruptly laid off, Michael can’t
Olmos all make cameo appearances; perhaps of the living, which will allow him to cross bear to tell his wife. He eventually heads home
such details won’t be exciting to those whose over and see his daughter one last time. to the boondocks on the usual train, recognising
familiarity with Mexican culture begins and Although Héctor and Miguel’s journey to most of the faces on it. One, though, is unfamiliar.
ends with Chipotle, but no d la Cruz leads them to discover the
find de Joanna (Vera Farmiga), a woman claiming to be
manches, s they’re great. ungl
unglamorous side of fame, Coco gives space to a behavioural specialist, presents Michael with
Similar care is taken thes complex emotional moments without
these an unusual offer: identify a specific passenger
with Miguel. He comes g
ever getting too dreary. (The expressionist on the train and receive a whopping reward.
from a family of shoemakers: designs – alternately glowing and colourful Bewildered, but with a pressing incentive to
his great-great-grandmother tatt
and tattered and dark – also help to modulate go after the supposed prize, Michael accepts
Imelda learned the be
these beats.) Its victorious denouement offers and the lady vanishes. She returns as a less
trade after being everyon a different way to think about what it
everyone cordial voice on the phone, this time issuing
deserted by her means to live on, and how that starts by dire instructions for her charge to follow.
treating those dearest to us well. Too It’s a fateful transaction in transit, placing
The quick and the dea
dead
ad bad films for adults aren’t this smart. The Commuter firmly in the realm of Hitchcock
and Highsmith, though there are also echoes
Credits and Synopsis of David Fincher’s The Game (1997) in the
sudden incursion of chance and chaos into
Co-directed by Film Editors Animators Gael García Bernal clerk, Department Dyana Ortelli a well-ordered existence and in the seeming
Adrian Molina Steve Bloom Gini Cruz Santos Héctor of Family Reunions Tía Victoria ability of a shadowy, omniscient organisation
Produced by Lee Unkrich Michael Venturini Benjamin Bratt Lombardo Boyar Luis Valdez
Darla K. Anderson Production Designer Ernesto de la Cruz plaza mariachi/ Tío Berto
to manipulate events at will. Like Jonathan
Original Screenplay Harley Jessup ©Disney Enterprises, Alanna Ubach Gustavo John Ratzenberger Trevanny, the hapless player of Highsmith’s
Adrian Molina Original Songs by Inc./Pixar Mamá Imelda, great- Ana Ofelia Murguía Juan Ortodoncia Ripley’s Game, the cash-strapped Michael has
Matthew Aldrich Kristen Anderson- Production great-grandmother Mamá Coco,
Original Story Lopez Companies Renée Victor great-grandmother Dolby Atmos apparently been selected as the perfect patsy to
Lee Unkrich Robert Lopez Disney presents Abuelita, Natalia Cordova- In Colour carry out some dirty work. However, he’s initially
Jason Katz Germaine Franco a Pixar Animation grandmother Buckley [2.35:1]
Matthew Aldrich Adrian Molina Studios film Jaime Camil Frida Kahlo unprepared for how ruthless his watchers can
Adrian Molina Original Score Executive Producer Papá Selene Luna Some screenings be – a covert attempt to alert the authorities
Directors of Composed by/ John Lasseter Alfonso Arau Tía Rosita presented in 3D
Photography Produced by Papá Julio, great- Edward James results in a fellow commuter being literally
Camera: Michael Giacchino grandfather Olmos Distributor thrown under the bus. Further dissent only
Matt Aspbury Sound Designer Voice Cast Herbert Siguenza Chicharrón Buena Vista
encourages the forces toying with Michael to turn
Lighting: Chris Boyes Anthony Gonzalez Tío Oscar/Tío Felipe Sofía Espinosa International (UK)
Danielle Feinberg Supervising Miguel Gabriel Iglesias Mamá the screw and test his mettle. At one point, the
presence of an inconvenient corpse necessitates
Mexico, present day. On the Day of the Dead, 12-year-old la Cruz, whom Miguel believes to be his great-great-
Miguel Rivera wants to enter a talent show instead of grandfather (Coco’s father). However, when they find
some perilous contortions by Michael to
accompanying his family to honour his ancestors. His de la Cruz, Miguel learns that he stole Héctor’s songs evade capture – Collet-Serra has devilish fun
great-grandmother Coco angrily smashes his guitar. and poisoned him. De la Cruz attempts to silence placing Neeson in a succession of tortuously
Attempting to steal singing star Ernesto de la Cruz’s both of them, but Miguel’s deceased family comes to tight spots underneath the moving train.
guitar from his crypt, Miguel is transported to the land the rescue. Miguel discovers that Héctor is his real Like the hitmen in Richard Fleischer’s seminal
of the dead. Needing the blessing of his dead relatives great-great-grandfather. Returned to the land of the railroad thriller The Narrow Margin (1952),
to return to the land of the living, Miguel enlists the living, Miguel sings Héctor’s song ‘Remember Me’ to
help of Héctor, who is on the verge of being forgotten Coco. On the next Day of the Dead, Coco too has passed Michael hasn’t a clue what the person he’s
and banished to the ‘final death’. They seek out de away, but the whole Rivera family is together again. hunting looks like. He’s forced to play sleuth
through the carriages, sizing up the regulars – a

56 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

 Darkest Hour
Director: Joe Wright
Certificate PG 125m 21m

Reviewed by Philip Kemp

Winston, it seems, is in fashion. Over the past
year or so we’ve seen him portrayed by Brian Cox

REVIEWS
(Churchill), John Lithgow (The Crown), Michael
Gambon (Churchill’s Secret) and Robert Hardy
(Churchill: 100 Days That Saved Britain), besides
featuring as an offscreen presence in Dunkirk, A
United Kingdom and Viceroy’s House. Now it’s Gary
Oldman’s turn to take on those jowly features and
that distinctive, orotund voice, and his is perhaps
the most convincing rendition we’ve had yet.
The action of Joe Wright’s film is confined to
the crucial three weeks in May 1940 following
Neville Chamberlain’s resignation as prime
minister. We kick off with the ailing premier
being comprehensively demolished in the
House of Commons by Clement Attlee, while
one MP murmurs to his neighbour his surprise
that Churchill isn’t present. “He’s ensuring
his fingers aren’t on the murder weapon,”
comes the whispered reply. The line is typical
Dangers on a train: Vera Farmiga and Liam Neeson of Anthony McCarten’s script, which often
undercuts the risk of excess reverence with
characterful supporting cast including Florence frequently lending more than a touch of the sardonic wit. A similar function is discharged
Pugh, Andy Nyman and Jonathan Banks – while absurd to the close-quartered fight sequences – by Winston’s wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott
trying to avoid appearing suspicious himself. such as a bruising encounter with an assailant Thomas, faultless as ever), responding to one of
It’s an often calamitous process of trial by error, in the vestibule that eludes the attention of his indignant outbursts by telling him “You’re
with Michael pressed into a paranoiac state, headphone-clad passengers, or Neeson swinging insufferable!” and fondly addressing him as “Pig”.
seeing suspect behaviour in ultimately banal around a Stratocaster as a makeshift weapon. Churchill’s weaker points aren’t wholly glossed
asides. In one testy exchange with an obnoxious It’s arguable that Michael may have been over, either. The WWI Gallipoli disaster gets
broker, the script’s vague undercurrent of more intriguing minus his police background name-checked more than once. And at one of
anger at the 1 per cent and corporate amorality – more of an unwitting Roger O. Thornhill the uncomfortable weekly get-togethers with
becomes a momentary wave. Having had (North by Northwest) type, perhaps. Yet it’s also George VI – scheduled, at the PM’s suggestion,
his humble business attire sneered at by the overwhelmingly clear that the narrative’s job at lunchtime – the king (a shrewdly gauged
fat cat, Michael’s response, delivered with is to shake the character out of his ennui and performance from Ben Mendelsohn, never
relish by Neeson, will no doubt elicit a few return him to his true calling: being a detective. overplaying the stammer) expresses surprise at
audience cheers: “On behalf of the American If this arc is predictable, it’s never less than Churchill’s formidable alcohol intake and asks
middle classes, fuck you Goldman Sachs.” entertaining, with the film’s hurtling pace how he manages it. “Practice,” comes the reply.
As the embattled executive, Neeson effortlessly sustained through to a pyrotechnic finale. All this, though mildly exaggerated for comic
carries the movie, which dutifully caters for the There may be little of genuine originality here, effect, falls well within the bounds of plausibility.
star’s latter-day action chops. His kickass persona but in its delirious, goofy momentum, The But it’s when Churchill is at his most beleaguered
here is more appealing than the dour avenger Commuter reaffirms Collet-Serra as an expert – the Low Countries are overrun, the French
reprised in the Taken saga, with Collet-Serra practitioner of modestly budgeted hokum. army is collapsing, some 400,000 Allied troops
are boxed in at Dunkirk, and he’s isolated in
Credits and Synopsis the war cabinet, with Chamberlain and Halifax
pressing him to seek peace terms with Germany
– that Darkest Hour spirals off into the further
Produced by Richard Bridgland a The Picture Ron Halperin Vince Sam Neill
Andrew Rona Music Composed Company production Didier Lupfer Andy Nyman Captain Hawthorne realms of fantasy. First he receives a nocturnal
Alex Heineman and Orchestrated by in association with Tony visit from the king, unheralded and seemingly
Screenplay Roque Baños Ombra Films Clara Lago In Colour
Byron Willinger Production A Jaume Collet- Cast Eva unaccompanied, who in the space of a week or
Philip de Blasi Sound Mixer Serra film Liam Neeson Roland Møller Distributor so has inexplicably swung round to the PM’s
Ryan Engle Jim Greenhorn In co-production with Michael MacCauley Jackson Studiocanal Limited
Story Costume Designer TF1 Films Production Vera Farmiga Florence Pugh
side and now tells him to consult ‘the people’.
Byron Willinger Jill Taylor With the participation Joanna Gwen So Churchill does just that – boarding an
Philip de Blasi Stunt Co-ordinator of Canal+, Ciné+, Patrick Wilson Dean-Charles
Director of Mark Vanselow TF1 and Amazon Alex Murphy Chapman
Underground train, complete with cigar,
Photography Prime Instant Video Jonathan Banks Danny MacCauley
Paul Cameron ©StudioCanal S.A.S. Executive Producers Walt Ella-Rae Smith
Editor Production Michael Dreyer Killian Scott Sofia
Nicolas de Toth Companies Juan Sola Dylan Elizabeth McGovern
Production Designer Studiocanal presents Jaume Collet-Serra Shazad Latif Karen MacCauley

New York, present day. Michael MacCauley, an ex-
detective now working as an insurance salesman, is
laid off by his company. Travelling home on his regular
commuter train, he is approached by a mysterious
woman, Joanna, who offers him $100,000 if he can
correctly identify a passenger before the last stop.
Michael initially accepts, but balks when he’s then
ordered to kill the passenger in exchange for his family’s
safety. Another commuter is murdered when Michael
attempts to alert the police. Michael tussles with an
undercover FBI agent, whom he mistakes for the target.
The agent is subsequently found dead; suspected of
being the killer, Michael hides beneath the train to
evade police. He calls his former police partner Murphy,
who suggests that the passenger may be a witness in
a murder case. After dispatching an assassin, Michael
identifies the witness, Sofia, who is carrying data
implicating police officers and Joanna’s organisation.
When Michael refuses to kill Sofia, Joanna orchestrates
the derailment of the train. Michael saves himself and
the remaining passengers by decoupling their carriage.
Murphy, revealed to be in league with Joanna, tries to kill
Sofia but is shot while fighting Michael. Sofia is safely
delivered to the FBI, and Michael reunites with his family.
Some months later. Having rejoined the police,
Michael apprehends Joanna in Chicago.
The lion in Winston: Gary Oldman

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 57

 Downsizing
USA 2017
Director: Alexander Payne
Certificate 15 135m 24s

and asking a compartment of assorted

plebs if he should capitulate to Hitler. They,
of course, all staunchly chorus “Never!” And just
REVIEWS

to cement the premier’s populist credentials,

when he starts quoting Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ –
“To every man upon this earth / Death cometh
soon or late” – the verse is rounded off for him by
a young black man. (To allow for all this to play
out, the one-stop Tube journey from St James’s
Park to Westminster takes about ten minutes.)
Wright’s film never wholly recovers from this
height of absurdity, despite some spirited acting;
Ronald Pickup as a touchingly frail Chamberlain
(who was to die of cancer six months later) and
Stephen Dillane as a vampiric Halifax both make
their mark, and Oldman’s delivery of the final
‘Fight on the beaches’ speech exhibits fine afflatus.
But Winnie on the District Line? Yeah, right.

Credits and Synopsis

Produced by presents in Sir Anthony Eden

Tim Bevan association with Ronald Pickup
Eric Fellner Perfect World Neville Chamberlain The incredible shrinking man: Matt Damon, Jason Sudeikis
Lisa Bruce Pictures a Working David Schofield
Anthony McCarten Title production Clement Attlee
Douglas Urbanski A Joe Wright film Reviewed by Henry K. Miller (2013) to the broad caricatural satire of his first,
Written by
Anthony McCarten
Executive
Producers
Dolby Digital
In Colour
Spoiler alert: this review Citizen Ruth (1996), and beyond. What’s new is,
Director of James Biddle [1.85:1] See Feature reveals a plot twist appropriately, the sense of scale – the giant vista
Photography Lucas Webb on page 32 The audacity of Alexander of a perfect, sterile American city – and of sweep,
Bruno Delbonnel Liza Chasin Distributor
Editor Universal Pictures Payne’s new film lies in its with time-shifts of years coming unexpectedly.
Valerio Bonelli International willingness to ditch its high- One such leap elides the decade between
Production Cast UK & Eire
Designer Gary Oldman concept premise and move on – and then do downsizing’s invention by a team of Norwegian
Sarah Greenwood Winston Churchill it again. As might be inferred from the title, scientists, for whom it is earnestly intended
Music Kristin Scott
Dario Marianelli Thomas Downsizing takes place in a world where people as a means to combat overpopulation,
Production Clementine choose to be shrunk for reasons of economy, overconsumption and waste, to its commercial
Sound Mixer Churchill, ‘Clemmie’
John Casali Lily James
more or less, but Payne is wise enough not exploitation in the US a decade or so later,
Costume Designer Elizabeth Layton to get caught up in the thickets of practical where it has become a way to get rich, simply by
Jacqueline Durran Stephen Dillane
Viscount Halifax
what-ifs and what-abouts, and his film has the reducing overheads. Such is the appeal to Paul
Production Ben Mendelsohn rare quality of purposeful unpredictability. and Audrey Safranek (Matt Damon and Kristen
Companies King George VI Tonally, its range extends from the Midwestern Wiig), Nebraskans who choose to get small out
Focus Features Samuel West
melancholy of his most recent film Nebraska of frustration: the same time-shift reveals Paul
London, May 1940. In the House of Commons,
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain comes under Credits and Synopsis
blistering attack from Clement Attlee, leader of
the opposition, for the way he is conducting the
war. Afterwards, Chamberlain – who is ill with Produced by Music Composed Production Cast Udo Kier Dolby Digital
cancer – tells his cabinet that he must resign. The Mark Johnson and Conducted by Companies Matt Damon Konrad In Colour
Alexander Payne Rolfe Kent Paramount Pictures Paul Safranek Søren Pilmark [2.35:1]
post is offered to Viscount Halifax, the foreign Jim Taylor Sound Mixer presents an Ad Dr Andreas Jacobsen
Christoph Waltz
minister, who turns it down, saying the only leader Written by Greg Chapman Hominem/Gran Dusan Mirkovic Jason Sudeikis Distributor
the opposition will accept is the maverick Winston Alexander Payne Costume Designer Via production Hong Chau Dave Johnson Paramount
Churchill. At his home, Chartwell, Churchill expresses Jim Taylor Wendy Chuck Executive Producers Ngoc Lan Tran Maribeth Monroe Pictures UK
Director of Visual Effects Megan Ellison Kristen Wiig Carol Johnson
his doubts; his wife Clementine strengthens his
Photography Industrial Light Jim Burke Audrey Safranek Jayne Houdyshell
resolve. His newly appointed young secretary, Phedon Papamichael & Magic Diana Pokorny Paul’s mother
Rolf Lassgård
Elizabeth Layton, shocked by his verbal brutality Edited by Framestore Film Extracts Dr Jorgen Asbjørnsen Phil Reeves
towards her, is about to resign, but stays on when Kevin Tent Sube y baja/Up Ingjerd Egeberg Larry, Audrey’s dad
he apologises. Churchill has an awkward meeting Production Designer ©Paramount Pictures and Down (1959) Anne-Helene James Van Der Beek
Stefania Cella Corporation Asbjørnsen anesthesiologist
with King George VI, who disapproves of him.
Belgium and the Netherlands fall to German
forces, the French army is in retreat and the Norwegian scientists invent a process to shrink shrunk as punishment, came to the US as a refugee
British army is surrounded at Dunkirk. In cabinet, humans to a tiny fraction of their normal size, as and now lives in a shantytown on the margins of
Chamberlain and Halifax urge Churchill to seek peace a means of cutting consumption and waste. Leisureland. Paul initially uses his medical training
terms with Germany; the Italian government offers to Ten years later, Nebraskan couple Paul and Audrey to help her, but gets drawn more closely into her
mediate. Churchill phones President Roosevelt to beg Safranek decide to join one of the numerous world, helping her locate and distribute thrown-away
for US help, but to no avail. Isolated and desperate, he ‘communities of the small’ when they realise that food for her neighbours; a relationship develops.
authorises Halifax to explore what terms might be on their savings will give them a high standard of life Paul, Ngoc Lan, Dusan and Dusan’s accomplice
offer from Germany. The king, who has come round there, the cost of necessities being correspondingly Konrad all travel to the original downsized
to Churchill’s side, tells him to seek the people’s low. However, Audrey abandons the plan at the community in Norway, whereupon they learn
view. Churchill boards a Tube train; all the passengers last moment, leaving Paul shrunken and alone in that a massive methane emission from the Arctic
urge him to defy Hitler and fight on. Heartened, Leisureland, a downsized community in New Mexico. spells the end for humanity in a few hundred
Churchill sends the ‘little boats’ to rescue the troops Paul attends a party thrown by his neighbour years’ time. Though the Norwegians have built an
from Dunkirk and rallies the Tories behind him. The Dusan, a Serbian smuggler, who pours scorn on underground shelter for this eventuality, with the
opposition agrees to join a wartime coalition. In the the narrow horizons of their fellow small people. aim of preserving the species, Ngoc Lan, Dusan
House of Commons, Churchill proclaims: “We shall Afterwards Paul encounters Ngoc Lan Tran, a and Konrad reject the idea; after realising the
fight on the beaches… we shall never surrender!” one-legged Vietnamese woman who was forcibly depth of his feelings for Ngoc Lan, so does Paul.

58 | Sight&Sound | February 2018


to be stuck in a rut, still living in his childhood
home after his mother’s death. These scenes work
because Payne plays down the fantasy element
in favour of social observation – the shrinking
procedure itself is sold like Tupperware used to
be, at specially hosted parties, and the Safraneks’
problems are painfully contemporary. But the
film jumps the tracks, for the better, when Audrey
– stop reading if you haven’t seen it – welshes on
the deal, backing out while Paul, oblivious, goes
ahead, and she leaves, never to be seen again.
With Audrey’s abrupt departure, what looked
set to be a comedy involving the differences
between the tiny and the full-scale becomes
something quite different. The downsized live in
dedicated communities, just like the outside world
but in miniature, under protective domes; what
is sold as a new life turns out to be the old one of
aimless consumption, status anxiety and petty
gripes, where the hot water in the McMansion
comes out scalding and the neighbour makes a
racket. It is when Paul encounters said neighbour,
louche Serbian smuggler Dusan (Christoph Waltz),
in a brilliantly chaotic party scene, that things
become really interesting. Just as the audience is
getting the point – that the downsized, given the
opportunity to start society from scratch, have
merely recreated an American purgatory, class
and ethnic divisions included – Payne blithely has
Dusan spell it out, allowing the film to turn again.
Paul comes to find fulfilment in good work,
when he helps Dusan’s cleaner Ngoc Lan Tran
(Hong Chau) with her limp. She is a one-legged
Vietnamese refugee who was downsized as
punishment, and what might read on the page
like self-serving liberal fantasy is anything but
on the screen. Ngoc Lan is a good Christian; from
her perspective, which the film largely adopts,
Paul is doing nothing more than his duty by
helping her and the mostly Latino denizens of
the shantytown where she has been made to
live. Ngoc Lan is a caricature like everyone else.
She speaks in broken English, and Downsizing
has come under attack for this; but apart from
anything else, Hong Chau’s performance,
which she herself has righteously defended, is
among the strongest things in the film, making
the pliable, endlessly affable Paul her foil.
The film’s crux comes when it transpires
that the valiant effort to downsize has been for
nought, and humanity is doomed to extinction
all the same. The cynic Dusan (with his partner-
in-crime Konrad, a tremendous cameo by Udo
Kier) and the Christian Ngoc Lan decide to stay
on the earth’s surface and make the best of it,
while Paul is tempted to join the inhabitants
of the original Norwegian ‘community of the
small’ in an underground shelter where they
and their descendants will sit out the next few
millennia, preserving the species. (The big
decision is, characteristically, accompanied by a
perfectly observed wheeled-suitcase joke.) While
Downsizing is not not about the end of human
life on earth, it confronts the prospect with
minimal sentiment, and uses it to ask questions
about what the good life might consist of, here
and now. Its critique of overconsumption is
aesthetic, or philosophical, but not especially
‘green’; though it abhors greed and selfishness,
it is unashamedly individualistic.
Eric Clapton Life in 12 Bars
United Kingdom/USA 2017
Director: Lili Fini Zanuck
REVIEWS
Slowhand Clap: Eric Clapton
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston appears to be holding very little back. We learn,
Someone was eventually going to make a bio- for example, about the trauma of his rejection by
doc about Eric Clapton, though few might have his mother, who, pregnant at 16 by a Canadian
predicted that it would be the producer of Driving airman, left Eric in Surrey with his grandma and
Miss Daisy (1989), whose only previous feature headed off with a new lover. There’s the pain
directorial credit was the drug-themed policier of his infatuation with George Harrison’s wife
Rush back in 1991. It seems that Lili Fini Zanuck Pattie Boyd, which we see laid out in the letter
caught Eric Clapton at a pivotal moment when he wrote to try to win her heart. And Zanuck
she chose him to record the soundtrack for that has also retrieved some startlingly unflattering
movie, since the tragic death of his four-year-old archive footage of Clapton drunk, disorderly,
son Conor in a fall from the window of a New coked-up and abusive to his audiences during
York apartment block had left him a changed, the succeeding years of darkness and indulgence.
cleaned-up man after years of self-destructive With the truly awful demise of young Conor
addictions. It also prompted a creative renaissance adding another painful chapter, there’s certainly
in the Grammy-winning ballad ‘Tears in Heaven’, a sense that, while Clapton’s take on the blues
which featured on the Rush soundtrack. doesn’t exactly come from the same cultural
Now Fini Zanuck has made what is an wellspring of suffering and injustice as, say,
undeniably intimate and confessional portrait that of B.B. King or Muddy Waters, his music is
of the musician. In human terms, Clapton evidently a genuine response to a life littered with
emotional carnage. It is rather affecting, in the
Credits and Synopsis film’s final stages, to see him arriving at a place
of personal contentment and self-knowledge in
his seventies. But by then the focus on Clapton
Produced by Composed by Company/Passion
Lili Fini Zanuck Gustavo Santaolalla Pictures production the performer has become a secondary concern,
Scooter Weintraub Sound Recordists A Lili Fini Zanuck film this being in essence one of those docs fascinated
Larry Yellen Russell Edwards Executive Producer
John Battsek Stephen Haywood Vinnie Malhotra by the evidently dramatic life of someone who
Written by David Lascelles also happens to be an extraordinary musician.
Scooter Weintraub Theresa Radka In Colour
Larry Yellen [1.85:1]
To some, this will seem to be giving short
Director of ©Bushranch shrift to what brought Clapton to public
Photography Films Ltd Distributor
Will Pugh Production Altitude Film
attention in the first place – though, to be
Editors Companies Entertainment fair, Fini Zanuck does a decent enough job of
Chris King Showtime chronicling Clapton’s 1960s output, through
Paul Monaghan Documentary Films
Original Score presents a Zanuck The Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream and Blind
Faith up to the high watermark of the 1970
A biographical documentary charting the fortunes
of English blues musician Eric Clapton, drawing
album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
on interviews and his own private archive. Martin Scorsese made a similar trajectory work
Born in Surrey in 1945, Clapton was raised by for him in 2011, with his three-and-a-half-hour
his grandmother, believing her to be his mother. George Harrison doc, yet here Fini Zanuck
His obsession with black American blues records takes the brave but problematic decision to
led him to perfect his own guitar playing. He rose dispense with the usual talking heads, sticking
to musical prominence during the 1960s, playing
with The Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers instead to voiceovers from an array of captioned
and blues-rock trio Cream, but fame did not bring contributors, including Clapton himself. Yes, this
fulfilment. An infatuation with George Harrison’s wife smooths out what would otherwise be frequent
Pattie Boyd increasingly dominated his emotional transitions from hairy youth to gnarly old age,
life, inspiring the landmark 1970 album ‘Layla and but with material of such raw emotion it also
Assorted Other Love Songs’. Rejection by Boyd
plunged Clapton into years of self-destructive
somehow renders proceedings that bit more
addiction. However, when his four-year-old son academic – we never see the light in Clapton’s
Conor died in 1991 after falling from the window of eyes, or read Boyd’s face, when they’re telling
a New York apartment block, the tragedy prompted us all these painful things. For a documentary
Clapton to give up drugs and alcohol. In recent trading on its confessional quality, this surely
years he has found contentment with wife Melia mutes the overall impact. Ultimately, for all its
and their daughters, and has launched a charitable
foundation to help sufferers of substance addiction. sense of close communion with its subject, Fini
Zanuck’s film falls between several stools.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 59
 Ferdinand The Final Year
USA 2017 USA/United Kingdom 2017
Director: Carlos Saldanha Director: Greg Barker
Certificate U 106m 12s

Reviewed by Andrew Osmond Reviewed by Philip Kemp

The Story of Ferdinand was a picture book This is a depressing film. Not because it’s badly
published in America in 1936, written by Munro made: on the contrary, director Greg Barker
REVIEWS

Leaf, with illustrations by Robert Lawson. (Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden)
Amusing and pleasing, it’s the tale of a gentle bull, and his team take what could so easily have
Ferdinand, who loves flowers and sits blissfully been a stiff, dry study, full of posed occasions and
among them. When he’s stung by a bee and formal speeches to camera, and give us a warm,
stampedes, humans mistake him for a savage intimate picture of people working in the top
beast and send him to the bullring, but, in the echelons of the US government and – the cliché
book’s words, he “wouldn’t fight and be fierce no seems unavoidable – trying to make a difference.
matter what they did”. Finally the humans give What’s depressing is our knowledge of what is
up, returning Ferdinand to his happy home. about to follow them and demolish the results
Leaf wrote the story in 40 minutes; it’s a few of their painstaking efforts like an ill-tempered
hundred words long, complemented by Lawson’s child kicking over a stack of wooden bricks.
pictures. It became a worldwide hit. In 1938 Farmed and dangerous: Ferdinand Barker’s team were evidently given
Disney made a very faithful seven-minute cartoon unprecedentedly close access to their subjects
version (Ferdinand the Bull), which won an Oscar. with plasticine poultry in 2000’s Chicken Run. and they make the most of it, not hesitating
Now Ferdinand has been desecrated in a terribly At worst, the film feels less like Ferdinand to present them as less than infallible, even
misconceived feature-length computer cartoon than Barnyard, a cheap Nickelodeon cartoon occasionally comic individuals. We see secretary
by Blue Sky Studios, which successfully adapted from 2006 (which was memorable for having of state John Kerry, about to depart for the White
Charles M. Schulz to CGI in The Peanuts Movie ‘male’ cows with udders). The characters are House, suddenly remembering he’s forgotten
in 2015, but works none of that magic here. weak, with a particularly bad voice/design his phone and having to dash back for it; UN
Made by Blue Sky veteran Carlos Saldanha, mismatch for comedian Kate McKinnon, who ambassador Samantha Power negotiating
who co-directed Ice Age (2002) and directed Rio just sounds wrong as a bucktoothed cartoon with her six-year-old over whether she’s going
(2011), Ferdinand turns a short, elegant story into a goat. The best characters are the three Germanic to buy him a doughnut; security adviser Ben
rambling, ungainly one, adding a crowd of surplus hectoring horses, who could have strayed in from Rhodes making a farcically clumsy attempt to
characters who can’t lift a hoof to Ferdinand, DreamWorks’ Madagascar films. There’s also climb into the back seat of a limo carrying a
and dollops of crass comedy and redundant a funny scene where Ferdinand finds himself, shoulder bag. There are emotional moments
narrative. The first act has the calf Ferdinand inevitably, in a china shop and desperately too: Barack Obama embracing an 85-year-old
fleeing a farm after his dad fails to return from contorts himself so as not to break anything – a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb, Power giving
the bullring (this is a film where talking animals highlight amid the witless chases and crashes. way to tears as she addresses an audience of
know all about abattoirs but still think bulls Though tedious, Ferdinand is likely to be newly accredited US citizens (including her
stand a fighting chance against matadors). praised by some pundits for its timely message own live-in nanny), explaining that she’s an
Ferdinand ends up in a second, kinder farm – which is doubly impressive given that the film immigrant too. She was born in Ireland, she tells
and grows up to huge size with a surrogate started development six years ago. Adults have them, arriving in America at the age of nine.
family (cute girl, grumpy dog). Then there’s the often found political messages in the original The running theme of what these people are
accident with the bee from the book, at which Ferdinand, most obviously a pacifist one. It’s trying to achieve is more than once expressed by
point he’s sent back to the first farm. After that hard not to see the new cartoon as an attack on Obama: while never naively underestimating
clumsy opening, Ferdinand must still go through toxic masculinity, with the other bulls mocking the dangers abroad in the world, to always aim
many silly mishaps before the bullring finale, Ferdinand mercilessly for his gentleness. Later, to prioritise the route of diplomacy over force,
which is itself less funny and pointed than it Ferdinand comforts a bull who won’t admit that negotiation over military threat. Openly and
is in the book. The cartoon wanders from an he’s grieving for a friend, and another who’s had unashamedly partisan, Barker’s film could be
animal dancing contest, more laboured than a horn snapped off in a fight. When the broken accused of presenting a rose-coloured view of
funny, to Ferdinand saving other bulls from the bull asks bitterly if he’ll have to smell flowers the Obama administration – in particular, the
mincing machines of the abattoir. The latter like Ferdinand from now on, Ferdinand tells him word ‘drones’ is never uttered. But it’s frank in
scene already felt lazy when Aardman did it no; that’s just how Ferdinand happens to be. showing the greatest foreign-policy failure of
the presidency – Syria, where US efforts were
Credits and Synopsis blocked and comprehensively outmanoeuvred
by Vladimir Putin and his client Assad.
Significantly, this is where Power and Rhodes,
Produced by Cinematographer Chip Lotierzo Lupe Paco Dolby Atmos
John Davis Renato Falcao Anthony Anderson Daveed Diggs In Colour with their widely differing temperaments (she
Lisa Marie Stetler Edited by ©Twentieth Century Bones Dos [2.35:1] cool and considered, he brash and impulsive),
Lori Forte Harry Hitner Fox Film Corporation Bobby Cannavale Raúl Esparza
Bruce Anderson Production Designer Production Valiente/ Moreno Some screenings find themselves most at odds over what needs
Screenplay Thomas Cardone Companies Valiente’s father Gabriel Iglesias presented in 3D to be done. It seems to have been deliberate on
Robert L. Baird Music by/Music Twentieth Century Peyton Manning Cuatro
Tim Federle Conducted by Fox Animation Guapo Juanes Distributor
Obama’s part to assemble a team of people who
Brad Copeland John Powell presents a Blue Sky Gina Rodriguez Juan 20th Century Fox would all bring their own perspective rather than
Screen Story Supervising Studios production Una Boris Kodjoe International (UK)
Ron Burch Sound Editors Executive Producer Miguel Ángel Klaus
passively agreeing with each other or the boss.
David Kidd Randy Thom Chris Wedge Silvestre Karla Martinez The action runs chronologically as the
Don Rhymer Gwendolyn El Primero village mother clock ticks down to election night. Knowing
Based upon the Yates Whittle David Tennant Sally Phillips
book The Story of Supervising Voice Cast Angus Greta what we do, there’s a bitter edge to the team’s
Ferdinand by Munro Animators John Cena Flula Borg Jeremy Sisto assumption that they’ll be able to pass the
Leaf, illustrations James Bresnahan Ferdinand Hans Ferdinand’s father
by Robert Lawson Scott Carroll Kate McKinnon Jerrod Carmichael baton to like-minded successors, and that
they’ve successfully ‘locked in’ their key
Spain, the present. Ferdinand is a mild-natured bull bee, causing him to rampage. The police take him back
calf, being raised on a farm for the bullring. While his to the farm he fled from. An arrogant matador chooses
achievements over climate change, Cuba and
fellow bulls look forward to fighting, Ferdinand just loves Ferdinand as the bull for his farewell fight. Ferdinand Iran. As the image of Trump looms increasingly
flowers. His father is taken to the bullring and doesn’t organises a breakout for his fellow bulls, but is himself ubiquitous on TV screens behind their heads,
return; Ferdinand escapes and finds a much gentler captured. In the bullring, he refuses to fight, despite we’re reminded that nothing in politics –
farm, where a girl and her father treat him kindly. the matador’s goading; finally the audience takes pity especially in US politics – is ever ‘locked in’.
Ferdinand grows to enormous size. One day he follows on Ferdinand and calls for his release. He returns to the Having got to know these people, their defeat
his owner to a flower festival, where he is stung by a gentle farm with the other escaped bulls, blissfully happy.
seems all the more painful. When the horrendous

60 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

 Glory
Bulgaria/Greece 2016
Directors: Petar Valchanov, Kristina Grozeva
Certificate 12A 101m 8s

REVIEWS
Rail facts: Stefan Denolyubov

Oval and out: Samantha Power, Barack Obama Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton Gosheva. Working here with co-scenarist Decho
Though their lives are inextricably and tragically Taralzehkov, they’ve laid out an economical
results come in, Rhodes sits outside on some bound together, the two protagonists of the treatment of a story with reported origins in a
darkened steps, completely incoherent with Bulgarian film Glory don’t share a great deal of small item in the Bulgarian press. Tzanko may
shock; and as she prepares to quit her White screen time. An unlikely pair, they are a study be ripped from the headlines, but the sort of
House office, Power sadly takes down from in contrasts: Tzanko (Stefan Denolyubov) is a character played by Denolyubov, a ‘little person’
the wall the drawings her kids have made for grizzled lineman with a pronounced stammer sucked up into media frenzy and victimised by
her. We’re left with an aching nostalgia for the who lives in the countryside and has toiled away circumstances outside their control, is one that
brief period when the US was led by a mature, at his unglamorous job for fully 25 years, his cinema has had frequent occasion to revisit – the
dignified president and his intelligent team. closest companions the rabbits that he raises. His set-up is a staple of screwballs and satires, and one
age is difficult to pinpoint, for his hermit’s beard that Rainer Werner Fassbinder cuttingly made
Credits and Synopsis gives him an ancient look. Julia (Margita Gosheva) use of in his Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven (1975).
is a youthful 40 and favours tight, slightly The continued fascination exerted by
armorial business attire. She is professionally Fassbinder’s films comes in part through their
Produced by Brent Calkin association with
Julie Goldman Prettybird Pictures dynamic where Tzanko has been given to stasis; confrontation of the European modernist
John Battsek ©Home Box Executive Producer glib and quick-talking where he is thick-tongued; and Hollywood classicist traditions, while the
Greg Barker Office, Inc. Sheila Nevins
Cinematography Production a rising star in the ministry of transport who lives filmmaking in Glory belongs firmly in the
Erich Roland Companies In Colour in a clean, impersonal Sofia apartment with all neorealist school as it has come to us in the 21st-
Martina Radwan Magnolia [1.78:1]
Edited by Pictures and HBO
the modern conveniences. She and her husband century international festival picture. Identified
Joshua Altman Documentary Films Distributor (Kitodar Todorov) are preparing to set aside by undressy natural lighting, uninflected
Langdon Page present a Passion Dogwoof
Original Music Pictures and Motto
some fertilised embryos so that they might have performances, everyday locations that seem to
Philip Sheppard Pictures production a child at some undecided point down the line, have been selected with an eye for maximum
Production A film by Greg Barker though little indicates that this mother-to-be is drabness, and camerawork accomplished with
Sound Mixer Produced in
brimming over with the milk of human kindness. just a hint of handheld tremor, the style is often
A documentary following three of Barack Obama’s
Tzanko and Julia are brought together by a matched, as here, with subject matter that
senior aides through 2016, the last year of his piece of happenstance – he reports his discovery touches on contemporary economic anxiety: you
presidency: secretary of state John Kerry, UN of a pile of unaccounted-for money on the tracks could call it neoliberal neorealism. The Dardenne
ambassador Samantha Power and deputy national that he patrols, and her department sees in his brothers are the high priests of the form – and
security adviser and speechwriter Ben Rhodes. We civic-minded honesty a chance to manufacture we do have a handful of shoulder-level travelling
also hear from national security adviser Susan Rice
a hero, a story to distract attention from the shots here – while it has become something of a
and from Obama himself. Their chief preoccupations
are the nuclear agreement with Iran, steps towards reports of its corruption and malfeasance. It’s with national institution in neighbouring Romania.
normalising US-Cuban relations, the forthcoming fame’s interruption of his previously humdrum Early on in the film, Grozeva and Valchonov
Paris conference on climate change, and trying life that Tzanko’s problems begin. All that he are working in the register of deadpan comedy.
to negotiate an end to the conflict in Syria. really wants is the return of his engraved Slava There are a few underplayed gags that make
We see Obama visiting Hiroshima, where he watch, a family heirloom that Julia mislays; clever use of foreground and background space,
meets survivors of the H-bomb blast, and Laos,
where he apologises for the US bombing of the
misused, discarded and ignored by the ministry, particularly a long bit of business involving
country during the Vietnam War. Kerry visits the he turns for help to an opposition journalist finding Tzanko a replacement pair of trousers, and
Arctic to see the effects of climate change. Power (Milko Lazarov) who buffaloes the brakeman the touch of using a buzzing fly as a kind of refrain
visits Nigeria and Cameroon to offer US support into acting as a whistleblower, in the process every time his house is revisited is a nice one.
against Boko Haram. On election night we see earning him a dangerous new notoriety. As Tzanko and Julia’s interlocked stories move
the Obama team’s reaction to Donald Trump’s
Co-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar along, however, a sense of ambient menace settles
victory; the film ends on inauguration day 2017,
as they prepare to quit the White House. Valchonov won attention of their own for over the proceedings, sustained through
2014’s The Lesson, also starring Denolyubov and withholding and misdirection. The film

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 61

 The Greatest Showman
USA 2017
Director: Michael Gracey
Certificate PG 104m 39s

teases at the possibility of a physical Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson critic labels the show a “primitive circus”, but
threat to Tzanko, or even to his pet rabbits, The Greatest Showman assumes a place in a obliviously optimistic Phineas embraces the
then after a respite from these little prodding long history of P.T. Barnums on film (Wallace label, sealing his transformation from urban
REVIEWS

flicks to bring down your guard, it goes for the Beery played the entertainer twice in the pauper to “prince of humbug”. It’s a film so
lunging, knockout haymaker. It’s an effective bit 1930s) and is the second musical version of devoted to wish-fulfilment and spectacle that
of blindsiding, but for all its diligent realism, the his life, following the eponymous Broadway the ethical questions around Barnum’s freak
film is an airless affair, its shrewd deployment hit. In fitting tribute to its subject’s legendary show are glossed over and his third-act setbacks
of narrative strategies leaving little room for the tall tales, the film plays havoc with history in barely have time to register on screen.
irrelevancies that allow a movie to breathe. With order to tell a crowd-pleasing yarn. Star Hugh In contract to the earnest amateurishness
so much set-up and payoff, it’s a relief when you Jackman has fostered an ambition to play of La La Land, The Greatest Showman opts for
do encounter a scene without an immediately Phineas Barnum for years, a dream that has all-out razzle-dazzle, even if the edits and props
evident purpose, such as Tzanko drunkenly now reached the screen via first-time director sometimes hide the footwork. Jackman is
shuffling off with a prostitute. Glory puts forward (former VFX specialist) Michael Gracey, with a impressively, unwaveringly sincere, though
an artless appearance, but it’s a movie on a strict, story by TV writer Jenny Bicks and songs by La Michelle Williams as his wife Charity appears
efficient schedule, running like clockwork. It has La Land lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. less convinced by her thin character and gaudy
the aesthetic limitations of its style, with none This is not so much a biopic as a rags-to-riches costumes. Zac Efron is disappointingly bland
of the sense of discovery or happy accident. montage set to pulsating, stomping power in an ill-defined role, but Rebecca Ferguson
ballads. Opening number ‘A Million Dreams’ has great fun as seductive soprano Jenny
Credits and Synopsis sets the tone, with young Phineas singing an Lind. Keala Settle steals the show, though,
ode to self-determination while waltzing across as Barnum’s bearded lady, belting out the
a couple of decades of triumph-over-adversity: film’s most memorable song, ‘This Is Me’.
Producers ©Abraxas Film Ivan Savov
Bulgaria: Production Minister Kanchev from orphaned New York street urchin to desk With Disney alumna Zendaya in a sympathetic
Kristina Grozeva Companies Hristofor Nedkov clerk with a posh wife and young family. After role, streetdance-influenced routines, abounding
Petar Valchanov Abraxas Film with porter
Greece: the support of Mira Iskarova he loses his dull office job (in lumpen mimicry of anachronisms and tunes that ape contemporary
Konstantina Bulgarian National Galya The Crowd and The Apartment,t he gazes frustrated pop – specifically the bombastic
bomb empowerment
Stavrianou Film Center in
Irini Vougioukalou co-production In Colour
from the rows of talent-show winners – The
anthems sung by talent-
Screenwriters with Graal Films, [1.78:1] desks to the rows Greatest Showman n will aappeal best to a preteen
Kristina Grozeva Screening Emotions, Subtitles
Petar Valchanov Aporia Filmworks,
of headstones in a mar
market. It is probably
Decho Taralezhkov Red Carpet with the Distributor nearby cemetery), aan insult to this
Director of support of Bulgarian New Wave Films Phineas takes a aaudience, however,
Photography National Television,
Krum Rodriguez Central Cooperative Bulgarian gamble on a waxworks orks museum, but tha
that the film vaguely
Editor Union present theatrical title it fails to draw much h interest. Scenting champions diversity while tiptoeing
Petar Valchanov Slava
Production where the public’s real fascination around the prejudice
prejudices it claims to condemn.
Designer Cast xhibit living
lies, he decides to exhibit Precious, passing mmoments of whimsy
Vanina Geleva Margita Gosheva
Composer Julia Staykova
hering ‘oddities’
people instead, gathering (a chorus line of swa
swaying laundry, Efron
Hristo Namliev Stefan Denolyubov and parading them in the round to a and Jackman’s boozy duet) are similarly
Sound Mixer Tzanko Petrov
Ivan Andreev Kitodar Todorov
wildly enthusiastic audience. A sneering diluted. Like so many of Barnum’s own
Costume Designer Valeri humbugs, The Greates
Greatest Showman is a noisy
Kristina Tomova Milko Lazarov Hugh Jackman diversion that fails to de
deliver on its promise.
Kiril Kolev

Bulgaria, present day. Tzanko Petrov, a loner lineman Credits and Synopsis
working for the state railway, is going about his
rounds one day when he discovers a heap of euro
Produced by Production Designer Phosphene Twentieth Century Michelle Williams Austyn Johnson
notes scattered over the tracks. Reporting his Laurence Mark Nathan Crowley Lola|VFX Fox presents in Charity Barnum Caroline Barnum
findings, Tzanko is feted for his honesty in an insipid Peter Chernin Songs by Soho VFX association with Rebecca Ferguson Cameron Seely
ceremony arranged by Julia Staykova, a public- Jenno Topping Benj Pasek Shade VFX TSG Entertainment Jenny Lind Helen Barnum
relations expert at the ministry of transport. During Screenplay Justin Paul & Company a Laurence Zendaya Eric Anderson
Jenny Bicks Score by/ nineteentwenty Mark/Chernin Anne Wheeler Mr O’Malley
the ceremony he surrenders his watch, a family Bill Condon Conductors Lightstream Studios Entertainment Keala Settle
heirloom, to Julia, who neglects to return it before Story John Debney Stunt Co-ordinator production Lettie Lutz Dolby Atmos
leaving for an appointment at a fertility clinic. Jenny Bicks Joseph Trapanese Victor Paguia Executive Producers Yahya Abdul- In Colour
Julia mislays the watch, and attempts to placate Director of Re-recording Mixers Choreographer James Mangold Mateen II [2.35:1]
an increasingly frantic Tzanko with a replacement. Photography Paul Massey Ashley Wallen Donald J. Lee Jr W.D. Wheeler
Seamus McGarvey Lewis Goldstein Tonia Davis Natasha Liu Distributor
Disgusted, he contacts a muckraking journalist, Film Editors Costume Designer ©Twentieth Bordizzo 20th Century Fox
Kiril Kolev, who promises to help him find the watch Tom Cross Ellen Mirojnick Century Fox Film Deng Yan International (UK)
if he will appear on Kolev’s morning news show to Robert Duffy Visual Effects Corporation and Cast Paul Sparks
discuss endemic corruption in the railways and Joe Hutshing MPC TSG Entertainment Hugh Jackman James Gordon
Michael McCusker Rodeo FX Finance LLC P.T. Barnum Bennett
the indifference of the transportation minister to Jon Poll Raynault VFX Production Zac Efron Sam Humphrey
his reports on the problem. Torn away from the Spencer Susser Brainstorm Digital Companies Phillip Carlyle Tom Thumb
fertility clinic by the resulting PR disaster, Julia
arranges to have incriminating cash planted at New York, the 19th century. Phineas Barnum, the his distance from the troupe, excluding them from the
Tzanko’s home, leading to his arrest. He agrees to poor son of a tailor, works as a clerk and marries aftershow party. While he is on tour with Jenny, the
issue a public apology to the minister in order to his childhood sweetheart Charity, who is from a show continues in New York, despite bigoted protesters
have charges dropped, but on returning home is disapproving upper-class family. After losing his job, picketing the theatre. Phillip and trapeze artist Anne
waylaid and assaulted by disgruntled co-workers. Phineas opens a waxworks museum. It’s not a success, start a tentative romance but fear adverse reactions to
Julia, following a successful visit to the so he recruits some ‘living exhibits’, including a bearded their mixed-race relationship. When Jenny attempts to
fertility clinic, reads a news item about the lady and a dwarf. The crowds love the show, but a seduce Phineas on tour, he leaves for New York, only to
suicide of a railway worker, and worries that critic attacks it, calling it a “circus of humbug” – a find the theatre has burned down after a confrontation
the deceased is Tzanko. Stricken with guilt, she label that Phineas embraces. He hires Phillip Carlyle, between the protesters and the troupe. Charity leaves
goes on a drunken bender, waking the following a well-connected theatre producer, who arranges an him, after reading reports of Jenny kissing him on
day to discover the watch in her car. She gets appointment to meet Queen Victoria. At Buckingham stage. At rock bottom, Phineas considers giving up,
word that the deceased is not Tzanko, and goes Palace, Phineas meets renowned soprano Jenny Lind, but after securing financial support from Phillip and
to deliver the watch to him. He appears to greet and hires her for an American tour. While his success reconciling with Charity, he reopens the show as a
her with a blow from a blunt object, while Julia’s with Jenny impresses an upper-class audience, real circus in a tent. He hands ringmaster duties to
husband waits nearby, oblivious, in the car. including Charity’s parents, Phineas increasingly keeps Phillip in order to spend more time with his family.

62 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Journey’s End Jumanji
United Kingdom/The Netherlands/Belgium 2017
Director: Saul Dibb
Welcome to the Jungle
Certificate 12A 107m 44s USA 2017, Director: Jake Kasdan
Certificate 12A 118m 52s

Reviewed by Matthew Taylor under Stanhope, who is betrothed to his older Reviewed by Kate Stables
R.C. Sherriff’s venerable WWI play Journey’s sister Margaret, but on arrival the youth finds his Keener on playful character interaction than
End (1928) has, on the whole, been well served wide-eyed notions of heroism rather muddied. twisty plotting, this glossy homage to Jumanji

REVIEWS
by its various film adaptations over the decades. One of Sherriff’s provisional titles for Journey’s (1995) lovingly spoofs 1990s videogames
Most of them – James Whale’s 1930 version for End was Waiting, and in Dibb’s film the inertia rather than the original’s board-game and pulp-
Gainsborough, Michael Simpson’s BBC TV film experienced by soldiers hanging around adventure themes. Screen homage is its jam
of 1988, and even The Other Side (Die andere Seite, and anticipating their likely obliteration is throughout, in fact, as it nods to The Breakfast Club
1931), which featured the intriguing distinction palpable (“We’re all just generally waiting for in its teen scenes, Tron in its videogame levels, and
of German actors playing quintessentially something,” muses Osborne). The compacted Freaky Friday in its kids-and-adults-body-swap
British officers – have remained rigidly faithful timeframe, comprising several days leading conceit: four high-schoolers, made to clear out
to Sherriff’s text, though Jack Gold’s Aces up to a grave deadline, may inevitably recall a storeroom as punishment for various crimes,
High (1976) exchanged the earthbound stasis Christopher Nolan’s recent Dunkirk. However, happen on an old videogame. Trying it out, they
of the trenches for the skies above (its aerial the scale couldn’t be more different – in place are whisked into Jumanji’s jungle world and
sequences were reused in Blackadder Goes Forth, of the latter’s teeming vistas there is dank transformed into the avatars they had chosen.
itself obviously indebted to Journey’s End). subterranean claustrophobia and the eerily Director Jake Kasdan concentrates on the one-
While not taking any dramatic liberties with depopulated swathe of no man’s land that note gags of his stars channelling nervy teens –
its source, Saul Dibb’s sturdy, well-acted new lies beyond. Here, there is no deliverance in Dwayne Johnson quailing as a game nerd, Karen
film, adapted by Simon Reade, persuasively the works – the company is matter-of-factly Gillan’s feminist horror at her Lara Croft-styled
revisits what George Bernard Shaw once called informed that reinforcements will not be avatar. The action sequences (outrunning rhinos,
a “slice of life – horrible, abnormal life”. forthcoming. Save for the climactic onslaught Indiana Jones-style booby-trapped corridors) are
For the men of C Company, anxiously of Operation Michael, the action is confined eye-popping but hold little jeopardy, despite the
awaiting the imminent German offensive to a surprise raid on a German position – ‘three game lives and you’re really dead’ concept.
of March 1918, the attempt to maintain a conducted in daylight, as Stanhope grimly It’s visually lavish, lesson-learning,
slim semblance of normality becomes key to notes, so that the top brass will receive their family-friendly fun. But the laughs dilute the
coping with the fragile nature of existence in intelligence in time for dinner. The sequence excitement, and ensures it never achieves the
the trenches. In the case of Stephen Graham’s is a jolt of chaotic movement after the queasy jolting fear that the original conjured up.
Trotter, the focus is on routine mealtimes and stillness of the dugout, and it takes a while to
the often unidentifiable cuisine dished up by process the loss of a major player off screen. Credits and Synopsis
deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). Hibbert Within a strong ensemble, Bettany shines as
(Tom Sturridge), an officer faking neuralgia the kindly Osborne, who takes Raleigh under his Produced by Effects and Anthony ‘Fridge’
to avoid combat, distracts himself by crowing wing when Stanhope can’t bear to; a scene prior Matt Tolmach Animation Johnson, ‘Franklin
William Teitler Sony Pictures ‘Moose’ Finbar’
about romantic conquests in London, while to the raid, with Osborne calming the lad’s nerves Screenplay Imageworks Karen Gillan
Osborne (Paul Bettany) prefers to reminisce with banal talk of hot drinks and gardening, Chris McKenna Stunt Co- Martha Kaply, ‘Ruby
Erik Sommers ordinators Roundhouse’
about tending his rockery in the New Forest. is particularly moving. Claflin’s tormented Scott Rosenberg Gary M. Hymes Nick Jonas
Then there is Stanhope (Sam Claflin), the Stanhope is on a par with Colin Clive’s portrayal Jeff Pinkner Oakley Lehman Alex
Screen Story Bobby Cannavale
company’s traumatised captain, who has found in Whale’s original, while Butterfield is well Chris McKenna ©Columbia Pictures Van Pelt
a more direct way to banish the reality of the cast as the earnest novice. And regular Ben Based on the book Industries, Inc. Ser’Darius Blain
Jumanji by Chris Production young Anthony
dugout: the bottle. “You’ll find him changed,” Wheatley collaborator Laurie Rose once again Van Allsburg and Companies Madison Iseman
says Osborne to Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), the proves his knack for photographing landscape, the film Jumanji Columbia Pictures young Bethany
[1995], Screen Story presents a Matt Morgan Turner
naive young recruit whose first posting this lending the trenches an earthy immediacy that by Greg Taylor, Jim Tolmach/Seven young Martha
is. Raleigh has excitedly volunteered to serve previous adaptations of the play can’t match. Strain, Chris Van Bucks production Alex Wolff
Allsburg, Screenplay A film by Jake young Spencer
by Jonathan Kasdan Rhys Darby
Credits and Synopsis Hensleigh, Greg Executive Nigel
Taylor, Jim Strain Producers Marc Evan Jackson
Director of David Householter Principal Bentley
Photography Jake Kasdan
Produced by Production Wednesday Films Made with the Cast Rupert Wickham Gyula Pados Dwayne Johnson Dolby Atmos/
Guy de Beaujeu Sound Mixer A Saul Dibb film support of the Sam Claflin General Rayleigh Edited by Dany Garcia Auro Barco
Simon Reade Bryn Thomas Developed with BFI’s Film Fund Captain Stanhope Rose Reade Mark Helfrich Ted Field In Colour
Screenplay Costume Designer the assistance of Executive Producers Asa Butterfield Margaret Steve Edwards Mike Weber [2.35:1]
Simon Reade Anushia Nieradzik Anyway Productions Anthony Seldon Second Lieutenant Production
Based on the play by Supported by the Will Machin Raleigh In Colour Designer Some screenings
R.C. Sherriff and the ©Journey’s End Tax Shelter of The Natalie Brenner Toby Jones [2.35:1] Owen Paterson Cast presented in 3D
novel by R.C. Sherriff Films Ltd/The British Federal Government Sam Parker Private Mason Music Dwayne Johnson
and Vernon Bartlett Film Institute of Belgium and The Mary Burke Tom Sturridge Distributor Henry Jackman Spencer Gilpin, ‘Dr Distributor
Director of Production Tax Shelter Investors Charles Auty Second Lieutenant Lionsgate UK Production Mixer Smolder Bravestone’ Sony Pictures
Photography Companies In association Steve Milne Hibbert John Pritchett Jack Black Releasing UK
Laurie Rose BFI and Wales with uFund Christian Eisenbeiss Stephen Graham Costume Designer Bethany, ‘Professor
Editor Screen present in Produced with Ivan Dunleavy Second Lieutenant Laura Jean Shannon Shelly Oberon’
Tania Reddin association with support from the Robert Norris Special Visual Kevin Hart
Trotter
Production Designer Metro International Welsh Government David Grindley Paul Bettany
Kristian Milsted Entertainment and Media Investment Sue de Beauvoir Lieutenant Osborne The US, present day. During high-school detention,
Music British Film Company Budget Bastien Sirodot Robert Glenister nerdy Spencer, arrogant athlete Fridge, loner Martha
Hildur Gudnadóttir and Umedia a Fluidity Produced by Adrian Politowski colonel and vain Bethany are sucked into Jumanji’s jungle
Composer Films production Third Wednesday Gilles Waterkeyn Miles Jupp
Natalie Holt Produced by Third Films Limited world by an old videogame. Their new avatar-bodies,
Captain Hardy
the opposites of their real selves, help them bond
and take risks. Each only has three game ‘lives’,
Northern France, 1918. Raleigh, a naive young officer, company should stand its ground for as long as some of which they lose. They are tasked with
is posted to the frontline trenches to join an infantry possible. Stanhope threatens to shoot Hibbert, an saving Jumanji by retrieving the Jaguar’s Eye jewel,
company awaiting an imminent German offensive; officer feigning neuralgia, for desertion. Osborne and stolen by villain animal-whisperer Van Pelt, and
he is excited to serve under Captain Stanhope, who is Raleigh are selected to lead a surprise daytime raid returning it to a giant statue, high on a mountain.
betrothed to his sister Margaret. However, Stanhope to capture a German officer. The operation succeeds, Battling through the game’s levels to find the jewel,
is now a tormented alcoholic, who confides to his but Osborne and many others are killed. The German they fight Van Pelt’s motorcycle henchmen and his
lieutenant Osborne his horror at being responsible offensive is launched the next day, decimating the animal hordes. They recruit Alex, a teen trapped
for Raleigh, and his fear that Margaret will learn company. When Raleigh is killed, Stanhope emerges in the game since 1996. Finally escaping a rhino
of his drinking via the boy’s letters. Stanhope is on to the trenches, just as more shelling destroys horde, a jaguar pack and Van Pelt, they help Spencer
informed by his superiors that no reinforcements the dugout. Margaret receives Raleigh’s first letter, scale the mountain and reinsert the jewel. Returned
will be provided for the coming attack, and that the which relates his admiration for Stanhope. to real life, they find Alex a happily grown man.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 63

 Jupiter’s Moon
Hungary/Germany/Monaco 2017
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Certificate 15 128m 33s

Reviewed by Michael Brooke

On the evidence of his five features to date,
Kornél Mundruczó is one of contemporary
REVIEWS

cinema’s most thoughtful theologians. The full-

length opera Johanna (2005) transplanted the
miraculous aspects of the legend of Joan of Arc
to a Hungarian hospital; both Delta (2008) and
Tender Son (2010) offered oblique variations on
the return of the prodigal son; and White God
(2014) channelled Robert Bresson’s Au hasard
Balthazar as much as Sam Fuller’s White Dog in
its tale of the cruel exploitation of a faithful dog
by distant bureaucrats and hands-on oppressors.
Co-written by his White God screenwriting
partner Kata Wéber, Jupiter’s Moon is Mundruczó’s
most conceptually complex film by some
distance, its ambitions signalled by an opening
title that introduces us to Jupiter’s moon Europa,
believed to have a potentially life-bearing
saltwater ocean under its icy surface. This and
the story’s premise about a young Syrian refugee,
Aryan Dashni (Zsombor Jéger), who finds himself
blessed/cursed with supernatural powers after
being shot while trying to enter Hungary illegally,
have caused the film to be labelled as science Hope floats: Zsombor Jéger
fiction, but it’s more of a magical-realist parable.
Indeed, Europa is never subsequently mentioned, slowly floating down the side of a block of flats; at the world has rarely seemed more complex or
but the notion that present-day Hungary has another, the surrounding room and its contents convoluted, our appetite for the miraculous may
become an alien world policed by men in black similarly defy gravity, to the alarm of its other, be greater than ever, especially if it’s couched in the
masks reminiscent of Star Wars stormtroopers non-levitating, no-longer-sceptical occupant. form of easily graspable images that can be spotted
is pervasive throughout. The alien-visitor At its Cannes competition premiere last year, merely by looking up (a running gag concerns how
theme is underscored further by light-relief Jupiter’s Moon was often criticised for an excess rarely people do this). Even Stern the arch-sceptic
interludes, such as Aryan trying to cope with the of ambition, and it’s true that in its keenness to can be converted by the simple touch of a hand
trappings and rituals of a five-star restaurant. cram in multiple hot-button issues (religion, on his head as he kneels to tie Aryan’s shoelaces,
The man who has brought him there, his homosexuality, racism, medical negligence, the a modern substitute for foot-washing. And if we
mentor-cum-exploiter Gábor Stern (Merab refugee crisis, Islamist terrorism) and even genres never truly understand where Aryan’s coming
Ninidze), is calculatedly inscrutable at first, (action film, suspense thriller, fish-out-of-water from, Jéger’s appealingly wide-eyed performance
denouncing torture, rape and child massacres comedy, philosophical art movie), it sometimes makes it clear that he shares our bafflement
in the Bible while shushing a pair of evangelical runs the risk of seeming much more diffuse and about what’s happening to him: holy innocents
Christians who ask him what he believes in. He’s hard to read than Mundruczó’s earlier films. But are a common theme in western culture, but few
a refugee-hospital doctor who also facilitates this may be Mundruczó’s point: at a time when have the latter quality in such abundance.
various black-market activities inside the camp
– as police chief László (György Cserhalmi) Credits and Synopsis
pointedly says, when asking him to censor an
official medical report: “You should overlook
Producers of Hungarian András Bálint The Hungary-Serbia border, the present. Ambushed
some things that I do, just as I do with you.” But Viktória Petrányi National Film Fund, voice of Gabor Stern by border-patrol forces, Syrian refugee Murad drowns,
Stern can’t overlook the fact that Aryan seems to Viola Fügen Eurimages, Film Farid Larbi
and his teenage son Aryan is shot by police chief
Michael Weber und Medienstiftung bearded Syrian man
be exhibiting all the characteristics of a Biblical Michel Merkt NRW, Mitteldeutsche Máté Mészáros László. Aryan is taken to Dr Gábor Stern’s refugee-
angel aside from visible wings, not least because Written by Medienförderung, ambulance driver camp hospital, and levitates in front of him. Fired
Kata Wéber Medienboard Szabolcs after refusing László’s request to censor any mention
of his potential as a nice little earner. (Although, Cinematographer Berlin-Brandenburg Bede-Fazekas
since he’s raising money to pay compensation for of refugees being shot, Stern takes Aryan with him
Marcell Rév A film by Kornél policeman
Editor Mundruczó Lajos Valázsik to Budapest. A conversation with his girlfriend Vera
a botched operation, Stern may also see Aryan’s Dávid Jancsó With the financial Musi plants the idea that Aryan might be an angel. While
arrival as an opportunity for personal atonement.) Production Designer support of NMHH - Péter Haumann László looks for both Aryan and Murad (whose corpse
As often with Mundruczó’s films, individual Márton Ágh National Media and Zentai is unidentified), Stern shows off Aryan’s powers to
Composer Infocommunications Zsolt Nagy
set pieces are technically astonishing, starting Jed Kurzel Authority, Creative tattooed boy various people for money: one is so unsettled by it
with an extended five-and-a-half-minute take (or Sound Europe MEDIA Zoltán Mucsi that he kills himself. Determined to find his father,
Gábor Balázs Produced by waiter Aryan quizzes other refugees prior to confronting
seamlessly knitted series of takes) that follows Costume Designer Proton Cinema, Ákos Birkás someone he recognises – one of a group of Islamist
Aryan’s progress between dense woods either side Sabine Greunig Match Factory György
terrorists about to trigger a mass metro bombing.
Stunt Co-ordinator Productions, KNM Sándor Terhes
of the Serbian-Hungarian border, incorporating Gáspár Szabó Executive Producers Bárándy Murad and Aryan’s passports are found in the wreckage,
a panicked underwater interlude and a desperate Eszter Gyárfás making them suspects. Stern visits the widower of a
sprint for his life that must have been even ©Proton Cinema, Júlia Berkes In Colour woman who died on his operating table and offers him
Match Factory Judit Sós [2.35:1] money; it’s refused. In the morgue, Stern identifies
harder on the camera operator than it was on the Productions, KNM Subtitles
Production Murad’s body. Vera informs on them to László, who
actor (Marcell Rév’s cinematography displays chases them, but is thwarted when Aryan floats away.
Companies Cast Distributor
a similarly propulsive energy later, especially The Match Factory Merab Ninidze Curzon Artificial Eye Reunited with Aryan, Stern checks into a hotel. A
during multiple car chases). CGI-assisted scenes presents a Proton Doctor Gabor Stern former colleague betrays Stern to László, who goes
Cinema production Zsombor Jéger Hungarian
of Aryan levitating are rendered all the more to arrest Aryan. Stern confronts László in the lobby,
in co-production Aryan theatrical title
disorientating by the backgrounds lurching in with Match Factory György Cserhalmi Jupiter holdja but is shot before he and Aryan can escape to the lift.
Productions, László László catches them on an upper floor. Aryan leaps
sympathy, as if channelling Aryan’s own vertigo, KNM, ZDF/Arte Móni Balsai through the corridor window, floating above the city.
and each successive set piece offers visual variety: With the support Vera In the street below, a child shuts his eyes and counts.
at one point, all we see of Aryan is a shadow

64 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

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 Last Flag Flying Lies We Tell
USA 2017 United Kingdom 2016
Director: Richard Linklater Director: Mitu Misra
Certificate 15 124m 35s Certificate 15 109m 35s

Reviewed by Ryan Gilbey Reviewed by Nikki Baughan

The names and some of the Over the past two years, UK filmmakers
See Rushes background details may be have been showcasing the four corners of the
REVIEWS

page 10 different, and the language
stripped of much of its
notorious coarseness, but
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying is in part a
belated catch-up with the navy buddies at the
centre of Hal Ashby and Robert Towne’s salty
1973 comedy The Last Detail. (Both films are
based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan, who also
co-wrote the screenplay for the new film with
Linklater.) Matching the cast of that earlier
picture to the performers here is a mug’s game:
Bryan Cranston, as Sal, could just about pass
muster as an older version of Jack Nicholson’s
Billy Buddusky, but Steve Carell as Larry, who
enlists his pals’ to accompany him as he takes
home the body of his son, killed in the Iraq War, is
no Randy Quaid. Then again, Linklater – himself
the king of the cinematic waiting game, what
with the Before trilogy (1995-2013), spread over
nearly three decades, and Boyhood (2014), which
took 12 years to make – is not really fashioning
a sequel. He’s using The Last Detail instead as a
springboard for reflecting on how little the US,
and especially its foreign policy, has changed
or progressed in the intervening years.
Some half-hearted comedy is wrung from
the fish-out-of-water exploits of these middle-
aged Vietnam vets let loose in the turn-of-the-
millennium world. They examine newfangled
mobile phones with a quizzical bemusement
more suited to Daryl Hannah’s mermaid in
Splash (1984), while musing on how context is
altered by the passing of time. Sal, for instance,
can’t believe that people now pay to go on
holiday to the place where tens of thousands of
his countrymen, and millions of Vietnamese,
lost their lives. From the moment we first see
him complaining about a police reality show
(he wants to know why the cops are never seen
bringing corrupt CEOs to book), Sal is marked
out as the firebrand of the group, while Richard
(Laurence Fishburne), now a preacher, urges
caution at all times, and the softly spoken Larry
lies somewhere in the middle. Each man is
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Sandra Adair Production
Ginger Sledge Production Designer Companies
Richard Linklater Bruce Curtis An Amazon Studios
John Sloss Music presentation
Screenplay Graham Reynolds A Detour
Richard Linklater Production Filmproduction/
Darryl Ponicsan Sound Mixer Zanzero Pictures/
Based on the novel Chris Strollo Cinetic Media
by Darryl Ponicsan Costume Designer production
Director of Kari Perkins A Richard
Photography Linklater film
Shane Kelly ©Amazon Content Produced in
Film Editor Services LLC association with
The US, 2003. After his son Larry Jr is killed while
on a tour of duty in Baghdad, the recently widowed
Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd calls on two old friends who
served with him in Vietnam 30 years earlier. Sal
Nealon, a rabble-rouser who now owns a bar, and
Richard Mueller, who is now a reverend, agree to
accompany Larry to view his son’s coffin before the
burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Larry, who
discovers that the official story about his son dying
in battle is a lie (he was in fact shot from behind in
Vets in a spin: Cranston, Carell, Fishburne
politicised by their adventure together: Richard
after being mistaken for a terrorist (his surname,
Mueller, sounds a bit too close to ‘mullah’), and
Larry when he discovers that his son didn’t die a
glorious death in combat, as the army claims, but
was shot in the head while on a drinks errand.
The latter revelation occurs in the film’s most
effective scene, when the men are adrift in the
boundless white of the hangar at the military
base where fallen soldiers are presented to their
families in closed coffins. This stark, dazzling
aesthetic becomes cleverly symbolic of the action
of the scene, with no corners left for the truth to
hide in, no shadows to protect the military’s lies.
It’s the one moment when Linklater appears
to be thinking cinematically. The rest of Last Flag
Flying is structurally halting and dramatically
meagre. The script is rife with sentimentalised
odes to the contribution of the military, obvious
points about the language of governmental
betrayal across the years (WMDs, the phrase
‘Stay the course’), and banal instances of
contemplation, such as when Larry watches
footage of Saddam Hussein’s dead sons on
television and says: “I lost one, he lost two.”
The performers sleepwalk through the usual
buddy-movie shtick, and there is little here to
surprise audiences already of a liberal mindset,
let alone sway or entice those who are not.
Big Indie Pictures Reverend Richard O’Toole
Executive Producers Mueller
Harry Gittes Yul Vázquez In Colour
Thomas Lee Wright Colonel Wilits [2.35:1]
Karen Ruth Getchell J. Quinton Johnson
Washington Distributor
Deanna Reed-Foster Curzon Artificial Eye
Cast Ruth
Steve Carell Cicely Tyson
Larry Shepherd, ‘Doc’ Mrs Hightower
Bryan Cranston Graham Wolfe
Sal Nealon John Redman
Laurence Fishburne Jeff Monahan
a convenience store), decides that he doesn’t want
him to have a military funeral after all. The army
surrenders the coffin reluctantly but the plan to
transport it in a hired van is derailed when Richard
is arrested, mistaken for a terrorist. Once freed, he
joins the others travelling by train, accompanied by
the young soldier Washington, who served alongside
Larry Jr. Back at home on the day of the funeral,
Larry opens a letter written to him by his son, passed
on by Washington, in which he says he loves him.
country in exhilarating ways. In Hope Dickson
Leach’s The Levelling, for example, the Somerset
Levels became the backdrop for the burdens
of adult responsibility; Alex Taylor’s Spaceship
saw Guildford as the setting for a fantastical
exploration of modern adolescence; and in Francis
Lee’s blistering debut God’s Own Country, the wild
landscapes of Yorkshire perfectly underscored
the emotional unfurling of the film’s embittered
protagonist. In first-time filmmaker Mitu Misra’s
version of modern England, however, Yorkshire
becomes the setting for blunt-edged cultural
warfare, with battle lines drawn along the most
obvious racial and gender clichés. While Lies We
Tell’s overarching theme may be the devastating
ripples of secrets and lies, it lacks any hint of
narrative stealth or dramatic complexity.
The film sets its tone immediately, with
high-powered Demi (a brief cameo from big-
name draw Harvey Keitel) being driven to an
extramarital tryst by his loyal right-hand man
Donald (Gabriel Byrne). “The only men who get
caught are the ones who don’t love their wives
enough,” says the cocksure Demi – only to then
die of a heart attack. Tasked with cleaning up his
employer’s love nest, Donald comes face-to-face
with the beautiful young Amber (Sibylla Deen).
While he initially dismisses Amber as a
prostitute, it transpires that she is, in fact, Demi’s
long-term mistress and also a trainee lawyer.
But she is from a strict Muslim family, so any
hint of her clandestine relationship could be
ruinous both to her reputation and to her career.
When Donald is persuaded to help her destroy
all computer and phone evidence of the affair,
he is slowly drawn into her world and the long-
held secret – concerning an arranged marriage
to, and subsequent divorce from, her vengeful
cousin KD (Jan Uddin) – that consumes her.
Although Indian-born Misra is credited
as co-screenwriter, alongside Ewen Glass
(TV’s Hollyoaks) and fellow first-timer Andy
McDermott, there’s no real sense of authenticity
or sensitivity here. There are kernels of truth in
the depiction of the British Muslim experience,
particularly the disconnect between older
generations still tied to tradition and youngsters
with a more western identity, focused through the
uncomfortable prism of the arranged marriages of
young girls who have no say in their own future.
Yet rather than exploring these issues on their
own terms, Misra attempts to shoehorn them into
a standard thriller format, with the multicultural
elements amped up to such a histrionic degree
that it becomes almost pantomime. Amber’s
parents, for example, are one-note religious
zealots, completely unconcerned about their
children’s happiness. “When are you going to stop
judging us by British standards?” spits Amber’s
mother, in one example of the on-the-nose
dialogue, when her daughter confronts her about
her arranged marriage. “You should thank Allah
you were 16 and not 12.” KD, meanwhile, is a
moustache-twirling villain who abuses women,
loans his pregnant girlfriend out to his henchman
and has his sights set on Amber’s younger sister.
As Amber, Australian star Deen shows

66 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

 Love Is Thicker than Water
United Kingdom/The Netherlands 2016
Directors: Emily Harris, Ate de Jong
Certificate 15 105m 12s

Reviewed by Hannah McGill

Like last year’s Kids in Love (2016), this UK
romantic comedy-drama sees a young man

REVIEWS
sample life’s riches via an affair with a louche,
high-born woman, only to see the romance
falter because her gilded world cannot easily
accommodate his relative ordinariness. To
this strangely rigid notion of British social
class Love Is Thicker than Water adds startling
regional and ethnic stereotyping: Johnny
Flynn’s Arthur is Welsh, which the film treats
as akin to being a semi-housetrained animal,
whereas the Jewishness of Lydia Wilson’s
Vida is pointed up by her whole family
Adultery life skills: Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel being rich, frail, bitchy aesthetes who bring
up the Holocaust in every conversation.
strength and determination, but these qualities Modern hipster trappings – fairy-lit Hackney
are no match for the relentless subjugation lofts, fur-trapper hats and a soundtrack of fey La Vida loca: Lydia Wilson, Henry Goodman
her character endures, not only from the men indie folk – don’t disguise the old-school sitcom
around her but also from the camera, which conservatism through which the film filters of sex before midnight”; they speak mostly of
lingers over her, and her appalling treatment, difference. Visiting Arthur’s family in Port steelworks, and have no time for art, unless it
with voyeuristic glee. (The only man who treats Talbot for the first time, Vida baffles the oiks involves Richard Burton, who is a god to them.
her with any respect is Donald; even then, the by asking for herbal tea. Shortly thereafter, she Perhaps the film’s biggest problem, however,
script forces her to attempt to seduce him.) This is fastidiously appalled at being served fish is its failure to convince us that anything stands
is meant to be Amber’s journey to freedom, yet and chips – and even more so when one of in the way of its central couple other than one
she is never allowed to be in charge of her own Arthur’s lairy sisters barges in for a pee while of them just being horrible. Romantic heroines
story. Indeed, while its aim may be to shine she’s in the bathroom. Indeed, controlling don’t have to be perfect, but it aids audience
a light on the Indian community’s outdated their urine seems to be a family problem: identification if they’re not downright loathsome.
treatment of women, Lies We Tell overplays the one character of colour, Arthur’s half- This is Vida after Arthur’s father dies and she
this rampant misogyny to such a point that it brother Llion (Alex Lanipekun), signals his accompanies him home to Port Talbot for the
becomes the very thing it is trying to condemn. lack of common ground with Vida’s family by funeral: “What the fuck am I doing here?” And
pissing all over their bathroom. Well – black this, when Arthur asks her if she’ll wait for him
Credits and Synopsis and Welsh? Who let him off the leash? while he spends a bit of time there with his
Might the peculiarly tone-deaf take on British widowed mother: “No, I won’t fucking wait! It’s
class and culture be down to writer and co- not a war! If you stay here, we’re done!” For Vida,
Produced by Adam Howe KD
Andy McDermott Reece Ritchie director (with Emily Harris) Ate de Jong being seemingly, the only distance more impossibly
Malcolm Scott ©Bradford Nathan no Shoreditch millennial but a Dutchman active onerous than that between middle and working
Danny Gulliver International Film Gina McKee
Screenplay Associates Ltd Heather in filmmaking since 1976? Indeed, perhaps class is that between London and Wales. She also
Ewen Glass Production Nicholas Farrell he’s had this script under his bed for a while, punches Arthur hard in the face and smashes
Andy McDermott Companies Anthony Quest
Story Presented Manzar Sehbai-Pal
for despite the studied contemporaneity of the a camera he can ill afford to replace – yet in the
Mitu Misra by Bradford Zulifikar music and fashions, the film’s placing in time film’s final assault on sense and logic, when
Screenplay International Film Harish Patel
Development Associates Haji
is highly peculiar. Not only does digital and reconciliation looms, it’s he who apologises to
Jon Sen Developed in Emily Atack mobile technology play an improbably slight her. Romcoms tend to rely on us rooting for a
Irfan Ajeeb association Tracey role in the young leads’ lives, but the Welsh union. It’s an interesting shift to find oneself
Mitu Misra with Bradford Harvey Virdi
Director of International Film Banu characters have apparently been disinterred rooting instead for one partner to run away
Photography Associates Limited Harvey Keitel from the 1950s. They are interested, says as far and as fast as he can – but presumably
Santosh Sivan Executive Demi Lampros
Editor Producers Arthur, only in “beer, rugby and three minutes not quite what the filmmakers intended.
Chris Gill Santosh Sivan In Colour
Production Mark Platts [2.35:1]
Designer Credits and Synopsis
Jane Levick Distributor
Original Music Cast Miracle
Composed by/ Gabriel Byrne Communications Produced by Emily Harris + Robert Blythe London, the present. The whirlwind romance between
Music Produced by Donald Ate de Jong Ate de Jong George Davies cycle courier and aspiring animator Arthur and cellist
Zbigniew Preisner Sibylla Deen Written by Executive Producers Remy Beasley
Sound Recordists Amber Ate de Jong Jennifer Darling Brenda Davies Vida hits snags when they meet each other’s families:
David Mitchell Mark Addy Director of Andrea Scarso Vida’s mother is unwelcoming to Arthur, while Vida is
Martin Beresford Billy Photography Max Benitz In Colour upset that Arthur’s relatives are Welsh and working
Costume Design Jan Uddin Zoran Veljkovic [2.35:1] class. The couple throw an engagement party, at which
Editor
Arthur’s father has a heart attack and dies. Shortly
Bradford, Yorkshire, present day. After philandering Antonio Ribeiro Cast Distributor
Production Designer Johnny Flynn Jinga Films afterwards, Vida’s mother also dies. Arthur decides
businessman Demi dies of a heart attack, his loyal Charlotte Pearson Arthur Davies to stay on with his mother in Wales, which infuriates
right-hand man Donald is tasked with cleaning Music Supervisor Lydia Wilson Vida; they split up. Arthur’s animation mysteriously
out his love nest; he meets Demi’s beautiful young Johnny Flynn Vida Berliner appears online, becoming a viral hit. Vida inherits
mistress Amber. A trainee lawyer from a devout Sound Design Juliet Stevenson
Rob Prynne Ethel Berliner £500,000 from her mother’s estate. Vida’s father
Muslim family, Amber enlists Donald’s help in Wardrobe Henry Goodman visits Arthur’s mother, and they decide to hold a joint
destroying the evidence of her affair. This is made Sam Perry Levi Berliner memorial service for their spouses. At the party, Vida
more difficult by the meddling of her violent cousin Al Weaver tells Arthur that she has quit music and intends to
KD, from whom she is divorced. Finding a video of ©Barnsbury Adam Berliner
Pictures Ltd
retrain as a GP. Arthur apologises to her for what went
Alex Lanipekun
Amber and Demi together, KD threatens to divulge Production Llion Davies wrong in their relationship, and they kiss; but the
her secret to her family if she interferes in his Companies Jessica Gunning party ends badly when Arthur’s homophobic brother
upcoming marriage to her younger sister. When Barnsbury Pictures Emily Davies Llion beats up Vida’s gay brother. On their way home
Amber successfully stops the wedding, KD has her Ltd, Mulholland Ellie Kendrick to Wales, Llion confides to Arthur that it was he who
killed. Donald confronts KD at her graveside; when he Pictures BV, Master Helen Berliner
Media, Ingenious Sharon Morgan uploaded the animation. Arthur and Vida reunite.
shows no remorse, Donald runs him over in his car. present a film by Sara Davies Arthur’s animation is displayed in a London exhibition.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 67

 Makala
France 2017
Director: Emmanuel Gras

Reviewed by Hannah McGill

“Time is going by so fast,” frets solemn,
hardworking Kabwita near the start of this
REVIEWS

documentary, as he contemplates the challenge

of amassing enough cash to progress the building
of his family home. Viewers who have just
watched Kabwita painstakingly hack down a
vast tree and prepare its wood for sale as charcoal
may beg to differ, for ‘fast’ is one quality few
would claim for this film. We will go on to watch
Kabwita leave his home in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo to transport the charcoal
(the ‘makala’ of the title), precariously tied in
bundles on a pushbike, for sale at city markets;
what seems ‘fast’ to Kabwita, pressured as he is by
poverty, the changing seasons and the demands
of growing children, is rendered languorous
and beautiful to us by the loving attentions of
director and cinematographer Emmanuel Gras.
If the danger of aestheticising and exoticising
the struggles of the poor is clear and present in
a film such as this (and if it’s a distinct challenge
not to wonder if Kabwita might have preferred
a lift on the camera crew’s truck to being filmed
by them as he pushed his bike along endless
roads), the unfussy respect Gras confers on
his subject elevates this portrait from mere
voyeurism to a generous and elegant meditation
on what it is to work. The initial scenes in which
Kabwita chops down the tree, in a landscape so
depleted by slash-and-burn farming practices
that his family often subsists on rat meat, gather
elemental force as he proceeds, until we seem Road trip: Kabwita Kasongo
to be watching a mini-drama encompassing all
of man’s relationship with nature. When the renders them all the more touching. Never does in his own act of prayer. Whether Kabwita is
tree falls, with Gras’s camera coiling around its the director pin Kabwita down to speak to the a regular churchgoer, or has simply stumbled
beautiful branches, we’re at once triumphant camera about who he is or how he feels. We into an environment that speaks directly to his
for the indefatigable Kabwita and heartbroken gather what we can about him largely from the wearied mind, we’re not given to know; but the
for the dwindling remains of a forest now play of light and emotion across his determined film’s shift from poetic evocation of the practical
barely worthy of the name. Lovely, yearning features. Elsewhere – as when man, bike and into the spiritual realm is both startling and
cello refrains, composed and played for the film bundles trundle on through the pitch darkness, effective. Religious or not, we can’t help but share
by Gaspar Claus, remind us what other uses silhouetted against the light of nocturnal in Kabwita’s relief as he hands his worries over
humans have found for the bodies of trees. campfires – he’s unashamedly glamorised as a to his God. Like the opening sequence with the
Kabwita’s subsequent journey cross-country figure of myth, a young and beautiful Sisyphus. tree, the scene glories in the strange specialness
to sell his charcoal is played as a very low-key The parable-like quality of the film becomes of being human – of being an animal driven
road movie, reminiscent in its driven simplicity literal when Kabwita enters a church, there to to transform and conquer and mythologise
of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999). Where experience a lively sermon on the subject of what surrounds it, and then to plead for divine
Alvin Straight was played by an actor and adopted “the journey of the honest man”, and to engage help with all the resulting difficulties.
a lawnmower as his means of transport out of
ornery eccentricity, Kabwita is playing himself, Credits and Synopsis
and proceeds on foot because he has to. But Gras,
like Lynch, drip-feeds information to keep us
Produced by Performed by of Ciné+ and Canal+ This work has With the support In Colour
engaged with a story that is as much about one Nicolas Anthomé Gaspar Claus International benefited from Fonds of Procirep, Angoa, [1.78:1]
man’s private character, aspirations and regrets Written by Sound With the support of d’aide à l’innovation Région Île-de-France, Subtitles
Emmanuel Gras Manuel Vidal the Région Auvergne- audiovisuelle from the SCAM bursary
as it is about the global forces that influence Filmed by Rhône-Alpes, and the the Centre national Brouillon d’un rêve, Distributor
his destiny. We learn early on that Kabwita Emmanuel Gras ©Bathysphere Région Île-de-France du cinéma et de of the La culture Dogwoof
Editor Production In association with l’image animée avec la copie privée
can be touchy and sensitive as well as stoically Karen Benainous Companies Cinémage 10 With the participation project, the Sacem
productive; he whimpers and moans as his wife Original Music Bathysphere presents A film by of Région Auvergne- for the creation of
Composed and With the participation Emmanuel Gras Rhône-Alpes the original music
Lydie removes splinters from his feet, prompting
her to accuse him of exaggerating the pain. A documentary filmed in the Democratic Republic help him to rebuild his bundles. On the road, thieves
He is also, we go on to discover, an attached of the Congo. Kabwita, a young husband and father, attempt to extort money from him for allowing him to
and concerned parent: fretful about sourcing the cuts down a tree to turn into charcoal, which he pass; he bargains down their prices. He visits Lydie’s
right medicine for one of his children; unwilling will travel far and wide to sell. He hopes to use the sister, who is looking after his daughter Divine; he
proceeds to buy metal sheets for the roof of the house leaves a pair of shoes for the girl but declines to see
to even see another, who lives away from home, he is building for himself, his wife Lydie and their her, as the parting would be too painful. He barters
in case having to part from him again upsets her small children, one of whom is sick with persistent with customers in markets; everyone asks for big
too much. Acknowledgements of fatherhood as diarrhoea. With Lydie’s help, Kabwita prepares the discounts on his wares. He purchases medicine for
a complex emotional engagement, rather than charcoal. He ties it in enormous bundles on to his his child, and goes to see a merchant about buying
a duty or chore imposed on men by women, are bicycle and sets off. Along the way he meets and metal sheets, but they are far too expensive for him.
talks with other charcoal sellers. A bus strikes his He visits a church and listens to sermons about how
rare in any genre; the careful, unobtrusive manner
bicycle, knocking his load into the dirt, but the others an honest man proceeds through life. He prays.
in which Gras observes these revealing moments

68 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Phantom Thread
USA 2017
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Certificate 15 130m 23s

Reviewed by Adam Nayman

Control freaks abound in the
See Feature films of Paul Thomas Anderson:

REVIEWS
on page 20 takes one to know one, as the
saying goes. Phantom Thread’s
high-end fashion designer
Reynolds Woodcock, who custom-makes
dresses for royalty and hoi polloi in London
circa 1950s, is as much a model of obsessive-
compulsive mania as Daniel Plainview in There
Will Be Blood (2007); this master-dressmaker
works in softer and more pliant materials
than the wildcat oilman, but is similarly
uncompromising about his process and results.
In contrast to his much lauded, Oscar-winning
performance in Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t
shoot the works in Phantom Thread. In fact, in
what he has declared will be his final role, he
cedes the movie to his much less heralded co-star,
the Luxembourgeois actress Vicky Krieps. It’s a
gesture that is both in keeping with the script’s
tricky, point-of-view-shifting structure and
with Anderson’s own imaginative immersion
– after two decades of fixating on macho Last mannequin standing: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps
masochism – inside a female consciousness.
It’s a reversal that makes the director’s eighth Danvers; she’s there to keep the man of the house formal restraint. Acting for the first time as
feature his most ambitious and surprising. from succumbing to true romance.) It’s when his own cinematographer, Anderson opts for
In Inherent Vice (2014), Anderson worked Alma decides that she wants more, and Reynolds a trim efficiency of camera movement that’s
dutifully to Thomas Pynchon’s epic, novelistic begins to worry about what that intimacy is so much more refined than his brash 1990s
template and skilfully integrated his own going to do to his aura of aloof impenetrability, features that he could be a different filmmaker.
obsessions about damaged societal outsiders and that Phantom Thread begins to cultivate its At the same time, the cloistered, claustrophobic
the mythology of his native Los Angeles. Phantom devastatingly funny domestic subtexts. Not compositions and precise, intricate stitching
Thread, which is Anderson’s first movie set fully only does Krieps hold her own with Day-Lewis of Dylan Tichenor’s editing don’t delimit the
outside California, serves a different Master. in the scenes where Alma begins to impose her script’s expansive, suggestive ideas about
Its clear dramatic model is Alfred Hitchcock’s will on Reynolds, but she sustains Anderson’s creativity and co-dependency, nor do they
1940 adaptation of Rebecca, in which a nervous, precarious perspectival conceit, which is to constrain the interpretative spaciousness of a
untutored young woman is brought into the get inside the mindset of a (supposedly) great work that critiques the allure of surfaces without
confidence (and marriage bed) of a mysterious, artist’s muse (basically what Darren Aronofsky tarnishing its own. Phantom Thread’s apparent
fabulously prosperous older man only to find tried and failed to do last year in mother!). severity is a brilliant disguise that only really
herself dwarfed in his affections by the memory The tension between Anderson’s wicked sense unravels in retrospect: what’s underneath is a
of his departed first wife. PTA’s cinephile- of humour and his immaculate craftsmanship battle-of-the-sexes comedy that ruthlessly strips
prankster side finds expression in naming – the latter placed in even sharper relief by away layers of archetype and artifice to arrive
his Second Mrs de Winter stand-in Alma – a scenes depicting Reynolds’s own meticulous at its maker’s most nakedly happily-ever-after
possible salute to Hitchcock’s wife and editor process, legible but not underlined as an ending to date – a resolution whose casual
Alma Reville (and Hitchcock himself is paid allegory for filmmaking – is potent stuff. It’s insanity bypasses Hitchcock, makes a beeline
homage in the Day-Lewis character’s surname). made even more so by the relative sense of for Buñuel, and gets there in one piece.
The Rebecca figure, meanwhile, is not a dead
spouse but, in another plausibly Hitchcockian Credits and Synopsis
nod, the spectre/structuring absence of Reynolds’s
late mother, who did a number on her son to
Produced by Pictures presentation Dr Robert Hardy England, 1950. Fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock
the point that he’s become England’s suavest, JoAnne Sellar in association Harriet Sansom meets waitress Alma while visiting the country;
most seductive commitment-phobe. Dashing Paul Thomas with Perfect Harris
he takes her back to his cottage and uses her for
Anderson World Pictures Barbara Rose
and handsome when he goes out on the town Megan Ellison A JoAnne Sellar/ Lujza Richter measurements for a new dress. His sister Cyril arrives
and given to massive appetites – he meets Daniel Lupi Ghoulardi Film Princess Mona to help, and Alma observes the siblings’ intense,
Written by Company production Braganza perverse co-dependency; the older woman intimidates
Alma when she serves him a hilariously heavy Paul Thomas Executive Producers Julia Davis
her. Over time, Alma becomes Reynolds’s live-in
breakfast while working in a restaurant in the Anderson Adam Somner Lady Baltimore
Editing Peter Heslop girlfriend and fully integrates into his professional life.
countryside – Reynolds is a Bluebeard whose Dylan Tichenor Chelsea Barnard Dolby Digital Cyril warns her brother that she may be overstaying
manor is home not to the corpses of ex-wives Production Design In Colour her welcome. Alma alters Reynolds’s routine and,
but to a wealth of dresses, each measured Mark Tildesley [1.85:1] one night over dinner, he lashes out, criticising her
Music by/ Cast cooking and suggesting she leave. In retaliation,
to the contours of live-in lovers long since Orchestration by Daniel Day-Lewis Distributor
discarded as easily as their formal wear. Jonny Greenwood Reynolds Woodcock Universal Pictures Alma poisons him using mushrooms, which weaken
Production Vicky Krieps International him to the point that he needs her to care for him
At first, Alma feels like an outsider in the Sound Mixer Alma UK & Eire (during the night, he hallucinates a vision of his late
House of Woodcock (go on, read that sentence Adrian Bell Lesley Manville
mother, wearing a wedding dress). After recovering,
Costume Design Cyril Woodcock The film has no
and try to deny that this is a comedy). But she Mark Bridges Camilla Rutherford credit for Director he proposes marriage, and they are happy for a time,
soon grows cosy in her role as Reynolds’s prize Johanna of Photography. until mutual resentments resurface. One morning,
mannequin, assuming pride of place in the ©Phantom Jane Perry Alma makes Reynolds an omelette with the poisoned
Thread, LLC Mrs Vaughan mushrooms, and he eats it, seemingly aware of her
household and unnerving Reynolds’s older sister Production Gina McKee
Companies Countess Henrietta plot; he understands that he needs to be controlled
Cyril, played by Lesley Manville. (In the Rebecca- and cared for, while she accepts a hybrid role as
A Focus Features Harding
esque schema of the script, Cyril is an update and Annapurna Brian Gleeson wife, mother and muse to an impossible man.
of the sinister, manipulative housekeeper Mrs

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 69

 The Post
USA/India 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Certificate 12A 115m 47s

Reviewed by Adam Nayman

In the HBO documentary
See Feature Spielberg (2017), the filmmaker
REVIEWS

on page 42 talks about writing stories

with the lens of his camera.
The visual style of The Post
is that of a veteran pounding out something
on deadline. The story goes that Spielberg
pushed back production on two other features
– including the massively budgeted Ready
Player One – in order to get the film into US
cinemas for December, and there’s no denying
the timeliness of the material. Watching the
Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham
(Meryl Streep) agonise over the personal,
institutional and ethical implications of printing
top-secret government documents – which
means risking her newspaper’s already failing
financial health and incurring the wrath of
the Nixon White House – can’t help but be
compelling in the context of its own historical
moment, the early 70s, to say nothing of a present
tense where ‘fake news’ is alternately a baseless
accusation and an alt-journalistic imperative.
If anything, though, the film’s snugness (and,
arguably, smugness) as a Trump-era allegory Paper chase: Meryl Streep
is also part of what’s wrong with it. Whatever
its various satisfactions as a righteous, all-star her courage, so that each fine-grained gesture moment featuring swelling music and smiling
Hollywood entertainment – the sort of movie and expression is almost beside the point. reaction shots – The Post makes its audience feel
that wins Oscars, and all that implies – its flaws The overall goal of The Post – beyond a good without working through the ways that
are myriad. For one thing, Spielberg’s timing deceptively light quality of entertainment, America’s print media has become compromised
feels off in trying to replicate the pace and which it more or less delivers, especially when and even complicit in wide-scale obfuscation
urgency of a historically contemporaneous excellent character actors like Tracy Letts and in the ensuing decades. That would be a tricky,
drama such as All the President’s Men (1976). Bradley Whitford are given space to do their troubling subject. What’s going on in The Post
Here, when the camera isn’t hurtling showily thing – appears to be peddling reassurance about can at best be viewed as whistling optimistically
through hallways, it’s plunked down so that both the importance and continued viability of in the dark, and at worst as the sort of gently
Streep and Tom Hanks – playing the paper’s a free press. If the first point is so self-evidently reactionary nostalgia that hangs over a lot of
editor, Ben Bradlee, who was impersonated to true as to be redundant (it’s difficult to imagine Spielberg’s work (including Bridge of Spies).
Oscar-winning perfection by Jason Robards in what a movie arguing otherwise would even And then there’s the matter of the very
Alan Pakula’s classic – can talk at each other and look like), the second is a bit hard to swallow in final scenes, which are embarrassing in
the audience about the gravity of their decisions. such sugar-coated fashion. By turning Graham the way they simultaneously flatter and
It’s not that the seriousness of the subject- and company’s eventual Supreme Court victory insult the viewer’s intelligence and sense
matter is up for debate, or even that Spielberg over (faceless) agents of government censure of history. It’s the sort of broad, nudging
and his collaborators don’t have their hearts into a crowd-pleasing climax – a ‘we did it!’ reference you’d expect from Forrest Gump.
in it. But it’s disappointing that a director who
doesn’t just write with his camera but, at his Credits and Synopsis
best, paints vivid, detailed canvases, has arrived
at something bland and impersonal. The Post
Produced by Music by/Music Production Spielberg film Tom Hanks Carrie Coon
lacks the noir-ish shadows and serrated wit of the Amy Pascal Conducted by Companies Logos: Participant Ben Bradlee Meg Greenfield
director’s 2015 Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies Steven Spielberg John Williams DreamWorks Pictures, Media, Amblin Sarah Paulson Jesse Plemons
Kristie Macosko Production Twentieth Century Partners Tony Bradlee Roger Clark
(which used Hanks far better), and its focus on Krieger Sound Mixer Fox and Reliance Executive Producers Bob Odenkirk David Cross
process – how a lead becomes a story and is then Written by Drew Kunin Entertainment Tim White Ben Bagdikian Howard Simons
Liz Hannah Costume Designer present in Trevor White Tracy Letts Zach Woods
transformed into a physical, printed newspaper Josh Singer Ann Roth association with Adam Somner Fritz Beebe Anthony Essaye
– doesn’t hum in the same way it did in Lincoln Director of TSG Entertainment Tom Karnowski Bradley Whitford
Photography ©Twentieth Century An Amblin Josh Singer Arthur Parsons In Colour
(2012), where the depiction of backroom political Janusz Kaminski Fox Film Corporation, Entertainment/ Bruce Greenwood [1.85:1]
manoeuvring was electric and exciting. Film Editors Storyteller Pascal Pictures Robert McNamara
While Lincoln was clearly designed to Michael Kahn Distribution Co. and Star Thrower Cast Matthew Rhys Distributor
Sarah Broshar LLC and TSG Entertainment Meryl Streep Daniel Ellsberg E1 Films
function as a re-election commercial of sorts Production Designer Entertainment production Katharine Alison Brie
for Barack Obama, The Post plays – perhaps Rick Carter Finance LLC A Steven Graham, ‘Kay’ Lally Graham
unintentionally, but no less potently – as a Washington, 1971. After agreeing, against the advice of will have legal and financial consequences for the
fantasy of a Hillary Clinton administration. some of her board members, to make the ‘Washington paper and its staff. As pressure mounts from all
Streep’s poised, presidential performance is Post’ into a public stock offering, publisher Katharine sides – from her concerned advisers, from Bradlee
an act of wish-fulfilment, lending measures Graham is confronted with a crisis. Her editor-in-chief and his staff, and from the White House of President
of empathy and wisdom to each one of Ben Bradlee is determined to locate and publish a Richard Nixon – Graham finds the courage to give
series of classified documents about the US’s role in the story the go-ahead. She and her staff then
Graham’s vertiginously difficult decisions on the Vietnam War. Despite her friendship with secretary wait anxiously for the outcome of a series of court
the night the Post is meant to go to press with of state Robert McNamara (who commissioned the decisions. The freedom of the press is finally upheld
excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, exposing study, which has been smuggled out of a government by the Supreme Court and the ‘Post’ is vindicated.
government attempts to mislead the public office by idealistic whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg), The film ends by flashing forward to the Watergate
about the Vietnam War. She’s impeccable, but Graham recognises the importance of the story. break-in, which will also be reported by the ‘Post’,
However, she is worried that publishing the material eventually bringing down Nixon’s presidency.
the script keeps prosaically reminding us of

70 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Renegades Rey
France/Germany/Belgium 2016 France/Chile/The Netherlands/
Director: Steve Quale Germany/Italy/Qatar 2017
Certificate 12A 105m 11s Director: Niles Atallah, Certificate 12A 90m 20s

Reviewed by Trevor Johnston Reviewed by Hannah McGill

Whether the setting is WWII or the aftermath The obscure tale of French lawyer and explorer
of the Gulf War, the likes of Brian G. Hutton’s Orllie-Antoine de Tounens becomes a torrid

REVIEWS
1970 programme-filler Kelly’s Heroes and David O. tangle of conflicting accounts, related via a range
Russell’s 1999 highlight Three Kings have already of elaborately anti-naturalistic approaches,
made the prospect of nabbing your enemy’s in this 2017 Rotterdam competition selection
looted spoils an enticing one. Where both those (it took the Special Jury Prize). “Who do you
antecedents displayed a certain mischief in the think you are?” de Tounens (Rodrigo Lisboa) is
telling, revolving around American protagonists repeatedly asked by his local guide, Juan Bautista
with not-exactly-noble motivations, this Luc Rosales (Claudio Riveros). The answer is that
Besson-produced offering puts a charitable spin de Tounens thinks he is the rightful king of the
on events by turning its snaffled Nazi gold into Mapuche people of Patagonia and Araucanía.
the prospect of humanitarian aid for beleaguered To the Chilean authorities, however, he’s a
Bosnia during the 1990s Balkan conflict. Hence French agent provocateur seeking to inflame
its action-man crew of US Navy Seals get to shoot their ongoing conflict with the Mapuche. And
guns, pilot copters, take out Bosnian Serb heavies to the Mapuche themselves? They’re reserving
and dive for the stolen bullion at the bottom of judgement, since the elder who is supposed to
a lake – but their activities take place under the Stealth freaks: Sylvia Hoeks have handed Tounens his mandate has died.
auspices of a Nato-led peacekeeping force. Given It’s perhaps not surprising that cinema, a
that this is the era of Srebrenica, hardly a shining nod here, and together with director Steven Quale medium highly reliant on pioneering egotists and
hour for UN-sponsored intervention, perhaps (a long-time associate of James Cameron, going acts of cultural appropriation, retains a fascination
the humanitarian angle is understandable. back to The Abyss and Titanic) they conjure up with explorers and colonial pioneers. From The
What’s rather less believable is the key plot some arresting images, such as the divers entering Holy Mountain (1973), Aguirre, the Wrath of God
component involving the destruction of a huge a sunken church, torchlight beams glancing off (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), to Apocalypse Now
dam by Yugoslav partisans during WWII, which the stained-glass windows in the watery depths. (1979), The Mission (1986) and The New World
left the town where Nazi forces stashed their Clearly a lot of effort has gone into this, (2005), filmmakers have sought to highlight the
stolen French gold and massacred the locals under yet it’s all in service of a project whose bland moral ambiguity of adventures abroad, while
a newly formed lake. Yet only the granddaughter characterisation and forgettable cast suggest revelling in the mad grandeur of the ideas and
of a child escapee from the slaughter now knows a script that went before the cameras several personalities involved. More recently, Ciro
what’s under the water. Did nobody else ever polishes short of the finished article. It’s hard Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) chose to
notice the missing village or the burst dam, or to get terribly worked up about the exploits of privilege the indigenous side of such an encounter.
think about recovering the victims’ bodies? the film’s quintet of adventurers when there The story told in Rey is a blank canvas for
The screenplay, by Besson and Richard Wenk, is only the most rudimentary differentiation ideas about colonialism. Given the scarcity
simply thrusts on regardless, clearly keen to get between them; when they have their diving of real-world facts about de Tounens and his
to the business of locating and retrieving the gold gear on for the grand finale, it’s hard to tell plan, he may be regarded as a colonial exploiter
from the depths, here visualised with old-school who anyone is anyway. Thank goodness in the asserting a dubious claim in pursuit of profit,
craftsmanship that involved building an entire circumstances for the ever reliable J.K. Simmons or as a positive force against the mistreatment
village in a studio tank in Malta, then flooding as their martinet commander, who brings more of the Mapuche by the Argentine and Chilean
it so that these sequences could done for real, authority and comic timing to his role than it governments; as the tool of larger foreign powers
in camera, rather than falling back entirely on probably deserves, but at least injects some zing that the Chilean authorities believe him to be, or
CGI. Production designer Hugues Tissandier and into the movie. Elsewhere, an honest B-picture as the less interesting figure in a story that’s really
underwater DP Pete Romano certainly deserve a plod is about the best you can say of it. about the moral decisions taken by Rosales. The
film does play with those variable interpretations
Credits and Synopsis – sometimes signalling them with cartoonish
directness, as when the mutually mistrustful de
Produced by Stunt Supervisor Programme of the Paris, 1944. German soldiers raid gold deposits
Tounens and Rosales shoot each other suspicious
Luc Besson François Doge European Union from the Banque de France, and a convoy drives side-eyes across a campfire – but for the most
Raphael Benoliel ©EuropaCorp -
Written by Studio Babelsberg to Yugoslavia to hide the booty there. part it’s less concerned with political whys
Richard Wenk Production Cast In 1995, as war rages in Bosnia, US Navy Seals, part and wherefores than with the murky, mutable
Luc Besson Companies Sullivan Stapleton of the Nato-led peacekeeping mission, mount a covert
Directors of EuropaCorp presents Matt Barnes
notions of place and power that underpin it all.
operation to kidnap a Bosnian Serb general, making a
Photography a EuropaCorp, Charlie Bewley Highly theatrical courtroom scenes, in
Brian Pearson Studio Babelsberg Stanton Baker daring escape in a stolen tank and causing considerable
Underwater: production Sylvia Hoeks collateral damage. US admiral Levin admonishes the which the actors wear masks of papier-mâché,
Pete Romano With the participation Lara Simic five-man team, and orders them to take a break from emphasise the stylised, ritual nature of
Editor of Canal +, OCS Joshua Henry
Florent Vassault and C8 Ben Moran
duty. Chief petty officer Barnes and his comrades find officialdom and the arbitrariness of officially
Production Designer A Steve Quale film Diarmaid Murtagh a purpose of their own, however, when local bar owner sanctioned positions, rights and borders. The
Hugues Tissandier Produced with the Kurt Duffy Lara, girlfriend of team member Stanton, asks them to prosecutors pass to the jury de Tounens’s
Original Music support of Deutscher Dimitri Leonidas help her retrieve the French gold from a nearby lake. As
Composed, Filmförderfonds, Jack Porter
a boy, Lara’s grandfather was the only one to escape
sketched-out bill of rights for his new kingdom,
Arranged and FFF Bayern, Clemens Schick
Produced by/ Medienboard Berlin- Petrovic when Nazi forces massacred everyone else in the signed by French officials Lachaise and
Conducted by/ Brandenburg, FFA Ewen Bremner village, before partisans blew up the neighbouring dam Desfontaines. But does the document bear the
Guitars/Electric - Filmförderungsan- Lance Corporal to drown the Germans in revenge. She now wants to
Bass/Tamburica/ stalt, Filmförderung Jim Rainey
stamp of authority that would transform it from
Melodica/ Baden-Württemberg J.K. Simmons
use the proceeds to set up a humanitarian foundation. words on paper to a mandate to reign? Come to
Percussions/ With the support Levin Barnes’s men draw up plans to locate and refloat
that, do Lachaise and Desfontaines even exist? As
Keyboards/ of the Belgian Tax the bullion, using ‘borrowed’ US equipment and
Programming Shelter system of Dolby Atmos helicopter support. However, Bosnian Serb forces de Tounens describes bringing the Frenchmen
Eric Serra the Belgian Federal In Colour with him to Araucanía, the footage that we see
Sound Government via [2.35:1]
have been trailing them, and drop explosives into
Patrick Veigel Belga Films Fund Part-subtitled the lake just as the Seals are reaching the surface unspooling is of him traversing the forests alone.
Guillaume A EuropaCorp, Studio with the spoils. Levin, who has discovered their plan, Perhaps, after all, he is just insane. But if he is,
Bouchateau Babelsberg and Distributor sends a helicopter gunship to their rescue, killing the
Didier Lozahic Belga Productions Signature his insanity is mirrored by that of a bureaucracy
Matthieu Dallaporta co-production Entertainment Bosnian Serbs. He announces a high-profile return of
Developed with the the gold to France – but has diverted half of the funds
that has become madder the further it has
Costume Designer
Esther Walz support of the MEDIA to Lara’s new foundation to help rebuild her country. separated itself from the very land and
people over which it seeks dominion.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 71

 Roman J. Israel, Esq.
USA/Canada/People’s Republic of China/United Arab Emirates 2017
Director: Dan Gilroy
Certificate 12A 122m 9s

The film finds its only calm in the Reviewed by Jason Anderson
company of the Mapuche people An honourable if often bewildering attempt to
themselves, who call things as they see them revive the outmoded forms of the high-minded
REVIEWS

and are unconcerned with status. Indeed, Hollywood legal drama and the Sidney Lumet-
it’s hard not to share their slight weariness style character study, Roman J. Israel, Esq is full
with the melodrama pitched into their midst of peculiar elements, the most peculiar being its
by this earnest, delusional Don Quixote. title character. Until the slick mid-film makeover
The liberal deployment of degraded and that may be the most stupefying development
damaged film stock and crackly sound, in Dan Gilroy’s uncharacteristically erratic
meanwhile, presumably seeks to affirm the screenplay, he’s presented as a man who checked
idea of unreliable memory and ephemeral out of American society in 1975, judging by his
human concerns, though the fact that such unflattering Afro, his baggy burgundy suit and
effects are so favoured by experimental the steady stream of vintage jazz, funk and soul
filmmakers renders them something of a on his fuzzy orange headphones. Played by any Roman in the gloamin’: Ejogo, Washington
cliché, however lovingly they’re applied. actor who wasn’t of Denzel Washington’s calibre,
Roman most likely would’ve remained a series they deserve. But then Gilroy’s ambitions are
Credits and Synopsis of stereotypical markers of neuro-difference stymied by Roman’s mystifying bid to chuck
(“He’s a bit of a savant,” says someone, in case his ideals and live the high life, and by the
viewers hadn’t noticed) and musty cultural subsequent pile-up of clumsy contrivances.
Produced by d’Amiens, Hubert Black & White
Lucie Kalmar Bals Fund, Corfo, [1.85:1] reference points. But as he’s done so often before, Worse yet, all of these events are supposed to
Screenplay EAVE Puentes, Subtitles Washington gives such texture and depth to his take place within a thoroughly implausible
Niles Atallah Binger Filmlab
Director of With the Distributor character that he’s very nearly able to mask the three-week timespan – which may explain
Photography participation of HOME Artist Film incoherence of the movie that surrounds him. Colin Farrell’s occasional inability to disguise
Benjamin Aide aux Cinémas
Echazarreta du Monde, Centre English subtitles title
The second directorial effort by screenwriter his confusion as his own character makes a
Editor National du Cinéma King Dan Gilroy after Nightcrawler (2014), the film rapid-fire transformation from Gordon Gekko-
Benjamin Mirguet et de l’Image
Art Director Animée, Ministère
shares its predecessor’s aspirations to be the style sharpie to newly idealistic crusader.
Natalia Geisse des Affaires kind of modern-day morality play that was Though some of these problems were
Original Music étrangères et du Lumet’s speciality and was once not so rare on possibly exacerbated by the decision to cut
Sebastián Jatz Développement
Rawicz international, studio release slates. Whereas the earlier hit 12 minutes and reorder scenes following the
Sound Recordists Institut Français strongly evoked Network (1976), with its tale of original version’s poor reception at Toronto in
Claudio Vargas Supported by
Peter Rosenthal TorinoFilmLab - a sociopathic cameraman who was uniquely September, they’re also indicative of a structure
Production Award attuned to TV viewers’ appetites for true-life that’s surprisingly rickety for a writer of Gilroy’s
©Mômerade, Diluvio, and Audience
Circe Films, unafilm Design Fund
carnage, here the model seems to be The Verdict ability. Just as disappointing – especially given
Production With the support (1982). Like Lumet’s star vehicle for Paul Newman, all the trappings as an old-school social-issue
Companies of the Creative
A production of Europe-MEDIA
Gilroy’s collaboration with Washington (which drama – is the short shrift the film gives its
Mômerade, Diluvio in Programme of the the actor executive-produced) uses the lowest ostensible subjects: the legacy of the civil
co-production with European Union rungs of a badly flawed legal system as the context rights movement in the post-Obama present
Circe Films, unafilm, Recipient of
EYE Filmmuseum, post-production for the smaller story of a man caught in an ethical and the corrosive effects of a plea-bargaining
Kiné-Imágenes, grant from Doha crisis he has largely engineered for himself. system that Roman assails as “butchery”.
Sonamos Film Institute
With the support of Produced by For much of the film, the plan goes exceedingly Nevertheless, it’s almost worth enduring
Aide aux Cinémas Mômerade, Diluvio well, even if some of the more promising tangents the movie’s many missteps just to watch
du Monde - Centre Co-produced by
National du Cinéma Circe Films, unafilm,
– such as Roman’s inability to understand what Washington makes of its most minor
et de l’Image EYE Filmmuseum, how African-American activism has changed moments – such as when Roman grumbles
Animée, Ministère Kiné-Imágenes,
des Affaires Sonamos
during the decades he has spent working in his about the metal detector that causes a Gil Scott-
étrangères et du Executive law firm’s back room – get less attention than Heron album to disappear from his iPod.
Développement Producers
international, Catalina Vergara
Institut Français, Niles Atallah Credits and Synopsis
Netherlands Film
Fund + Hubert
Bals, Film- und Cast
Medienstiftung Rodrigo Lisboa Produced by and IN Splitter, L.P. Cast Los Angeles, present day. Roman J. Israel is a defence
NRW, TorinoFilmLab, Orllie-Antoine Jennifer Fox Production Denzel Washington attorney with a prodigious memory but limited personal
Doha Film Institute de Tounens Todd Black Companies Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Denzel Washington A Columbia Pictures skills. When his partner and mentor dies of a heart
Development Claudio Riveros Colin Farrell
Written by presentation George Pierce
attack, Roman discovers that their firm is in debt.
supported by Juan Bautista
Fonds d’aide au Rosales Dan Gilroy in association with Carmen Ejogo Looking for a new job, he meets civil-rights activist
développement du Director of Macro Media, Topic Maya Alston Maya, who is intrigued by his idealism. He also attracts
Photography Studios, Cross Linda Gravatt
scenario du Festival In Colour and the interest of successful criminal lawyer George
Robert Elswit Creek Pictures, Vernita Wells
Edited by Bron Creative, The Pierce; he agrees to work for George, but remains
Amanda Warren
Chile, 1858. French lawyer Orllie-Antoine de Tounens John Gilroy Culture China - Image Lynn Jackson focused on his plans for a class action suit that will
believes that he is the chosen king of the Mapuche Production Designer Nation Abu Dhabi Hugo Armstrong reform the plea-bargain system. George assigns Roman
people of Patagonia and Araucanía, and must Kevin Kavanaugh Content Fund Fritz Molinar to the case of a teenager being tried as an accomplice
Music A Jennifer Fox/Escape Sam Gilroy
unite them against their Chilean and Argentine James Newton Artists production in the murder of a convenience store clerk. Hoping to
Connor Novick
oppressors. However, the Mapuche leader with Howard Executive Producers Tony Plana
make a deal, the young man tells George the killer’s
whom he claims to have agreed this has died, and Supervising Derek Dauchy Jessie Salinas location, but is then murdered in prison. Betraying
the tribespeople are not convinced by his claims. Sound Editor Ben Ross DeRon Horton his own code of ethics, Roman secretly divulges the
Margit Pfeiffer Aaron L. Gilbert Derrell Ellerbee
De Tounens’s local guide, Rosales, betrays him to Costume Designer
killer’s whereabouts in order to collect a $100,000
Alex Lebovici Amari Cheatom
the Chilean authorities, who believe him to be a spy Francine Jamison- Steve Ponce reward from the clerk’s relatives. Maya pursues Roman
Carter Johnson
for France. In court, the prosecution picks holes in Tanchuck Michael Bloom romantically but is confused by his newly lavish
de Tounens’s story, and Rosales portrays him as a Adam Pincus Dolby Digital lifestyle. The killer, now in prison, threatens Roman,
violent revolutionary. De Tounens continues to insist ©Columbia Pictures Charles D. King In Colour telling him he knows about the reward. Roman is
Industries, Inc., Kim Roth [1.85:1]
that he has a right to the lands, complaining that CCP Inner City Film Poppy Hanks murdered in the street by an associate of the killer.
none of his ‘subjects’ has been called to testify. He Holdings, LLC, Macro Betsy Danbury Distributor
The final scenes reveal that Roman returned
is sentenced to exile, with execution if he returns Content Fund I, LLC, Brian Oliver Sony Pictures the money before he died, and that George will
to Chile. De Tounens dies in France in 1878. Bron Creative Corp. Releasing UK continue his work by filing the class action suit.

72 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Song of Granite
Ireland/Canada 2017
Director: Pat Collins

Reviewed by Ben Nicholson

Much of Pat Collins’s career,
See Rushes both in his documentary output

REVIEWS
page 8 and 2012’s fiction debut Silence,
has been devoted to portraying
the palimpsest of myth,
history and landscape that is his native Ireland.
These interests coalesce into perhaps their most
dynamic and resonant form yet in his new film
Song of Granite, an ostensible biopic of sean-nós
singer Joe Heaney, whom he paints into folkloric
tradition with a vacillating arrangement of fiction
and documentary. Along with the influence of his
own prior practice, Collins has taken inspiration
from cinéma vérité and the ethnographic work of
Robert Flaherty, in particular his 1934 study of
survival off the west coast of Ireland, Man of Aran.
The introductory text to Man of Aran states
that the fight for existence and independence is
“a fight from which [the man] will have no respite
until the end of his indomitable days”. This could
well be a description of Collins’s fictionalised
version of Heaney, who becomes a symbol of the
various elements of Irish identity that fascinate the
director, not least the salt-of-the-earth everyman
and peripatetic labourer. There are a number
of scenes that could almost have been snipped
directly from Man of Aran – the whole of Song of
Granite is shot in crisp, textured monochrome
– particularly those detailing Joe’s childhood in Folk hero: Macdara Ó Fátharta
Connemara around 1930. A later one sees the
adult Joe (at this point played by singer Mícheál rather to create an impression of the man through concert, like when archival footage shows the
O Confhaola) at ease while building a dry stone discrete but related moments from his life. real Joe as a lauded performer in America while
wall in the rugged Irish countryside. It’s a brief They act like the individual stories about a great O Confhaola is seen evoking Murnau’s The Last
aside, a character grace note, which carries great hero that conflict and entangle to form a single Laugh as a downtrodden doorman in a hotel.
pathos after Joe’s migration to Glasgow for dock complex vision, or like keys played together as A third actor, Macdara O Fátharta, plays
work, with documentary audio from the real Joe’s the chords in an elegiac hymn. The same effect is Joe in his later years, when he worries about
son describing his father’s prolonged absences. gleaned from the fluid definition of ‘biopic’ that dying in a foreign land and when his legacy
“You always had your eye on the horizon,” a friend Collins adopts, allowing him to shift from fiction is on his mind. It creates the impression of
reminds him, but Joe feels cursed to wander, like to documentary to supposition with complete Song of Granite as a lament for Joe, another
Mad Sweeney of Celtic legend. He never feels freedom. A consistency of deeper truth allows song passed down to be sung of the heroes
more at peace than when fleetingly rooted in his for moments that should be jarring to work in of yore, now returned to the land.
own soil, either literally or when in communion
with the ghosts of his home through song. Credits and Synopsis
“I suppose they go way back to the poets who
wrote them long ago,” a young Joe (Colm Seoighe) Produced by Inc., Harvest Films Ltd Cast A portrait of Irish folk singer Joe Heaney (1919-84),
speculates about the unaccompanied ballads that Alan Maher Production Mícheál Ó Confhaola combining drama, documentary footage and music.
his father has bequeathed to him, “but we still Jessie Fisk Companies Joe in his 40s
Martin Paul-Hus A Marcie Films,
Ireland, c1930. Joseph Heaney is a quiet boy living
Macdara Ó Fátharta
sing them.” They take on a spiritual dimension Producer Amerique Film Joe in his 60s
in a Connemara village with his parents. A series of
in the hands of Collins, who emphasises their Pat Collins production with Jaren Cerf vignettes describe his adolescent life: cutting up
Written by Harvest Films, South Rosie potatoes for farming; fishing for lobsters at night;
importance within both the local village Pat Collins Wind Blows, Roads Pól Ó Ceannabháin dancing a jig on the shore; learning about the Bible in
community where Joe grows up and within the Eoghan Mac Entertainment Pádraig Ó hÉanaí
the local schoolhouse. Throughout all this runs a rich
Giolla Bhírde In association with Kate Nic
immigrant communities that he later joins. A Sharon Whooley Bord Scannán na vein of traditional folk songs, which Joe learns from his
Chonaonaigh
night of songs in a Glasgow pub ends with a spine- Director of hÉireann/Irish Film Máirie father. The boy’s shyness stops him singing in public,
Photography Board, Broadcasting
tingling solo from O Confhaola that conveys, in Richard Kendrick Authority of Ireland,
Peadar Cox though he performs reluctantly to his classmates.
Darach Decades later, in the 1950s and 1960s, an adult
an unbroken take, the beguiling power of sean- Editor TG4 and with the Griogair Labhruidh
Tadhg O’Sullivan financial participation Joe is working in Glasgow’s shipyards. He wanders
nós singing, regardless of the words being sung. Griogair
Production of Société de Lisa O’Neill the streets drunk with a co-worker; he watches
It’s like a voice from the old country reaching Designers Développement Damien Dempsey his children play from a window, before leaving
through time and space, and makes for one of Pádraig O’Neill des Enterprises singers in Dublin pub the kitchen without a word to his wife. A night of
David Blanchard Culturelles - Québec, Colm Seoighe
the most haunting scenes in recent memory. Composers Téléfilm Canada young Joe
singing with other Irish workers in a pub leads
Collins’s take on Joe ties him to the land in a Delphine Measroch A film by Pat Collins to Joe performing to a rapt crowd. Interspersed
timeless way, as when “the mountains stretched Guido Del Fabbro Developed with In Black & White with these scenes is documentary footage of Irish
Sound the support of [1.85:1] migrant labourers, and also audio of Heaney’s
into the sky”. He is, as a result, equated with the John Brennan Bord Scannán na Part-subtitled children candidly recalling their father’s absences.
Sylvain Bellemare hÉireann/Irish
characters of Irish legend, the types who would Bernard Gariépy Film Board Joe eventually embarks on a voyage to North
Distributor
inhabit such songs: Finn MacCool, Mad Sweeney Strobl Executive Producers Thunderbird America, where he works as a doorman and seems
and Heaney himself He’s as complicated as those Costume Designers Philip King Releasing to long for home. In the years preceding his death
Louise Stanton Tina Moran
famed characters too: “Sometimes I don’t know,” Joe worries about his legacy, and records songs for
Nicole Pelletier Keith Potter
posterity. Archival footage shows him performing
he confesses, “if I’m the warrior or the beast.”
©Marcie Films Ltd, in Rhode Island in 1966, before the film returns to
This mythic quality is reinforced by the 9338-0415 Québec Ireland, where Joe meets his younger self by a river.
decision not to follow a single linear narrative, but

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 73

 Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi
USA 2017
Director: Rian Johnson
Certificate 12A 151m 38s

Reviewed by Kim Newman

Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
In his 1980 parody song ‘Yoda’ (to the tune
REVIEWS

of The Kinks’ ‘Lola’), Weird Al Yankovic

imagines the plight of Mark Hamill/Luke
Skywalker circa The Empire Strikes Back: “The
long-term contract that I had to sign says I’ll
be making these movies till the end of time.”
The viewpoint character of George Lucas’s
original Star Wars trilogy, Hamill’s Luke suffered
somewhat – upstaged by his cooler friends
and relations, removed from the happy ending
allotted to Princess Leia (Luke’s putative love
interest, until she turned out to be his sister) and
Han Solo, and shunted off to be the equivalent
of a hermit monk while the rest of the galaxy far,
far away got on with business. While Harrison
Ford became a major movie star/grouch icon
and Carrie Fisher a notable writer/wit, Hamill
was wandering through low-rent stuff like The
Guyver (1991), Time Runner (1993) and the remake
of Village of the Damned (1995), doing his most
impassioned work as the demented voice of the
Joker on various animated Batman projects.
For Hamill and Luke, Rian Johnson’s entry in
the long-running series (given the pastiche of
chapter-play format, it should perhaps be labelled Let there be lightsabres: Daisy Ridley
a serial) is a belated opportunity to get their due.
Glimpsed at the end of J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars The salty white topsoil churns to reveal blood-red a ribbing administered long ago and far away
Force Awakens (2015), Hamill finally dominates a dirt as men and machines scramble against in the first and best of the Star Wars parodies,
Star Wars film as a grizzled, regretful presence – a each other. Johnson, unlike Abrams or Gareth Ernie Fosselius’s short Hardware Wars (1978).
former apprentice turned master, contemplating Edwards in the 2016 flashback entry Rogue One, At one point, Johnson – probably the best
his many failures yet returning with the grey leavens political high seriousness and fan-service director to sign up for the franchise and certainly
gone from his beard for a climax in which he tear-jerking with enough charm and humour the best writer-director – has droid R2D2 spur
stands up to a ridiculously overwhelming attack to prevent The Last Jedi becoming the biggest on a disconsolate Luke by replaying the ‘you’re
(“Fire every gun we have at that man,” snarls downer ever delivered at Christmas by the Walt my only hope’ holo-message from Leia that
his nephew-nemesis) and departs mysteriously. Disney Company. Star Wars has a poor track kicked off the whole saga in Star Wars. It’s an
The previous instalment was a last hurrah for record with cuteness and comedy – no one is achievement that this particular tale of defeat
Ford in this universe – though Han Solo is due clamouring for the return of the Ewoks or Jar Jar and death – by the end of the film, the entire
back in a prequel next year – but this is all about – but the guinea pig/penguin/puffin-like Porgs, rebel alliance can fit in one small spaceship – can
Hamill, with a side reverence for the genuinely natives of Skywalker’s island retreat, infest odd convincingly deliver its own spark of hope… an
departed Carrie Fisher (who cedes a little space corners of the film (and the Millennium Falcon) abused stable boy on a backwater world, head
to Laura Dern’s chic Vice Admiral Holdo). without becoming cloying. The neatest inside full of the tales of Luke Skywalker, plays with
It’s a valedictory entry, as obviously patterned joke has what seems to be a shot of a landing a broom as if it were a light sabre, and looks
on The Empire Strikes Back as The Force Awakens spaceship turn out to be a steam iron, paying back to the stars for adventure in a just cause.
was on Star Wars (1977), though Johnson plays
more tricks on long-term fans who think they Credits and Synopsis
can detect where character arcs are going. In
Empire, Luke and his master Yoda are separated
from the rest of the gang on a spiritual retreat/ Produced by ©Lucasfilm Ltd Maz Kanata A distant galaxy. The warships of the oppressive
Kathleen Kennedy Production Domnhall Gleeson First Order, commanded by General Hux, pursue the
training exercise; here, Daisy Ridley’s Rey nags Ram Bergman Company General Hux
Written by A Lucasfilm Ltd Anthony Daniels
fleet of the Resistance. Pilot Poe Dameron leads
the reluctant master to school her in the ways a costly mission to destroy the First Order’s most
Rian Johnson production C-3PO
of the Force, while a large cast of old and new Based on characters Executive Producers Gwendoline Christie formidable ship, but is demoted by Admiral Leia
friends and enemies struggle through their created by J.J. Abrams Captain Phasma for disobeying orders. Rey – a young woman with
George Lucas Tom Karnowski Kelly Marie Tran
own subplots and a great many awe-inspiring potentially great supernatural powers – has tracked
Director of Jason McGatlin Rose Tico
explosions. Like Empire, this chronicles a Photography Laura Dern down Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi Knights. She
Steve Yedlin Vice Admiral tries to convince him to rally to the Resistance, but
disastrous period for the Resistance – a term, Film Editor Cast Amilyn Holdo he has been disillusioned since his nephew/disciple
incidentally, taken from The Force Awakens and Bob Ducsay Mark Hamill Frank Oz Ben Solo turned against him and swore allegiance to
Production Designer Luke Skywalker Yoda
embraced by real-world critics of President Rick Heinrichs Carrie Fisher Benicio del Toro
Supreme Leader Snoke of the First Order. Finn, a former
Trump – because penultimate episodes must Music General Leia Organa DJ stormtrooper, and Rose Tico, a recently bereaved
take us to the brink of disaster before a valiant John Williams Adam Driver Resistance worker, recruit rogue DJ to disable a device
Production Ben Solo, ‘Kylo Ren’ Dolby Atmos on Snoke’s flagship, which the First Order are using to
rally in the final chapter. All the heroes’ plans Sound Mixer Daisy Ridley In Colour
track the Resistance fleet, but DJ betrays them. Rey
fail – which means John Boyega and new face Stuart Wilson Rey [2.35:1]
still believes Solo, who has taken the name Kylo Ren,
Costume Designer John Boyega
Kelly Marie Tran spend most of the film haring Michael Kaplan Finn Some screenings is redeemable, and stands with him when he murders
down a plot cul-de-sac – and the cause of good Stunt Co-ordinator Oscar Isaac presented in 3D Snoke – only to be shocked when he takes command
Rob Inch Commander of the First Order. Leia’s forces take refuge on a barren
only avoids extermination by kamikaze gestures. Visual Effects Poe Dameron Distributor
There’s plenty of emotion and spectacle, & Animation Andy Serkis Buena Vista
planet and Ren (her son) leads an attack against
Idustrial Light Supreme Leader International (UK) them. Luke intervenes so that the surviving rebels can
with Adam Driver’s Ben Solo/Kylo Ren the & Magic Snoke escape in the ‘Millennium Falcon’, at the apparent cost
most complicated character in the entire saga, Lupita Nyong’o of his life. Luke’s example inspires others to resist.
and a terrific final skirmish on a planet whose

74 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

Tempestad
Mexico/The Netherlands/Canada 2016
Director: Tatiana Huezo

Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton

Mexican-Salvadorean documentary-maker
Tatiana Huezo’s Tempestad is a film of disparate

parts that leaves space for the viewer to find
the connections. This is true, firstly, of its two
parallel narrative strands. The great majority of
the movie’s dialogue is delivered in voiceover
monologue by two different women. The first
to be heard is Miriam Carbajal. Miriam is never
seen speaking on screen, and we never get a
definitive visual identification of her, though
we do glean certain facts from her narration:
that she is the mother of a young son, Leo; that
she had a leg amputated at some point earlier
in life; and that she was imprisoned at a Gulf
Cartel-run prison in Matamoros for human
trafficking, a crime she did not commit. Guilt or
lack thereof is in this case apparently a matter
of very little concern – Miriam describes being
told before her imprisonment that she will be
serving as one of the ‘pagadores’, a purely symbolic
conviction to make the police look proactive,
doing time for other people’s crimes. The second
voice, which comes with a kind, weathered
face behind it, appears nearly a third of the way
through the movie, and is that of Adela Alvarado,
a middle-aged woman who comes from a long
line of circus people, and who today operates
a small family circus. These two women take
turns guiding the movie, and as they do, one
is compelled to ask why, exactly, their stories
have been matched. Being narrative-minded
creatures, we might even anticipate an eventual
merging of these separate accounts – is Miriam
kin of Adela’s? Are they headed for a meeting?
An answer, of sorts, arrives in a scene that is a
rupture, the longest piece of onscreen dialogue in
the film, when Adela is seen dissolving into tears
during a convocation with female relatives. This
precedes her describing the kidnapping of her
daughter Monica, a university student believed
to have been sold into sex slavery or worse with
the full knowledge and connivance of the local
police. Here, then, is something like a connection
– not only are both women mothers separated
from their children by cruel circumstance, but
Miriam has gone to prison for human trafficking,
the illegal industry that has sucked Monica into
its nebulous depths. All that is missing – and this
is very much the point – are the actual culprits.
If the relationship between the testimonies of
Miriam and Adela clarifies somewhat with the
passage of time, that between the dialogue and
the imagery in Tempestad remains ambiguous. As
Miriam begins her monologue, there is an almost
descriptive quality to the accompanying scenes.
Her narration of leaving the prison, for example, is
matched to images looking out of an unidentified
crumbling structure through punctures in the
concrete walls; and when she describes going to
a bus terminal with the intention of travelling
back home across Mexico to reunite with her
son, we are obligingly given images of a terminal
and a bus driving through the countryside.
The bus, the ribbon of rugged road ahead and
the terrain that both women pass through will
remain constants, though as Miriam’s dialogue
turns to recounting her time inside the prison, the
relationship between speech and image changes,
suggesting loose visual analogy. Some pairings
Conviction politics: Miriam Carbajal
offer up ready readings – as Miriam begins to
describe witnessing the cavalier killing of a fellow
prisoner, for example, the accompanying image
is that of a labourer shovelling away dirt at the
shoulder of a road, as though digging a grave.
More generally, the purpose of the imagery in the
Miriam sections seems to be to build and sustain
an atmosphere of hovering, imminent threat.
Huezo has an eye for inclement, leaden skies, and
her film is fairly filled with footage of Mexican
federal police armed to the teeth, interrogating
travellers at roadside checkpoints, patrolling
the highways or just milling about menacingly.
If their presence is meant to be in some way
reassuring to the citizenry, the content of Miriam
and Adela’s narratives tells us that it shouldn’t be.
The police officers that Huezo chooses to show,
stocky in their black body armour and often
Credits and Synopsis
Producers Maupomé Film and Video, S. de
Nicolás Celis Tatiana Huezo R.L. de C.V. - Terminal
Sebastián Celis Original Music Films, S.A. de C.V.
Screenplay Leonardo Heiblum Production
Tatiana Huezo Jacobo Lieberman Companies
Director of Sound Designer Pimienta Films
Photography Lena Esquenazi presents in
Ernesto Pardo co-production
Editors ©Pimienta Films, with Cactus Film &
Lucrecia Gutiérrez S.A. de C.V. - Cactus Video Terminal
Mexico, present day. A documentary matching
the recorded testimonies of two women with
images captured across the countryside.
Miriam Carbajal, a young mother never definitively
identified on screen, describes being taken from
her airport job and arrested on trumped-up human-
trafficking charges, then shipped off to a prison in
Matamoros that’s privately run by the Gulf Cartel
for a shakedown profit. Miriam testifies that she was
guilty of nothing, her imprisonment merely a symbolic
gesture by the federal police, who confessed as
much during her booking. Miriam’s account switches
with that of Adela Alvarado, who is seen with her
extended family in the small circus that they run.
The relationship between these women’s
REVIEWS
ominously masked, are overwhelmingly a force
of men; the civilians that she lingers on are a more
mixed bunch, but her camera favours the female,
often alone, pensive and, implicitly, vulnerable.
This reads as an attempt to universalise Miriam’s
experience – identified only as a voice, she might
very well be any one of these women, and their
fate might well be hers. This single guiding
concept doesn’t take long to take root, however,
and though Huezo and cinematographer
Ernesto Pardo find several resonant and
striking framings, a few different, complicating
points of approach or distinct, variegated
movements might have helped Tempestad to
better bear its running time. The movie can’t
be faulted for the conscientious duty it does to
its subjects, though this failure to shift gears
shuts it off from the highest demands of art.
Made with the With the support of [1.85:1]
support of Grupo Instituto Mexicano Subtitles
Cuprum, Grupo de Cinematografía
Cleber, IDFA Bertha Made with the Distributor
Fund, Fondation Alter Estímulo Fiscal de la ICA Films
Cine, IMCINE, Los L.I.S.R. (EFICINE)
Cabos International Executive Producer
Film Festival 2013, Jim Stark
Gabriel Figueroa Film
Fund Desarrollo In Colour
narratives is at first ambiguous, until Adela discusses
the kidnapping of her daughter Monica ten years
previously. Monica remains missing, one of the
countless victims of the human-trafficking rings that
operate in full view of, and in connivance with, the law
– the criminals that Miriam has served time for. Miriam
begins by describing her release and homecoming,
and images of bus travel across the countryside
accompany her story; there are also images of the
omnipresent police force, which gives the sense of
Mexico being under the control of a hostile occupying
army. Adela’s story is illustrated with scenes of circus
life, climaxing with her making herself up as her clown
character. Miriam’s narration ends as she is reunited
with her son Leo, and with images of water and rebirth.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 75

 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
USA/United Kingdom 2017
Director: Martin McDonagh
Certificate 15 115m 10s

Reviewed by Graham Fuller

Halfway through Martin McDonagh’s stylish,
bitter black comedy Three Billboards Outside
REVIEWS

Ebbing, Missouri, a fawn appears before Mildred

Hayes (Frances McDormand) as she’s planting
flowers beneath one of her three billboards. These
signs ostensibly protest the failure of local sheriff
Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) to find the
killer and rapist of Mildred’s teenage daughter
Angela, but they have taken on the quality of a
lurid memorial. For the first time in the film, and
only because she’s alone, Mildred drops her hard-
as-nails act when she sees the fawn. She tenderly
addresses the visitor, speculating whether it’s
Angela reincarnated. “Well, you’re pretty, but you
ain’t her,” she says. After the fawn has wandered
off, Mildred bows her head and almost sobs.
Mildred’s encounter with the fawn is highly
reminiscent of the scene in which Helen Mirren’s
HRH is fleetingly confronted by a soon-to-be-
butchered stag near Balmoral in The Queen (2006)
– a metaphor for the hounding to death of another
beautiful young woman. It comes shortly after
a revelatory flashback to an argument between
mother and daughter: Mildred won’t let Angela Justice writ large: Frances McDormand
use her car because she’s been smoking pot all day;
Angela sneers that her mother is a hypocrite, as she McDonagh has proceeded quite cynically What places Three Billboards in a higher
used to drink-drive with Angela and her brother as a filmmaker. In Bruges was beautifully shot emotional register than its two predecessors
Robbie in the car. It’s true, Mildred admits, but she and glitteringly written, but what was the is the tragic poignancy of Angela’s death
did it only because her husband Charlie had been point of it? Seven Psychopaths was an ingenious and the sincerity of the sorrow Mildred
hitting her. These details convincingly sketch in but heartless postmodern metafiction about expresses to Willoughby and Anne. The late
the family’s wretchedly dysfunctional history. The screenwriting that became tricksy by the end rapprochement between Mildred and Dixon
exchange ends with Angela snapping that if she and lacked the richness of Spike Jonze and – played to perfection by McDormand and
can’t have the car then she’ll walk, and maybe she’ll Charlie Kaufman’s like-minded Adaptation Rockwell – begins when he tells her where they
get raped on the way – to which Mildred passively- (2002). McDonagh has also shown too many can find the rapist drifter who has menaced
aggressively retorts that she hopes she does. debts to Quentin Tarantino – the cancer- Mildred and beaten up Dixon. It turns into
That Angela was indeed raped that night as afflicted Myra (Linda Bright Clay) facing something much more hopeful when they
she was dying, and that her body was burned down the man about to shoot her (Harrelson) confess to each other that they’re uncertain
by the killer, explains Mildred’s attempt to in Seven Psychopaths closely echoes Dennis whether or not they’ll kill him – McDonagh
alleviate her crushing feelings of guilt by lashing Hopper facing down Christopher Walken in persuasively rejecting the eye-for-an-eye morality
out at Willoughby’s police department. It’s a the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993). jokingly discussed in Seven Psychopaths.
form of therapeutic transference, desperate and
unwarranted but understandable. Mildred’s Credits and Synopsis
refusal to remove the billboard signs – even
though Willoughby says he’d do anything Produced by Carter Burwell Finance LLC Diarmuid McKeown Willoughby, ‘Bill’ Penelope
to catch the killer, that the law prevents him Graham Broadbent Production Production Rose Garnett Sam Rockwell John Hawkes
Pete Czernin Sound Mixer Companies David Kosse Officer Dixon Charlie Hayes
carrying out widespread DNA testing, and Martin McDonagh Jonathan Gaynor Fox Searchlight Daniel Battsek Abbie Cornish Peter Dinklage
that he is himself dying of cancer – elicits Written by Costume Designer Pictures and Film4 Film Extracts Anne Willoughby James
an appalled silence from the sheriff. The Martin McDonagh Melissa Toth present a Blueprint “Don’t Look Lucas Hedges Kerry Condon
Director of Pictures production Now” (1973) Robbie Hayes Pamela
conversation evokes Jean Renoir’s words from Photography ©Twentieth Century A Martin Zeljko Ivanek
La Règle du jeu (1939) – “The awful thing about Ben Davis Fox Corporation, McDonagh film Cedric, desk sergeant In Colour
Film Editor Film4, a division Made in association Cast Caleb Landry Jones [2.35:1]
life is this: everybody has their reasons.” Jon Gregory of Channel Four with TSG Frances McDormand Red Welby
Mildred comes closer to expressing guilt Production Designer Television Entertainment Mildred Hayes Clarke Peters Distributor
Inbal Weinberg Corporation, and Executive Producers Woody Harrelson Abercrombie 20th Century Fox
when she apologises to Willoughby’s wife Anne Music TSG Entertainment Bergen Swanson Sheriff William Samara Weaving International (UK)
(Abbie Cornish) for perhaps contributing to his
subsequent suicide, though Anne absolves her Missouri, present day. Local resident Mildred Hayes rents Willoughby shoots himself. Dixon, grief-stricken,
of blame – Mildred is transparently innocent, three dilapidated billboards from advertising manager clubs Welby and throws him out of his first-floor
Red Welby. Mildred’s signs denounce popular sheriff Bill office window. New sheriff Abercrombie fires Dixon.
as she well knows. Though taken seriously by Willoughby for not solving the rape and violent murder of A crop-haired guy menaces Mildred. Willoughby
police officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), the her teenage daughter Angela seven months previously. posthumously pays the next month’s rent for the
feud between Mildred and Willoughby had in Willoughby tells Mildred that, lacking DNA billboards. Dixon torches them. Mildred firebombs the
fact become a collusion, as evidenced by Mildred evidence, he cannot catch Angela’s killer, and that police station. Burned in the blaze, Dixon is hospitalised
stepping outside their enmity to sympathise – he is himself dying of cancer. Angela’s depressed alongside Welby, and apologises to him. Mildred and
“Oh, baby” – when he coughs blood during one brother Robbie berates Mildred about the billboards. the dwarf James, who has provided her with an alibi
When dentist Geoffrey criticises her, she drills one for the time of the fire, go on a disastrous date.
of their confrontations. As usual, McDonagh is of his thumbnails. Mildred’s estranged husband Dixon eavesdrops on the crop-haired guy boasting
alert to how conflicts are codified into games Charlie nearly throttles her. Macho racist police about raping and burning a woman. He beats up Dixon,
by opponents who share affinities: Colin Farrell officer Dixon, in reality a pathetic mother’s boy, but Dixon gets his DNA. The crop-haired guy was
and Ralph Fiennes’s characters in McDonagh’s steps up the feud by arresting Mildred’s black serving overseas when Angela was killed. Dixon and
In Bruges (2008) and the two opposing ‘teams’ in co-worker Denise for marijuana possession. Mildred resolveanyway to drive to Idaho, where his
After spending a perfect day with his wife Anne car is registered, to kill him. They set off the next day,
Seven Psychopaths (2012) all set playground rules
and their two small daughters, the terminally ill their desire to kill the crop-haired guy already waning.
before embarking on western-style shoot-outs.

76 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

The Unseen Walk with Me
United Kingdom 2017 United Kingdom 2017
Director: Gary Sinyor Directors: Marc J. Francis, Max Pugh
Certificate 15 108m 13s Certificate PG 93m 56s

Reviewed by Kim Newman Reviewed by Richard Combs

Ever since Don’t Look Now (1973), marriages ‘Walk with me’ is a phrase that is both a
fractured by grief over the loss of a child have fair summary of the physical action in this

been rather overused in horror-suspense films –
usually, just to give characters some relationship
wheels to spin until they are haunted (The
Changeling, 1980) or attacked by psychopaths
(Vacancy, 2007). Gary Sinyor’s The Unseen works
harder on this underpinning, disguising itself
as a study of upper-middle-class family trauma
for about half its running time, before venturing
very politely into slasher-stalker territory.
Jasmine Hyde and Richard Flood are
unnervingly convincing as the shattered parents,
who both find that they can no longer trust their
senses in the aftermath of their son’s drowning
under the cover of a basement swimming pool.
The film literally privileges the viewpoint of
Hyde’s Gemma, with the camera eye sharing both
her periods of fuzzy vision (the first thing to blur
is a page from the Bible she is reading aloud to
record an audiobook of the Book of Psalms) and
her complete blindness over the equally deep-
seated troubles of Flood’s Will, who starts hearing
things (his son’s ghostly voice) at precisely
the same time his wife stops seeing them.
Given that these are the sort of people who
have a basement swimming pool – and can
think of nothing when Will, in the throes of
incipient religious mania, asks if they have
committed any sins worth such punishment
– there’s an air of brittle smugness to their pre-
bereavement lifestyle that risks alienating the
most empathetic viewer. However, this edge of
estrangement serves the plot, which needs to
keep ambiguous the nature of the threat posed.
Simon Cotton’s Paul comes into the film
as a blurry Good Samaritan, a soothing voice
who helps Gemma through her first serious
episode of impaired vision (diagnosed as a
form of panic attack). Later, when she finds a
stranger in her home, she screams and sets off
an alarm… before Will reassures her that Paul
is her mystery lifesaver. Reassurance is only
temporary, however, as omens continue: Paul
lives alone (with “no wife and no wifi”) on a
remote Lake District estate, where Gemma and
Will are invited to stay to escape their grief.
There, only a single upper-storey room has shaky
mobile-phone reception; Paul’s shadowy past
The walls have ears: Jasmine Hyde
as a failed pharmacologist provides him with a
supply of suspect sleeping pills; and his hobby as
a recordist of birdsong means he has a stalker’s
toolkit of surveillance equipment on hand.
There are almost equal genre precedents for
psychopathic violence directed at temporarily
incapacitated heroines from charming
strangers and from brooding husbands, and
Sinyor keeps seesawing between the male
leads, who have a knack for being threatening
but having semi-plausible excuses for it. Thus
while Gemma is slowly noticing things amiss
with the helpful newcomer in her life, it’s
possible that her husband is going violently
off the rails – in an attempt to reach the dead
child, he lights candles in church and creates a
homemade pentagram. At one point, Gemma
wakes up to find that he has left her alone in
the wilderness to be closer to their son’s ghost.
Like a lot of paranoid suspense films,
The Unseen works best when its menace is
indeed unseen. It may be a little low-wattage
in the thrills department (though there’s an
unnerving sequence as Gemma is struck blind
while driving on a motorway in the rain), but
Sinyor – previously a comedy specialist (Leon
the Pig Farmer, Stiff Upper Lips) – works creepy
tricks with blurs, sounds, whispers and glances.
However, the finale seems embarrassed by horror
conventions it feels obliged to follow – all the
way to a happy family coda that’s somehow
chilly in its return to stultifying normality.
REVIEWS
documentary about Vietnamese Zen Buddhist
master Thich Nhat Hanh and the essence of
his invitation to spiritual awakening. A lot of
walking (mostly in silence) is done by Nhat
Hanh and his community of monks and nuns
at Plum Village, the centre he has founded
in south-west France. The film begins with a
single file of devotees in the woods, and then
expands to a group with Nhat Hanh in the
middle, taking their walk at a slow devotional
pace. Connecting with Mother Nature is a way
of enacting the quality of ‘mindfulness’ that has
become Nhat Hanh’s now widely known – and
enacted – method for living in the here and now.
The walking groups proliferate through the
film, especially once visitors from the everyday
world arrive at Plum Village by tourist coach,
or when the order goes on one of its lecture
tours to the US. Silence may no longer be as
strictly observed here – children join busily
in the walking – but still there is something
called ‘sacred silence’ which can be a pathway to
mindfulness, to peace and serenity. As one of the
nuns explains, “Silence can absorb all sounds. It’s
like a black colour is the absorption of all colours.”
Walk with Me doesn’t attempt to delve too far
into the quality of mindfulness – which has been
one of the complaints levelled against the film
– and only offers brief glimpses of what is said
on Nhat Hanh’s speaking engagements. Equally
terse titles summarise his biography prior to the
founding of Plum Village: “In 1966 Zen Buddhist
master Thich Nhat Hanh was forced into exile
following his efforts to bring about peace during
the Vietnam War.” The exile ended when he was
given permission to return to Vietnam in 2005.
Instead of a straightforward account of
either the movement or its founder, Walk with
Me offers a not always complementary split,
a two-tier recounting of both. Most
of the film is taken up with its visual

Credits and Synopsis

Producer the support of the [1.85:1] England, present day. Gemma Shields and her
Gary Sinyor BFI’s Film Fund husband Will are grief-stricken after the accidental
Written by Executive Producers Distributor
Gary Sinyor Richard Donner Miracle drowning of their young son Joel. Gemma suffers from
Director of Philip Hodari Communications spells of hysterical blindness. Blundering out of her
Photography Leslie Lipowicz house into the road, she is rescued by Paul Deitch, a
Luke Palmer Michael Rosenberg stranger who takes her to hospital. When medication
Editor Joe Sinyor
only partially alleviates the problem, Gemma and
Paco Sweetman David Tucker
Art Director Will take advantage of Paul’s offer to put them up
Joe Waters at a guest house on the estate he is renovating in
Composer Cast the Lake District. However, it transpires that Paul
Jim Barne Jasmine Hyde is an obsessive stalker who has bugged the Shields
Sound Designer Gemma Shields
Tom Jenkins Richard Flood home and is playing back recordings of Joel to drive
Will Shields Will mad while planning to take Gemma for his own.
©Magnet Films 5 Ltd Simon Cotton Gemma fakes a blind spell to force Paul to reveal his
Production Paul Deitch true nature. Paul murders a taxi driver Gemma has
Companies Sushil Chudasama
Magnet Films
called in an attempt to escape, and makes a potentially
Himesh
presents lethal attack on Will. Gemma overpowers and kills
Developed with In Colour him. Later, Gemma and Will dote on their new baby.
In a Buddha world: Walk with Me

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 77

 Youth
People’s Republic of China 2017
Director: Feng Xiaogang
Certificate 15 135m 18s

documentary of events and customs Reviewed by Roger Clarke

at Plum Village and on tour: the rituals The cinema of South-east Asia is no stranger to
of dress; the preparation of food; monks and films about acting and dance troupes. This most
REVIEWS

nuns shaving their heads; the wrapping of the recent iteration comes from Feng Xiaogang,
sticks that are used to sound a gong every 15 the ‘Chinese Spielberg’, who is immensely
minutes to bring devotees out of their daily popular in his own country but generally little
activities and back into the present moment. known in the west, despite the succès d’estime
Alongside this there is a first-person narration, of his 2016 feature I Am Not Madame Bovary.
spoken by Benedict Cumberbatch and taken Youth is by any standards a musical. It’s
from Nhat Hanh’s own journals, Fragrant Fame bloodied by the theme tune of MASH,
Palm Leaves, which recounts a struggle that with perhaps a nod to the ‘scar dramas’ of
we don’t see dramatised in the film’s calm the 1980s, such as Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town.
flow of lyrical imagery: “I had always thought Indeed, it’s almost as if the Fifth Generation
of myself as a solid entity. But suddenly I never happened, so determined is the director
saw that the entity I had taken for me was to avoid nuance and refinement in his big
really a fabrication”; “I became a battlefield. I push for sentiment and melodrama.
experienced destruction upon destruction.” The film follows the fortunes of a man and a
Curiously, with the existential struggle taking woman over 40 years of tempestuous Chinese
place solely on the soundtrack, this frees the film history, beginning in the 1970s, when they
visually to become something else: a performance are both young dancers in an army cultural Red flag: Miao Miao
piece, almost carnivalesque. We may not hear too troupe providing entertainment for the soldiers
much from Nhat Hanh, but we see the crowds – mostly stylised propaganda performances of the film – busy with grandiose camerawork,
gathered in his arenas, with banks of lights and of uplifting Maoist doctrine, but inevitably cinematographer Luo Pan borrowing heavily
microphones. One advertising display features suffused with aspects of ancient Chinese culture. from, yes, Steven Spielberg, but without
his name beneath those of Elvis Costello and By the end of the film, these two have become incorporating Spielberg’s ability to develop
Tony Bennett; and during a visit to a juvenile invalids, damaged goods, witnesses to vast character. There’s a lot of whizz-bang and tears,
detention facility, one of his acolytes attempts social change and losers in the transition to but little soul. The lush and over-upholstered
to describe him to the inmates: “You know modern wealth – a process that often favours orchestral score verges on the infantile.
Yoda in Star Wars? He’s a little bit like that.” the most selfish (a theme also partly explored Poor Xiaoping is sent mad by the sights she
in Jia Zhangke’s recent Mountains May Depart). witnesses, and is cured only when she attends
Credits and Synopsis We first meet elfin and enthusiastic He the last ever performance of her old troupe, led
Xiaoping (Miao Miao) as a new recruit in the out to the fields in a restorative dance. In the
troupe, and it doesn’t take long for the ‘mean third and final act, which becomes increasingly
Produced by Production Distributor
Marc J. Francis Companies Thunderbird girls’ to get on her case, bullying her about her stretched in narrative competence, some of
Max Pugh Speakit Films Releasing clothes and her hygiene. A rather poignant the old troupe have become rich, while Feng
Written by presents in
Marc J. Francis, association with incident, when she filches a uniform to have is reduced to arguing with corrupt officials
Max Pugh SunnyMarch a film a photograph taken, seems a portent of bad who have impounded his vehicle – he is
Narration from by Marc J. Francis
Fragrant Palm & Max Pugh
luck and pack rejection. (That photograph, now scraping a living delivering books and
Leaves: Journals Supported with a reassembled after a bitter tearing-up, resurfaces doesn’t have the means to pay them off. That
1962-1966 by production grant at the end of the film, 40 years later.) Meanwhile, he is a disabled war hero means nothing.
Thich Nhat Hanh from Sankalpa,
Cinematography Bertha Foundation Liu Feng (Huang Xuan), who accompanied The film hit the news after being sensationally
Marc J. Francis Executive Xiaoping to the camp, always keeps an eye out dropped from the release roster in China prior
Max Pugh Producers
Edited by Nick Francis for her, and their fates seem inextricably linked. to the recent party conference, with political
Marc J. Francis Himesh Kar The film segues from a large number of observers straining to explain the reasons. The
Max Pugh Chade-Meng Tan
Music Composed William G.A. Moore gratuitous shower scenes, which linger on the truth is there’s nothing in this film that would
and Arranged by women’s bodies, to a second-act reverse, when displease the status quo – it’s largely on-message,
Germaine Franco narration by
Sound Designer Benedict
in 1979 the dancers are sent to the front of the right down to the attack on corruption. Made
Anna Bertmark Cumberbatch Sino-Vietnamese War and there made to suffer almost entirely for the domestic market, it’s not
©Speakit In Colour
horribly. The wartime attacks are – like the rest destined to be celebrated in years to come.
Productions Ltd/ [1.78:1]
Max Pugh Part-subtitled Credits and Synopsis
Documentary. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen
Buddhist master, has founded the Plum Village centre Producers Production Dingding Lin China. The film follows the fortunes of a man and a
in south-west France, where he puts the philosophy of Wang Zhonglei Companies Li Xiaofeng woman over 40 years, beginning in the 1970s, just
mindfulness into practice with a community of young Wang Zhongjun A Zhejiang Dongyang Shuwen Hao before the death of Mao Zedong. He Xiaoping joins
Gong Yu Mayla Media, Huayi Wang Tianchen
monks and nuns. (In 1966, Nhat Hanh was exiled from Song Ge Brothers Pictures, Can Chen an army cultural troupe, having been recruited by
Vietnam because of his efforts to bring an end to Qi Jianhong iQiyi Motion Pictures Wang Keru handsome and kind-hearted lead dancer Liu Feng. A
the war.) Excerpts from his journals recounting his Zhang Fangjun (Beijing) Co., Beijing ‘Little Ballet’ country bumpkin, Xiaoping is teased and scolded by her
struggles to establish an authentic sense of self are Written by Sparkle Roll Media, Sui Yuan fellow students, especially when they find out that her
Geling Yan Beijing Jingxi Culture Drolma
read over scenes of his acolytes (who have forsworn Based on her novel & Tourism Co.,
father has been imprisoned as a political undesirable.
sex) going about their daily routines. Every 15 Director of August First Film Dolby Atmos/DTS:X Feng, meanwhile, harbours a crush on one of the other
minutes, chimes are sounded to bring them back into Photography Studio production In Colour dancers. In 1979, the Sino-Vietnamese War breaks out,
an awareness of the immediate moment. Coaches Pan Luo Executive Producer [2.35:1] and the members of the troupe come face-to-face
bring American visitors to Plum Village; the visitors Editor Feng Xiaogang Subtitles with the horrors of the conflict. Xiaoping loses her
Zhang Qi
join in communal activities such as long walks to Production Designer Distributor mind, and Feng an arm. The troupe is disbanded.
reconnect with Mother Nature. Nhat Hanh goes with Haiying Shi Cast Trinity Film Later, with the economy shifting towards modern
members of the order on a speaking tour to the US. A Music Huang Xuan capitalism, life has improved for many of the troupe’s
nun makes a rare visit to her father in an old people’s Zhao Lin Feng Liu Chinese former members, but not for Xiaoping and Feng.
Dai Xiaofei Miao Miao theatrical title
home. The group conducts a teaching session in Sound Xiaoping He Fang Hua
She is still recovering from her incarceration in a
a juvenile detention centre. One monk visits his Terry Tu Zhong Chuxi mental hospital; he is scraping a living delivering
family and goes through photo albums detailing his Costume Designer Xiao Suizi books. They find each other again and live out
youthful hopes of romantic and business success. Xiaoli Liu Yang Caiyu their days as a devoted but unmarried couple.

78 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

 Home cinema
HOME CINEMA
Dark doings: (clockwise from top left) The Big Combo, Force of Evil, Secret Beyond the Door and The Dark Mirror
WHERE THE GENRE ENDS
A fine collection of Hollywood
noir highlights the wild variety
of the films that are lumped
together under that label
FOUR FILM NOIR CLASSICS
THE DARK MIRROR / SECRET BEYOND THE
DOOR / FORCE OF EVIL / THE BIG COMBO
Robert Siodmak / Fritz Lang / Abraham Polonsky / Joseph
H. Lewis; US 1946/1947/1948/1955; Arrow Academy;
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate
PG; 363 minutes; 1.37:1, 1.78:1. Features: extensive
commentaries and essays on all four films; The Big Combo
original screenplay; radio plays; reprints of contemporary
reviews; writings by Lang, Polonsky and Cornel Wilde
Reviewed by Andrew Male
Has ‘film noir’ had its day as a critical term?
Apologies for this incendiary opening gambit,
especially in this review of Arrow’s impressively
assembled and gorgeously remastered four-
disc box-set, but after reading the essays in
the collection’s beautifully presented 58-page
hardback book, and especially after listening to
the in-disc commentaries, two things stood out.
One was the impressive individual qualities of
each film. In terms of studio creation, authorship,
artistry and individual style, Arrow has brought
80 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
together four works that are unique and seductive
texts purely on their own terms, without the
organising (and limiting) noir categorisation.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, few
of the critics Arrow has enlisted use the term ‘noir’.
Rather than subjecting the films to prescriptive
discussions of structure/plot/character/setting/
morality, they concern themselves with the
specifics of each production, focusing on how set
problems and practicalities, directorial freedom
(or lack of it) dictate the films’ look and mood.
In discussing Robert Siodmak’s 1946
psychological thriller The Dark Mirror, a film
about an extreme form of sibling rivalry, in
which Olivia de Havilland plays identical
twin sisters, David Cairns is excellent on the
way Eugen Schüfftan’s split-screen special
effects and Siodmak’s own on-set attempts to
disguise the use of doubles – heavy shadows
across the face, slow tracking shots from the
rear, particular camera angles – contribute
to the film’s unsettling look and mood.
It’s film analysis that holds hard to that
old Jacques Rivette aphorism, that every film
is a documentary of its own making, and it’s
an approach that pays dividends, especially
when we get to the collection’s second
psychological thriller, Fritz Lang’s Freudian-
gothic snake-pit Secret Beyond the Door.
An attempt by Lang and producer Walter
Wanger to beat Hitchcock at his own game,
with their own super-Rebecca, Secret stars Joan
Bennett (Mrs Wanger at the time) as a dreamy
heiress who marries a charming British architect
(Michael Redgrave) only to discover he is a
near-penniless widower with a teenage son,
a disfigured housekeeper, a wife who died
in suspicious circumstances, and a series of
rooms in his New England mansion where
he recreates the scenes of famous murders.
“This one went wrong from the beginning,”
Lang told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in
the 1969 book The Celluloid Muse. Both Michael
Brooke in his booklet essay and Alan K. Rode in
the audio-commentary approach Secret as a near-
incoherent document of ruin, a film, as Brooke
reminds us, “about the complexities of married
life and human relationships whose principal
collaborators were themselves either married
(Wanger/Bennett) or in a romantic relationship
(Lang and screenwriter Silvia Richards)”.
Few of the critics here use
the term ‘noir’. Instead, they
concern themselves with the
specifics of each production

The film is only more rewarding as a result,
when you realise the glazed defiance of Joan
Bennett’s performance and Michael Redgrave’s
look of locked-in panic were as much a result
of Lang’s brutalising treatment of them on
set as of their ability to inhabit their roles, or
that the spiralling madness of Secret’s final
half-hour is effectively documentary evidence
of a director driving his production company
and his own career into the ground.
A bigger problem with the noir category
emerges when analysing a sui generis
work like Abraham Polonsky’s 1948 film,
Force of Evil. “Most [noirs] were constrained
by budget, genre and studio,” explained
Polonsky. “Force of Evil is a genuine free
expression of a point of view. We own it.”
Force of Evil was a one-off – a poetic realist
Cain-and-Abel tale of two brothers (played by
John Garfield and Thomas Gomez) brought
down by the numbers racket and, by extension,
American capitalism, made with almost complete
artistic control by a group of socialist New
York Jewish intellectuals during the very brief
cultural ascendancy of the ‘Hollywood Left’.
In discussing Force, Andrew Spicer, Frank
Krutnik and – in back-and-forth audio
commentary – Glenn Kenny and Farran
Smith Nehme variously trace the look of the
film to Cocteau, Vigo and Edward Hopper,
and the dialogue to the King James Bible. The
physicality of the performances is a constant
theme – how the mood and weight of scenes
shifts depending on how Garfield and Gomez
employ their physical presence within the frame.
It’s analysis that relocates the film with its
makers and its audience, rather than its critics.
As Krutnik argues, Force of Evil’s place in 70s noir
criticism is problematic; its lack of box-office
success – and the philistinism of earlier audiences
– both being exaggerated in order to justify its
critical rescue from oblivion. Eddie Muller’s
breakdown of The Big Combo similarly pushes
against standard readings. Instead of approaching
it as a work authored by either embattled auteur
Lewis or cinematographer John Alton, Muller
views this cruel, brutal crime thriller as, in part,
a battle of industry hierarchies between its
star Cornel Wilde and the fast-working hired
hand Lewis, the emerging ugliness of Wilde’s
cop character neatly echoed in the crude edits
Wilde the star made to Lewis’s long takes.
Muller, the president of the Film Noir
Foundation, has written extensively on the
genre and would be the last person to argue for
the invalidity of noir as an organising term for a
certain kind of post-war Hollywood cinema. But
his analysis, along with the others here, focuses
on how films are shaped by institutional and
individual factors, rather than say, how they reflect
post-war society or tick noir’s stylistic or narrative
boxes. In identifying and rescuing such films for
closer analysis and regard, the noir devotees of the
70s and 80s did immensely valuable work. But each
individual film is its own site of complexity and
to see the four here singled out for their difference,
in a box-set that has anthologised them for their
supposed similarities, was a source of deep joy.
New releases
THE APARTMENT
Billy Wilder; US 1960; Arrow Academy; Region B Blu-
ray; Certificate PG; 125 minutes; 2.35:1. Features: book,
featurettes, commentaries, screenplay, trailer.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
The Apartment may be set during the Christmas
holidays but, despite its sophistication and
peerless wit, it offers little in the way of festive
cheer. This is a romantic comedy macerated in
moral corruption and director Billy Wilder’s
trademark cynicism. Inspired by the British
weepie Brief Encounter (1945), but transferred
to mid-century Manhattan, The Apartment is
as much about loneliness and self-loathing as
it is about love. And yet, the joy of its airtight
script by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, its
bittersweet score by Adolph Deutsch, and Joseph
LaShelle’s gleaming monochrome widescreen
cinematography make it a film to savour – not
to mention the famous forced-perspective sets
by Alexandre Trauner, which transform an
office block into an anonymous dystopia.
Jack Lemmon plays the hapless C.C. Baxter,
a desk jockey at a New York insurance firm
who is so much of a loser at love that instead of
enjoying flirtations of his own he lends his flat to
his sleazy colleagues for their adulterous trysts.
Shirley MacLaine plays Fran, the unattainable
object of his affection, a charming lift operator
whose heart is broken by one of those duplicitous
office creeps: a callous boss played by Fred
MacMurray, returning to the insurance business
after his previous turn for Wilder in Double
Indemnity (1944). Lemmon and MacLaine make
an adorable couple, two lost souls in the mean
streets, but sharing an ambiguous attraction
right up until the film’s famous last line.
Disc: The film appears here in a really gorgeous
new 4K restoration, taken from the original
camera negative, with deep blacks and crisp
detail, and Arrow Academy has gone to town on
this Blu-ray release, extras-wise. It begins with an
illustrated 150-page book featuring three essays
on the film. The excellent set of supplements on
the disc includes a full-length audio commentary
from Bruce Block, an introduction and scene
commentaries by Philip Kemp, and a video essay
Unholy office: Jack Lemmon in The Apartment
HOME CINEMA
on Wilder and Lemmon by David Cairns. There’s
also a new interview with Hope Holiday, the
actress who plays Baxter’s barfly pickup; vintage
interviews with the cast and crew; a making-of;
a Lemmon profile; plus screenplay and trailer.
THE CHAMPION: A STORY OF
AMERICA’S FIRST FILM TOWN
Marc J. Perez; US 2015; Milestone Film; Region-free
DVD; 35 minutes; 1.85:1. Features: additional vintage
doc Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee (1935); eight
vintage silents, totalling more than 2.5 hours of
restored footage; booklet with contextual essays.
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
This two-disc package, by way of a few modest
docs and a collection of unassuming early silents,
limns the entirely forgotten tale of Fort Lee, New
Jersey, which between 1909 and 1913 became the
American centre of film production, predating
the Southern California enclaves. Fort Lee was
conveniently across the river from downtown
Manhattan, where landscapes for westerns,
Hometown USA melodramas and cliffhangers
were hard to find; in 1912 D.W. Griffith shot The
New York Hat and The Musketeers of Pig Alley in Fort
Lee, and Edison was merely the first to use the
cliffs known as the Palisades for action scenes. A
few entrepreneurial independents quickly realised
that saving travel costs from the city by building
studios in Jersey made sense. It began with the
smalltime outfit labelled The Champion (later
to be folded into the Universal amalgamation
devised to challenge Edison’s trust), and spread
to branches set up by Pathé, Eclair, Willet, Kalem,
and Alice Guy-Blaché’s Solax. Theda Bara, Mary
Pickford and Mack Sennett all began their careers
in Fort Lee; even the African-American pioneer
Oscar Micheaux filmed there. Only a handful
of years and one Hudson River-freezing winter
later, the West Coast beckoned as the more
sensible all-purpose station for the industry.
From the earliest Champion film (1910’s The
Indian Land Grab) to Perez’s 2015 doc (really, a
paid-for promotional film produced by the Fort
Lee Film Commission), this is amateur night, and
all the more fascinating for that. Perez’s zippy,
digitally busy film can be clogged with stirring
music and wistful chapter titles, but the 1935
amateur film Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee, by
non-professional New Jerseyans Theodore Huff
and Mark A. Borgatta, is pure home movie, a silent
dirge for collapsing studio buildings abandoned
only 16 years earlier. “Whole towns ‘somewhere
in France’” – a title card reads – “were built and
‘destroyed’ on the lot where the High School
now stands.” The eight vintage films, made
between 1910 and 1912, and including a Florence
Lawrence one-reeler and the earliest version
of Robin Hood, are rough-hewn samples of the
era’s thousands of films, most now lost forever.
Discs: Adequate-as-can-be digital sprucings of
neglected antiques, with the foreseeable
degree of trauma and decay.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 81
 New releases
GUNS AT BATASI
HOME CINEMA
John Guillermin; GB 1964; Signal One;
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format;
Certificate PG; 103 minutes; 2.35:1. Features: audio
commentary by actor John Leyton; trailer.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
The poster copy for this quintessential exercise
in post-colonial hand-wringing sounds
suspiciously like they’re trying to sell another
Zulu: “Outnumbered but never outfought!” runs
the hyperbole. “Besieged in a jungle powder keg
half way between heaven and hell.” All of which
makes it sound like those restless natives are in for
another pasting from Her Majesty’s armed forces,
when the film’s actually an anguished accounting
of much-changed political realities eight decades
on from the derring-do at Rorke’s Drift. Set in a
fictional African republic in the aftermath of a
British handover, it sees the UK military reduced
to the status of bystanders when regime change
puts a rather fiercer independence movement in
charge, many of whom have previously received
political mentorship and army training from
the Brits. Standing his ground at a rural outpost,
however, is Richard Attenborough’s by-the-
book sergeant-major, who’s not about to take
orders from anyone who isn’t his commanding
officer, precipitating a tense stand-off.
Credited to novelist Robert Holles and various
other hands (including Peeping Tom writer Leo
Marks), the screenplay’s pretty sceptical about
the rebels’ idealistic credentials, makes no bones
about Britain’s utterly diminished authority,
and reserves most sympathy for Dickie’s old
warrior, a near-caricature of punctiliousness,
but no racist even if his paternalist attitudes
are shaped by years of sterling service. A superb
showcase for a great character actor, and
Guillermin’s composed widescreen filming
gets the most out of it, while understandably
struggling to convince us the Pinewood backlot
is a convincing ringer for more exotic climes.
Disc: A sharp transfer is the selling point, the
solo commentary from co-star John Leyton
agreeable but somewhat repetitive.
HAMMER VOLUME ONE:
FEAR WARNING!
MANIAC / THE GORGON / THE CURSE
OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB / FANATIC
Michael Carreras / Terence Fisher / Michael Carreras /
Silvio Narizzano; UK 1963/1964/1964/1965; Indicator/
Powerhouse Films; Region-free Blu-ray; Certificate 15;
344 minutes; 1.85:1/1.66:1/2.35:1/ 1.85:1. Features:
documentaries, audio commentaries, cast and crew
interviews, introductions; The Gorgon comic-strip adaptation,
originally published in House of Hammer magazine;
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb Super 8 Version; Die!
Die! My Darling!: alternative presentation of Fanatic with
the US title sequence; booklets with new essays by Kim
Newman, Marcus Hearn, Kat Ellinger and Jo Botting.
Reviewed by Vic Pratt
Four lesser-known shockers from the Studio
that Dripped Blood emerge resplendent in this
splendidly random box. First up is Terence Fisher’s
final outing with Peter Cushing and Christopher
Lee, The Gorgon (1964). Possibly the least known
of Fisher’s works with the dynamic duo, this is
a period-set tale of an ancient Greek monstress
on the snake-haired prowl in a misty Mittel-
82 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
European village ripe with gothic atmosphere.
Delightfully sharp image quality allows us to
enjoy the autumnal tones of the leaves that litter
Fisher’s frame, as well as a naughty chance to
chortle at the cheapness of the gorgon’s barely-
wiggling barnet and, conversely, the liveliness
of Lee’s hefty proto-Lord-Summerisle wig.
Cushing and Lee’s absence is felt in Michael
Carreras’s Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964),
but 1920s-style pulp thrills abound. Mysterious
men sport fezzes, brash desecrators get their
cloth-fisted comeuppance, and an explorer’s
beautiful daughter (Jeanne Roland) is romanced
by a roguish chap (Terence Morgan) with a
natty ancient-Egypt-meets-atomic-era temple
in his basement. The plot is indistinct, and
this particular mummy may be even less
expressive than Lee’s ancient undead upstart,
but he does have a nice line in heavy breathing,
and can squash heads with his fusty feet.
Maniac (1963) is an enjoyably improbable
Psycho-influenced thriller. Crisply shot in ’scope, it
sees Kerwin Mathews’s gadabout artist unwisely
helping his lover (Nadia Gray) free her mad
hubby from prison. Beautiful French location
settings – especially a creepy quarry, used to
great effect – draw attention from improbable
accents and a ludicrous sub-Hitchcockian plot.
Last, and best, is Silvio Narizzano’s Fanatic
(1965) in which a dangerously headstrong young
lady (Stefanie Powers) foolishly visits her dead
fiancé’s mother (Tallulah Bankhead, eye-rolling
like a trouper, no doubt drawing inspiration
from the ladies in 1962’s What Ever Happened
to Baby Jane?). This fearfully modern painted
hussy is promptly imprisoned in the attic, to be
force-fed porridge and passages from the bible
forever more, lest she sinfully marry another chap
(monolithic man’s man Maurice Kaufmann).
Peter Vaughan, meanwhile, is brilliantly sinister
in one of those parts where he prowls around
the woods with a shotgun, and Yootha Joyce, as
Bankhead’s tormented maid, reminds us she was
a fine actor. Donald Sutherland is an only-in-it-for-
the-money vision in crumpled denim as an idiot
Playing it ghoul: The Gorgon
labourer, sporting worryingly blond eyelashes
and the obligatory trousers held up with string.
Macho man saves the naughtily independent girl
in the end, of course, but one wonders whether
marvellous marriage to her stiff-jawed saviour
will be any less of a prison than that attic room.
Discs: The finished package was unavailable
for review, but it includes a fine essay on Fanatic
by Dr Josephine Botting. Aficionados will enjoy
an abundance of trailers, mini-docs, interviews,
and essential nerdy stuff, including the Super 8
silent cut-down of Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and
a 1970s comic-strip adaptation of The Gorgon.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF
SHERLOCK HOLMES
Billy Wilder; USA 1970; Eureka Entertainment; Region
B Blu-ray; Certificate PG; 125 minutes: 2.35:1. Features:
video interview with Neil Sinyard; The Missing Cases
(50 mins) – presentation of deleted sequences; deleted
epilogue scene (audio only); archive interviews.
Reviewed by Kate Stables
“I want to change the image of him. He’ll still be
tall, aesthetic and cerebral. But he’ll be real,” Billy
Wilder insisted to his biographer in 1969. His
lavish, melancholy comedy-drama concentrates
on Holmes as a disappointed romantic,
misogynist and dope fiend, happily engaged
in Odd Couple sparring with Colin Blakely’s
energetic, blundering Watson. Severely lopped
down from its planned four-episode roadshow-
length before release, it flopped with audiences
expecting a spoof or a Basil Rathbone-style
mystery. The curious viewer can play detective
and appraise the missing sections, whose script
pages, stills and sections of original footage
are connected up as storylines in the extras. In
truth, the deleted scenes feel a tad laboured.
There’s much to admire, however, even in the
witty and wistful truncated 125-minute version,
handsomely mounted on veteran Alexandre
Trauner’s impeccably detailed sets (real cobbles
for Baker Street). Robert Stephens’s arrogant,
faintly Wildean Holmes delivers Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond’s cutting dialogue with relish.
His waspish ennui anticipates today’s highly
strung TV incarnations of Holmes (Mark Gatiss
admits that he and Steven Moffat borrowed from
Wilder’s bromance for Sherlock). Christopher
Lee’s smoothly cynical Mycroft (“I’m the only
actor to have played both brothers,” he boasts
in the extras) adds to the general elegance,
as does Miklós Rózsa’s yearning score.
Disc: Cinematographer Christopher Challis’s
Scottish landscapes come up soft and green
in this pleasing transfer. If Neil Sinyard’s deft
analysis is the key interview, Christopher Lee’s
reminisces also offer pleanty to savour, and
editor Ernest Walter’s frank admission that he’d
have changed Wilder’s downbeat ending.
PULP
Mike Hodges; UK 1972; Arrow Video; Region B Blu-
ray/Region 2 DVD (separate releases); Certificate
12; 95 minutes; 1.85:1. Features: interviews (Hodges,
cinematographer Ousama Rawi, editor John Glen,
producer’s son Tony Klinger), trailer, booklet.
Reviewed by Michael Brooke
The cinematic equivalent of the difficult
second album, the noir pastiche Pulp
Revival

HOME CINEMA
SCREAMPLAY
Forty years after it was released,
Dario Argento’s visionary horror
classic looks more bizarre and
more gorgeous than ever
SUSPIRIA
Dario Argento; Italy 1977; Cult Films; Region B Blu-ray;
Certificate 18; 98 mins; 2.35:1. Extras: new Argento
interview; audio commentary by Kim Newman and Alan
Jones; interview with Argento and Claudio Simonetti;
interview with Simonetti, Norman J. Warren and Patricia
McComack; feature: The 4K Restoration Process
Reviewed by Michael Blyth
Two of the hottest tickets at last year’s BFI
London Film Festival were Luca Guadagnino’s
summertime swoonfest Call Me by Your Name
and the 4k restoration of Dario Argento’s baroque
shocker Suspiria. Italian roots aside, the two films
are poles apart in terms of style and content, a fact
which makes Guadagnino’s upcoming remake
of Argento’s beloved girls’ school screamer such
a tantalising prospect. While remakes of much-
loved horror classics are no surprise these days, it
is a testament to the iconic status of Argento’s film
that Guadagnino should choose to follow up his Coven ready: Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion
much-lauded hit with a reimagining of it. Forty
years after he changed the face of horror cinema, Deep Red (1975), Suspiria is above all a sensory Given the quality of the transfer, it is a pity that
Argento’s influence remains pleasingly palpable. experience, not a logical one. While the Cult Films’ packaging fails to match the beauty
For audiences today, Suspiria is perhaps whodunnit frameworks of Argento’s crime capers of the film. Their cover image, a reproduction
the definitive Argento film – the one that demanded they made at least some sense (albeit of the design used for the previous Nouveaux
immediately springs to mind when considering not much), the fantastical nature of Suspiria freed Pictures/Cine-Excess and Cult Films release, is
the auteur’s eye-popping set pieces and penchant him from the shackles of rational storytelling, a far cry from the bespoke artworks we have
for operatic violence. So closely associated is allowing him to focus on style and atmosphere. got used to seeing from some specialist home
the film with its director that it is easy to forget Argento already had a reputation as a master cinema labels (check out Arrow Video’s recent
that this exercise in supernatural excess came visual craftsman, but Suspiria allowed him to Argento reissues The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
as a shocking departure at a time when Argento experiment more than ever before, to refine his and Phenomena to see how it should be done).
had built a reputation for sleek and stylish giallo vision and enhance it. Nowhere is this more Still, it’s what’s on the inside that counts,
pictures, which traded in black-gloved killers evident than in the lurid, still astounding colour and there are some decent extras to enjoy
and maverick detectives, rather than ghouls scheme. Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli’s use here – a new 27-minute interview with
and goblins. From Suspiria’s hyper-styled, of imbibition Technicolor to retain colour in Variety’s Nick Vivarelli and Argento himself,
nightmarish opening moments, in which the film print (a process used for The Wizard of and an hour-long documentary about the
a young American ballet student arrives in Oz and Gone with the Wind) bathes the film in a 4K restoration process are the highlights.
Germany during a ferocious storm, it is clear wash of unnatural light, resulting in a primary Elsewhere, other extras, such as the audio
Argento had abandoned the ‘real world’ – even glow so rich as to feel entirely otherworldly. commentary by Kim Newman and Alan Jones,
before the witches have come out to play. Given Argento’s painstaking efforts to create a and interviews with the likes of Goblin’s Claudio
The dancer in question, Suzy Bannion (Jessica truly unique visual experience (and aural one too Simonetti, horror director Norman J. Warren
Harper), eventually arrives at her destination, the – let us not forget to mention the multi-layered and critic Patricia McComack are gratefully
prestigious Tanz Dance Academy in Freiburg, soundscapes of prog-rockers Goblin), Cult Films’ carried over from the previous release.
Germany, only to find its doors locked. Frantically similarly meticulous work is much appreciated. It is worth noting the similarly timed
trying to gain access, she sees another student Restored in accordance with Argento’s original arrival of an alternative 4K restoration from
fleeing in crazed terror. The next day, when Suzy Technicolor Dye Transfer specification, TLE US label Synapse of the original uncut,
is welcomed into the school, she learns that the Films’ 4K scan looks every bit as vibrant as you uncensored Italian 35mm camera negative
young woman from the previous night has been would hope, more than doing justice to Argento’s with colour correction supervised by Luciano
found murdered. As Suzy adjusts to her new outré vision. Meanwhile, once degraded or lost Tovoli. This Region A release also features
home, a series of strange events pile up – her frames have been reinserted to produce the a host of additional extras not found in the
health deteriorates and she is put on a special most complete version of the film possible. Cult Films set, including commentaries by
diet, she hears strange noises in the night, the Argento scholars Derek Botelho, David Del
school is plagued by a maggot infestation and, of From the hyper-styled, Valle and Troy Howarth, a 30-minute visual
course, more disappearances. It is not long before essay by Michael Mackenzie, a featurette on
Suzy realises that macabre powers are at work nightmarish opening moments, the German locations and a retrospective on
here – but who exactly is running this school?
Co-written with Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s
it is clear Argento had the making of the film – all wrapped up in a
lovingly designed steelbook. Completists, no
then partner and star of his previous film, abandoned the ‘real world’ doubt, will want to own both editions.

February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 83

 Rediscovery
HOME CINEMA

IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA
In his pioneering documentaries,
the French filmmaker Jean Rouch
explored the vast diversity of
Africa – and gave Africans a voice
EIGHT FILMS BY JEAN ROUCH
MAMMY WATER / THE MAD MASTERS / MOI, UN
NOIR / THE HUMAN PYRAMID / THE LION HUNTERS /
JAGUAR/ LITTLE BY LITTLE/ THE PUNISHMENT
1956-71; Icarus Films/ Region 1 DVD; 19/ 29/ 74/ 93/ 81/
93/ 96/ 64 mins; 1.33: 1; Features: Documentary Jean
Rouch, The Adventurous Filmmaker by Laurent Védrine
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
“The cinema isn’t for us. It isn’t for poor people.”
So says one of the protagonists of Jean Rouch’s
Moi, un noir, ‘Edward G. Robinson’, an immigrant
to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, from Niger, who came
with dreams of a better life but instead finds
himself a peon day-labourer at the port, living in
the Treichville slums. What Robinson says is, in
one sense, belied by his Hollywoodised nickname,
and those of his friends, who go by the sobriquets
Tarzan, Dorothy Lamour, and Eddie Constantine.
Even if they have to scrimp to go to the movies,
they’re all of them self-styled stars – their
imaginations colonised by American cinema
while their land is colonised by Europe – featuring
in the films of their own lives. In another
sense, however, it gets at an essential truth of
filmmaking – shooting a movie is an expensive
process, and to wield the cinematic apparatus
you have to be able to pay the price of admission.
This barrier of access is what Rouch was
attempting to get around in Moi, un noir, a
feature film that he describes in his introductory
narration as being made with, rather than
about, its subjects – a work of what would be
termed participatory ethnography. Rouch
commands the camera, but the story of the
film, shot without synch sound, is told in post-
production voiceover by its stars, principally
Robinson, who fills in his own dialogue when
not describing the circumstances of his life and
expressing his hopes, frustrations and fantasies,
including an erotic reverie. (Re-viewing the film
after reading the Cuban-American artist Coco
Fusco’s accusation of having been clumsily
“sexually accosted” by Rouch, his salacious
side seemed more than usually evident.)
In his artistic practice, at least, Rouch’s
approach towards power dynamics was rather
more laudable. His stated intention of ceding
some decision-making power in shaping the
narrative of Moi, un noir was more than a merely
symbolic one, and he would be responsible
for training generations of young African
filmmakers and showing their work abroad, his
pupils including Oumarou Ganda, the film’s
‘Robinson’. Moi, un noir was shot at a point when
Rouch had already been in and out of Africa for
much of his life. He was born in 1917 in Paris,
his mother a painter, his father an explorer and
naval meteorologist who kept the family on the
move, setting a peripatetic pattern that the son
would follow. Jean studied civil engineering,
and fled the European conflagration in 1941
to ply his trade working for Travaux Publics in
Niger, then still a French colony. While on the
job, he was entranced by animistic possession
ceremonies, which inspired the same part of him
that had been besotted with the irrationality
of surrealism. Returning in 1946 after having
served in the engineering corps of the Free French
Army and started an anthropology doctorate,
he brought along a camera, a spring-loaded
16mm Bell & Howell purchased at a Paris flea
market, and got down to his life’s work.
The earliest Rouch films contained in this new
four-disc set by Icarus Films, redressing a dearth of
available English-subtitled works by the director,
are Mammy Water and The Mad Masters, both dated
1956. The latter film, one of Rouch’s most infamous
and unshakeable, observes a meeting of members
of the Hauka possession cult. Black natives of Accra
in present-day Ghana, then the British-controlled
Gold Coast, they congregate to participate in a
ceremony which involves roasting dog meat and
giving themselves over to a lather-lipped, jerky-
limbed trance state in which each Hauka takes
on an alter-ego such as the general, the governor,
or the corporal of the guard – strutting, ridiculous
parodies of the high-handed colonial ruling class.
The Mad Masters, which was awarded Best
Short Film at Venice in 1957, helped to establish
Rouch’s name as a documentarian, but Moi, un
noir was the film that indicated the direction
Rouch described ‘Moi, un noir’
as being made with, rather than
about, its subjects – a work of
participatory ethnography
Theatre of the absurd: Jean Rouch’s Little by Little (1971) shows off his anarchic sense of humour
of future works like the superlative Jaguar.
The material that makes up that film, finally
screened in 1967, was originally filmed in the
mid-1950s, following Rouch’s spending years
in the field studying the myths and traditions
of the Songhay peoples. Having first trekked
along, camera in tow, with a trio of Songhay men
travelling on foot to the coastal Côte d’Ivoire,
Rouch years later made an assemblage of the
footage for two of his subjects, friends and
longtime collaborators Damouré Zika and Lam
Ibrahim Dia, who would provide the film with a
jocular, freewheeling, and loquacious voiceover
from the vantage-point of settled adulthood.
Damouré and Lam, crack improvisers who
have the natural rapport of a double-act, return
in the remarkable Little by Little, a variation
on Rouch’s best known film, 1961’s Chronicle
of a Summer (1961), which likewise reverses
the usual direction of the ethnographic gaze
to study the Parisians. Our heroes are here
playing representatives of a successful trading
concern in Ayorou, Niger, charged with studying
the ways of city living in preparation for the
company’s building of a high-rise headquarters,
a set-up that allows for comedy that plays like
a more provocative version of Sacha Baron
Cohen’s man-in-the-street ambush work – at
one point Damouré is found wielding calipers
to practise phrenology on confused Parisians.
Little by Little is the movie that best exemplifies
the absurdist, anarchic sense of humour that is
one of the constants in Rouch’s cinema, along
with his enormous affection for Africa, which in
footloose films like Jaguar and The Lion Hunters
can be felt in all its diversity and vastness, a
continent impossible to explore in full. There is
much, too, that remains to be discovered of the
sprawling Rouch filmography – a journey that
this set is the first leg towards accomplishing.

84 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

New releases
reunited the writer-director, producer and
star of the previous year’s breakout hit Get
Carter, but it’s so tonally different that audiences
of the time were understandably nonplussed.
It’s still an acquired taste today, with Michael
Caine’s pulp-novelist protagonist narrating
his own story in such parodically hardboiled
fashion that the proceedings frequently threaten
to break out into full-blown metatextuality.
The central scenario errs just on the right side
of plausibility – Caine, self-exiled to Malta, is hired
to ghostwrite the memoirs of Mickey Rooney’s
retired Hollywood heavy, a George Raft wannabe
spending so much time with real gangsters that
he imagines himself to be one as well. However,
what surrounds it is crammed with so many
improbable coincidences, gratuitous visual and
verbal gags (Hodges knew Malta well, but it’s
tempting to assume that the island was picked
specifically for one joke about a living Maltese
falcon) and other noir references (including
Lizabeth Scott’s last screen appearance, as a
neofascist politician’s wife) that it has at least as
much in common with Hodges’s similarly tongue-
in-cheek Flash Gordon (1980) as it does with his
more straight-faced thrillers. It might not have
worked at all if it wasn’t for Caine’s effortlessly
unfazed performance as a man who bangs out
equally unlikely scenarios for a living and who
isn’t about to be upstaged by one concocted by
others: he rarely came closer to matching Robert
Mitchum’s deceptively lazy-looking insouciance.
Disc: This new restoration substantially
advances on previous video releases, not least
thanks to the direct input of cinematographer
Ousama Rawi, one of a quartet of engaging
interviewees. The booklet includes an essay by
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas that usefully unpicks
the film’s multiple layers, and a fan letter J.G.
Ballard wrote to Hodges after seeing the film.
THE PUMPKIN EATER
Jack Clayton; GB 1964; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region-
free Blu-ray; Certificate 12; 109 minutes; 1.85:1. Features:
selected scene commentary by historian Neil Sinyard;
interviews with Jeremy Mortimer, actors Frances
White and Fergus McLelland, camera operator Brian
West; gallery; trailer; notes by Melanie Williams.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
These days Jack Clayton’s precisely calibrated
drama of a disintegrating female psyche looks
increasingly like one of the great films of the
60s, but recognition has been an awfully long
time coming for a box-office disappointment
which received a surprisingly lukewarm critical
reception on its initial release. Opinion in this
very organ was that a British director had dared to
go all Antonioni, a clear act of aesthetic temerity
and evidently to be slapped down. Perhaps at
that juncture British cinema had yet to earn the
right to be given parity with the continentals,
but it’s hardly as if enveloping melancholia, a
caustic portrayal of bourgeois patriarchy, and
direction clearly attuned to the emotional mood
music of individuals in their environment were
all celluloid territory Antonioni held in sole
ownership. As The Pumpkin Eater unfolds, you
might sense nuances of Bergman and Buñuel too,
yet the lacerating verbal evasions and ironies in
Harold Pinter’s adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s
Blades of glory: Okamoto Kihachi’s The Sword of Doom (1966)
celebrated source novel display his characteristic
imprint, and Clayton’s facility for shooting his
performers like ghosts floating through the
frame adds another distinctive element. In the
end, school-of-Antonioni isn’t the half of it.
Indeed, Anne Bancroft’s contribution as the
despairing protagonist, popping out a gaggle
of kids in some vain attempt to take root in the
world, all the while drifting loose from errant
third husband Peter Finch, is so powerful that
such considerations of cinephile taxonomy
become secondary. Her meltdown in the Harrods
food-hall is properly distressing, yet even more
notable is the close-up in the final scene, where
her telling internalisation of the character’s
struggle against her consuming demons is
simply heart-shredding. She’d already won an
Oscar for Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker,
but it really doesn’t get any better than this.
Disc: The beautiful transfer picks out every
speck of detail in Ossie Morris’s black-and-white
lensing, while the highlight of a worthwhile
extras package is Jeremy Mortimer’s affectionate
yet clear-sighted recall of his novelist mother
Penelope’s unconventional personal history.
THE SWORD OF DOOM
Okamoto Kihachi; Japan 1966; Criterion UK; Region
B Blu-ray; Certificate 12; 120 minutes; 2.35:1.
Features: critical commentary by Stephen Prince,
trailer, printed essay by Geoffrey O’Brien.
Reviewed by Michael Brooke
Of the 1960s samurai films that are easily
available in the UK, The Sword of Doom is one of
the darkest and most psychologically intriguing,
thanks not least to the fact that Nakadai Tatsuya’s
protagonist Ryunosuke is established as an
amoral sociopath from his very first appearance,
as he’s seen slaughtering a defenceless elderly
pilgrim seemingly at random. A formidable
swordsman whose eyes convey far more than
his sparse dialogue (especially when he lowers
them just prior to delivering a fatal blow), he
dispatches his enemies with a deft casualness
that recalls Mifune Toshiro in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo
HOME CINEMA
(Mifune has a comparatively small role here
too) but without any sense of a greater purpose,
except insofar as it’s possible to argue – or at
least for Ryunosuke to convince himself – that
all his victims in some way signalled their
desire to die shortly before he obliged them.
The abruptness of the decidedly open ending
is explained by the original plan to film more of
Nakazato Kaizan’s multi-volume source novel,
but it follows what must be one of 60s Japanese
cinema’s most thrilling action set pieces, a marvel
of widescreen framing, intricate choreography
and forensically precise cutting as Ryunosuke
slaughters a seemingly endless parade of
enemies, some of whom might be figments of
his increasingly disturbed imagination. The
imagery here becomes overtly expressionistic
as he slashes at shadows, screens and sounds
before finding flesh-and-blood victims on whom
to take out his by now wholly demented rage.
Disc: A very clean high-definition transfer of
an occasionally contrasty but mostly satisfying
source. There’s only one substantial on-disc
extra, but Criterion regular Stephen Prince
rarely pauses for breath on the commentary,
offering a full monograph’s worth of close
analysis, while Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay
offers useful historical and literary context
in more immediately accessible form.
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
Jimmy T. Murakami; UK 1986; BFI; Region B Blu-ray and
Region 2 DVD dual format; 84 minutes; booklet, featurettes,
commentary, music and effects track, archive film.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Children’s author Raymond Briggs, famed for
The Snowman and Fungus the Bogeyman, was
probably the last person anyone expected to
write about a nuclear holocaust. Nevertheless,
he published When the Wind Blows in 1982: a
black comedy about a middle-aged couple in a
country cottage following government advice to
survive a nuclear strike. In 1986 it was adapted
into this striking mixed-media animated
movie, with bumbling James and Hilda
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 85
 Television by Robert Hanks
HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR
HOME CINEMA

Various; UK 1980; ITV/Network; Region B Blu-ray; Certificate

15; 702 minutes; 4:3. Features: ‘Guardian of the Abyss’
widescreen version; commercial break stings; ‘Rude
Awakening’ opening montage raw takes; image gallery.
It’s surprising, looking back, to realise what
you could show in a primetime Saturday night
slot nearly 40 years ago: blood, sex, flashes of
nudity or near-nudity, sexualised violence… One
indication of how far House of Horror overstepped
the bounds is my own adolescent memory of ‘The
Carpathian Eagle’, an episode featuring a serial
killer who, apparently believing herself possessed
by a centuries-dead Hungarian countess, follows
her practice of stabbing her victims in the chest
with a ceremonial knife before ripping out
their hearts: the frisson of arousal and terror
is still vivid (and – a quick straw poll of other
middle-aged men reveals – not just for me).
Perhaps the lesson is that you can get away
with outrageousness if you camouflage it with
banality. Hammer heroes and villains are, by
and large, creatures of the suburbs, living in dull
semis or minimally picturesque cottages around
Wendover, Hazlemere, Hemel Hempstead,
driving mid-range saloons, apparently buying
their clothes at M&S or C&A. The horrors that
overtake them are mostly familiar: werewolves,
cannibalism, over-responsive fetish dolls, satanic
cults. Every one of these 13 dramas contains
situations you remember from somewhere
else, plot twists you can see looming a mile off
(if you haven’t guessed the secret behind the Hammer House of Horror ‘The Carpathian Eagle’
revenant rapist in ‘Visitor from the Grave’ in
the first 10 minutes – well, congratulations on features a killer who stabs her victims in the chest with
leading a life so filled with novelty and surprise).
But though the dramas rarely terrify, they
a ceremonial knife before ripping out their hearts
do often manage to instil a sense of unease, a
feeling that you are being drawn into something the script’s conviction that the Latinate term for the gap between location film and studio
nasty. Perhaps the banality of setting and plot ‘wolflike’ is ‘vulpine’. Now that horrifies me. video is a little too glaring. No extras.
even adds to that; it’s a world that, even without Disc: OK source material, but Blu-ray
the interventions of slashers, time-travelling seems an unnecessary luxury. PIPKINS: THE COLLECTION
witches and ex-concentration camp guards Michael Jeans et al; UK 1973-81; ATV/Network;
with a bent for behavioural experimentation, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Region 2 DVD; Certificate U; 1200 minutes; 4:3.
might feel constricting, even strangulating. Michael Darlow; UK 1979; BBC/Danann; Region- Features: episode commentaries, cast interviews,
Though we’re living in the permissive society, free DVD; Certificate 12; 225 minutes; 4:3. extracts from missing programmes.
there’s an underlying sense that we’re not At the opposite end of the TV drama spectrum, ATV’s children’s series was a response to
comfortable with it: sex is the gateway to evil – a classic adaptation at times almost paralysed Sesame Street, and the influence is clear in the
to being slashed by a serial killer, attacked by a by its desire to do right by the source material. backyard setting, the mix of live action with
werewolf. At bottom, the morality is Victorian. That’s disappointing, given that it was animation and the mingling of people and
Throughout, there is pleasure to be had from written by Jack Pulman in between the two puppets; less clear in the inexpressive puppet
spotting the actors – on the way up to or down crowning achievements of his screenwriting faces – Topov the monkey, in particular, has an
from stardom (Brian Cox and Peter Cushing in career – I, Claudius (1976) and the brilliant Eyes Without a Face quality. In the beginning,
‘The Silent Scream’), or at the midpoint of careers World War II farce Private Schulz (1981). the central character was puppetmaker Inigo
that should have been bigger (Angela Bruce, Michael Darlow’s production creates a lively, Pipkin, but actor George Woodbridge’s sudden
Anthony Valentine, Anna Calder-Marshall). almost Dickensian sense of urban squalor, death during the second series meant a switch
The most effective episode, by some way, is Edinburgh standing in for St Petersburg. in title and style, with the narcissistic Hartley
‘Rude Awakening’, written by Gerald Savory and As the existentially tormented murderer Hare and his Brum-accented sparring partner
directed by Peter Sasdy, about an estate agent Raskolnikov, John Hurt, who could do so many Pig, who was a pig, taking centre stage. The
who keeps awakening from nightmare into varieties of strangeness, projects anguish but slapdash, hit-and-miss quality makes it hard
nightmare, at every turn punished for a murder perhaps not enough of a sense of what might to recommend for pre-schoolers; but it is
he has only dreamed about. There is pathos and cause it. Timothy West, as the policeman anarchic, eccentric and sometimes very funny.
creepiness in Denholm Elliott’s performance, Porfiry Petrovich, gets better lines and makes Disc: The programmes are transferred from often
and in the limp Carry On, man-made fibre-clad the most of them, adding a dash of wit and dreadful video-tape sources and presented in
sexiness of his fantasies. The dull implausibility intellectual lightness to proceedings that need random order. Unusually generous extras include
of ‘Witching Time’ is vindicated by Jon Finch’s it. Siân Phillips is on stirring form as Katerina brief extracts from the original Inigo Pipkin series,
nervy central performance; and ‘Children of Ivanovna, stepmother of Raskolnikov’s beloved with scripts credited on screen to Sam Selvon –
the Full Moon’ – Diana Dors as a lycanthrope Sonya (a sensitive, luminous Yolande Palfrey). can this really be the distinguished Trinidadian
matriarch – is both compelling and ludicrous, Disc: The picture isn’t quite sharp, and as author of The Lonely Londoners, who co-wrote
with its school-play transformation effects and in so many BBC dramas of the 70s and 80s, the film Pressure (1975) with Horace Ové?

86 | Sight&Sound | February 2018

New releases
Bloggs voiced beautifully by John Mills
and Peggy Ashcroft. The score by Roger
Waters and title song by David Bowie provide an
unsettling note beneath the comedy. It’s a curious,
wonderful film, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami
with a combination of whimsy, humour and
World War II nostalgia that slowly gives way
to icy terror and tragedy. When the Wind Blows
pokes fun at the ludicrous precautions advised
by the authorities. as James and Hilda prepare
to crouch behind a door for 14 days, with tinned
food and boxed-up paperwork. But then there’s
the sting: what if the bomb really did drop?
While the film’s varied tones and styles are
sometimes distracting, the charm of the central
couple and the devastation of the final scenes are
undeniable. James and Hilda can only understand
their impending fate through their memories
of the war, and likewise this time capsule of
Cold War politics and propaganda continues to
be a reference point for the ultimate threat. A
masterpiece of chilling British understatement,
it’s an unforgettable modern classic.
Disc: This dual-format DVD/Blu-ray release
from the BFI is wisely stocked up with extras:
a feature-length doc on Murakami, vintage
making-of, an interview with Briggs, chatty
audio commentary and an isolated music and
effects track. A 1975 government information
film, Protect and Survive, drives home the terror
of the nuclear threat. The booklet features
essays, credits and illustrations. Despite
occasional specks, the high-definition transfer
nicely renders the film’s complex textures.
WILL IT SNOW FOR CHRISTMAS?
Sandrine Veysset; France 1996; BFI Region B Blu-ray and
Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 12; 91 minutes; 1.66:1.
Features: Interviews with director Veysset, cinematographer
Hélène Louvart and actress Dominique Reymond
Reviewed by Isabel Stevens
Sandrine Veysset’s impressive debut is even
more remarkable given that she made it at the
age of 30, determined to make a feature rather
than start with shorts and considering she had
little experience behind the camera (she had
done some production design on Leos Carax’s
films and worked as his driver). So easily could
her tale of seven children and their mother
have slid into sentimental social realism: living
in a rundown farmhouse in Southern France,
they toil on the land, exploited by their ogre-
like father who channels the profits of their
labour into his ‘legitimate’ family nearby.
Out of this bleak subject matter arrives a
film that is alive to the rhythms of family life
and a child’s perspective on hardship. Drama
brews slowly from summer to winter as the
colours are drained out of the landscape and
the backstory of the nameless mother and
father is quietly revealed. Farm life is never
seen as idyllic – Veysset, who grew up on a
farm herself, was familiar with the hard labour
required. So much of the film unfolds to the
picking of crops, the children and their mother
tending tirelessly to them day and night. All
the actors (including the only professionals,
Dominique Reymond and Daniel Duval, who
play the couple) spent months getting acquainted
with the land in preparation, and it shows.
Freaks and Greeks: Jason and the Argonauts
There are joys too, however simple: Hélène
Louvart’s camera feels like an eighth sibling
as the kids industriously construct toys out of
farm produce or hang out around the TV or up
trees. Louvart is right there with them, shooting
between their father’s legs or rushing to school
with them under the protection of a tarpaulin
from the rain. What the film manages so
marvellously is to balance a sense of entrapment
and freedom. The feeling that their mother is
in a cage is ever present (a move may split up
her family and would take them away from
the haven of the countryside) but Veysset and
Louvart show ripples of anarchy surfacing as
well as glimpses of the bliss of motherhood that
movies rarely witness. Veysset has made only two
films in the 20 years since. Let’s hope this vital
release allows them and her more prominence.
Disc: The restoration and transfer fully capture
the chromatic warmth and chill of the seasons
in Louvart’s vivid 16mm cinematography.
Extras include insightful reflections on the
film from Veysset, Louvart and Reymond
and an essay by critic Jonathan Romney.
THE WONDERFUL WORLDS
OF RAY HARRYHAUSEN, VOL 2
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND / JASON AND THE
ARGONAUTS / FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
Cy Endfield / Don Chaffey / Nathan Juran; UK
1961/1963/1964; Indicator/Powerhouse Films; Region-free
Blu-ray and DVD dual format; Certificate PG; 101/104/103
minutes; 1.66:1/1.66:1/2.35:1. Features: Mysterious Island:
intro by Ray Harryhausen; two commentaries; interviews
with Harryhausen, Michael Craig, Ray Andrew, Kim Newman;
two featurettes; Super 8 version; score; image gallery; comic
book; trailers. Jason and the Argonauts: two commentaries;
interview with Harryhausen; featurettes: The Harryhausen
Legacy, The Harryhausen Chronicles; storyboards; trailers.
First Men in the Moon: commentary; introduction by
Randall William Cook; interviews; featurettes; score; image
gallery; trailers; trailer commentary by John Landis.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Can Ray Harryhausen be considered an auteur?
According to Randall William Cook, in the
introduction to First Men in the Moon included
in this set, he’s “the acknowledged auteur of the
films that bear his name”, and in the interview
with Harryhausen himself that accompanies Jason
and the Argonauts, John Landis also says as much.
But how far can this suggestion be justified?
The director of a film may well stand as its
auteur; so sometimes can a screenwriter, even
occasionally a producer (Val Lewton comes to
mind). But exceptionally gifted and visionary
HOME CINEMA
though Harryhausen undoubtedly was, he
didn’t direct the features that bear his name,
nor script them – although, as Cook notes, “it
might have been better if he had”. So when
those films are let down by inept scripting
or duff acting – as films in the Harryhausen
canon so often are – the faults can scarcely be
laid at the door of their special effects creator.
Of the present trio, these weaknesses are at
their most blatant in First Men in the Moon. Despite
a credit for Nigel Kneale as co-screenwriter,
the script – an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s 1901
novel – is heavy-handed, jettisoning the original’s
more subtle reflections in favour of knockabout
comedy. There’s sluggish direction from Nathan
Juran; Edward Judd makes a stolid lead, Lionel
Jeffries gives a shouty, hammy performance
as the scientist Cavor, and poor Martha Hyer
(playing Judd’s girlfriend) is dragged along to
provide intermittent decorative interest.
Harryhausen’s contributions are relatively
limited: there’s a giant caterpillar that briefly
menaces the Earthmen, some Heath Robinson
machinery, and the insectoid Selenites
(moon-dwellers) swarm bug-eyed across the
lunar sets. The Selenites’ leader, the Grand
Lunar, who lives in a huge green jelly, is oddly
reminiscent of Dan Dare’s nemesis, the Mekon,
from the British children’s comic Eagle.
Matters improve in Mysterious Island,
adapted from Jules Verne, with gutsy direction
from Cy Endfield and John Prebble – best
known for his popular accounts of Scottish
history – co-credited for the slightly more
literate script. Michael Craig makes a spirited
hero, and the cast includes Joan Greenwood
(rather wasted) and Herbert Lom as a dignified
Captain Nemo. From Harryhausen we get
some relishably threatening monsters: a giant
crab, a giant chicken, giant bees (all, we’re
told, the products of Nemo’s experiments in
‘horticultural physics’), plus an underwater
nautilus, shelled and tentacled to baroque effect.
The matte paintings of the Pacific island are
impressive, and there’s a fine volcanic eruption.
Standout here is Jason and the Argonauts. Not
for its hero: Todd Armstrong’s limited acting
skills are sorely exposed. But, as in Island, there’s
a rousing score from Bernard Herrmann, and
Harryhausen’s creative genius is seen at full
stretch: the screeching harpies, the lumbering
giant statue of Talos, the multi-headed Hydra
and, most fondly remembered of all his creations,
the sword-battle with the skeletons. In an
interview Harryhausen tells us he early on nursed
ambitions to become an actor, but soon realised
he wasn’t gifted for it; instead, he achieved “an
indirect way of acting” through the models
he so painstakingly created and animated.
So – Ray Harryhausen, auteur? Perhaps
not. But Kim Newman, in his comments
on First Men, gauges it better: these films,
he suggests, were “built around the
personality of Ray Harryhausen”.
Discs: Scrupulous 4k (Jason, First Men) and
2k (Island) restorations bring up all the
detail with startling clarity: the colour in
Jason is particularly splendiferous. Extras
are lavish to the point of extravagance.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 87
 Lost and found
FOUR FRIENDS
HOME CINEMA
OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
Late in his career, Arthur Penn
directed some clunkers – but
this downbeat, intelligent tale of
60s America isn’t one of them
By Geoff Andrew
It remains one of the great mysteries of mid-20th-
century American cinema: how could Arthur
Penn – the acclaimed and highly successful
director of New Hollywood landmarks like Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big
Man (1970) and Night Moves (1975) – have become
by the end of the 80s, for many moviegoers, a
forgotten man? Even before his remarkable hit
with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, he’d made
a name for himself with such highly regarded
titles as The Miracle Worker (1962), Mickey One
(1965) and The Chase (1966); but by the second
half of the 80s he was reduced to making a
relatively routine espionage thriller (Target, 1985),
a forlorn remake of Joseph H. Lewis’s My Name
Is Julia Ross (Dead of Winter, 1987), and a comedy
vehicle for TV magicians (Penn & Teller Get Killed,
1989). Thereafter it was back to television, where
he’d cut his teeth directing drama in the 50s.
Penn’s decline was so steep and sudden it led
David Thomson, a great admirer of the early and
middle-period films, to begin his essay in The
New Biographical Dictionary of Film with the stark
question, “What has happened to Arthur Penn?”
In examining how the director had become
“nearly a nonentity”, Thomson – unlike many
– rightly allows that The Missouri Breaks (1976)
stands alongside his most impressive work, but
seems to have scant regard for Four Friends (1981),
which he includes among those last films which
“are as if made by someone else”. Here I beg to
differ with David, for while there are scenes in
the movie which are a little clumsy – notably a
barroom brawl that lurches into broad, slapsticky,
bad-taste comedy – the film is far from negligible.
With its partly autobiographical script by
Steve Tesich, the award-winning writer of Peter
Yates’s Breaking Away (1979), Four Friends centres
on Yugoslav immigrant Danilo (Craig Wasson)
and his three closest friends at the Roosevelt
High School in East Chicago: handsome jock
Tom (Jim Metzler), Jewish mortician’s son David
(Michael Huddleston), and Georgia (Jodi Thelen),
a determinedly free-spirited rebel who claims
to be the reincarnation of Isidora Duncan and
with whom all three boys are in love. That’s
the situation at the start of the 60s, anyway; as
the seismic decade proceeds, friendships are
tested, dreams dashed, and time takes its toll.
It’s a coming-of-age saga, then, which
rhymes the personal with the political, but less
portentously – and less distinctively – than John
Milius’s in many ways similar Big Wednesday
(1978). But it’s also a tale of love’s torment –
Danilo’s shyness and romantic aspirations lead
him to reject Georgia’s suggestion that he help her
88 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
Chicago hopefuls: Craig Wasson, Reed Birney, Jim Metzler, Jodi Thelen and Michael Huddleston
America is more complicated the older man, long denied any chance of social
mobility, believes his son should follow him
than Danilo realised: lives are and toil in the steel foundry, whereas Danilo,
encouraged by the youthful optimism of the early
constrained by class, money, 60s, wants to play his clarinet, go to college, see
ethnicity, politics and war more of America… and more of Georgia, with her
dreams of fame, fortune and creative freedom.
lose her virginity, thereby driving her, to his regret, But America proves more complicated than he
to direct her attention elsewhere – in this respect realised: lives are constrained by class, money,
the film echoes Maupassant’s observation that “le ethnicity, politics and war. Danilo’s encounter
bonheur n’est pas gai”: to attain a state of happiness with an industrialist’s family exposes – with a
is no easy thing. This theme also inflects the shocking scene that exemplifies, in a manner
narrative insofar as it interrogates the migrant’s characteristic of Penn, the nation’s propensity for
dream of America as a land of plenty and freedom, violence – how inward-turned the upper-classes
to which Danilo and his stern, devoutly working- can be. Likewise, racism may rear its ugly head at
class father subscribe in very different ways. the most unexpected moment, a woozy hippie
Like a far darker version of the relationship dream may turn into a deadly nightmare.
between Dave and his stone-cutter dad in Breaking Tesich and Penn for the most part chronicle
Away, the generational conflict between Danilo the changes of the 60s with a light touch – a sign
and his father (Miklos Simon) reflects their of the precise times depicted might be a ball
respective experiences of American society: emblazoned with the profiles of JFK and Jackie, a
Smokey Robinson song, or the TV transmission
of the first moon landing – so that the separate
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID destinies of the four friends never feel merely
subservient to the overarching social history. Why
did the film fail and disappear for decades? The
‘W
‘What [Four Friends] likes of Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert applauded
demonstrates is the
d it in the USA; in the UK, if memory serves, the
ttenacity of roots and the Guardian’s Derek Malcolm, the Observer’s Philip
pull of tradition: a natural
p French and Time Out’s Paul Taylor all wrote
phenomenon ignored by
p enthusiastic reviews. Perhaps it paid the penalty
most analagous movies,
m of having no stars in the cast; perhaps, despite
where the campus revolts
w the comedy, it was too downbeat; or perhaps
and alternative cultures are
a after Star Wars (1977) and Heaven’s Gate (1980),
cutt off
ff from
f all
ll other
o forms of life, generally there was little appetite for the adult concerns
not only excluding but occluding the older of the New Hollywood cinema. ET would
generations. Here there is no ignoring appear the year after Four Friends, offering a very
the places and the people that were a different take on friendship, America and life.
formative influence’ This piece is dedicated to the memory of
Tom Milne ‘Monthly Film Bulletin’, July 1982 Paul Taylor, man of cinema (and football) who
sadly passed away two days after it was written.
ADVERTISING FEATURE
SUSPIRIA
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Auteur/
Devil’s Advocates, 96pp, paperback,
£9.99, ISBN 9780993238475
One of the most globally recognisable
instances of 20th-century Euro
horror, Dario Argento’s Suspiria is
poetic, chaotic and intriguing. The
cult reputation of Argento’s baroque
nightmare is reflected in the critical
praise it continues to receive 40
years after its original release, and
the film has recently been reissued
in an acclaimed 4K restoration. For
fans and critics alike, Suspiria is as
mesmerising as it is impenetrable, and
in this Devil’s Advocate Alexandra
Heller-Nicholas considers the complex
ways that Argento weaves together
light, sound and cinema history to
construct one of the most breath-
taking horror movies of all time.
www.facebook.com/
DevilsAdvocatesbooks
THE LIFE AND FILMS
OF CAROL REED
By James Howard, Inkinc/CreateSpace,
298pp, illustrated, paperback,
£12, ISBN 9781979459105
High time to reassess the career
of Carol Reed, Britain’s first film
director to be knighted and the
man behind the Bafta Best British
Film for three years running in the
1940s – a feat still unequalled.
Reed was among the most stylish
filmmakers Britain has yet produced,
routinely hailed by critics of the day
as the country’s – indeed, the world’s
– greatest director. His four-decade
career took in a variety of subjects
and genres: comedies, thrillers,
musicals, documentaries, historical
dramas; the works of Dickens, H.G.
Wells, Joseph Conrad, J.B. Priestley,
A.J. Cronin – and Graham Greene,
with whom he collaborated on what
is often regarded as the greatest
British film ever, The Third Man.
amzn.to/2Aeze1B
ACROSS THE ART/
LIFE DIVIDE
Performance, Subjectivity, and Social
Practice in Contemporary Art
By Martin Patrick, Intellect Books,
256pp, paperback, £20/$26.50,
ISBN 9781783208548
Martin Patrick explores the ways in
which contemporary artists across
media continue to reinvent art that
straddles both public and private
spheres. Examining the impact of
various art movements on notions
of performance, authorship and
identity, Across the Art/Life Divide argues
that the most defining feature of
contemporary art is the ongoing
interest of artists in the problematic
relationship between art and life.
www.intellectbooks.com
I AM (NOT) A NUMBER
Decoding The Prisoner
Alex Cox, Kamera Books, 208pp,
paperback, £9.99, ISBN 9780857301758
Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid
and Nancy, is back with his latest
book to mark the 50th anniversary
of the cult TV series The Prisoner. I
Am (Not) a Number explores the
surreal yet iconic series, providing
answers to all the questions that
engrossed and confounded viewers
in 1967-68, and fans since: who is
Number 6? Who runs The Village?
Who – or what – is Number 1? A
brilliant guide from a renowned
filmmaker and critic, perfect for any
fan of what is perhaps the best, the
most original and certainly the most
perplexing TV series of all time.
kamerabooks.co.uk/
iam(not)anumber
September 2012| Sight&Sound | 89
 Books
BOOKS
Hands of the ripper: Gustav Diessl as Jack and Louise Brooks as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), based on a pair of plays by Frank Wedekind
THE AGES OF LULU
PANDORA’S BOX
By Pamela Hutchinson, BFI Film Classics/
BFI Palgrave, 105pp, ISBN 978184457966
Reviewed by David Thompson
Pandora’s Box (1929) is one of those miracle
movies – a film in which director and star were
engaged at the right time in the right studio
on the perfect subject. In an earlier epoch, its
director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, born in Austria,
was regarded as one of the greatest, exploring the
potential of silent cinema to the highest level.
He brought a new lustre to Garbo in The Joyless
Street (1925) and plunged into Freudian fantasy
with Secrets of a Soul (1926). Then he embraced
the coming of sound in his intense war drama
Westfront 1918 (1930) and made pure cinema in
his 1931 adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The
Threepenny Opera (in many ways superior to
the stage original). But Pabst’s reputation soon
wavered, and by continuing to make films under
the Nazis, and subsequently refusing to show
regret, his name became severely tainted. In the
case of the star of Pandora’s Box, the American-
born Louise Brooks, the opposite was true. Never
particularly celebrated at the time she made
movies, rejected by Hollywood and spurned
by critics as not up to the task of playing the
90 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
lead in Pabst’s film, she was rediscovered in
the 1950s and elevated to the status of one
of the most luminescent of screen icons.
I can still recall my first sighting of Pandora’s
Box, on a goodish 16mm print at a university film
society in the mid-70s (we still await a Blu-ray
release of the superb 2009 restoration). Instantly
I saw an actress whose performance was totally
modern, whose beauty was hypnotic and whose
erotic allure was supreme. At that time, finding
out about Louise Brooks involved a fair amount
of research, though I was pleased to discover my
near-namesake David Thomson’s The Biographical
Dictionary of Film singled her out as “one of the
first performers to penetrate to the heart of screen
acting”. Kenneth Tynan’s brilliant and influential
New Yorker profile appeared in 1979, and shortly
after that Brooks’s wonderful writings were
collected as Lulu in Hollywood. She even became
visible again, revealing her shrewd insights
when interviewed in Kevin Brownlow and David
Gill’s television series on the American silent
cinema, Hollywood (1980). Through restorations
and DVDs, it has been possible now to see more
of her films, with even a fragment from one
of the lost titles rediscovered just last year. But
the movie that everyone returns to is Pandora’s
Box, as Brooks’s incarnation of Lulu remains so
far above all her other screen roles, and Pamela
Hutchinson’s highly sympathetic and well
researched book is therefore a welcome and long
overdue addition to the BFI Film Classics series.
This book is particularly valuable in detailing
the origins of the film, how it came to be made
at all and the striking personalities involved.
Pandora’s Box is based on two plays by the once
scandalous figure of Frank Wedekind, whose
work and life were inextricably involved in
the smashing of sexual taboos. The plays were
first performed in 1906, but since then have
proved almost impossible to stage, not least
for the singular problem of casting Lulu, the
free spirit who is at the centre of every scene
and desired by all the other characters. She is
a dancer who has been kept by a newspaper
magnate, Dr Schön, while sharing her body
with other men she encounters. When Schön
announces he is to marry a respectable young
woman, a jealous Lulu overwhelms him to such
an extent that he has to surrender to her (this
scene in Pandora’s Box was rightly singled out
Is Lulu a shining feminine
light cutting through a corrupt
patriarchal society, or a victim
of her own uninhibited lusts?
by the critic J. Hoberman, who observed that
“few movie moments are more electrifying than
Brooks’ radiant smirk of triumph”). But on their
wedding day, a tussle with a gun ends with Lulu
shooting Schön. She evades prison with the help
of Schön’s son Alwa and a frustrated, selfless
lesbian admirer, the Countess Geschwitz, but
financial ruin leads Lulu to London where a
first attempt at street prostitution results in her
murder by Jack the Ripper. Hutchinson takes
us through this narrative in unerring detail,
underlining Pabst’s significant departures from
the original and demonstrating how Wedekind’s
palindromic structure is compressed but also
heightened through the film’s imagery.
The play has receded a little over time
and today we are more likely to experience
Wedekind’s drama through Alban Berg’s
astounding opera Lulu, regularly performed
around the world. A recent production seen in
London and New York, directed by the artist
William Kentridge, made explicit reference to
Pabst’s film and the image of Brooks, revealing
just how far the film continues to pervade
our ideas about Wedekind’s creation. For
the opera singer Barbara Hannigan, whose
dream was to perform the character, Lulu is
the “architect of her own destiny” and “one
of the most honest people I have ever met”.
Is Lulu a shining feminine light cutting
through a corrupt patriarchal society or a
victim of her own uninhibited lusts? It’s the
question that makes Pandora’s Box such a
challenging and controversial dramatic tale,
and it’s also why Pabst’s uncompromising
and totally unsentimental film has dated
so little. As Hutchinson adroitly points out,
it pictures “female sexuality not as moral
weakness but as an eruption of pleasure”. She
notes that everything turns constantly on how
much men’s desire for Lulu is transformed
into hate, and how far money potentially
poisons all the relationships throughout.
Furthermore, the complexity of the subject
matter is deepened in the film through the
relationship of its director and star. Brooks
was chosen for the role (which almost went to
Marlene Dietrich, then a minor German actress)
because Pabst saw her in Howard Hawks’s A
Girl in Every Port (1928) and recognised how
her very artlessness gave her a special intensity
on the screen. Brooks would later claim she
couldn’t act, only be herself. She was more
than willing in interviews and in her writing
to discuss her free attitude to sex and refusal to
play by anyone’s rules. As Hutchinson tells us,
Pabst readily exploited the antipathy of most
of the German cast for the Yankee imposter,
and perhaps, as Brooks suggested, he regarded
her with much the same ambivalence as Dr
Schön did Lulu. When Pabst and Brooks met
some years later, he wearily warned her she
would suffer the same fate as Lulu, and indeed
the carefree actress did fall on hard times until
her final years of rehabilitation. As this book
makes very clear, rarely has the blurring of a
screen role and real life been so fruitful for a
creator and so tantalising for the audience.
HITLER IN LOS ANGELES
How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots
Against Hollywood and America
By Steven J. Ross, Bloomsbury, 432pp,
ISBN 9781620405642
Reviewed by Tom Charity
Hitler in Los Angeles? The title carries an
undercurrent of the absurd, a whiff of the
Ferris wheel rolling off Santa Monica pier
in Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), or Der Führer
strolling around Warsaw in Lubitsch’s To Be
or Not to Be (1942). But it shouldn’t. While
Adolf never made it to the States in person,
his ideas found a receptive audience among
German émigrés and American isolationists.
In February 1939, 22,000 attended a fascist
rally in Madison Square Garden.
Throughout the 1930s, America’s most
successful export industry (an industry
predominantly run by Jews, many of them
European émigrés) scrupulously avoided any
mention of Hitler or National Socialism. In his
study City of Nets, Otto Friedrich argued that this
was primarily for commercial reasons: Germany
was simply too lucrative a market to offend.
Historian Steven J. Ross fleshes out that picture
by showing how Germany’s consul to Los Angeles,
Georg Gyssling – pursuing Joseph Goebbels’s
agenda – exercised pressure behind the scenes to
keep Hollywood movies neutral and the US out of
the war. Gyssling was not above cautioning actors
with relatives still in Germany that participation
in anti-Nazi films could prove problematic for
them. And he warned studios that their movies
could be banned in Germany. In this, Joseph Breen,
who oversaw the enforcement of the Production
Code, was an ally: defamatory portraits of foreign
heads of state were prohibited. Most studio chiefs
capitulated. When an explicitly political project
did get made, it didn’t stay that way. Louis B.
Mayer was quick to expunge anything Gyssling
took issue with in Frank Borzage’s adaptation of
Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades (1938).
But this is only a small part of Ross’s fascinating
tale. His focus here is not on Hollywood per se, but
on the actions of a Jewish lawyer, Leon Lewis, who
took it upon himself to set up surveillance of the
German Bund (Association) in Los Angeles, of the
consulate, and of several German and American
fascist organisations that sprang up in the 30s:
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
the Silver Shirts, the American National Party, the
KKK, and others. Lewis set up his own spy ring
BOOKS
as early as 1933, years before the FBI identified
fifth columnists as a real threat. G-men and the
Los Angeles Police Department were fixated on
communism throughout this decade, and law
enforcement officers seemed predisposed to
conflate the Red menace with Jewish influence,
a recurring thread in Nazi propaganda. (Ross
has sobering statistics about the prevalence of
anti-Semitism in the US in the 30s and early 40s.
As late as July 1945, 67 per cent of Americans
agreed that “Jews have too much power and
influence in this country”, according to one poll.)
Lewis’s remarkably effective amateur
intelligence operation notched up several
important successes: sowing discord between
the German-American leadership, containing
and countering propaganda efforts, and
keeping detailed files on Nazi sympathisers
working in the film, ship and aviation
industries and on their wealthy patrons. Ross
shows that Lewis’s information fed into the
early hearings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee (instigated to counter
Nazi supporters) and facilitated the swift
round-up of agitators when war was declared.
But Lewis’s most dramatic coup came in
October 1937. It involved actor Victor McLaglen’s
brother Leopold, a 6’6” former world ju-jitsu
champion, a veteran of the Boer War and World
War I, and a rabid anti-Semite: he hatched an
implausible but heartfelt plan with Kenneth
Alexander, head of the Los Angeles Silver Shirts,
to assassinate leading Jewish Angelenos, a
“wholesale slaughtering” to “start a worldwide
stink”. The fascists’ hit-list included Jack Benny,
Herbert Biberman, James Cagney, Eddie Cantor,
Charlie Chaplin (not Jewish, but a bête noire for
the Nazis even before The Great Dictator was
released in 1940), Sam Goldwyn, Al Jolson,
Fredric March, Louis B. Mayer, Paul Muni, Joseph
Schenck, Sylvia Sidney, Walter Winchell and
William Wyler – as well as Leon Lewis. McLaglen
planned to hire White Russian hitmen to carry
out the murders with pipe bombs, as many as
24 assassinations in one night. Fortunately, one
of his co-conspirators was an undercover agent
working for Lewis, and the plot was foiled.
Lewis and his operatives emerge as authentic
heroes. Especially impressive are the efforts
of mother and daughter volunteers Grace
and Sylvia Comfort, who risked their lives
infiltrating numerous Nazi cells. Someone –
Spielberg? – should really turn this tale into a
movie. In a sense it wouldn’t be the first time:
Hollywood’s first overtly anti-Hitler propaganda
film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), was ‘ripped
from the headlines’ in classic Warner Bros style,
and inspired by the exposure of Germany’s spy
operations in the US, which had been brought
to trial just four months earlier. It was a case
that prompted many in the US to rethink its
isolationist instincts – Breen among them. Lewis’s
work laid the foundation for the prosecution, but
characteristically he shied away from publicity
and the FBI took the credit. Now wouldn’t
be a bad time to set the record straight.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 91
 MOVIES THAT MATTERED
More Reviews from
a Transformative Decade
By Dave Kehr, University of Chicago Press,
272pp, ISBN 9780226495545
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
BOOKS
There are two kinds of writing about film. One
treats movies as star vehicles, or bellwethers
of social and political phenomena, or triggers
to personal recollection. The other assesses
them as a series of decisions made from post- to
pre-production intended to tell a particular
story, crystalise a particular feeling, or express a
particular ethos, and makes the effort of reverse-
engineering to get back to the root of authorial
intention, and to then measure that intention
against accomplishment. In general, I believe
the former type of writing is much easier to do
than the latter and my reason for thinking this
is simple – there is so much more of it about.
Dave Kehr, programmer at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art and former vocational film critic,
is one of the best to ever work at the reverse-
engineering end of the profession. He has been
a staffer for the New York Times, New York Daily
News and Chicago Tribune, but it was at his first
gig at alternative paper the Chicago Reader that
he was given the most column space in which to
propound his particular nuts-and-bolts brand of
auteurism, forged under the influence of Andrew
Sarris and through autodidactic immersion
at the student-run Doc Films society while
studying English at the University of Chicago.
Movies That Mattered is the second collection of
Kehr’s work to be published by his alma mater’s
THE FILMS OF
TERENCE FISHER
Hammer Horror and Beyond
By Wheeler Winston Dixon, Auteur, 418pp,
ISBN 9781911325338
Reviewed by Jonathan Rigby
On 7 July 1947 Terence Fisher arrived at
Highbury Studios to start shooting his first
film, a genteel ghost comedy called Colonel
Bogey. Twenty-five years later, on 27 October
1972, he departed Elstree on completion of his
final work, Frankenstein and the Monster from
Hell – which, as its title suggests, isn’t genteel
in any way. In that quarter-century span his
directorial style – methodical, elegantly framed,
yet punctuated by dazzlingly staged outbursts
of action and violence – brought about, as
the critic Jean Boullet put it, “la résurrection
collective aux grands archétypes du Fantastique”.
Historical nuts and bolts of the ‘7 July 1947’
variety are not Wheeler Winston Dixon’s
concern in The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer
Horror and Beyond. Indeed, you’re more likely
to stumble across generalities like “[Fisher]
would not attempt a sequel [to Dracula] until
1966,” which is out by a full year. Instead, Dixon
underlines Fisher’s crucial importance to the
post-war development of gothic cinema. The
idea that Hammer itself, rather than Fisher, was
somehow the auteur is countered here in Dixon’s
assertion that when other Hammer directors
(Don Sharp, John Gilling, Freddie Francis)
92 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
Killer queen: Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Mystery of Oberwald (1981)
press and, like 2011’s When Movies Mattered, it
draws from pieces written during his Chicago
Reader years, here mixed with contributions to
Chicago magazine. The magazine pieces include
a handful of appraisals of directorial careers
as a whole (Budd Boetticher, Jacques Rivette),
as well as work in the line that is presently
designated as the ‘think piece’, discussing
such topics as sequel-mania, the decline of
the popularity of the western, and the rise of
home video technology. The lion’s share of
the pieces collected in Movies That Mattered,
though, are in-depth, roll-up-the-sleeves analyses
of individual films released in Chicago from
1974-86 – that is to say, good ol’ reviews.
While auteurism is sometimes reductively
discussed as though it were only an elaborate
ruse to rehabilitate the ‘assembly line’ product
of the Hollywood studio system as art, the
variety of films discussed in Movies That
Mattered reflect Kehr’s admirable catholicity
of interests. He doesn’t duck any comers,
“venture into the realm of Hammer Gothicism,
whether they like it or not, their works bear the
undeniable stamp of Fisher’s approach… Whether
or not he directs the film, this world is his.”
The book is Dixon’s update of a 1991
publication that had a far better title – The Charm
of Evil: The Life and Films of Terence Fisher. (That
book also had an exceptional introduction by
the director John Carpenter, sadly abandoned
here.) Dropping the word ‘life’ from the title was
a shrewd move, given that Dixon’s biographical
sketch is somewhat perfunctory – failing, for
example, to mention Fisher’s first wife. Even
the director’s career is strangely represented. A
chronological trip through his pre-horror phase
gives place to a disorganised second half in which
his Frankenstein and Dracula films are lumped
together in sections of their own, after which a
chapter of scattered ‘Satellite Projects’ (largely
films Dixon deems failures, among them The
Mummy, 1959; and The Phantom of the Opera,
1962) is followed by ‘Six Late Films’ that Dixon
considers classics – though at least one of them,
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) was actually
made less than halfway into Fisher’s career.
Dixon accords Fisher’s early work far more
space (and reverence) than it usually commands,
invoking Bertolucci, Clair, Renoir, Cocteau,
Lang, Rossellini, Vigo, Ophuls, Rohmer and
Godard in reference to such films as To the
Public Danger (1947), Portrait from Life (1948),
Marry Me! (1949) and Face the Music (1953).
Also, when speaking of Stolen Face (1952) and
Four Sided Triangle (1953), he rightly hails “the
surreptitiousness and skill of Fisher’s narrative
grappling with both Straub and Huillet’s Moses
und Aron (1973) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s
1981 shot-on-video feature The Mystery of
Oberwald, an opportunity for the author to
draft an early perspicacious theory of what
constitutes video aesthetic and exhibit his
more than usual attention to colour palette.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, who followed Kehr at
the Reader, notes correctly in his introduction
to the book that Kehr has the stuff of “a first-
rate literary critic” in the capsule discussions of
relevant authors that pop up in various pieces.
Studio-era Hollywood is also an important frame
of reference for Kehr, but he brings it into play in
some interesting and unexpected circumstances.
Discussing Xie Jin’s Legend of Tianyun Mountain
(1980), for instance, Kehr muses on the analogy
between the old studios and the Party-controlled
mainland Chinese film industry, and he lauds
Ann Hui’s Boat People (1982) for its loyalty to the
tradition of the classical melodrama – the same
tradition he criticises Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
compression”. Unfortunately, this particular
skill is one Dixon doesn’t share. The synopses
contained in this book roll out at truly punishing
length; any sneaky film studies undergraduate
keen for an easy fix on Fisher’s work will find
it’s probably quicker just to watch the films
than plough through Dixon’s plot round-ups.
Another problem is that, contrary to the
blurb’s claim that the book has been “entirely
Fisher’s directorial style was
methodical, elegantly framed, yet
punctuated by dazzlingly staged
outbursts of action and violence
Terence Fisher on the set of The Gorgon (1964)
for bowdlerising, diagnosing Robert Benton’s
film as “a very timid melodrama, afraid of the
very emotions that it attempts to exploit”.
Movies That Mattered reflects a criticism of
enthusiasms for the most part, though in its
final section, ‘Autopsies/Minority Reports’,
we find Kehr in demolition mode. Even his
damning appraisals are measured and devoid
of showboating but, like Sarris, he has a way
with the deadly barbed epigram. Describing
David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984), for
example, Kehr writes: “For Lean, fiction is a
foreign land, and, like a good colonialist, he
sets out simultaneously to explore and reform
it. The films he sends back are his trophies,
so many boars’ heads ready to be mounted
above the mantel” – one of those judgements
that feels like the epitaph for a reputation.
This instance aside, Kehr usually registers
as sympathetic to old and often unfashionable
workhorses still toiling in a fast-changing
industry, including Stanley Donen, Robert Aldrich
and Ingmar Bergman, whose Fanny and Alexander
(1982) is given a sensitive reading. Of the big-name
New Hollywood movie brats he is slightly more
leery: Spielberg, De Palma and Coppola all get
taken to the woodshed, while work by Schrader,
Zemeckis and Bogdanovich is praised. As in his
last collection, Kehr does some of his finest writing
here on Clint Eastwood, in these years still very
much not a critical darling, discussing Eastwood’s
screen persona as it is reflected in his directorial
work, both of which mark him, as “a master of the
art of holding back”. It’s a compliment that Kehr
deserves in turn. With little recourse to persistent
personal pronouns or adjectival overkill, he
has created a body of work that beneath the
surface vibrates with pure movie love.
revised and rewritten”, it is essentially as it was
in 1991. Dixon notes that lost footage from
Dracula was recovered in 2011, and that improved
special effects were controversially applied to
The Devil Rides Out (1968) the following year.
But otherwise he recycles several Hammer
myths that were exploded long ago – notably
Fisher’s contention that Hammer had little or
no trouble with the BBFC, which now seems
laughable. Dixon even refers in the present
tense to people long dead, such as Peter Cushing,
cinematographer Jack Asher, composer James
Bernard and Fisher’s widow Morag. In addition,
the book’s ‘Gothic Impulse’ chapters drag in slabs
of film theory (quoting Annette Kuhn, Laura
Mulvey and others) that are never successfully
integrated with Dixon’s own text. Among the
book’s other peculiarities is a reference to David
Spenser appearing “in race drag” in 1959’s The
Stranglers of Bombay (strange to direct this at a Sri
Lankan cast member, rather than, say, Warren
Mitchell) and the claim that Fisher “refused
to become involved” in Hammer’s latterday
lesbian vampire films, when in fact he was only
prevented from directing Lust for a Vampire
(1971) by the after-effects of a road accident.
Of course, the book was never published that
doesn’t contain a few errors. But it’s sobering
to recall that the earlier edition of this one
featured a still of Christopher Lee as Mycroft in
Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(1970) and identified it as Lee playing Sherlock
in Fisher’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace
(1962). Even more sobering – a quarter-century
later, that photo, and that caption, are still there.
Village of the damned: Patrick McGoohan as Number 6 in The Prisoner
I AM (NOT) A NUMBER
Decoding The Prisoner
By Alex Cox, Kamera Books, 224pp,
ISBN 9780857301758
Reviewed by Tim Hayes
Filmmaker Alex Cox’s book about The Prisoner
TV series coincides with the show’s 50th
anniversary, which has already spurred a fresh
Blu-ray set of the episodes and a reshowing
on television – although far enough down
the programme guide that stumbling upon
it accidentally was the only way to discover
it. Television has moved on from The Prisoner,
something Cox addresses as part of a belief
that modern series are lauded to the skies but
hobbled by a sedate pace, sombre demeanour
and a determination never to actually end. But
The Prisoner – which follows the Kafkaesque
plight of ‘Number 6’, played by Patrick
McGoohan, who is inexplicably trapped in a
mysterious village community from which
he repeatedly tries, and fails, to escape – will
only ever be 17 divisive episodes of theatre and
ritual, enigmatic from the off, before ending
in a notorious bad trip via Philip K. Dick and
Samuel Beckett, emerging from the tensions of
the Cold War and curtailed by friction between
star Patrick McGoohan and funder Lew Grade.
Cox puts each episode under the microscope
individually, in the order they were filmed rather
than broadcast, which undoubtedly sorts out some
accidental narrative kinks. Two episodes featuring
Colin Gordon as overseer Number 2 are clearly
a pair, tracking the administrator’s declining
Alex Cox believes modern TV
series are lauded to the skies but
hobbled by a sombre demeanour
and a determination never to end
BOOKS
fortunes and worsening ulcer in his struggle
with Number 6 (McGoohan), before eventual
dismissal from the post – an arc made pointless
when the episodes were broadcast the other way
around and weeks apart. Number 6 wins many of
his other battles too, leaving a string of Number
2s cowed, sacked, chased out of The Village, or
dead awaiting resurrection by the resident mad
scientists. Cox sees a particular skill-set behind
Number 6’s victories, and from there determines
the prisoner’s original profession (not a former
spy), the identity of the mysterious Number 1
(not McGoohan), and the overall purpose of
The Village itself, which makes for a playfully
bonkers retooling of the available evidence.
It also continues Cox’s efforts to grapple
with the after-effects of the Cold War and the
cultural shadow of the mushroom cloud, which
remains deadly serious. Having fallen out of
favour among film financiers and viewers – the
global fan club of his Repo Chick (2009) probably
meets under the roof of the present writer –
Cox authored a forensic analysis of the JFK
assassination in time for the 50th anniversary
of that event in 2013, and has lately written a
series of online jeremiads against escalating
nuclear tensions in the era of Donald Trump.
Tension between The Prisoner’s apparently
libertarian ethos, its circular conclusion and a
simultaneous fascination with the kind of thing
Cox terms “the miniature, the semi-practical
and the twee” is all part of its dislocating effect.
Cox is surely right to detect a sign of intent from
McGoohan in opting to make ‘Free for All’ the first
post-pilot episode, in which a docile electorate
votes Number 6 into a position of power and
then loses interest, and also right to see the
melancholy settling over the psychedelia in the
final episode, ‘Fall Out’. Number 6 winds up back
where he started, on the streets of Westminster,
still labelled a prisoner by the end credits of
his own show, free only to drive the soon-to-be
paranoid and over-surveilled streets of HM Open
Prison London, the same as the rest of us.
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 93
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FEEDBACK
READERS’ LETTERS
Letters are welcome, and should be
addressed to the Editor at Sight & Sound,
BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN
Email: S&S@bfi.org.uk
OF MONSTERS AND MEN
While I wouldn’t disagree that the sexual politics
of Blade Runner 2049 are problematic, I must take
issue with David Lane’s attempt to characterise
the scene in which the villanous industrialist
Niander Wallace murders a newborn replicant
as revealing of the filmmaker’s misogyny (Letter
of the Month, S&S, January). To me it seems
to be one of two key scenes that illustrate the
sequel’s narrative advance on its progenitor.
The original Blade Runner depicts Wallace’s
predecessor Tyrell as proud and paternal. He has
an emotional range Wallace conspicuously lacks.
As in Philip K. Dick’s source novel, the replicants
lack empathy while the humans are becoming
dehumanised. 2049 shows that this process has
become complete: as shown in the scene Lane
objects to, Wallace is simply monstrous, lacking
even a creator’s love for his work. Other humans in
the story barely register as characters. The burden
of empathy has passed to the replicants, holograms,
hybrids and the eternal ‘is he or isn’t he?’ Deckard.
The other scene is K’s debrief, in which the
subtly probing Voight-Kampff test has been
replaced by a discordant word salad that seems
designed to batter its subject into submission
rather than extract an empathetic response. The
entire human world has been reduced to a human
din, desensitised and exploitative (and not just of
women – there’s an extended sequence of child
slavery that’s gone largely uncommented upon).
That the audience can still react with revulsion
to the cruelties of 2049 is to the film’s credit.
Kate Halprin By email
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
David Lane expresses discomfort over the female
replicant’s horrific death in Blade Runner 2049,
but this scene is supposed to be horrific (Letter
of the Month, S&S, January). It is supposed to
highlight the ambition, insanity and frustration
of a character in the film. It highlights the
moral ambivalence shown towards replicants
(a major thrust of the narrative). That is its
entire point. It makes Wallace ruthless and
dangerous. It is rightly difficult to watch.
Yes, there is an argument that a filmmaker’s
vision and/or philosophy can be interpreted
from her/his work but to accuse a filmmaker
of the same morality or character as
shown by her/his worst fictional monsters
on screen seems utterly perverse.
Alan Miller By email
HOPE AND GLORY
Already thrilled to embrace Arrow Academy’s
Blu-ray 4K restoration of Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment as a pre-festive self-gifting binge, I
was delighted to read Mark Cousins’s erudite
and touching take on its final line (“Shut up and
deal”) and his consideration of how a Sheldrake
USA has matured (Endings, S&S, January).
Having discovered The Apartment in the early
1980s, I’ve updated a battered VHS tape through
DVD and Blu-ray across a 27-year ritual of viewing
LETTER OF THE MONTH
SPOILED ROTTEN
Nick James’s round-up of British cinema
(‘The Year in Review’, S&S, January) gives new
meaning to the phrase ‘spoiler alert’, damning
a brilliant, expansive year for British film
(including all the debuts he mentions, and then
some) with a myopic and well-worn diagnosis.
He confesses to not yet having caught up
with Michael Pearce’s Beast, but I wonder
how many other British films have gone
unnoticed here? Relevance, dialogue, invective
this masterpiece each New Year’s Eve, at home
or in hotels, alone or attached – until finding my
own Ms Kubelik and becoming a mensch at last.
Jon Medcalf By email
SOUL MATES
Kim Newman’s review of Carnival of Souls (Home
Cinema, S&S, December) fails to mention the
most obvious inspiration for the film: ‘The
Hitch-Hiker’, an episode of The Twilight Zone
broadcast just a couple of years earlier. The plot,
with Inger Stevens haunted by a mysterious
hitch-hiker, is practically the same, with a
few details changed. It was originally written
by Lucille Fletcher as a radio play, which was
produced Orson Welles in 1941 with music
by Fletcher’s husband, Bernard Herrmann.
R.J. Laaksonen Helsinki, Finland
OH, BROTHER!
Since David Thomson, in Warner Bros: The
Making of an American Movie Studio (Books,
S&S, December), places significance on Jack
Warner’s wide mesmeric smile, it’s a shame
Jack is misidentified in the caption with the
photo accompanying your review as well as
in the piece. That’s the youthful, grinning Jack
second from the left, not yet sporting the pencil
moustache that would serve as what Thomson
calls “italic overlining”. The dour and for all
we know toothless suit at the far right is Albert
Warner, perfectly cast as the studio’s treasurer.
Gerry Putzer New York
comes in many shapes and sizes. How about
You Were Never Really Here, The Death of
Stalin, Dunkirk, Three Billboards…, The Party,
Dark River, Lean on Pete or the near-perfect
Paddington 2 (above)? The last is a wonder
of a film that delivers its hard stare at the
world through candy-coloured glasses –
something Nick James might receive from me
the next time we cross paths at the office.
Ben Roberts Director, BFI Film Fund
MAKING A MURDERER
Not having known about the 1908 novel
L’Enfer, I’m fascinated by Stephane Duckett’s
suggestion that it was a more likely inspiration
for Robert Bloch’s Psycho than the Ed Gein
murders (Letters, S&S, December).
In his autobiography, Bloch downplayed
the Ed/Norman link, claiming he “knew
very little of the details concerning the [Gein]
case, and nothing about Gein himself”.
In his online article ‘Norman, Is That You?’,
film historian Tom Weaver relates the impact
on Bloch of a man named Calvin T. Beck. The
reclusive Beck self-published a genre-related
magazine named Castle of Frankenstein, and
his corpulent appearance resembled Bloch’s
description of the Bates Motel proprietor. On the
rare occasions Beck ventured out of his house,
his possessive mother insisted on accompanying
him, and she was often heard haranguing him.
In yet another premonition of Psycho, Beck’s
father suffered a stroke and spent his last
years secluded in an upstairs bedroom. Bloch,
Beck, Stefano, Hitchcock, Perkins, Herrmann...
Where does one start or stop when trying to
trace the men who created young Norman
and made him so haunting on screen?
Preston Neal Jones Hollywood
Additions and corrections
January p. 76 Bingo The King of the Mornings: Certificate 15, 113m 36s;
p. 80 The Dinner: Certificate 15, 120m 25s; p. 70 Hostiles: Certificate 15,
133m 17s ; p. 83 Human Flow: Certificate 12A, 140m 15s; p. 93 Sanctuary:
Certificate 15, 89m 31s; p. 94 Shot Caller: Certificate 15, 120m 28s
February 2018 | Sight&Sound | 95
 ENDINGS…
WILD STRAWBERRIES
Ingmar Bergman offers a rare note
of optimism at the close of his great
work, with the doctor finding solace
in a memory of family contentment
By Adam Scovell
The main character in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild
Strawberries (1957), Professor Isak Borg (Victor
Sjöström), an eminent bacteriologist, spends
the majority of the film travelling back through
his memories and worries. Though in actuality
he is travelling by car to Lund to receive an
honorary degree, in Bergman’s terms the terrain
we inhabit is not simply a physical realm but
a psychic one too; journeys are both inner
and outer experiences. It is not an inanimate
collection of roads, hills and houses but a
skin that holds time within its scars. Borg is
accompanied by his daughter-in-law Marianne
(Ingrid Thulin), who has joined him even
though she is planning to leave Borg’s son, Evald
(Gunnar Björnstrand), following a disagreement
about the fate of their unborn child. Along
the journey, the pair meet various characters,
including a trio of youngsters, one of whom,
Sara (Bibi Andersson), resembles Borg’s lost love.
The interactions between these characters and
other passengers cause the melancholic doctor
to drift off into dreams, reveries and memories.
Looking back is an addictive action whose
potency increases as memories accumulate.
But Borg has lived a life of avoidance, fearful of
the pain in his past. His lost love seems to hold
the greatest power in his earlier memories,
suggesting this is the source of the pain that
96 | Sight&Sound | February 2018
haunts him. The unhappiness of his eventual
marriage rears its head too, strangely linking
potential academic failure with his failure to
be a loving husband. Even the recapitulation
of the unhappiness between his son and
Marianne has been avoided until this trip. It
appears he has been resigned to accepting the
loneliness of the passing years rather than trying
to confront his ghosts. As one character asks
him, “Have you looked in the mirror, Isak?”
The film’s final shot links his dream-world
of good and bad memories but finds solace
rather than torment. Time has been a key worry
throughout the film; the handless clock in both
his first dream and in his elderly mother’s room
implies a waste or loss. Is Borg really worried
that his life has been meaningless? Bergman
could have ended with a continuation of this
pessimistic streak – he did as much the same
year in The Seventh Seal – but he knows that
contentment before death is a more powerful
and complex conclusion. The doctor’s true love
guides his older self gently through a field to a
lake to see something. Bergman shows us the
man witnessing his past as a gift; the gift of a
memory. Light is shining on his face, flickering
in his almost tearful eyes. It’s an image that
embodies totally a moment of happiness.
But what does Borg really see in that final shot?
The sight we are presented with is an idyll, his
It’s Bergman’s most emotional
ending; seeing a youthful
vision of home through the
older eyes of experience
parents enjoying the passing of their own time
alone while their large family enjoy themselves on
a boat tethered nearer to the house. The father is
fishing, the mother watching on. Both are waving
back fondly but the sight is not a simple one. Borg’s
expression shows us he is witnessing something
profound, beyond words. For his parents are
content, even in just that brief moment away
from the confrontations that have characterised
the memories in the earlier half of the film. Borg
reminisces about such childhood memories, so
he says, to calm him before sleep; a soothing proof
that his life was not actually hopeless at all.
The screen fades from his memory-scape to the
contented man in bed, having faced his demons
on the road and now ready for sleep. It’s Bergman’s
most emotional ending; seeing a youthful vision
of home through the older eyes of experience. One
feeds into the other, a bright and brilliant light
shining through the dusty murk of a pessimist’s
prism. The hollowness and meaninglessness
he had perceived in his life was only an illusion
caused by the timidity of not looking directly
back. Fear over who we once were will always
crop up from time to time. Bergman ends on the
reaction to this realisation, arguably the whole
drive of the film captured in one moment. There
is no naivety in regarding such warm memories
from the days when wild strawberries grew
freely in the garden, just an awareness that the
best of days and the worst of days sat side by side
and always will: “Today, tomorrow, forever.”
Wild Strawberries screens as part
i of ‘Ingmar Bergman: A Definitive Film
Season’, which runs until March at
BFI Southbank, London, and at selected
cinemas nationwide
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