Eavesdropping at the Movies: 173 – Ad Astra

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Ad Astra sees a withdrawn, isolated Brad Pitt take to the stars as Roy McBride, an astronaut in search of his father, and with him writer-director James Gray shows us stunning imagery and brings us brilliantly into McBride’s suppressed mental state. José is head over heels in love with the film’s epic feel, its exploration of universal human problems, the way in which it imagines a human race that, in spreading to and taming other planets and moons, brings its pre-existing problems with it, and the way in which Gray expresses McBride’s inner turmoil through action. Mike is less keen, particularly arguing for the weakness of the film’s first act, and asking questions of the film’s gender theming, but finds much to love too.

Ad Astra is a vast, careful, $100m art movie, the likes of which only Christopher Nolan normally gets to make. It’s very much worth your time. See it on the largest screen you can.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

This entry was posted in Podcasts and tagged Ad Astra, Brad Pitt, epic, James Gray, loneliness, space, Tommy Lee Jones on .

The Saint (Phillip Noyce, 1997, USA)

My original review:

Arroyo, Josè.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 7, Iss. 5,  (May 1997): 52-53,3.

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 172 – Hustlers

J-Lo runs the show and steals every scene in Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s crime flick about a team of strippers who run a scam to steal from Wall Street traders and CEOs. Its style, energy and representational strategies impress us, it drew an audience to Cineworld that we aren’t used to seeing, and we discuss how it fits into what we decide to call “state of the nation cinema”, films that brazenly and deliberately depict, condemn and critique the institutions and power structures of modern America.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Live Flesh (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 1997)

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My original review in Sight and Sound:

Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 8, Iss. 5,  (May 1998): 50-51,3.

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Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, USA, 1985)

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My original review, which appeared in the very first issue of The Montreal Mirror, on 20th of June 1985, and which indicates the film showing in various cinemas which no longer function as such.

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The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted, UK, 1999)

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My original review for Sight and Sound:

Arroyo, Jose.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 10, Iss. 1,  (Jan 2000): 62-63,3.

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Frisk (Todd Verow, USA, 1995)

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Dennis Cooper’s quasi-experimental novel Frisk is now considered a classic examination of sado-masochistic fantasy. Todd Verow’s film of the book, though intelligent and daring in its own right, does little to disprove the old adage that great novels rarely make great films. The comparison is generally invidious and is only worth making here because Frisk raises interesting questions about the limits of what is represen table even in independent cinema.

The film, like the novel, courageously tries to represent a murderous sexuality, one that verges on sensual cannibalism. The loved one is reduced to a thing that seen, felt, smelled, licked, sucked and tasted. The violent transformation of humans into corpses is depicted as a compulsive romantic gesture. The power over another’s life (in all the pleasure of its horrors and the horror of its pleasures) is shown with a detachment that precludes guilt or remorse. That the film attempts to wrestle morally with these taboos is to its credit.

Challenging and imaginative in its complexity, Frisk’s narrative structure is still lucid. The story is framed by Julian and Kevin reading Dennis’ letters as they journey to meet him. However, Dennis also describes writing to Uhrs the porn star and his memories of Henry, so the impression is made of the film’s narration passing on to other characters who take over particular scenes, enabling the audience to see both their views of Dennis’ desires and their own. This complex narration mobilises different audio-visual media (Super-8 film, video) and a wide array of filmic devices (jarring montages, elliptical editing, episodic fades to black) to suggest, texture and delimit memory. Frisk is also fascinating in its manipulation of time. For example, in the scene where Dennis has rough sex with Henry, we first see Henry opening the door for Dennis. After a close-up of Dennis’ face, a flash-forward shows a close-up of Henry’s arse being punched. The next shot returns to the ‘present’ as Dennis and Henry move into the room before the same close-up of Henry’s arse being punched is repeated, now in the present. The whole sequence illustrates how, in consciousness, the present, future and past all coexist, and how fantasy and truth blur.

That Frisk doesn’t quite succeed is not entirely the film-makers’ fault. To work, it would have had to create sublime imagery that could simultaneously make viewers understand such murderous sexuality, but also evoke dread and disgust at the notion that their own desires might be complicit with the protagonist’s. Frisk cannot do this: under the present system of censorship much of what is most disturbing in the book (the sexual murder of a young Dutch boy, for example) is unfilmable. The film tries to get around this problem by a voiceover narration that tells us what can’t be shown (“I made a long, straight, slit from his throat to his stomach and licked all the inside”).

Words are a weak substitute for images in the cinema, yet this strategy is typical of a film which aims to represent the unrepresentable by not showing it. And the film makers have put a great deal of imagination into the effort. For example, in the scene where Dennis tortures the addict played by Alexis Arquette, he moves a knife to kill the addict but the next shot shows the knife cutting the rope from which the addict is hanging. The transformation of a person into a corpse is made in a cut, bypassing the murder itself.

This is clever, but not powerful. In spite of its qualities, Frisk doesn’t live up to its own ambitions. The low budget shows in the long takes and the poor quality of the cinematography. A kinder person would say the acting is Brechtian, but with the notable exception of Alexis Arquette, it is merely amateurish. The heterosexuals, women and black people here are tokens, queer cinema reincarnations of the spectres of “positive images” that have traditionally haunted lesbian and gay cinema. More damagingly, the film fails to evoke the necessary combination of dread and desire. Nonetheless, it is this failure in the light of its ambitions that makes Frisk so interesting to watch.

José Arroyo

Originally published in Sight and Sound:

Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 8, Iss. 1,  (Jan 1998): 40-41,3

Hustler White (Bruce La Bruce, Canada, 1996)

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My original review for Sight and Sound:

Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 6, Iss. 9,  (Sep 1996): 46,3.

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Chop Suey (Bruce Weber, USA, 2001)

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My original review:

Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 12, Iss. 6,  (Jun 2002): 39-40,3.

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Poil de carotte (Julien Duvivier, France, 1932)

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An astonishing moment of melodrama in Duvivier’s Poile de carotte  (see below) where the eponymous hero, a young child,  rages against the conditions of his life: his mother hates and abuses him; his father is indifferent; his siblings are favoured. A family, he tells his father, should be made up of those one loves and those that love one. But that´s not his own situation. Whilst he watches everyone else give and receive love, he alone seems exempt, alone in the world and raging. It’s an extraordinary moment of child rage followed by an equally extraordinary dramatisation of child abuse on film that is depicted as  both physical and psychic.

 

 

The rest of the film will show how a child is driven to suicide and how that suicide is avoided. I don´t hink I´ve ever seen anything like it on film., particularly since its darkness is layered over with the picaresque, thus rendering it amusing and likeable. It´s an incredible achievement of tone, beautifully visualised by Duvivier, with lyrical dream sequences where the child´s inner self eggs him on to off himself.  A powerful film in spite of some weaknesses in the performances by the children and the mother (Robert Lynen, Simone Aubry). Still the great Harry Baur plays the father and is a joy to see.

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 1999)

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My original review for Sight and Sound that appeared in:

Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 9, Iss. 9,  (Sep 1999): 40,3.

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Yves Montand in Marcel Carné’s Les portes de la nuit

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Screenshot 2019-09-19 at 10.14.34.pngYves Montand is ridiculously handsome and sexy in Carné’s Les portes de la nuit. He’s at least a foot taller than anyone else in the frame, hair pompadoured, his shoulders made even wider by the zooty suits of the period; and he’s referred to as Tarzan. That plus his public persona as an immigrant man of the people associated with the Communist Party gives one an insight as to the range and depth of his popularity as a pop idol of the period, and what it represented. The film itself was a flop.

José Arroyo

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L´homme du jour (Julien Duvivier, France, 1937)

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L´homme du jour has so many delightful moments, many that revolve around Maurice Chevalier singing :Il-y-a de la joie (above), Yop la Boum! Ma pomme, and Mon vieux Paris. In fact Chevalier has grown on me over the years. Except in his great Lubitsch films (The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour With You, The Merry Widow), I used to find his mugging tiresome. But now his presence gives me a lift. Watching him is like hearing Ethel Merman: what they do is not subtle but it evokes joy. No one evoked preening, smug masculinity like Chevalier until Burt Reynolds came along in the 70s, and both ironise it enough so that we know they´re both kidding it and embodying it simultaneously.

 

Moreover, unlike in his American films where he always invariably ended up as upper class, in L´homme du jour, Chevalier is the Chevalier born in Ménilmontant, a Parisian version of a cockney, man of the people, an electrician who wants to be a star, a man like the star himself. In the clip above, in a glorious art deco setting,, Duvivier shows us Chevalier trying to hide his dirty shoes, before integrating himself into the queer world of toffs, where floors open and tables rise, by getting them all involved in singing ´Ma pomme.´That they all do so with less talent, skilll and chic only enhances the natural nobility of the working man Chévalier.

But  L´homme du jour is Duvivier as well as Chevalier and there are other pleasures: the satire on celebrity culture, the kidding of the highbrow, the sympathy with the queers and whores that people his films; the conceptual and technical flair of the mise-en-scène. This has a great moment where Chevalier as Alfred Boulard, an electrician who dreams of becoming a star, goes backstage to see his girlfriend in a show Maurice Chevalier is starring in, and we get to see Chevalier as himself teaching Chevalier as Alfred Boulard how a song should be done. I´d say such as ironic self-awareness  postmodernism before the fact if it weren´t also evident in so many other works of this period. You can see the excerpt below:

 

 

A French musical, clearly influenced by the backstage musicals of the period, and much more visually and conceptually sophisticated than most of them.

As an interesting aside, Sheldon Hall has pointed out to me that ´L’HOMME DU JOUR was one of the 14 feature films shown on BBC Television before the war (on 12 and 13 Sept 1938)´. The UK title was Man of the Moment.

 

According to Sheldon Hall in Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television 1929-1981, L’homme du jour/Man of the Moment was one of the first feature films to be screened  on British Television, (12.09.1938), p. 52.

José Arroyo

 

 

Jarman Obituary, Gay Times

Derek Jarman: Angelic Compositions The Legacy of an English Queer Arroyo,

José;Treut, Monika Gay Times; Apr 1994; 15, 187; LGBT Magazine Archive pg. 10

A period piece.

 

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 171 – The Souvenir

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A gentle, somewhat meandering podcast to follow a gentle, somewhat meandering film. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir talks of artistic development, the vigour of youth, life without money worries, and the complications of love, all through a soft camera and subtle performances. It’s a film that refers to and respects art, that remembers the past fondly, and that leads José to explain the Portuguese concept of saudade, quoting Eugène Green here.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 170 – Ne Zha

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Ne Zha, a Chinese animated film, holds the record for the biggest box office in a single market (having made over $700m in China), but Mike isn’t that impressed with it, comparing it to the likes of Ice Age. José had a better time, though asks himself why he overlooks some of its more questionable elements, including a rather homophobic running joke that just doesn’t go away. But there’s a certain flair and thoughtfulness to some of its visual design and characterisation that we appreciate, and it gives us food for thought.

Discussing Ne Zha leads us into a conversation about British film culture as it relates to foreign language cinema. It’s not impossible to see foreign language films in Birmingham – though Ne Zha making it to Cineworld, as opposed to the Electric or mac, is notable – but outside London, the kind of culture that European and South American countries have of showing films from other countries as a matter of course in the main cinemas just doesn’t exist here. In going through our list of podcasts so far we see this reflected, a little over one eighth of our podcasts to date being about non-UK/US films, and a number of those thanks to MUBI, the streaming service, rather than cinema screenings. We can definitely do better, and intend to, but it is the case that foreign cinema culture in the UK barely exists.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2009)

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My original review of Broken Embraces as  published in Sight and Sound in 2009:

Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces is the work of a master film-maker who has lost control of his material. It’s an undisciplined and occasionally self-indulgent work: entire monologues that are meant to be dramatic culminations end up defeating the actors with the sheer amount of unnecessary plot they are forced to recount; the incessant voiceover narration by the central character Mateo – a former movie director who, now blind, writes screenplays under the pen name Harry Caine – while permissible for the noir genre the film stakes a claim to, is excessive in amount and deficient in tone, telling what’s happening but failing to communicate the feelings associated with these events. The film-within-the-film Chicas y maletas (Chick and Suitcases) is a sad mistake, even if the concept behind it – how fragile an art film is, how editing can reduce it from greatness to trash – is an interesting one. It’s clear, moreover, that it’s a reworking of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown(1988): to use one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century as source material for Mateo’s film maudit shows an uncharacteristic lack of judgement on Almodóvar’s part. When Mateo/ Harry, his agent Judit and her son Diego look at the director’s cut of Chicas y maletas and say, “It’s marvellous,” how can an authence familiar with Women on the Verge think anything other than, no, it’s not?

Those who require neatness, order, rigour and balance in their art will therefore find Broken Embraces a disappointment. But those with a more open disposition will find much not only to enjoy but to treasure – for example, when Mateo first sees Lena and we gasp right along with him at the beauty of Penélope Cruz and the beauty with which Almodóvar has shown it to us. It’s a moment to rank alongside Rita Hayworth’s expression when she says, “Who, me?” in Gilda (1946), or Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift’s kiss in A Place in the Sun (1951). And when Diego asks Mateo/Harry, who is feeling very down, what DVD would give him a little lift, he replies: “I’d like to hear the sound of Jeanne Moreau’s voice.” It’s something anyone who knows and loves cinema will understand.

Broken Embraces is, in fact, a cinephile’s dream of a movie. Penélope Cruz’s character is called Lena for a reason: Marlene Dietrich played Concha, the Spanish temptress who bewitches and destroys rich and powerful older men, in Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman (1935). The work was based on Pierre Louÿs’ novel La Femme et le Pantin, which Julien Duvivier turned into a film with Brigitte Bardot in 1959 and which Buñuel used as source material for That Obscure Object of Desire in 1977. Angela Molina, here cast as Lena’s mother, played the earthy Conchita (as opposed to the more ethereal one played by Carole Bouquet) for Buñuel. Thus Lena here is the daughter of both Dietrich and Molina (and perhaps even Bardot), and of the cinematic creations of von Sternberg and Buñuel. Lena’s nom de plume, Séverine, is another nod to Buñuel, this time the character played by Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour (1967). The film is full of such references, refracting a kaleidoscope of connections.

I mention them not to show what a good student of cinema Almodovar is (though there are few directors better), but because such an engagement with cinephilia is crucial to a film that is an extended thesis on cinema itself: the pre-credit sequence is made up of ‘stolen’ footage taken by the video camera that film-makers attach to the normal camera to see takes during and immediately after shooting; the first shot we see after the credit sequence is a light coming through a window and a turning page reflected in an eye – an image condensing a century of debate on cinema as a window on the world versus cinema as spectacular storytelling. Lena breaks up with her older lover Ernesto by speaking the words she is uttering in the silent footage he is watching – in effect a live dubbing of oneself. The film offers a whole treatise on the importance of editing, both through its plot and via what we are shown of the film-within-the-film. When we see an excerpt from Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), it’s not mere padding or empty quotation, it’s both source of, and comment on, one of Broken Embraces’ central themes (not to mention its title).

If Broken Embraces is sure to interest cinephiles, it will also be indispensable to Almodóvar fans. Aside from its take on Women on the Verge, it is a complement genetically to Bad Education (2004) and perhaps even Live Flesh (1997), and a continuation of themes explored in All about My Mother(1999). The forgiveness of absent fathers is a key, almost a structuring theme, in the film.

Broken Embraces offers evidence too of Almodóvar’s familiar fascination with structure (Lena sells herself for her father; Judit, in a different way, for her son). Cruz and Molina are fabulous. Visually, the director is working with a new cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto; it’s a departure (grainier, darker, less glossy than his work with José Luis Alcaine) and a potentially fruitful one for future development. However, the film lacks discipline in paring the unnecessary, and Almodóvar, with his insistence on forcing the characters to say, say again and say some more, seems to have lost sight of dramatising and showing. After his recent run of films (All about My Mother and 2002’s Talk to Her, at least, are masterpieces), anything less than great would be considered a disappointment. But as failures go, Broken Embraces is a great one. * Jose Arroyo

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Arroyo, Jose.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 19, Iss. 9,  (Sep 2009): 60.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 169 – Transit

Adapted from the 1944 novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, writer-director Christian Petzold’s Transit behaves to some degree like Shakespeare in modern dress. The story follows a German man, Georg (Franz Rogowski), escaping facist-occupied Paris to Marseille, and there encountering other refugees, forging connections and affections with them, making arrangements at consulates for passage and visas to Mexico and the USA, all while rumour and hearsay about the spread of the occupation to the port city hangs over him. But with markers from nearly a century later – present-day vehicles in particular, although much of the clothing lives in an ageless world that bridges the years, and an ethnic component that makes more sense in today’s world than the Forties – Petzold turns a historical narrative into a fable of creeping fascism and the refugee crisis of today. Indeed, the idea that Transit functions like modern-dress Shakespeare might make it sound terribly stilted and artificial, but the real power of Transit‘s transposition to the modern day is just how perfectly it works. Transit‘s world is deeply convincing.

Mike argues that part of the reason that this is the case is the film’s focus on the refugees, and the details of day-to-day life in a city merely threatened by future occupation rather than currently undergoing it. The film’s explicit visual symbols of occupation – stormtroopers lining up citizens against walls, dragging refugees from their families – do stand out, and are both necessary and necessarily rare. That the occupation looms is enough, for the most part – it’s what it makes people do and feel that is the film’s focus, and it doesn’t need to build a Children of Men-style dystopia to explore that. The film is described on the poster, in rather an exciting quote from Indiewire, as “Casablanca as written by Kafka” – a glib line that we partially agree with. The Casablanca connection is clear, at least in basic terms being a complicated World War II love story set in a – for now – safe haven for refugees, the assignment and value of visas and travel documents of constant importance. The Kafka connection is inaccurate, the bureaucratic systems depicted in the Mexican and US consulates being ones that, while overwhelmed by vast numbers of refugees, aren’t designed to confuse or dehumanise. Whatever ails Georg isn’t Kafkaesque.

Georg, as José points out, is something of a cipher. We hear little of his story, know only one or two real details about him of any substance – and even one of those may be a lie – but to the film’s credit it’s not something we ever question. His mental state, reasons for behaving as he does, are always clear, if, as Mike suggests, a little frustrating at one point. Through him, we are able to hear people’s stories, those he encounters in queues and cafés keen to tell him who they are and why they’re there. Being able to tell one’s story and having it heard is a central theme to the film, as well as the ways in which we change or misremember our stories to our benefit – a slightly unreliable narrator occasionally describing things that differ in details from how we’re shown them. Georg may not speak much, may not tell anyone his story during the course of the film, but the narration tells his story in the third person – José having read that some or all of the narration is lifted directly from Seghers’ novel, though having not read the novel, we cannot be entirely certain of how much.

The narration, when it faithfully describes what we see, comes across to Mike as rather needless – showing and telling at the same time to pointless effect. Mentioning one scene in which the narration tells us that a number of refugees feel shame for standing by as a woman is violently separated from her family, he complains that the film should be able to convey this visually. José argues that underlining the point through narration is purposeful, bringing home that we in the present day should feel the same shame for standing by as refugees and immigrants have the same things done to them today. The narration changes a dramatisation into a call to action, and in so doing the film constantly asks us pointed ethical and moral questions of ourselves.

In short, Transit is a considerable film and unquestionably worth your time. We can’t recommend it highly enough.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

House of Cards/ Double Indemnity

Brilliant use of Double Indemnity in House of Cards, Season 5, Episode 3. This is only a part of it

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 168 – It Chapter 2

Following 2017’s It, the characters are 27 years older, the events of the first film mere memories, and the effects are more thrilling than ever. But it leaves us feeling much the same as its predecessor – despite fantastic production values, wonderful monster design, and attempts to delve into interesting themes of trauma and the scars with which it leaves us, it’s, well, kind of stupid really.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.