La Vie et Rien d'Autre

This is a film made by Bertrand Tavernier in 1989. It is one of the best films about war, the effects war and coming to terms with war. It is set in 1920 and in it a major, played by Philip Noiret, is responsible for finding and identifying as many as possible of the 350,000 soldiers who were missing after the First World War.

Philip Noiret, Of course, is not just any actor, he is one of those actors who bring a huge presence and strength of personality to his work. He is the emotional core of this film which, nevertheless, is populated by and large cast representing a wide spectrum of society, military and civilian. Among them are two women both waiting for and seeking their men, who are still missing since the war. One, Alice, played by Pascal Vignal loses her job as a teacher at the beginning of the film and for most of its duration is working in a cafe. The other, Irène, played by Sabine Azéma, is high-born with aristocratic manners and expectations, and to underline the point she arrives in the film in a large, posh car driven by a chauffeur. Sabine Azéma Is a well established actress, having appeared in over forty films. I recognized her from two films I had seen, made by Alain Resnais, Smoking and No Smoking. I have read Janice Radway's 'Reading the romance' and so I am quick to spot early signs of a romance narrative in a film, so the romance in this film played out with no surprises for me. Indeed, I was able to tick of the essential romance elements as it proceeded.

I think that Bertrand Tavernier Is a sort of 'old school' man and filmmaker. In this film we see the class hierarchy laid out before us. Everyone seems to know their place and to act and think and perform according to it. I imagine that that is how it was in 1920 but it is not how we see things now.  Now, we do not think that people's ability, or quality, correlates with their class location. That is why we see so much injustice in class-structured societies. I think that that other fine French anti-war film, La Grande Illusion, better depicts society as a diversity of people overlain by a bizarre, constraining class structure making it, with its absence of predictable romance, a more satisfying film. Also, I don't think that Tavernier is much of a film stylist, but more of a 'set up the scene and point the camera at it and follow it' type of film maker, so we do not come to expect striking shots of use of photography. Nevertheless, La Vie et Rien d'Autre is an unusually good film that I have no hesitation is recommending.

Philomena

This is a deeply moving film about an investigation by a journalist, slightly lost at mid-point in his career, taken up as something to do. He assists a seventy-year-old woman, Philomena, in looking for the child who was forcefully taken from her when she was forced to live and work in a convent after becoming pregnant fifty years earlier. Everyone involved in this film emerges with a huge amount of credit (apart from organised religion). It is based on real events, and the journalist was Martin Sixsmith, one time BBC Russian correspondent and subsequently Tony Blair's director of communications. She is played by Judy Dench. The film is directed by Stephen Frears.

Judy Dench plays the part of an unsophisticated Irish woman excellently, and Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the part of Sixsmith modestly and well. The film moves between Ireland, where Philomena was incarcerated, and the United States, where her son was taken and lived his life before dying of AIDS. In the course of the film we discover that the convent was actively removing the children from their mothers and selling them to Americans for $1000; that the mothers were forced to work and could leave the convent only by paying £100; that the convent initially refused Pholomena any help in her search despite her son being buried in its grounds; that the convent lied about the availability of papers that would have been helpful, pretending that there had been a fire; that those in the convent believed that Philomena's unhappiness was the penance she should pay for having yielded to the power of sex. Sixsmith progresses from mild interest in Philomena's plight to anger as they uncover the terrible history of injustice and becomes more angry than Philomena, who remains unshaken in her Catholic faith.

Captain Phillips

This is a gripping edge-of-your-seat film about the highjacking of an American freighter captained by Tom Hanks with a short, mature, grey beard and sensible glasses, looking like a mid-western academic. It follows the hijacking from the beginning of the voyage, when Captain Phillips takes command of the ship, to the final resolution when - surprise, surprise - the American government, deploying three warships, a helicopter and, of course a team of invincible SEALs (which stands for Sea, Air, Land Teams) brings the film to a predictable conclusion, doing their SEAL-like heroics, in this case involving parachutes. The arrival of SEALs is like the fat lady singing in another context - it brings the story to a well-ordered conclusion according to the audience's expectations and the conventions of the genre. Lantern jaws and short haircuts are de rigeur as serious-looking military types, always refraining from smiling, bark phrases into their walky-talkies. Don't they have any unsuitable types, with floppy hair, smiling at inappropriate moments, and not taking the proceedings as seriously as they should?

The ship is highjacked by a bunch of Somalis who seem intelligent, if a little wild-eyed and unstable on occasions, and very focused on their goal of extracting several million dollars from who-ever they can persuade to pay up (the film does not make it clear who's pockets are in the firing-line, unlike Tobias Lindholm's recent film, A Hijacking, which focused on the negotiation process). Catherine Keener has an amazingly small part for such a well-known actress, and I suspect that most of her contribution - probably as distressed wife at the end of a telephone line - ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, Hanks has his hands full, with caring wife or not (he does find time to send her an email), degenerating in the course of the film from calm control to whimpering like a child. Given that the hijackers were demanding a very large sum of money, the absence of the ship's owners in the film is striking. It is known that the sea off Somalia is a hijacking hot spot, and it amazed me that a ship that size did not carry any weapons at all, given the number of guns on the US mainland. I would have thought that at least the captain would have had control of a cupboard containing arms.

The subtext of the film, the subliminal message, like that of many other American films flaunting the US's military hardware and prowess, is that the US has spent so much on its military equipment that it will never be beaten, and that the sixteen percent of it's population, and twenty percent of its children, who live in poverty, will just have to show a little understanding. Each time I saw in the film a radar screen, or a helicopter, or a gun, I asked myself 'how many schoolbooks did that cost?'.

A good film, like the recent Argo, for those who can switch off the political part of their brain for the sake of entertainment, and yield themselves to the pleasures of a straight-down-the-middle American genre movie. The director, Paul Greengrass, from Cheam in Surrey, has obviously made the Faustian pact. He is good at this sort of thing (he made The Green Zone, United 93 and a couple of Bourne films) and I hope he has a good career.

Museum Hours

Museum Hours is an unusual and interesting film - a lightly dramatised poetic film essay. It concerns two people. Johann is an attendant in the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna. He is middle aged  and reflects in voiceover and in accented English at the beginning of the film that he is happy enough in his job, and he tells us of things he did earlier in his life, which include being a roadie. He finds that most of the people passing through the museum don't seem very interesting, but there are a few who seem in some undefinable way to be potentially worth knowing. A woman, Anne, a Canadian, asks him how she can get to some hospital and he tells her which trains to take, and they become friends, wandering around Vienna together, looking at the city and dropping into bars. She is in Vienna because she has a friend here who is in hospital in a coma. There are long passages in the film where we see museum guides and overhear what they are saying about the paintings, and also we hear snatches of the commentaries on electronic guide devices. There is a particularly long passage where a guide discusses a Bruegel painting with a group of tourists.

This film is not about Anne, or Johann, or the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum or even Vienna, it is about our sensitivity to beauty.

As the couple walk about Vienna we see many found urban street scenes, many of them striking and even beautiful. The guide, speaking of the Bruegel painting, asks the group to say what they think is the centre of the painting, which teems with figures and details. Some respond with the easy answer - that is is what the painter says it is - the name of the painting, while the guide points to several details and parts of the painting which might as easily be central.

The film is inviting us to find beauty for ourselves and to arrive at our own conclusions - that beauty is not just where we are told it is, in galleries and in frames or cases, it is everywhere. The film makes more explicit this meaning at the end, when there is a sequence of filmed urban street scenes, framed, and on the soundtrack is an electronic commentary describing their interest, balance and beauty, as though they were exhibits in a gallery.

Further adding to the interest of this film are the facts that a coproducer is Patti Smith, and that Anne is played by the ever-elusive Mary Margaret O'Hara, who made the classic album Miss America, and who has never been able to make another album because of her excessive fastidiousness; so this film has music in its DNA.

Heaven's Gate

I saw Heaven's Gate when it was released and I more-or-less agreed with the concensus - that is has some stunning set pieces, but that the narrative is poor.

Since then I've read Stephen Bach's account of the making of the film and now I've seen this new three and a half hour version at the NFT in London, described as a version that has the director's approval.

Stephen Bach tells how the director, Michael Cimino, was a year late in delivering the film (after the first five day's shooting it was four days behind schedule) and was under pressure to deliver a three-hour version by a certain deadline. Going into the viewing cinema Cimino muttered "I think I can remove another fifteen minutes". The version that he then showed, edited by the director, was five hours twenty-five minutes long, and it was deemed to be unwatchable and certainly unreleasable. The battle scene alone was one and a half hours long! It was subsequently further edited by United Artists (butchered, some say) down to about three hours and was released to be panned by the critics and had a mixed reception in Europe. (Bach reminds the reader at this point that the French like Jerry Lewis.) Now we have this version, there hours thirty-six minutes long.

In making the film Cimino shot multiple takes of many scenes and printed (developed) the film, resulting in 1.3 million feet of film, which takes 220 hours to play. (Remember that there are 168 hours in a week.) This represents and enormous editing task.

Before Heaven's Gate Cimino made The Deer Hunter, and had a battle with the studio to prevent them cutting it, and it was released in the version Cimino wanted and won several Oscars. When Heaven's Gate went into production only a few had seen The Deer Hunter and the word was that it was very good. When Cimino won the Oscars United Artists found them selves with a star director on their hands, to be handled carefully and with respect.

It had always been intended that Chris Christofferson and Chrisopher Walken would be in Heaven's Gate, and it was hoped that the female lead would be taken by Jane Fonda or Diane Keaton. When Cimino proposed Isabelle Huppert for the female lead everyone was dumbfounded. She was just an unknown (in the USA) gamine who hardly spoke any English. Walken had been well received in The Deer Hunter, and Christofferson had made a good impression in Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More. Christofferson is a talented man, although I don't think acting is his strongest suit. Walken is called on to stand around looking awkward and to grunt a few lines. Huppert comes out of the film most strongly.

Cimino clearly empathises with the ethnicity of America's immigrants, and that is to the film's credit. Some of the major set pieces, such as the roller skating scene, and the dancing scene at Harvard are excitingly mounted and edited. This does not compensate for the weakness of the drama, and the central romantic triangle does not work very well. Clearly Cimino was more interested in the larger social and political perspective, but now we are left with a bloated romance that leaves most viewers cold. The prologue and epilogue were proposed at a late stage, and everyone agreed that they would make a more powerful film. In fact, the epilogue, with Averill weeping on his boat many years later, is pretty dreadful. The political narrative, about the conflict between vested interests and homesteaders is weak, with Sam Waterston fetching up as a two-dimensional baddy.

I don't think, however it is edited, that there is a good film to be found in those 220 hours of film that Cimino shot.

Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach is a good and interesting film maker, Frances Ha being his sixth feature, and I have seen the last four, including this film. His third film, Margot at the Wedding, used Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom Baumbach has a child. His forth film, Greenberg, used Greta Gerwig in a good part, and she is now Baumbach's partner. This film, Frances Ha, has Gerwig on screen in pretty well every scene playing an unfocused person whose life is drifting.

At the beginning of the film she separates from her boyfriend and for the rest of the film she is moving from friend to friend changing address often and the film follows her, with intertitles between the sections of the film showing their different addresses.

We follow Frances as she engages with her small and not particularly appealing circle of friends, always chattering, often inconsequentially, and even contradicting herself in adjacent sentences. I became tired of listening to and watching her. I came simply to find her irritating. The film reminded me of Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, which also followed a person who's life was empty and who did not have anything interesting to say. Also, in less extreme form, it made me think of Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, another very irritating film. I am sure the filmmaker and his crew enjoyed it when Frances went to Paris for a weekend and they could film her sitting disconsolately on public benches, bored, or lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and we could several times admire the Eiffel Tower in the background.

If the film has any dramatic arc it is that 27-year-old Frances is letting a satisfactory future slip away as she dithers and drifts. This is brought into focus in her work as a dancer when, instead of being promoted to the main company, she is offered an administrative job in the office.

Greta Gerwig plays the part of Frances well, and it is not her fault that Frances is so wearing.

The film is shot in a slightly strange monochrome - black and white with a slight hint of sepia, I think - in which the blacks are saturated and lacking detail, making the image seem slightly muddy. I also found the image quality of Margot at the Wedding to be strange - very subdued and low-contrast colour which had me wondering whether to adjust the colour controls of my TV.

I hope Frances Ha is an indulgence to celebrate the new relationship between Baumbach and Gerwig, and that his next film with be a return to form.

Before Midnight

This is the third film in a series about the romance of a couple, Jesse and Celine, who have now known each other for twenty years and now are living together in Greece. Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, was previously married and the film starts at the airport as he says goodbye to his son from the earlier marriage. There follows a long conversation between the couple in the car as they drive back from the airport. Then there is a scene with Jesse and his mates, when Jesse talks about his ideas for a possible future book. This is followed by long eating-around-the-table scene, with a many of their friends present. After that the couple go for a long walk, talking all the time. Then they go to an hotel room, where they have a row. Jesse seems slightly more the supplicant; he loves Celine, played by Julie Delpy, and is charming and eager to please her, she seems to express a little more autonomy, and it is not so surprising when it is she who speaks decisively. He is some sort of author, but that doesn't seem to add much weight or sagacity to his character.

For my taste these early scenes tend to be too long and to have too little significant content to be particularly interesting. Throughout the conversations there is a nicely controlled sense that either one or the other will say something that sends a conversation into a spin, leading to disaster and a row, and this is what happens at the end. I am sure many people will find these scenes horribly plausible. The final scene was for me quite painful and hard to watch. The film passes the time quite pleasantly, and leads to a satisfactory dramatic conclusion, although I did find my eyelids flickering downward in the earlier, long scenes. It is difficult to refer to these scenes without using the word 'long', and the question of dramatic economy does arise. More significantly, for me, is the question of what qualities may a good drama embody? My notion is that a good drama is a bit like a Chinese puzzle - that it should be elegant and fit together well, with balance, harmony and, in the case of drama, good rhythm. Information should not be sown and then, unused, left blowing in the wind, which I think does happen here on occasions. This film is more of the Mike Leigh school, where scenes seem to have been grown organically and naturally to embody certain essences and situations, but where the dramatic arc is less important. The dramatic thrust in this film is generated by the possibility that their conversations will at any time go in a bad direction.

Another reservation I have about these films is: are they not the wet dreams of a Texan in love with the tourist idea of Europe? We have had Paris, now we get Greece, or is this too flippant? Jesse and Celine are, to some extent, tourists and it is unarguable that we are shown in these films tourist-eye views of France and Greece. There is no sign in Before Midnight that Greece is crashing and burning as the Euro disintegrates.

Was their row something they would get over after a good night's sleep? Is there an opening for a sequel? To both of these questions I answer 'yes'. She said she doesn't love him any more, but tomorrow morning she can roll her eyes at him and backtrack. Maybe in nine years time we shall find out. It would be terrible for them to split up now because there is so much that is good (including twins!) in their relationship.

Richard Linklater is a very interesting film-maker, who now has a back-catalogue of good and diverse films. This series of films: Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight constitute alone an interesting and worthwhile body of work, improving, I think, as the series progressed. In working with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke (a Texan like Linklater) he has chosen to work with two actors who don't hesitate to take challenging parts (Delpy worked with Godard when she was 14!). I learnt to respect Hawke when I saw him in Sidney Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.

In Another Country

This is a South Korean film made by Sang-soo Hong, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film. It consists of three consecutive short films, each starring Isabelle Huppert. There are some similarities between the three stories. All the films are set in a tiny coastal resort and are populated by the same characters, particularly a young life guard and the manageress of the only hotel. In addition each story stars Huppert playing a different role. In one she is a film maker staying in the hotel and planning to make a film, in the next she is the wife of a businessman meeting her Korean lover in the hotel, and in the last she is accompanying a friend who is getting over a divorce.

Each of these stories is light and amusing, but interestingly there are minor incidents which spread across the three stories. A detail may be motivated in one story and resolved in another. For example in the first film the Huppert character is walking on the beach and disapprovingly notices a piece of broken glass, and in the last story she is drunk on the beach and carelessly discards a beer bottle. The young life guard, who lives in a tent behind the beach, is a significant character in each story, usually doing his best to ingratiate himself with the Huppert character, and we may speculate on whether she is appreciating his nice body, and in the last story she yields to the temptation.

So these three separate stories are not quite separate. It is a sort of hybrid. This film is an example of the innovation attributed to Asian cinema and it was well received in the London Film Festival showing when I saw it.