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.