Birdman

This is Alejandro Iñárritu's fifth film after Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Bable and Biutiful. He is without doubt a gifted film-maker.

It is the story of an actor, Riggan, who is directing his adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, dealing with all the difficulties, including a star actor, Mike, played by Edward Norton, who has ideas of his own.

Twenty years previously Riggan was the star of a movie franchise called Birdman, in which he played a - birdman, but he refused to make Birdman 4. After years in the wilderness he has adapted a short story for the theatre and is producing it - his attempt at 'quality' after success in popular cinema. This film is an account of his frustrations and humiliations, and his insecurities as expressed by his inner voice in the shape of Birdman, who often taps him on the shoulder and makes remarks that express Riggan's doubts. Also he copes with the criticisms of his daughter, his ex-wife and his current partner. Throughout the film Riggan is harassed, in motion, busy, abstracted, and I felt that I had not had a chance to get to know him. I would have like a quiet scene for that. All this is a feast of cinema and cinematography with rich, characterful images and a very mobile camera.

This film is not constrained by realism, and the first scene had Riggan floating in mid-air in a room, as though on an invisible magic carpet. In other scenes he soars vertically into the sky, wearing his raincoat, and flies along the street, his arms outstretched as though he thinks he is a bird. One of the challenges of this film is to understand what happens and what is fantasy a bit like in Black Swan.

I participated in a discussion about this film and saw that many struggle to understand it, and so do I. There are scenes I could not explain. I think the film is ambitious and it struggles to embody and express its ideas, using scenes of supernatural events to do so, such as Riggan floating off the ground, flying down a street, and having his previous incarnation as Birdman appear to make remarks to him. I can only speak for myself and, maybe due to my limitations, these scenes did not work for me. I was reminded of Bob Fosse's All that Jazz, which is also about the frustrations of putting on a production and I suddenly realised that has a supernatural eIement - Death in the shape of a beautiful woman, and seemed natural and seemless to me. When Riggan suddenly rose vertically into the air, wearing his raincoat it was abrupt and bizarre. I did not struggle to understand IIñárritu's previous four films.

I am reminded of Wim Wenders who made several good films culminating in Paris, Texas, and then he made Wings of Desire, with poor Bruno Ganz standing on top of buildings with angles wings stuck on his back, looking down at the people. Then we didn't hear much from Wenders after that until he stormed out of an awards ceremony for not getting an award for Buena Vista Social club. It has happened many times that film makers find success and access to larger budgets, with fewer people who can tap them on the shoulder, and they become over-ambitions and less disciplined. I hope Birdman is not Iñárritu's Wings of Desire.

Whiplash

Whiplash is a horrible story about horrible people, but of course this does not make it a bad film; other things do that.

It is the story of a drum student, Andrew, and his teacher, Fletcher. Fletcher insults and humiliates Andrew, calling him names and using cheap humour and foul language while the rest of the class cower in silence. This is the army transposed to a music school. We have seen those scenes where the sargent humiliates his troops. Music has never been so joyless and filled with fear. Later Fletcher justifies his behaviour expressing the belief that musicians achieve their best only when they are pushed, and it was all to make Andrew a better drummer

There is a romance story who's only function is to show us that Andrew is only a little less unpleasant than his teacher.

There is the scene where Andrew is on a bus late for an important session and the bus has a puncture (sigh....), so he hires a car and has a crash (sigh again....). he crawls out from the inverted car, his face covered in blood and goes to the session and performs. I was not sighing then, I was rejecting this overcooked rubbish. This may be dramatic for those who buy all this schtick.

It is easy to imagine this scene:-

"This is an important drumming scene and we need to something to make it really dramatic."

"How about he's drumming so hard that his hands bleed and the blood splatters all over the drums?"

"Wow! That's great! Let's do that."

And, my God, they did.

In a quieter scene Fletcher explains his belief that great artists are capable of performing beyond their expectations when they are encouraged and pushed, but I know that that is not how Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra rose to prominence. No-one drove them to the limit of endurance in a rehearsal room. I don't like the idea that art is like athletics, where effort is so important. Technical facility is not all: think of Miles Davis.

This is a film that does not entertain, it does not please us with its music or the wit and truth of its dialogue, and who's most profound ideas are false.

As one critic wrote "this is a film about jazz for people who don't know much about jazz,"

Night Train to Lisbon

I am not religious but I do occasionally pray. During this film, already able to guess the time very accurately, extrapolated from many glances at my watch, trapped in the middle of a row, I prayed for it to end. Stop. Anything. The film has marshaled many well-known actors for a farrago set in Lisbon; a Lisbon I don't know, where everyone speaks in English with a funny accent. The signs were ominous from the opening scene, which had Raimond (Jeremy Irons - the only 'English' character in the film, and let off his accents) alone in his room in Switzerland playing chess with himself, moving from one side of the chessboard to the other. This had the subtlety of a red arrow on the screen, pointing at him, labelled 'lonely intellectual'. In an early scene he was dithering on the railway platform as to whether to get on the train that was pulling out. At the last minute he jumped on, so it was fortunate that the train was setting off with its doors still open!

The film has quite a starry cast - with Jeremy Irons there are Tom Courtenay, Melanie Laurent, Christpher Lee, Charlotte Rampling and Bruno Ganz, all present and correct and doing 'accents'. I had difficulty concentrating on the narrative, so it was some time before I understood that the older characters were the younger ones in another time. The film proceeded at a steady unmodulated pace with far too many mind-numbing words and explanations, and to little cinema. The music was awful, washing around in the background, neither loud enough nor silent enough. I don't know if this film is an example of Euro-soup, but it is difficult to describe the music without using the word 'soup'. Normally interesting actors were awful, particularly poor Bruno Ganz. The cinematography wasn't bad, with lovely Lisbon, with all its steps, photographed with an atmospheric, golden hue.

A reviewer quoted on Rotten Tomatoes summed up this film well, saying 'take the last train to anywhere but here." while another wrote "after barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires." I needed a couple of strong drinks and a good night's sleep to recover from it.

Grand Central

This is a romance set in a nuclear power station and set in a resolutely working-class context. It stars two flavour-of-the-month actors, Tahar Rahim, who made his name in Jacques Audiar's A Prophet, and Léa Seydoux, who had blue hair in Blue is the Warmest Colour. At the beginning of the film unqualified Gary (Rahim) is looking for work and finds it in a nuclear power station. Karole becomes one of his colleagues there, and there is an affinity between them.

Karole is already involved and the romance becomes complicated. There are many scenes in the work place, presenting it as dangerous, and Gary is told that if he exposes himself to too much radiation he will lose his job.

I am not convinced that A nuclear plant is a particularly dangerous place because there are so many cautionary procedures, unless, of course, something goes seriously wrong, which is rare. In the film there are no managers or senior people and the film gives the impression that this working-class group of workers depend more on their wits and experience than on supervision. Even when Gary is reprimanded it is done by someone who is manifestly working-class.

The film uses electronic music, which is reasonably effective.

Rahim gives a particularly good performance, communicating youthful charm, innocence and gullibility, with an underlying toughness. I find Seydoux quite sour-faced.

I was sceptical about this depiction of  life in a nuclear plant, and I think that to fuel its drama the film used the modernistic appearance of the work, with workers performing their tasks in 'space' suits, to give a lay audience the impression that it is more dangerous and dramatic than it is.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

This is a film that will please many audiences - those looking for a summer blockbuster and those who enjoy a story that resonates with socio-political issues. It is a sequel (I didn't see the first one) set in a future where a simian virus has wiped out most of the human race and caused a sudden increase in the intelligence of apes. The few surviving humans are struggling in decrepit and broken cities, while the apes occupy rural areas. There are amazing scenes of huge communtites of apes, and of numorous apes swinging rapidly from tree to tree to tree through the forests. The early scenes with the apes are subtitled, but this segues into the later scenes where the apes speak in a sparse, croking English.

The story concerns one human enclave, lorded over by a benign and well-intentioned Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), which is running out of power and needs to repair a nearby dam. It sends an exploratory party to the dam. This is a group of callow americans straight out of TV drama, with a politically-correct regulation female, Ellie (Keri Russell) and a regulation negro, Foster (John Eyes) and they set off up the mountain in an English motor-car, a Landrover. The group is captured by the apes and we have the scene, which I have seen in other films, where they are taken to the heart of the ape community and the apes argue about what to do with them. The apes are led by the thoughtful and well-intentioned Ceasar (Andy Serkis), who listens to the group's leader, Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and allows him to go to the dam. During this scene there is a tense moment when it is revealed that one of the group has secretly brought a gun. It is striking that both the human and simian sides have well-intentioned and thoughtful leaders. When I watched the film I didn't know how the apes were rendered so I'm interested to see in writing this that they were actors.

There is contention on both sides: on the human side there are those who say "they are just animals, we must shoot them", and on the simian side there are those who say "humans locked us in cages and did experiments on us!" and some of them still have the scars to prove it. Ceasar and Dreyfus try to calm things down and maintain an uneasy coexistance, but the gun incident sowed mistrust which spread through both communities leading to deterioration on both sides and finally to disaster. Ceasar is challenged by the agressive and human-hating Koba and Dreyfus is dragged down by those seeking a more war-like posture. The apes are well-characterised, and we need to be able to recognize different apes to follow the story.

It is not hard to see the parallels between this story and many situations in the present world and in human history. The film could also be re-imagined as a cowboys 'n' Indians film with the Indians replaced by apes.

There is plenty of spectacle and the cinematography is very good, with images in a dark, grungy, sepia-ish brown, and plenty of spectacle. I saw the 3D version of the film and the 3D effects are well-controlled not too in-your-face.

There are a few moment when the narrative wobbles in the direction of cliched sentimentality, particularly when there is a baby ape that triggers the maternal instinct in Ellie.

This is an intelligent, enjoyable and thoughtful film that I do not hesitate to recommend.

Her

This is a film set in the future when computers will be able to simulate human intelligence and emotions. At the beginning of the film Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, installs a new "operating system" in his computer. Just as with my satnav, Theodore is able to choose whether he wants his computer to have a male or female voice, and he chooses female. Theodore is in the process of divorcing his wife, who was his childhood friend. His new computer is very helpful and he has many conversations with it. He finally admits that he has fallen in love with his computer, and it seems that his computer has fallen in love with him. Yes, this film requires that one suspends one's disbelief very high. At one point the computer says as an aside that it belongs to a book club, and at another it wakes Theodore up in the middle of the night and says that it just wanted to hear his voice.

One problem, of course, with falling in love with a computer is that sex is impossible. However, the computer, being very clever, has thought of that and assigns a woman - a real living female - as a surrogate to do sex with Theodore. Theodore tries, but his heart is not in it and he gives up (the sex, that is). Things happen. There are ups and downs, and misunderstandings, as there must be in any good romance. At one point the computer admits that it is stringing along over 8000 people in the same way that it is engaging Theodore, (although it does not mention whether they are all being assigned the same surrogate). He is understandably upset but he does have a shoulder to cry on, the understanding Amy, played by Amy Adams, a friend who has her own emotional difficulties.

All this takes place in a very stylised futuristic world. The cinematography and mise en scène are stunningly beautiful with an attenuate palet of reduced contrast and pastel shades, with some lovely images. The people in this film are mild, well-intentioned, and nice. With the pastel shades it is as though they are adult children inhabiting a nursery. The un-nurserylike characteristic of the interiors is that they are all immaculate, tidy, and clean. This is the opposite of grunge. I was amused to see that in an attempt to make the computers look different in a futuristic way, computer displays are actually thicker than those I would see in any contemporary computer shop. To hear the voice of the computer Theodore wears a small plastic earpiece, a bit like a hearing aid, in one ear. He never had to say "Hold on, You're breaking up, I'll go over by the window." and he never complained about the signal. A perfect world. The protracted conversations about emotional difficulties made me think, briefly, of Woody Allen. The sanitised world reminded me of Peter Weir's The Truman Show.

My difficulty with this film is that it is very insubstantial and I thought that it has no point. Joaquin Phoenix is an actor for whom I would go to see a film, and in this film is, as ever, very good. He, together with the mise en scène and cinematography are this film's strongest features. It is just that I'm not sure that these strengths justify the two hours it takes to see the film. At one point I realised that I had looked at my watch four times, and at the end of the film I was cuddling my watch in my hand and was pleased to leave the cinema. We live in a world with many political and other difficulties and I do not understand why anyone should want to make a film about nothing.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

This is a film that demands and justifies very close attention for the whole of its three-hour duration, and it left me emotionally drained. The performances of the two leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos as Adèle, and Léa Seydoux as Emma, are astonishing. The film follows very closely Adèle's life from schoolgirl to the beginning of her adult life well engaged on her career as a teacher. What impresses is how all the forces and influences to which she is subject are scrupulously and thoughtfully marshalled into a credible person's story. The main event is her first serious emotional engagement (aka 'love affair') which, as is so often the case, ended painfully for her. At the end of the film she is a wiser, more thoughtful, and slightly scarred woman.

Many of the elements that will form Adèle as an adult are here in this film, thoughtfully and subtly present - family, class, sex, peer pressure, ambitions and professional demands. Much work and thought went into this screenplay, and it easily justifies its long duration. The film was directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, who also adapted it from the source graphic novel. The transformation of Adèle from puppyish teenager to confident professional in the course of the film is gradual and astonishing.

Many discussions of this film are really discussions of the sex scenes. Being located in the UK, I expected this because I know how taboo mention of sex is here in polite conversation. The only rule is - if one must mention sex don't confess to being interested in the sex or enjoying it. I have heard no discussions of the pasta-eating scenes (there are three!) One should not go to this film on an empty stomach!

Much of the cinematography is hand-held, with Adèle being on screen for nearly all of the time with a camera not much more than about nine inches from her. This is not normally my preferred filming method, but I was happy with it here. Blue is a unifying motif throughout the film.

Le Skylab

This film was directed by Julie Delpy, who also wrote the screenplay. I have the impression that she succeeded very well in making the film that she set out to make. The film is about a family get-together in Britanny. It is well-directed, with fluid camerawork moving among a large cast, with a good feeling for the rhythm of the film as the events ebb and flow. The film has a flash-back structure, with an opening scene in the present soon flashing back to events in about 1979 when Albertine, the main character, was 11 years old. The film stays in the 1970s, recalling a train excursion to Brittany where the family spent time together eating and enjoying each other's company. At the end of the film there is the short scene back in the present.

This is a woman's film and it reflects a woman's interest in family and children. For me, much of the film lacked content because we watched ordinary people being ordinary people, and ordinary children being ordinary children, with nothing much happening. There was a lot of small talk signifying nothing, with no drama. When children amused each other with their childish anecdotes we had to listen to the WHOLE anecdote, the filmmaker clearly supposing that this would engage or entertain us. There were a few ups and downs, as there often are in families, but nothing of much consequence. The film seemed authentically French, as it should do, Delpy being French. The family ate a spit-roasted lamb but in all the chatter, I do not recall much discussion of either the food or the wine. This did not seem to me to be very French at all! Maybe these conversations occurred when I was squinting at my watch, fighting the urge to leave the cinema.

At the time of the flashback, 1979, many were concerned at the news that a space vehicle, Skylab, would crash to earth, possibly in France, causing alarm that was passed from the adults to the children. This is a barmy ingredient that gives the film and extra whiff of authenticity. There is even a shot of Skylab tumbling through space.

Delpy has clearly learnt from Richard Linklater the usefulness of trains as sets. The film, having some similarities to that wonderful film All Who Love Me Can Take The Train, starts and ends with a family on a train.

This brings me to what I saw as errors of judgement in this film. In the opening scene Albertine, adult, with her partner and two children are in a crowded train with reserved seats and she asks other passengers, also in reserved seats, to move so that they can sit together as a family. The other passengers refuse. The closing scene is a continuation of this, with Albertine insisting and even going so far as to lecture the recalcitrant passengers on the qualities of virtue. I cringed. In the second scene of the film Albertine, now eleven years old, is in a crowded train compartment, and there is brief eye contact between her and another passenger across the compartment, who smiles back and waves to her. He is immediately accused of being a pervert, and he storms out of the compartment, embarrassed and angry. This was in 1979. These scenes were unnecessary, embarrassing and against the tone of the rest of the film. I think 'Le Skylab' is a poorly-chosen title for this film, with its connotations of science fiction, and it will discourage potential viewers who would enjoy revelling in its family values for a couple of hours.

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.

The Master

This film is an account of a fictional cult leader, Lancaster Dodd, and his acolyte, Freddie Quell. Quell is an emotionally damaged and alcoholic war veteran who meets Dodd when he stows away on a ship. There is some empathy between them and Quell joins Dodd's cult and becomes his eager fixer.

At the beginning of the film we meet quell as he returns to civilian life after the war. There is a long scene of Quelle and his sailor friends making a sandcastle in the shape of a woman so that they can feign copulation with it. The scene suggests that Quelle is more than averagely preoccupied by sex. There is a later scene where Quell is watching a group of people dancing in a room, then there is a close-up of his eyes and, when we cut back to the dancing group, all the women are naked. This scene seems to making roughly the same point as the sandcastle copulation scene. The dancing scene is held for an embarrassingly long time, causing me to reflect on the humiliations actors must endure to receive their fee. After all this emphasis on Quell's interest in sex he does nothing in the film that is sexually untoward. So what was all that about?

Quell Is played by Joaquim Phoenix, an actor I admire, and Dodd is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. I have always thought of Phoenix as being quite well built but here he looks very thin and cadaverous. He gives an amazing performance, maybe slightly overdoing the talking-out-of-the-side-of-his-mouth schtick.

In civilian life Quelle tries a few jobs including photographer and making illicit hooch, but nothing works out. While stowing away on a ship he meets Dodd, and they seem to have an unlikely affinity for each other. Dodd is already embarked on his career as proselytiser and conman or,  as he puts it, 'I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher... but above all I am a man'. Quell joins Dodd's coterie and things jog along as Dodd finds wealthy sponsors and his enterprise grows. There is a disagreement between Quelle and Dodd and Quell goes his own way for several years. He returns to Dodd, finding him quite a lot more successful than he was when he left him.

This film has very little dramatic impulse. As one over-long scene meanders into another over-long scene I sat watching and wondering where it was leading. I thought of Dorothy Parker's description of Los Angeles as 'seventy-two suburbs in search of a city' because this film is seventy-two scenes in search of a story. This film is very well made and looks expensive, but the narrative arc is incoherent and lacks impulse, There are several unexpected scenes, such as one where Quell is made to blunder back and forwards, blindfolded, between the walls of a room, or one where suddenly they are in the desert playing with a motor bike, when I had no choice but to wonder where the scene was leading, whether it was entertaining, or what it was telling us of relevance to the story. The film is very much less than the sum of its parts. Maybe Anderson should try a little more delegation, particularly with screen writing. I liked Anderson's first three films but I did not share in the admiration for There Will Be Blood. This is Anderson's Heaven's Gate. As I watched Dodd's character - motivated by self-importance, vapid ideas and cliches - I wondered to what extent these qualities apply to this film.

It did not help this film's case that the film I saw after it was Michael Haneke's Amour, which cast into a horrible perspective the sheer banality of the points this film tries so expensively and incompetently to make. Those who like the idea of this film should give it a miss and obtain a DVD of Elmer Gantry instead.

Everyday

This is the film I preferred of those that I saw in the film festival in Dinard. It was introduced by its director, Michael Winterbottom, looking alarmingly young for a man who has directed 37 films. The film was made over a period of five years and it is about a family with four children. It shows in detail the day-to-day routine of the family's life, particularly as the children are got up, given breakfast and got off to school in the morning and collected in the afternoon. There are several scenes shot in the school showing the children during their classes. There are amazingly touching scenes of the children, who are real-life siblings and are too young to 'act', but are caught by Winterbottom in authentic moments of emotion and vulnerability.

The anomaly is that the father, Ian, is in prison so, very often, the children must be rounded up by their mother, Karen, put on a bus, then on a train, then into a taxi, to take them to visit their father in prison.

This film has not had a cinema release yet in the UK, although it has been shown on television. In Googling for reviews I did not find many, and some of those that I did find expressed disappointment that the film is boring because nothing happens. This is true, nothing happens, except Life. Those who make this complaint are those who have overdosed on Hollywood entertainment taken neat.

I very much admired recently the films of Asghar Farhadi, About Elly and A Separation. One thing I admired about these films was how, from very simple beginnings, the plot thickened, and how simple situations led to unexpected sequences. Everyday is the opposite. Little situations that may have made us tense because they may have led to trouble, didn't. This is just the same as how, usually, when one maybe forgot to lock the front door, one returns home to find that a no burglar has been in. These little anxieties occur but usually they are okay, and that is how it is in this film. The film is set in rural Norfolk and when one of the children, aged about seven, takes a hunting rifle and goes off into the woods looking for rabbits, nothing goes wrong and he is finally found by by his mother, given a smack, and sent to bed. I admired this film because it does not have acting shtick and it does not have dramatic shtick, which was so refreshing after so many films I have seen err in the other direction.
 
I course the mother does not need any more drama then she already has, with four children, an absent father, just a little occasional help from her mother in law, a job in B&Q during the day and a job serving in a pub in the evening. She is played very well by Shirley Henderson and her husband is played very charmingly by John Simm. The scenes of prison visits were shot in real prisons and the scenes in the classroom was shot in a real school.

The film is intercut with occasional scenes of the rural environment - fields, rolling hils, sheep and woods. The soundtrack has lovely music by Michael Nyman.

There are some scenes of family outings - trips to the seaside - showing that another man has seeped into her life, although we see no details other than that he occasionally joins them on outings and has tea with them. When, towards the end of the film, Ian is out of prison, there is a scene where they are in bed, him asleep and her, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly her eyes fill with tears and she says "You know, it was really hard, while you were away." He half wakes up

    "what...?"
    "I was seeing someone."
    "You were seeing someone while I was inside??"
    "Yes."
    "Who was it, who were you seeing??"
    "Eddy"
    "I don't believe it. You were seeing fuckin' Eddy??

So it goes on. There are shots of the children in their rooms hearing their parents' raised voices.The next morning Ian is at the breakfast table not looking as though he had a particularly good night but over it.

I think that with this film Michael Winterbottom has made a quiet masterpiece.

Argo

This is a very good film in many departments. It is gripping, entertaining, humorous, witty, well directed and well acted. It is a pity it has such a fatal flaw.

The film starts with a pre-credit sequence giving a decent summary of the United States' shameful diplomacy towards Iran. It recounts how, in 1953, United States destabilised and brought down a democratically elected government. Then it installed a puppet Shah and during 25 years provided him with money, arms and equipment so that he could terrorise, murder, torture and imprison its population, and humiliate them with enforced westernisation. All this was to enable American corporations to prosper and to ensure that the United States would have reliable supply of oil.

The film is based on true events centring on the siege of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979. As the embassy was being overrun six employees escaped out of the back door, ran through the streets, and found shelter in the Official residence of the Canadian Ambassador. The CIA sought to rescue these people, and that is what this film is about.

The film is directed by, and stars, Ben Affleck. Affleck has acted in more than 50 films and this is the third feature that he has directed. The previous two films that he directed, Gone, Baby, Gone and The Town Were solid, good quality films. With Argo I am sure that he will have a place at the high table of American filmmaking. The first time I saw this film, in the London film Festival in 2012, There was a round of applause in the cinema at a pivotal point in the story. The only previous occasions when I have experienced applause in the cinema have been during festival screenings when someone involved in the making of the film was present, not as a response to some development in the narrative. This, I think, is testimony to Argo's effectiveness as a gripping drama.

The film has good, juicy parts for John Goodman and Alan Arkin. Arkin is best known for his part Catch-22 and has acted in over 100 films. He was also a singer and has written several books. Goodman made his name in the television series Roseanne and subsequently established his reputation in films such as The Big Lebowski. Argo has a witty script, written by first-time writer Chris Terrio. Set in 1979, the film does a good job of reflecting the fashions and manners of that time without fetishising them.

Argo's problem arises from its internal contradiction. Its pre-credit sequence shows America's dreadful history colluding in the oppression of Iran for its own venal advantage; a history demanding justice. The bulk of the film, however, shows the United States cocking yet another snook at this unfortunate country, and emerging with the smirk on its face. Justice will not be done and might is right.

La Piscine

La Piscine was made in 1968 and it was directed by Jacques Deray. There are four glorious European stars in their prime: Alain Delon in a dark and complex role, Maurice Ronet delivering the superficial charm he does so well, Romy Schneider looking impossibly beautiful and Jane Birkin just out of nappies.

I have read several online reviews of this film and none of them understood it, most commenting that it is a bit too long and a bit too slow, and it takes too long for anything to happen. Thank God there was someone at the BFI who knew better!

I am a person who instinctively looks below the surface of things and for me this film is a feast.

It is set in a borrowed holiday villa in the south of France, where Jean-Paul (Delon) and Marianne (Schneider) are on holiday together and spend their days fooling around by the swimming pool. Suddenly a mutual friend, Harry (Ronet) telephones and invites himself with his daughter, Penelope (Birkin), and they arrive in an expensive and throaty sports car. They join in the fun by the swimming pool, prepare meals together and do a bit of shopping. Harry is a playboy type and an old friend of Jean-Paul, also a possible ex-lover of Marianne - it's for us and Jean-Paul to find out. As they play together there is a storm of undercurrents and one of the main pleasures of the film is enjoying the difference between their polite exchanges and what they are thinking. It has very often been commented that the cinema must accept the limitation that it can work with only surface appearances. This film is proof of the contrary.

Rendering the film more evocative is one's knowledge of Romy Schneider's tragic life (she had a son who died in an awful accident when he was fourteen years old, and subsequently Romy Schneider killed herself with alcohol and pills). Delon and Schneider had been lovers and after her death Delon arranged for her son's remains to be put in the same grave as her. Ronet, who as a painter exhibited alongside Dubuffet and played piano and organ, died of cancer a month before his 56th birthday; Alain Delon, now in his mid-seventies, is still a kingpin of the jet set life in Geneva, his adopted home, and we all know how Jane Birkin is!

This film reminds me of the work of Claude Chabrol and if this were a Chabrol film it would be one of his best. The restauration is marvellous and the image, the place, the Sun and the stars look wonderful up on the screen.