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.

Skyfall

This is a hugely enjoyable film that should give the Bond franchise a new lease of life. It starts with a pre-credit chase sequence in which one has no idea what is going on, other than that Bond is being chased, if one recognises Daniel Craig. The film continues with this knowingness, riffing frequently and often humorously on previous bond films.

After the chase there is the most glorious credit sequence I can remember seeing for a long time, accompanied by the excellent theme song written and performed by Adele (known to her mother as Adele Laurie Blue Adkins).

Bond's adversary, Silva, is played by Javier Bardem and his boss, M, by the ever-present Judy Dench. In this film M is not just a remote presence, but she plays an active role in the proceedings. As I watched the film I was tempted by the idea that this, along with Live Flesh,  could be one of Bardem's best films. He has a lot to do and he throws himself imaginatively into his nicely characterised role.

I have much respect for Daniel Craig since I saw him in Our Friends In The North. I recently managed to see him in Layer Cake which, I have heard, got him the Bond role. Here, I thought, he was quite interestingly on the cusp of being too old for the part, although we see that his body is in magnificent condition.

One of the qualities of the film is its humorous riffing on other other films. There is a scene reminding us of Apocalypse Now, with a helicopter approaching blaring music from Tannoys. An old Aston Martin car from the previous bond film is dusted off and used here in tongue-in-cheek way. Although the film has plenty of scenes abroad, particularly in Turkey and Macao, it is not a rootless international mess, but is firmly rooted in a plausible London that would not offend Londoners. There is an excellent British cast, including Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw excellent as a computer geek, Rory Kinnear as a bureaucratic flunky and Albert Finney humiliating hidden behind a huge beard. Female interest is provided by Naomie Harris and Berenice Marlohe. My only slight disappointment with the film was the lack of wit and spark in the exchanges between Bond and these desirable females. These occasionally fell flat for me. I was recently reminded of what wit can do for a script while watching Argo.

This is Sam Mendes' eighth film as director and he has entered very well into the spirit of how a Bond film should be.

Polisse

This is a pretty bad film. At least, I hope it is because, if there is any accuracy in its depiction of a police child protection unit, then God help us. They are shown as a loud-mouthed, untrained, undisciplined, unprofessional rabble loafing around in their open plan office, demonstrating their barrack-room culture.

Interviews of a very intimate sexual nature are conducted with suspects in this open plan office with other colleagues than the interviewer overhearing and chipping in smart remarks and interruptions, and no evidence of any formalities at all. Part of the 'drama' is to show how much the events that they deal with 'get' to them, yet there is no suggestion that any back up or counselling is available. There is just a fairly incompetent boss who occasionally emerges from his office. When one of them jumped out of a window she seemed to be taking a wise course of action. I felt like doing the same.

Too much of the film shows the tedious private lives of these people, making much of the film like a dreadful soap opera, as they shout, argue and gesticulate exaggeratedly at each other. Scenes are often allowed to go on too long, for instance, when they all go to a nightclub and we have to endure an interminable dancing display.

There is an implausible and redundant character - a journalist who is on an assignment to photograph the police department. It didn't take me long to guess that this part was played by the maker of the film, Maïwenn, up to something tricksy and cute. She is really called Maïwenn Le Bosco, but has adopted the French affectation of giving herself a one-barrel label. She devoted too much of the film to showing herself in character taking snaps, and no shot of her failed to show the 'red spot' logo of the Leica camera she was using. This was outrageous product placement. I know enough about photography to know that an identical camera is available at half the price but with the Panasonic logo on it, and I can't imagine many serious journalists would pay the necessary extra cash to flaunt a Leica logo. This redundant character nevertheless gives the film maker a chance for a redundant romance in her narrative. As I watched this film, becoming bored with squinting at the face of my watch, I let my eyes close to keep the tediousness at bay. Apparently it won a prize in the Cannes festival.

Bhumika

Bhumika was made in 1976 by Shyam Benegal, the leading exponent of 'new' Indian cinema. This refers to films that sought to break away from the tradition of making song and dance entertainment films, now referred to as bollywood.

The film is based on the autobiography of the actress Hansa Wadkar, who worked in the 1930s and 1940s in Indian cinema. Her autobiography is a seminal feminist text in India. In the film she is called Usha, and is played by the beautiful and intelligent Smita Patil, who died in childbirth at the age of thirty. Bhumika was the third film she had made for Benegal and she was not sure she wanted to be an actress. Throughout the making of the film Benegal had constantly to urge her to remain committed to the film. Bhumika won several wards in 1978, and only then did Patil become a committed actress. She died aged 30 in 1986.

The film has a complex structure. There is a narrative in the present, with flashbacks to the past. The present is in colour and the flashbacks are in monochrome. The flashbacks show Usha's childhood with scenes from films she was in, and from films which influenced her. These scenes are, inevitably, from traditional (song and dance) Indian cinema. When Bhumika was made there was a shortage of film stock in India, and Benegal used in the flashbacks stock that would have been used at the time, because these older, inferior stocks were more easily available. this gives these scenes extra authenticity.

Usha as a child learnt from her grandmother to love music, and all she wanted to do was sing. A family friend, Keshav, had contacts in the film industry and found her a job there, and she became a film star.

There were five men in her life. Her father, who she loved, was an alcoholic and died when she was young. She married the family friend Keshav and he was cruel and venal, doing his best to exploit her earning power. She loved her co-star, Rajan, and he loved her, but he was commitment-phobic. Sunil was a charming, nihilistic and intellectual film director who led her into an unsuccessful suicide pact. Vinayak was a prosperous businessman who wanted her as a domestic captive to care for his son and paralyzed wife.

At the end of the film, unhappy and alone, she decides to make a life alone. At one point, as she is contemplating escape from Vinayak's household, his paralyzed wife says to her "Why do you bother? The beds change, the kitchens change. Men’s masks change, but men don’t change.” As Benegal put it, talking about the film, she had learnt that freedom has a cost.

In the flashbacks we see many scenes of song and dance, and we have the translation of the song lyrics. Each song encapsulates a woman's dilemma.  These songs, and Usha's story, make a very powerful feminist text. The flashbacks are objectified as such by the intrusion of cameras and technicians. The credit sequence is such a scene leading us to expect a bollywood-style film. Then, towards the end of the credits, a camera on a boom enters the frame from the right, a dancer falls over, and technicians rush to her aid, destroying the bollywood illusion.

It is astonishing that this powerful and memorable film, pregnant with meanings that are relevant for us today, should be so little known, and not celebrated as the masterpiece it so clearly is.

Free Men (Les hommes libres)

This film is interesting because it is about the Muslim community in Paris during the second world war. It concerns a small-time dealer, Younes, in the black market who becomes politicised. Younes is played by Tahar Rahim who impressed us in Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and here he is excellently cast, having the right blend of youthful innocence and disengagedness. ````

Michael Lonsdale plays the head honcho of the mosque where much of the film is set, doing his best to keep the Nazis on-side, playing a part very similar to his part in Of Gods And Men, and looking similar.

In addition, there is a Muslim singer who sings in a style that is very similar to flamenco.

The film tells a story having elements we have seen many times before - unsympathetic Nazi Germans in trilby hats and long, leather overcoats, black Citroen Traction-avants bulging with bulging-overcoated men. Although the film is set in wartime Paris I thought that more could have been done with the cinematography to render the setting more vividly. Also, the telling of the story was quite prosaic. If I used stars I would give it three.

The Turin Horse

I don't know whether Bela Tarr will keep to his word and not make another film but, if he does, he will have finished his film-making career with his best film. The Turin Horse is about very little and yet it is about everything. It is a symphony with wind, a horse and two humans.

In it we see the daily routine of an elderly man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, who live a minimal existence in a rudimentary cottage in a God-forsaken place in central Europe, presumably Hungary. We see six days of their lives, each day introduced by a title. The highlight of their routine is their meal of a single boiled potato each, eaten with their fingers from wooden plates in about five minutes. When they rise in the morning Ohlsdorfer drinks two glasses of the local firewater, palinka, while his daughter goes to the well to fetch two buckets of water.

They have a horse which, at the beginning of the film, is linked to Friedrich Nietzche, and this little back-story succeeds in keeping the horse in our attention. In fact the horse, remarkably, in it's enigmatic speechlessness, becomes the emotional centre of the film. The Hungarian rain and mud that we became familiar with in earlier Tarr films is here replaced by a hellish wind, audible on the soundtrack throughout the fim. Even going outside is difficult, and the atmosphere is always laden with leaves and dust. There is a visit by a neighbour to fetch some palinka and, after he has unburdened himself of a political rant, he is sent on his way with a disparaging put-down by Ohlsdorfer. There was humour of this type in earlier Tarr films. Otherwise few words are spoken other than by Ohlsdorfer, who is elderly and slightly handicapped, to give instructions to his daughter.  Early in the film the daughter expresses a query that I'm sure is on many viewers' minds when she asks her father, after a brief conversation about woodworm, 'What's it all about, Papa?' He replies that he does not know. So little happens and yet I was gripped because the slightest change or incident in the routine makes one wonder where it will lead. One by one things on which their simple life depend start to fail, until the continuation of their life seems impossible, and the film fades to black. I was reminded of Beckett by the timeless fundamental nature of the world it depicts but with, instead of Beckett's abundance or words, Tarr's abundance of cinema.

The music is striking. It is a simple repeating dirge-like motive that could easily have come from Philip Glass. The wonderful monochrome cinematography, much of it in the near-dark interior of the cottage, is by Fred Keleman, the film-maker who made Abendland and the unseeable Frost, a film whose ownership is still the the subject of contention. Both Tarr and Keleman work in the European tradition of 'slow' cinema, traceable to Tarkovsky.

Compared to The Turin Horse, the other films I have seen recently have the weight of TV commercials. This film left emotions and images that will stay with me for a long time.