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.