From the mouths of babes

This from IMDb:

Screen siren Scarlett Johansson is eyeing a career switch as soon as she begins to wrinkle - she's preparing to become a director before movie bosses pass her up for another ingenue.

Johansson made her film debut at the age of nine in 1994's North, and already fears she'll be overlooked by the next budding beauty.

She tells America's Harper's Bazaar magazine, "It's hard to be a 24-year-old actor and not be typecast. A lot of roles are either for a sexy person or a Juno-type character.

"That ageism makes the actress fearful for her future, making her consider another path within the industry. There is some weird ageist quality in Hollywood, perhaps that's why I lean more toward directing and development.

"That's probably the direction I'll take; I can't keep up this face forever, you know."

Notwithstanding the fact that she’s only 24 (I’m 36, have yet to publish my first novel or direct anything beyond a shot-on-camcorder-edited-on-home-computer documentary about a local poetry society, but I’m nowhere near giving up hope), can I just add, for the defence, that an actress's best years are NOWHERE NEAR BEHIND HER AT EVEN TWICE THAT AGE.

Exhibit A: Diane Lane in ‘Unfaithful’ – age: 37; sex appeal: through the roof.

Exhibit B: Michelle Pfeiffer in ‘Stardust’ – age: 49; sex appeal: wowsers.

Exhibit C: Celia Imrie in ‘Calendar Girls’ – age: 51; sex appeal: the thinking man’s older woman.

Exhibit D: Helen Mirren in a random tabloid shot on some beach in a bikini – age: 63; sex appeal: timeless!

This post is dedicated to the natural beauty of older women everywhere. And to anyone who can’t see past their 20s … get a grip.

Golden Globe Awards

Congratulations to Kate Winslet for her double-whammy win at yesterday’s Golden Globe Awards, picking up Best Actress for ‘Revolutionary Road’ and Best Supporting Actress for ‘The Reader’. Both films are on my ‘must-see’ list.

Congratulations, too – and a respectful moment of silence – on Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor win for his frankly awesome re-invention of The Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’.

PERSONAL FAVES: Charley Varrick

Don Siegel’s follow up to his nihilistic 1971 classic ‘Dirty Harry’ was a complete change of pace, and perhaps explains why it didn’t find the mainstream success its predecessor (or indeed any of his collaborations with Clint Eastwood) did.

‘Charley Varrick’ is a quirky crime caper which ambiguously trades on its star Walter Matthau’s affable comedic persona, but benefits from him playing straight. Which isn’t to say that it’s not noir to the nines when it wants to be.

Opening with Charley (Matthau) and his three-man crew pulling a slick bank robbery in sleepy Tres Cruces, Mexico, the plan goes awry when a local cop tumbles to the false plates on the station wagon driven by Charley’s wife Nadine (Jacqueline Scott), the gang’s getaway driver. The resulting shoot-out leaves Charley’s crew decimated, and he and headstrong young crim Harman Sullivan (Andy Robinson, best known as the Scorpio Killer in ‘Dirty Harry’) are lucky to get away with the money.

Charley realises his luck might be running out when the haul clocks in a three-quarters of a million, not the $20-$30,000 he was expecting. Quickly realising the bank was laundering Mob funds, he turns his attention to how to stay alive now that the cops are the least of his worries. Things are complicated by the increasingly unpredictable Harman’s intent to start flashing his share around and living the high life.

Ex-stunt pilot Charley leaves Harman holed up in a trailer park and approaches photographer Jewell Everett (Sheree North), who runs a profitable sideline in forged documents, for a couple of passports. Little does he know that bank executive Maynard Boyle (John Vernon), simpatico to the dirty dealings at the Tres Cruces branch, has engaged pipe-smoking and effeminately named hitman Molly (Joe Don Baker) to get the money back.

Nor does he know that Molly and Jewell are known to each other, nor that molly has already tracked Harman down and had a little chat with him. That’s ‘little chat’ as in the kind of little chat Mr Blonde has with Marvin the cop in ‘Reservoir Dogs’.

In fact, a closer point of comparison might be ‘No Country for Old Men’. Molly comes off as a precursor to Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, a man similarly dispatched by underworld to types to recover a certain cache of cash and eliminate anyone who stands in the way. Both stride implacably through their respective films. Both take their work very seriously. Neither appreciative levity or smart comments (“I didn’t drive six hundred miles for the amusement of morons,” Molly growls when a gaggle of hookers find his name funny, the line delivered in the same granite tones as Chigurh’s stone cold “Call it, friendo” to an about-to-die gas station attendant). The only difference is that Molly is ineffably polite to the people he doesn’t have to kill and he smiles a lot more. Even though it’s the smile of a shark or a tiger. Joe Don Baker is on top form in the role; for my money it’s his best work on the big screen.

Matthau is terrific too, making his second appearance on the Personal Faves list in an uncharacteristically straight role (after ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’), even if his rumpled, somewhat shambolic persona makes it a tad unlikely that he’d prove romantically irresistible to Boyle’s uber-prim secretary Sybil Bolt (Felicia Farr) in an extended scene near the end that’s pure plot device.

Still, that’s the only quibble I have against Charley Varrick. Siegel’s direction finds and maintains a spot-on balance of wry humour, pacy narrative and a handful of excellently staged and edited action scenes. Vernon is perfectly cast as the oily executive who gets a nicely ironic comeuppance. Robinson is also good. Scott, North and Farr add a touch of sassy Seventies glamour as well as being appealing in their roles. And Michael Butler’s cinematography is just glorious.

The denouement is highly memorable, all the pieces slyly put in place beforehand, and the switcheroo payoff arrived at via a standout car/biplane chase.

The crime caper was a staple of Seventies cinema – ‘Pelham’ and ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ are prime examples – and in my book the still underrated ‘Charley Varrick’ is the equal of either of them.

12 Angry Men

Hitchcock famously said that it takes three things to make a great film: a great script, a great script and a great script. Other directors would no doubt champion mise-en-scene, or the ‘look’ of the film.

‘12 Angry Men’ has a good script. Not a great one, but a good one. The main … I won’t say ‘problem’, that would be unfair. The main niggle with Reginald Rose’s script is how laboured it becomes as Henry Fonda’s Everyman lights upon one inconsistency in the prosecution’s case after another. In the last 20 minutes or so, the script lurches towards contrivance with an overcooked bit of business about whether a key witness might have been wearing glasses or not. (Thinking back, I’m tempted to wonder if a crucial moment in ‘My Cousin Vinny’, which hinges on a similar premise, isn’t a very sneaky send-up.)

‘12 Angry Men’ doesn’t have any particularly ‘look’ to it either, other than Boris Kaufman’s sharp, realistic black and white cinematography. Apart from brief scenes at the beginning and end – one in court, the other on the courthouse steps – the whole 90-minutes play out in a cramped jury room. Nor is there mise-en-scene (oops, I’m using pretentious-speak; what I mean is ‘set-pieces’), unless you count someone jumping up from their chair, shouting a lot and brandishing a big pointing finger.

What makes ‘12 Angry Men’ a great film – riveting, tense and deserving of its status as an evergreen classic – is the acting. Every single role is perfectly cast (Fonda’s top-billing and producer credit notwithstanding, this is a 12-man ensemble piece).

Fonda’s man-of-integrity image arguably achieves its apogee here. He’s calm, dignified; but resolute. He doesn’t care whether the other jurors like him or not – several repeatedly try to browbeat him – and he doesn’t care how long the deliberations take or that the city is sweltering in a heatwave and the jury room fan is broken. He “just wants to talk” – mainly about whether an 18 year old will go to the chair or not as a result of their verdict – while the others want to hand down a guilty verdict and go home.

But Fonda’s performance, as with any actor’s in a chamber piece, is dependent upon the ensemble as a whole. Here we have Martin Balsom as the much put-upon jury foreman, Jack Klugman as a man whose wrong-side-of-the-tracks background gives him an empathy with the accused, Eg Begley as an obstreperous ‘hard justice’ type and – Fonda’s most vocal antagonist of all – Lee J Cobb, who tears up the screen in his portrayal of a father whose issues with his own son are alarmingly transferred to the youth in the dock.

Begley and Cobb get the show-stopping roles, personifying the uglier aspects of human nature just as Fonda epitomises the good, and they deliver the goods and then some! But kudos to the other performers – John Fiedler, E.G. Marshall (watch his face the moment he realises the youth might be innocent: it’s a brilliantly controlled piece of acting), Ed Binns, Jack Warden, Joseph Sweeney, George Voskovec and Robert Webber. Everyone nails their part precisely, and everyone has their moment.

There may be nothing overt about Sidney Lumet’s direction – nothing that shows the director’s hand – but the sheer quality of performance he draws from his actors, the accomplishment of taking the stagiest of material and making it gripping, are the highest testament to his skills as a film-maker.

THE FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: Grindhouse

Do you know how excited I was about ‘Grindhouse’? Imagine the adrenalin levels of a kid on Christmas Day, a fat kid in a sweetshop lockdown and no adults around to tell him not to, a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory, a dipsomaniac left in charge of a distillery, a voyeur given carte blanche to roam around the Playboy Mansion, and a member of the NRA at an arms bazaar. Now combine all those adrenalin levels, throw a few tequila slammers into the mix and shoot the whole thing full of heroin.

That’s how excited I was.

Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy reviewed it under the pullquote ‘The Movie I Was Put on This Earth to See’, and I was almost wetting myself.

And. Then. Something. Happened.

‘Grindhouse’ underperformed at the American box office. I started hearing dispiriting rumours: the film was being split in two for its European release; ‘Death Proof’ would come out first; there was no confirmed UK release date for ‘Planet Terror’. There was a big question mark over whether the spoof trailers would be released theatrically.

I. Was. Not. Happy.


I’ll admit it here and now: I was looking forward more to ‘Planet Terror’ than ‘Death Proof’, having been monstrously underwhelmed by ‘Kill Bill Vol. II’ (another Tarantino opus that got released in two parts, with a six month wait after the blistering first instalment with its iconic “House of Blue Leaves” set-piece).

Sure enough, the handful of lobby posters I’d seen for ‘Grindhouse’ quietly disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Death Proof’ posters. Frequent IMDb visits seemed to confirm that there was still no release date for ‘Planet Terror’. In the meantime, I’d tracked down the spoof trailers online and bookmarked them.

A week before ‘Death Proof’ opened, I got hold of ‘Planet Terror’ on Region 1 DVD, featuring the ‘Machete’ trailer (my personal favourite of the four spoofs). Me and Paula decided to have our own, cobbled together ‘Grindhouse’ experience: we watched ‘Planet Terror’ on DVD in the morning (including ‘Machete’), fired up the computer and watched the ‘Don’t’, ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ trailers, then went to the cinema and watched ‘Death Proof’ on the big screen in the afternoon.

It doesn’t quite equate to taking your seat in the cinema, watching two 90-minuters (each complete with ‘missing reel’) back to back, interspersed with the spoof trailers – ie. three and a half hours of moviegoing designed as an affectionate, often ironic but ultimately down and dirty throwback to the grubby joys of the exploitation B-movie double bill.

The point of those 70s double-bills was that you saw them in a cinema. Usually a dingy fleapit where the seats were dimpled with cigarette burns, smoke was still hanging in the air courtesy of the audience at the earlier screening, your shoes adhered to the floor thanks to a combination of melted ice cream, popcorn and spilled Ki-ora, and the films were interrupted at least a couple of times during the screening due to technical problems with the projector.

In order to recreate the experience, ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ – the former more authentically – are scratched and distressed and jump about a lot, simulating hamfisted splicing, and in the case of ‘Planet Terror’ the film seems to bubble up and burn into white nothingness.

Seen on DVD, you think “hmmm, that’s quite a convincing effect”. Seen on a computer, the spoof trailers are quite obviously that: spoofs. You find yourself picking hairs. Both ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’, as sleazily inspired as they are, are billed as “a film by Eli Roth” and “a film by Rob Zombie” respectively, the latter trumpeting a big star name (Nicolas Cage) – but no zero-budgeted exploitation flick would be thus advertised. Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ hits the mark as acutely as ‘Machete’, though, delivering a minute’s worth of stalk ‘n’ slash highlights while the voiceover drones monotonously “Don’t … don’t … don’t … don’t.”

Still, all of these component parts were meant to be taken together, as a three and a half hour whole … and were meant to be seen at the cinema. Instead, we got expanded cuts of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’, the former now clocking in 1 hour 45 minutes, and Tarantino’s opus pushing the two hour mark, again pushing the films another step away from their original aesthetic.

The damage done to both films is that you view them as separate entities, which leads to pointless exercises in critical approach whereby you try to reconcile the more authentic ‘look’ of ‘Planet Terror’ with the post-modern ironic playfulness of ‘Death Proof’ instead of thinking “zombie movie – cool; car chase movie – cool”. Or ruminating on the promise of the erotic given the plethora of eye candy (two quartets of heroines in ‘Death Proof’; cleavages a-go-go courtesy of Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton and Stacy Ferguson in ‘Planet Terror') and the non-inclusion of actual nudity (want topless women? the ‘Machete’ trailer’s the only place you’ll find ’em) and coming to the conclusion that an implied salaciousness : disappointment ratio is par for the course in exploitation movies and Rodriguez and Tarantino have played on this most effectively … when you should, of course, be thinking “wow, hot chicks”.

Tim comments, in his brilliantly written review, “the structural vulernability of Grindhouse makes it the same as those things it mimics, even while the very soul of Grindhouse is that, as a mimic, it is not the same thing. Therefore, the film becomes both thesis and antithesis”, and he’s absolutely right. To discuss structure is perhaps the most intelligent way to approach ‘Grindhouse’ critically. Otherwise, as just as valid, you can simply kick back with a big tub of popcorn, turn off your critical faculties and let your mind go “zombies, cool … wow, Rose McGowan’s a fox … machine gun leg … shoot-outs, cool … stuff blowing up … fast cars, cool … wow, Vanessa Ferlito’s a fox … Kurt Russell being a badass, cool … wow, how long’s this car chase gone on for? …” and so on and so forth.

They’ve been constructed deliberately – and a lot more cleverly than a first viewing might lead you to believe – but the component parts of ‘Grindhouse’ are quite simply a hymn to the gleeful pleasures of moviegoing in an age where hot chicks, fast cars, cheesy special effects and 90-minutes of low-budget mayhem were their own raison d’etre.

Comparing and contrasting the films is a redundant exercise. The distributors, by splitting ‘Grindhouse’ in two, have left the likes of your humble blogger here with no choice other than to do just that. I was even tempted to use this post as a prologue to articles on ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ over the next two evenings.

But I won’t because I’m convinced that if I ever get to see ‘Grindhouse’ in the format Messrs Rodriguez and Tarantino intended me to, then I’ll have seen a masterpiece of post-modern throwback indulgent irony. Yup, I know those last four words seem like a quadrille of contradiction but I reckon the movie that underperformed in America and never made it to the UK has what it takes to synthesise them; and until ‘Grindhouse’ gets released in this country in its original format (preferably in a theatrical run), or until I can get my hands on a Region 1 DVD, it will have to remain the best movie I’ve almost seen.

Peckinpah at the BFI

Between working commitments, my father’s birthday on the 9th of the month and the basic fact that I can’t afford it (one word: mortgage), I’m reluctantly* going have to give the BFI’s Sam Peckinpah retrospective a miss.

For those of you who can make it, click here for schedule and booking information, click here for Time Out’s very welcome corrective ‘The Softer Side of Sam Peckinpah’ and – if I may be permitted a blatant bit of self-promotion – click here to buy my book on Peckinpah from Amazon.



*That’s reluctantly as in ‘teeth-grindingly, fist-clenchingly, scowl-inducingly’.

PERSONAL FAVES: Wallace & Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit

A second viewing might alter my opinion, but I have to admit to a slight feeling of disappointment at Nick Park’s latest Wallace & Gromit animation, ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’, screened on BBC1 on Christmas Day. An inspired title, but for the first time in their 19-year partnership, encompassing four shorts and one feature-length film, it seemed like Wallace & Gromit by-the-numbers.

Was it really 1989 that the incomparable duo – cheese-loving, mild-mannered eccentric inventor Wallace (voiced by ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ stalwart Peter Sallis) and his faithful, if much put-upon, pooch Gromit (voiced by no-one; a world of emotion is contained in the movement of his eyes) – were introduced in the offbeat ‘A Grand Day Out’? According to IMDb it was, and boy does that make me feel old!

It was 1993’s ‘The Wrong Trousers’, boasting superior production values, that fully realised Park’s 1950’s-tinged vision: the small-town Northern locale (not too dissimilar from the Holmfirth of ‘Summer Wine’); the genre-based storyline (the vaguely sci-fi musings of ‘A Grand Day Out’ here replaced by a heist caper); and a frenetic commitment to high-speed visual inventiveness (Gromit and the penguin’s lunatic and hilarious model railway chase).

Two years later came ‘A Close Shave’, arguably the best of the short films. Another crime plot (sheep rustling); Gromit set up to take the rap (a priceless in-joke has the incarcerated canine sitting morosely in his cell reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fido Dogstoyevsky!); Wallace’s inventions taking on a ‘Thunderbirds’-style level of intricacy. Marvellous stuff.

But, for me at least, the high point was their triumphant transition to the big screen in 2005 with ‘Curse of the Were-Rabbit’, co-directed by Park and Steve Box. The narrative, entirely in keeping with Park’s nostalgic ’50s aesthetic, conjures up a plethora of cheesy horror genre B-movies.

Starting as it means to go on with deliberately lurid lettering for the title credit and ominous music, ‘C of the W-R’ sees the daring duo running a vegetable security firm called Anti-Pesto. Business is good and their clients sleep soundly knowing that their prize cucumbers and carrots and cauliflowers are being protected from a village-wide rabbit infestation. And with Lady Tottington’s Annual Vegetable Competition imminent, Wallace & Gromit’s very reputation is at stake should anything go wrong and the goods get gnawed or nibbled.

Something, of course, goes wrong. Summoned to Tottington Hall to rid the grounds of rapacious rabbits (note to self: enough with the alliteration already!), Wallace hits it off with Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) who is particularly taken with his humane treatment of the captured bunnies: he houses them in the cellar of chez Wallace and feeds them while he puts the finishing touches to his mind-control device. In arguably the most imaginative send-up of ‘Frankenstein’ since Mel Brooks’ legendary spoof, Wallace hooks himself up to the machine, intent on brainwashing the rabbits into an aversion to all vegetables. More ominous music; flashes of lightning. The experiment goes horribly wrong. Wallace creates a monster.

A huge, bounding, almost criminally cute monster.

With said were-rabbit on the rampage, allotments attacked, vegetables violated and Anti-Pesto’s reputation ruined (seriously: enough with the alliteration, Neil!), Lady Tottington’s roundly rejected but pitifully persistent smug suitor Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) proffers the services of himself, his hunting rifle, and his borderline psychotic bulldog. And he doesn’t care if Wallace & Gromit get in the way …

‘Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ spends a good half of its 90-minute running time setting out its stall: establishing characters, situations, locations, narrative and internal dynamics. Then Box and Park unleash a series of frenetic set-pieces culminating in a showdown at the vegetable competition which homages ‘Jaws’, ‘King Kong’ and – in the film’s standout mise-en-scene where Gromit and Quartermaine’s dog battle it out in model aeroplanes – ‘The Blue Max’.

The jokes come think and fast: “I think it’s a case of arson,” Peter Kay’s P.C. Mackintosh deliberates; “Arson?” someone echoes; “Aye, someone’s been arsin’ around.” There’s a “beware the moon” gag that’s worth the price of the DVD alone. Visual puns are everywhere, from Gromit’s graduation photograph (he went to Dogwart’s!) to a greenhouse being locked and alarmed by a keyfob as if it were a car.

There is something happening – some sly joke, or unexpected detail in the background – in every frame of ‘Curse of the Were-Rabbit’. I’ve seen it now, I think, half a dozen times and I’m still spotting things anew. It’s Wallace & Gromit at their finest and earned Park perhaps the most well-deserved Oscar the Academy has yet bestowed.

New Year's resolutions

First and foremost, a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all.

Here’s to a 2009 that gives us better news (enough with the ‘credit crunch’ doom and gloom, already; I’m convinced this any-minute-now recession would evaporate and the economy take an upswing if only the media would shut the fuck up about it) and better movies.

Here on Planet Agitation, I think I’ve just about got myself into a writing discipline that balances work on my novel-in-progress (about 22,000 words completed thus far) with new material for the blog. And with a few dirt-cheap January sale DVD acquisitions, I won’t be short of things to write about.

My aim is to post at least two articles a week (although I’m giving another shout to anyone who wants to contribute anything: any and all cinema related musings to opentosuggestions.neil@lycos.co.uk, please), with the weekend article given over to Personal Faves. Next up: cinema’s finest claymation double-act.

Later this month, on January 22nd to be exact, I’ll be celebrating the birthday of one of my favourite actresses – the oft underrated Diane Lane – by kicking off a three-day Diane-Fest (or a four-dayer if I can get hold of a copy of ‘The Big Town’ by then).

In February, the Second Annual Hitch-Fest will include ‘North By Northwest’ from the Personal Faves list. File under ‘fest’ during the following months these luminaries: Werner Herzog, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar; not to mention, during the latter stages of ’09 the obligatory Third Annual Dirk-Fest.

Just let me recover from this hangover and deal with going back to work tomorrow, then it’s back to business …

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog has always been drawn to characters driven by obsessiveness and madness, as his six-film relationship with Klaus Kinski (himself not the most well-adjusted of individuals) testifies. ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’, both born of this collaboration, are films of almost operatic grandeur. But Herzog has also proved a clear-sighted documentarist.

(Um, when I say "clear-sighted", what I mean is Herzog goes hell for leather getting to the emotional and aesthetic truth of his subject - and if that means staging a few scenes, then fuck it, that's exactly what Herr Herzog will do. We'll return to this subject when ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’ crops up on the personal faves list.)

In ‘Grizzly Man’, Herzog finds a real-life subject the equal of any of his fictive protagonists. Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers in the "grizzly maze" of Alaska’s Katmai National Park, often directly contravening the regulations on camping and non-interaction with the wildlife. He shot over 100 hours of video footage, focusing as much on himself as on the bears.

Reviews of the film trot out the same descriptions of Treadwell: "environmentalist", "troubled loner". Herzog’s documentary also shows him as a lachrymose sentimentalist ("I love you," he croons to the bears, whom he gives babyish names like ‘Mr Chocolate’); a paranoid fantasist (encountering a team of photographers on a wildlife shoot, he immediately decries them as poachers; a smiley face graffiti'd on a rock engenders a flight of paranoia that would be funny if ‘Grizzly Man’ were a work of fiction) and a rampant egomaniac (he deems the Katmai National Park "my land" and declares himself "a kind warrior").

Herzog never entirely calls it either way, though. True, he accuses of Treadwell of "crossing the line" during an expletive-ridden rant about the Katmai National Park authorities; but he also delights in the (almost accidental) visual poetry of some of Treadwell's footage. Herzog is too much of a film-maker, too much of a crazed adventurer himself, not to appreciate Treadwell's commitment. He's also too intelligent, too much of a realist, not to recognise Treadwell's naivety.

That Treadwell was killed by a bear is not so much irony as inevitability. A native Alaskan, interviewed by Herzog, advocates "Our people have lived with the bears for 700 years - they stay away from us, we stay away from them." A jolting cut from Treadwell’s childish musings to footage of two grizzlies locked in combat reinforces the point: these are huge, powerful animals that kill for food. Respect them, yes, but don’t try to play with them.

When another interviewee assets that Treadwell got the death "he deserved", it sounds harsh. By the end of the documentary, you realise it’s simply a statement of fact. "This is not a nature film," Herzog says at the outset. Very true. ‘Grizzly Man’ is a study in madness and just as compelling as if Kinski were in the lead role.

Compliments of the season

Prior to heading off to pick up Paula's father (our guest for today), prior to introducing the turkey to the oven and assuring the roast potatoes and pigs in blankets of a similar fate, prior to steaming the veg (all done over a glass or two of sauvignon blanc - chef's perogative!); prior to the conversation and the jokes and the new Wallace & Gromit on BBC1 later tonight ('A Matter of Loaf and Death' - inspired!) ...

... a few minutes to fire up the computer, log on and wish everyone who reads, follows or links to these pages a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Paul Scofield

Kudos to BBC2 for tonight’s ‘Arena’ documentary on Paul Scofield, who died earlier this year.

Contributors included Simon Callow, Donald Sinden, Felicity Kendal and Nicolas Hytner, who directed Scofield in his final film role – Judge Danforth in ‘The Crucible’ – in 1996.

In the main, the documentary focused on his theatre work for the RSC, featuring some jaw-dropping archive footage, particularly of his performance as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’.

Milos Forman’s adaptation, long a favourite of mine, has now been compromised for me. As memorable and as nuanced as F. Murray Abraham is, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch it again without wondering how different – how much more compelling – it might have been with Scofield in the role.

PERSONAL FAVES: Ocean's 11

When Steven Soderbergh made ‘Ocean’s 11’ in 2001, he was on a roll. After nearly a decade in the wilderness following his acclaimed debut ‘sex, lies and videotape’, he’d come storming back with uber-cool Elmore Leonard adaptation ‘Out of Sight’ in 1998, followed in rapid succession by ‘The Limey’ (still criminally underrated), ‘Erin Brockovich’ (a potential courtroom yawnfest that Soderbergh somehow made compelling*) and the multi-layered Oscar-winning ‘Traffic’.

Now I love all of those films, and it can be argued (quite easily it the case of, say, ‘Traffic) that all of them have more depth, more interest, more idiosyncracies – hell, just plain more to write about – than ‘Ocean’s 11’. In fact it wouldn’t be difficult to make a case for ‘Ocean’s 11’ as an incredibly entertaining but ultimately generic remake, file it under “style over substance” and move on.

But I would pick ‘Ocean’s 11’ over its stable mates any day. Several reasons.

It’s a pitch-perfect example of pure mainstream entertainment. You don’t need to think about it too much. You can kick back with a bowl of popcorn, crack a beer, relax and let 100 minutes of cool wash effortlessly over you. There’s plenty of films that fulfil the “pure entertainment” remit – most of them, in fact – but precious few that still manage to be supremely well-made and not insult the intelligence.

It improves on the original immeasurably. Lewis Milestone’s 1960 film was a ‘Rififi’-style crime caper teaming the Rat Pack with Sixties stalwarts Angie Dickinson, Richard Conte, Cesar Romero, Akim Tamiroff and Henry Silva; a classic in the making … or would have been had Milestone been able to shoot the film he wanted.

Sinatra and co. all had big room gigs at Vegas during the shooting and this, rather than the film, became their principle focus. Then there was the partying. We’re talking about the Rat Pack, after all. In Vegas. Analogy: imagine you’ve cast Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris in a movie shot around a brewery. How much usable footage do you think you’d get in the car each day of shooting?

Between his stars not turning up on set, and throwing out the script in favour of jokey ad-libbing when they did, the first ‘Ocean’s 11’ lost its chance at greatness. It’s still good fun, but a shroud of “what if” hangs over it.

Soderbergh, however, didn’t have such problems. The script for his version – by Ted Griffin – was tight as a snare drum (the reason there are no deleted scenes on the DVD is that everything slid together so perfectly: nothing about the script was redundant) and zinged with cool dialogue. The cast is top-notch: George Clooney**, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia (doing his best work in ages), Elliott Gould (ditto), Carl Reiner and Julia Roberts (the “introducing Julia Roberts” credit at the end is priceless). The second tier shine: Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan and Eddie Jemison hold their own against the big names.

Music, cinematography, production design, editing (want a masterclass on how to use a segue? watch this film) … everything melds smoothly and seamlessly.

I’ve used the word three times already, and it’s a tool of both the stoner and the lazy writer, but there really is no other way of describing ‘Ocean’s 11’: it’s cool.

Suavely, stylishly, seriously cool.




*As well as getting a career-best performance from Julia Roberts.

** ‘Ocean’s 11’ was the second of his six – so far – actor/director collaborations with Soderbergh.

Gary Cooper

Well, I did appeal for anything cinema related. My thanks to Viv Apple for giving The Agitation of the Mind its first poetry page. Her poem ‘Beau’ is a lovely tribute to the strength and integrity of Gary Cooper’s finest roles.

BEAU


How did it happen? When?
There was no look across a crowded room,
no sudden surge of dizziness as our hands touched.

Was it High Noon, your eyes still steady
in the piercing light, when I first thought:

I love you, Gary Cooper?

Was it the way you looked at Ingrid Bergman
in those Spanish hills where bells tolled,
made me say I love you, Gary Cooper?

Or was it that Grand Gesture
of sacrifice to save another’s honour
with your own? And yet stealing that gem
was a mere fiction. What I saw besides
was who you are. I love you, Gary Cooper.

In your eyes I saw compassion in a playful scene.
Three brothers chase a mouse across the floor -
you raise the broom, but cannot
bring the weapon down to kill.
For that, I love you, Gary Cooper.

I won’t express such love in the past tense,
for death is no more vast than the big screen.
Tears at your Viking funeral, Beau Geste;
and still I love you, Gary Cooper.


by Viv Apple

20 fearless actresses

Sorry: I’m a little tardy to the party on this one. And, not having been tagged by anyone, I’m doing my jumping on the bandwagon thing again. But, hey, it’s a boring afternoon at the office and my brain’s too torpid with ennui to write a proper entry, so here goes.

Film Experience Blog kicked off a “20 favourite actresses” meme a couple of weeks ago. Here’s my take on it. What follows is actually the third list I compiled. The first was, as per the remit, my 20 favourite actresses, but there was a lot of overlap with lists already compiled (check the links over at Film Experience Blog).

Then I … how to put this without sounding like a lecher? … compiled a list of 20 actresses who I consider particularly radiant, whose presence in a film, irrespective of quality of performance, engages me on a level that … Oh screw it, I’m digging a hole here and it’s about time I put the shovel down. Basically, I compiled a “most fanciable” list.

Then I decided I didn’t want to sleep on the sofa tonight, and came up with the idea of 20 actresses who have given fearless performances. Fearless emotionally, fearless sexually, fearless in terms of pushing the envelope beyond anything they’d done before. I’ve credited each of them with one film that, for me, best typifies the fearlessness of their performance.

In some cases – Isabelle Huppert or Jodie Foster or Julianne Moore, for instance – I could have reference numerous roles. That I’ve kept it at one is more out of fairness to say, Linda Hayden or Christina Lindberg, whose entire careers were saddled with nymphet eye-candy roles but both of whom went for it big time the one occasion they were given a real role.*

So, in no particular order:

Jodie Foster (The Accused)

Susan George (Straw Dogs)

Christina Lindberg (Thriller: A Cruel Picture)

Helen Mirren (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover)


Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive)

Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener)

Jennifer Connelly (Requiem for a Dream)

Linda Hayden (Blood on Satan’s Claw)

Paz Vega (Sex and Lucia)

Asia Argento (The Stendahl Syndrome)

Ingrid Thulin (The Silence)

Julie Christie (Don’t Look Now)

Kate Winslet (Heavenly Creatures)

Jung Suh (The Isle)

Samantha Morton (Under the Skin)

Beryl Reid (The Killing of Sister George)

Julianne Moore (Savage Grace)

Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves)

Charlotte Rampling (The Night Porter)

Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher)

*I stand by Lindberg’s performance in ‘Thriller: A Cruel Picture’ as a real role, even if the film itself is firmly mired as a grubby little exploitationer.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Prestige

Watch Christopher Nolan's second film 'Memento' - an out-of-nowhere cult hit that set him up for what has proved, so far, a stratospheric directorial career - and marvel at its cleverness, intricacy and structural legerdemain. Watch 'Batman Begins', the most impressive franchise re-boot this side of 'Casino Royale', and marvel at his sleight of hand vis-a-vis the identity of not-quite-villain Raz Al Ghul. Watch 'The Dark Knight' - in my humble opinion the best film released this year - and be utterly gobsmacked at the narrative-fracturing possibilities of one individual's force of will (the Joker's) smashing into the ordered and rigidly defined perameters of Batman's. Consider the themes of duality, confusion of identity and obsession that permeate Nolan's filmography.

It seems somehow inevitable that he and his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan would adapt Christopher Priest's novel 'The Prestige'. Using the word "adapt" loosely. Priest's novel flits between time-frames (it's bookended and mesologued by contemporarily-set scenes while the bulk of the narrative plays out amidst the greasepaint and gaslight of the Victorian music halls) and features four* different first-person narrators, none of whom are reliable. The unreliable narrator is a stock-in-trade of Priest's novels. He's also interested in perspective, illusion and doubles. He's a science-fiction writer (such genre staples as time travel, cloning and alternative histories have all featured in his work) whose novels don't read like sci-fi.

As written, 'The Prestige' doesn't come across as ripe for filming. With much of the first half devoted to working class magician Alfred Borden's diary, all fractured entries and elliptical clues, and the second consisting of aristocractic Rupert Angier's journal, just as sketchy and missing crucial bits of information, the narrative essentially stops halfway, goes back to the beginning and starts again.

What Nolan does is to take elements from both sections of the novel and shuffle them like a deck of cards. This is a film about illusions, and as such takes the form of an illusion itself. The opening sees impresario Cutter (Michael Caine) explain the stages of a magic trick - the promise, the turn and the prestige - to a young girl (who is she? - very important, this - and where, chronologically, does this occur?); he also gives evidence at the trial of Borden (Christian Bale), who is accused of murdering Angier (Hugh Jackman). Oh, and there's some business about a lot of top hats in a forest that comes on like 'Miller's Crossing' in a time-warp. Forest, what forest? And why so many hats? It's important; keep it in mind.

Do not take all of this at face value. Take some of it at deeper than face value. There are clues even in misdirections.

It's a film about illusions and it takes the form of an illusion, but 'The Prestige' isn't a parlour trick - not like 'The Village'. It's one of those rare films - 'Memento', 'A Tale of Two Sisters' and 'Deep Red' being the only other examples I can site off the top of my head - that get infinitely better once you know the twist. But, like those other films, it's not so much a twist as a complete re-evaluation and re-assessment of everything that's gone before it. The first time I saw 'The Prestige', me and Paula talked about it all the way back to the car, all the way home and all the way through a bottle of wine. Now, having seen it a good half dozen times, we still debate it after each viewing.

Of course, I can't get into a really interesting discussion of the film here and lay out some of the questions me and Paula only think we've answered, because I'd have to give away an audacious, jaw-dropping triple-whammy ending (I've spoken to some people who think it's a double-whammy ending; it's entirely possible it's a quadruple-whammy ending - like much of the film, it's up to the viewer to figure it out). And I want everyone who watches 'The Prestige' to be as blown away as I was by it.

So, I can take the easy way out and break out the superlatives, praise Christopher Nolan's faultless direction to the heavens, applaud a cluster of great performances - Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine and David Bowie (a revelation as Nikola Tesla), take a bow - and rave about the period recreation, the hugely atmospheric cinematography and the attention to detail that coheres what could have been a sprawling epic full of overlapping timelines and interrelationships into intimate drama.

Or I can say that the story is driven, superficially, by rivalry (which Nolan kicks into gear differently than Priest does, and perhaps more effectively) but is, on a deeper level, about obsession, about secrecy, about dualism. About price of success and the sacrifice that is demanded. There's a third-act revelation (or maybe second act, or maybe fifth act - you work it out) that demands a suspension of disbelief that may leave you thinking the Nolan has gone a twist too far, but the key to the film is not to take it literally. True, Priest's novel takes it literally - and then takes it even further (there's a definite H.G. Wells homage going on in the latter stages of the novel) - but Nolan's genius is to render it as a metaphor. After all, this is a film about the dualism. About sacrifice.

Does it agitate the mind? Oh, you sweet fucking-A betcha!!

*Or more.

Six degrees of happy birthday

According to IMDb, the following luminaries of the silver screen share a birthday today:

Tom Wilkinson, who starred in ‘In the Bedroom’, the debut movie of director Todd Field, who cast …

Jennifer Connelly in his follow-up ‘Little Children’, which co-starred Kate Winslet, who appeared in ‘Finding Neverland’ alongside Kelly Macdonald, whose co-star in ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ was …

Bill Nighy.

Frank Sinatra also has a birthday today, or would have done if he’d been alive. So I guess that allows me to say that for a pussy-whipped Mafia bagman he certainly cut some decent tunes without fear of a lawsuit.

A hit, however, is another matter.

Thank you and good night.

The Sea Inside

My thanks to Viv Apple for the following article.

‘The Sea Inside’ has been compared with ‘Whose Life is it Anyway?’ because of its subject matter, assisted suicide. Never having seen ‘Whose Life?’, I can’t compare the two, but I would be surprised if this daunting subject could be handled with more sensitivity and truth than in Alejandro Amenabar’s supremely moving film, based on a true story.

Javier Bardem plays the part of Ramon Sampedro, a Spanish fisherman and part time poet who at the age of 26 suffered a diving accident which left him a paraplegic. Now 54, Ramon has lived for 28 years with his family: his father, macho brother Jose, sister-in-law Manuela who is his main carer, and their son Javi, who helps Ramon by transcribing his laboriously written-by-mouth words onto a computer. Although bedridden, Ramon can talk normally and still manages to smile for much of the time, enabling those around him to empathise more easily. But his inner pain is conveyed by occasional dream sequences in which he gets up and flies over the countryside to the sea, which he still loves.

Through a friend who works with a ‘Right to Die’ organisation, Ramon is introduced to Julia, a lawyer whom he hopes will take his case to the courts to let him end his life. His family, especially his brother and father, are strongly against this, and the film’s tensions arise from the relationship between Ramon and all those who love him and yet have different views on how to help him. Julia herself has a degenerative disease which influences her growing relationship with Ramon, and despite the objections of some family members, Ramon is taken in a wheelchair to the court hearing. On the way, the camera shows us through Ramon’s eyes little snippets of everyday life, and on his face we see the re-discovery of the outside world he has missed for so long: a small boy being reprimanded by his father for straying off the path, two dogs doing what dogs do, and tellingly, his eyes puzzling over the turning sails of a wind farm half-hidden by a hill. It is small details like these throughout the film which lift it out of the ordinary.

Every character in Ramon’s story has significance. I haven’t mentioned them all, or the equally significant events which accompany the story’s flow, not because it would spoil the plot - this is not a plot-driven film - but because it might dilute some of its richness. It is memorable because of each character’s closely observed interaction with Ramon, and with each other. The ending has a gentle, unexpectedly sad twist, but despite its downbeat theme the film is absorbing throughout. Javier Bardem’s performance without doubt deserves the Best Actor award received from the 2004 Venice Film Festival.

by Viv Apple

This is England

Although it doesn't feature on the soundtrack, I couldn't help but hear 'This is England' by The Clash in my head as I sat down to watch Shane Meadows' film; in particular the snarlingly accusatory line "this is England / what we're supposed to die for".

Eight year old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose)'s father does just that: dies for his country in the Falklands War. The opening credits montage establishes the early 80s setting: clips from popular TV shows interspersed with newsreel footage of the social unrest that swept Britain during the Thatcher administration (I was still a couple of years shy of my teens back then but I remember the riots, the heavy-handness of authority).

Margaret Thatcher's presence is kept to a few shots in this sequence and the graffiti'd statement 'MAGGIE IS A TWAT' later in the film, but the legacy of her government hangs over the film like a dark spectre. This is the England I remember from my childhood: a country that was angry and spoiling for a fight, a country where racial epithets were common conversational currency.

Twenty odd years after the film was set (and having swallowed a hefty dose of political correctness in the 90s), the dialogue in 'This is England' is like a smack in the face (Channel 4, who screened it a few nights ago, broadcast a warning about the subject matter and language not just at the start, but during every commercial break). But again, it's just how I remember it. I recall friends of my father joking about "paki bashing"; the N-word was bandied about unashamedly. The National Front had an almost public face back then.

‘This is England’: agitates the mind and the memory.

Shaun, angry at his father's death and having difficulty communicating with his well-meaning but ineffectual mother, is bullied at school and subjected to tauts about his bereavement. Frustrated, painfully young and all too impressionable, Shaun's life takes a turn when he's befriended by a group of older lads, led by the locquacious Woody (Joe Gilgun). Soon he's having a whale of a time plinking away with a BB gun, getting a skinhead 'do, breaking into empty houses and committing random acts of vandalism.

Meadows shows both sides: the insubstantiality of this kind of lifestyle; and the sense of cameradie that comes of being part of a group or a gang; being accepted. Then things take a darker turn.

Woody's mate Combo (Stephen Graham) gets out of prison, having done a three stretch and kept shtum about things that would have implicated Woody, and renews old acquaintances. Combo's yer full-on skinhead, immediately showing up Woody and his gang as a bunch of kids in it for the image. Combo's dangerous, unpredictable and NF to the core. He's also eloquent and charismatic. He becomes a father figure to Shaun.

Combo enters the film at just under the halfway mark and things are never the same again - for Shaun or the audience. Stephen Graham's performance is like watching a snake: you're not all that keen on what you're looking it, but it's somehow mesmerising. His agitprop speech, a queasy bit of white supremastist rhetoric which repels even beholden-to-him Woody, is the dark centrepiece of 'This is England'. Meadows engages with his dangerous and controversial theme, his directorial approach that of a witness, not a moralist. He is intelligent enough not to preach to his audience.

'This is England' tells some unpalatable truths about cultural identity in Britain's not-so-distant past, and as such is not an easy film to watch. But nor is it without humour; and it's definitely not without a sense of tenderness towards its young, misinformed protagonist. After an up-and-down career following his superb debut 'TwentyFourSeven', this puts Meadows at the top of his game.

The ABC of literary adaptations

Give me a hand up while I climb on the bandwagon.

The Alphabet Meme, originated over at Blog Cabins, works according to the following rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

I should ’fess up here: I haven’t actually been tagged. But to quote McWatt in ‘Catch-22’, “Oh well, what the hell.”

Here’s my ABC of literary adaptations. Links where reviews have already been posted, reviews of the remainder to follow in due course:

All the Pretty Horses (Billy Bob Thornton, 2000; based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy)

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982; based on the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by Philip K Dick)

Clockwork Orange, A (Stanley Kubrick, 1971; based on the novel by Anthony Burgess)

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972; based on the novel by James Dickey)

Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973; based on the novel by William Peter Blatty)

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999; based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk)

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946; based on the novel by Charles Dickens)

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Garth Jennings, 2005; based on the novel by Douglas Adams)

Innocents, The (Jack Clayton, 1961; based on the novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975; based on the novel by Peter Benchley)

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Robert Bierman, 1997; based on the novel by George Orwell)

L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997; based on the novel by James Ellroy)

Man Who Would be King, The (John Huston, 1975; based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling)

No Country for Old Men (Coen Bros, 2007; based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy)

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959; based on the novel by Graham Greene)

Prestige, The (Christopher Nolan, 2006; based on the novel by Christopher Priest)

Quiet Man, The (John Ford, 1952; based on the short story by Maurice Walsh)

Remains of the Day, The (James Ivory, 1993; based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960; based on the novel by Alan Sillitoe)

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007; based on the novel ‘Oil!’ by Upton Sinclair)

Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984; based on the novel by Malcolm Lowry)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958; based on the novel ‘D’Entre les Morts’ by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac)

Whisky Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949; based on the novel by Compton McKenzie)

XXY (Lucia Puenzo, 2007; based on the short story ‘Cinismo’ by Sergio Bizzio)

You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967; based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969; based on the novel by Vasilis Vasilikos)

PERSONAL FAVES: That Obscure Object of Desire

Starting with the title, let’s ask: the object of whose desire, and how come she’s so obscure? Our, ahem, ‘hero’ and narrator Mathieu (the incomparable Fernando Rey) is the man who’s got it bad. The object (how flattering a term!) is dancer Conchita, and so skewed is Mathieu’s perspective that he sees her as two women. One, voluptuous and sensual (played by Angela Molina) inflames his passions; the other, elegant and cool to the point of icy (Carole Bouquet), continually denies him.

We’re in Luis Bunuel territory, all right.

The usual targets are lined up (Bunuel’s films often come across as the cinematic equivalent of a shooting range): the middle classes* (Mathieu is a wealthy businessman who utilises his contacts in the legal profession to get his way – or resorts to bribery if that fails); the church (Conchita’s supposedly God-fearing mother takes Mathieu up on a financial offer vis-à-vis her daughter); and the state (the battle of the sexes is played out against a backdrop of terrorist activity).

This is a film that could have been made this year and would have proved scathingly satirical and ridden to box office glory on a wave of controversy. Bunuel made it thirty-one years ago.

Mathieu narrates his saga of desire and frustration to his fellow passengers during a train journey. Present in his compartment – and sly personifications of these themes – are a lawyer (officialdom), a psychiatrist (apposite, given the nature of Mathieu’s obsession and the duality of his perception of Conchita), and a mother and daughter (symbolic of the family unit Mathieu is bastardising in buying off Conchita’s mother). The funniest scene in the film has the teenage daughter brusquely sent out into the corridor as Mathieu describes his night of non-consummation.

Presupposing Steve Martin’s hilarious almost-couplings with Kathleen Turner in ‘The Man With Two Brains’, Mathieu very nearly gets his way. Conchita, furious at her mother’s bargain with Mathieu, nonetheless agrees to live with him but begins treating him as little more than a sugar daddy, sponging off him while holding out against the necessity of intercourse for as long as possible.

Their first night sees him enter the bedroom with Conchita (Molina); she excuses herself to the bathroom and dons a nightgown, leaving it unbuttoned, her décolletage exposed. The Conchita who rejoins him (Bouquet) is dressed demurely and allows him the briefest of caresses before saying, “Not yet, I’m not in the mood now.”

Mathieu becomes forceful. Conchita acquiesces, but insists he extinguish the candles. “Don’t celebrate your victory too soon,” she warns as darkness embraces them. Grunting in shock, he stumbles out of bed and re-illuminates the candles. Beneath her nightdress, a silken arrangement of ribbons and bows; quite alluring, but preventative in its design. Or, to put it bluntly, if Ann Summers had designed a chastity belt, that’s what Mathieu finds himself doing battle with.

“I struggled with it for fifteen minutes,” he tells his fellow passengers sadly. “I was incensed … It was impossible to remove it.”

The final bitter joke of ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ is, of course, that Mathieu never gets his wicked little way. Bunuel’s subject is the concept of a woman for whom one’s passion is unrequited as having two sides: the yin and yang of erotic allure and physical unattainability. Casting two actresses in the same role is the perfect realisation. And in structuring an entire film around a besotted man being denied sex, Bunuel achieves cinema’s most absolute – and phenomenally witty – comment on sexual frustration.



*Not for nothing is one of his most famous works entitled ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise’.