ST VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL: PERSONAL FAVES: Wings of Desire

Try this one on for size: there’s this angel who gives up his wings, gives up immortality and omniscience for the sake of the woman he’s in love with, a woman who doesn’t even know he exists.

Schmaltzy, right? Complete barf-fest. More Hollywood than Hollywood. And yes, it’s something that Hollywood’s already done – the 1998 Nic Cage and Meg Ryan starrer ‘City of Angels’. And yes, it was a pile of poo.

But, see, this German guy did it first, name of Wim Wenders. Bit of an individualist, like. Does things differently. Try this one on for size: he made this movie called ‘Paris, Texas’, road movie like, but the critical scene in it, the scene the whole movie hinges on, is just a close-up of someone talking for four minutes. Static, you know. Absence of movement … in a road movie. See what I mean?

Same kind of deal with his angel-who-falls-for-a-mortal-woman-and-gives-up-his-wings movie, innit? The angel doesn’t forsake Heaven until the last quarter of the film, doesn’t even talk to the girl until the last ten minutes. I mean, in Hollywood right they’d be up in arms at the script conference, they’d want the angel and the mortal woman lighting up the old post-coital smoke in the first reel. Know what I mean …

Apologies. It would seem that the motor-mouthed little spiv who hijacked the ‘Hell Drivers’ write-up has got in on the act again. Let’s escort him off the premises and hail a passing constable.

Now, where were we?

‘Wings of Desire’ – its original German title ‘Der Himmel über Berlin’ translates as the considerable less poetic ‘The Sky Over Berlin’ – contains enough narrative to fill its closing few minutes. What Hollywood would have taken as a conceptual starting point, Wenders arrives at after nearly two hours of philosophical enquiry; and when he arrives at it, the union of angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin) isn’t a denouement as much as a re-beginning*.

So: two hours of philosophical enquiry. It sounds heavy, and in some respects it is. This is certainly not a film for anyone whose cinematic comfort zone is defined by narrative. It’s probably the closest Wenders – no stranger to long running times and extended takes – has come to what Andrei Tarkovsky called “sculpting in time”. Wenders also sculpts a very specific sense of place. ‘Wings of Desire’ was released in 1987, two years before the Wall fell, and it’s perhaps the most evocative portrait of Berlin as a divided city that cinema has ever achieved.

It sounds heavy, but in many respects it isn’t. You could easily watch it without subtitles, disregard the often portentous dialogue (although most of the film isn’t even dialogue: it’s the overheard thoughts of the people the angels encounter), and be spellbound by Wenders’ astounding gallery of black-and-white images. The film shifts to colour for the end sequence, as Damiel embraces the panoply of human experience. But it’s the black and white sequences that you remember. Wenders’ Berlin, part mythic part shatteringly realistic, is as detailed and memorable and alive as Dickens’s London.

‘Wings of Desire’ is a film-poem: at one an the same time, a hymn, an ode and an elegy. It is pure cinema, from its director’s astoundingly realised vision, to the pitch-perfect humanity of Bruno Ganz’s performance, to its captivating romantic heroine. The radiant Solveig Dommartin, Wenders’ then-girlfriend, also appeared in ‘Faraway, So Close’ and ‘Until the End of the World’ (which she co-wrote), as well as directing the short film ‘Il suffirait d'un pont’. She passed away in France two years ago at the age of forty-five.



* ‘Wings of Desire’ ends with the credit “to be continued”, a promise Wenders made good on six years later with ‘Faraway, So Close’.



i.m. Solveig Dommartin (16th May 1961 – 11th January 2007)

Nicht echt Deutsch: The Reader and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

With ‘The Reader’ up for just about everything Oscar-wise apart from Best Tea-Boy, I feel the need to pull the plug, burst the bubble, spit on the icon and have a word with the sacred cow about McDonald’s.

‘The Reader’ isn’t that good a film. It is, at best, deeply average. The cast is heavyweight (Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Bruno Ganz, Lena Olin), the cinematography is by two of the best practitioners of the art currently working (Chris Menges and Roger Deakins), the script is courtesy of David Hare and Bernhard Schlink’s source novel a breakout success beyond its original German-language publication, and yet the whole thing never quite adds up to the sum of its parts. As a viewing experience, it’s curiously antiseptic.

I could almost feel sorry for director Stephen Daldry – if, that is, I wasn’t so sure that he’s going to clean up on the 22nd – because the man genuinely seems to want to make profound and thought-provoking films. There was the inexplicably popular ‘Billy Elliott’, which aimed for a triumph-of-the-spirit aesthetic set against the potent backdrop of the miners’ strike. There was ‘The Hours’, with another heavyweight cast and ‘literary’ source novel. But the former was bogged down with clichés – from the gay best friend to the gruff no-son-of-mine father who, awww bless, comes through for the lad at the end – and made ‘Brassed Off’ look like cinema vérité; while the latter was just plain bogged down.

Next up, Daldry is helming an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s ‘The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ and I could weep into my beer that such a wonderful and iconoclastic novel has fallen into his hands. Chabon’s prose deserves a Guillermo del Toro, a Christopher Nolan, a Darren Aronofsky. Not a Stephen Daldry.

I started this blog to rave about the films I love, so wasting words on ‘The Reader’ runs contrary to the remit. Besides, there’s a blandness, a tiredness to it that inspires a similar malaise in yours truly. One of my favourite bloggers on film, Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy, provided an eloquent review of some 1,200 words, and yet summed it up perfectly in his pullquote: “What if they threw a Nazi porno and nobody came?”

Similarly, you could throw at ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ the question “What if they told a Nazi bedtime story and somebody died?” Okay, I’ll admit it: that was snide. I’m a little more inclined to be charitable to ‘TBITSP’ – it’s adapted from a children’s novel and I’ll make the assumption that director Mark Herman has pitched the film at an audience of similar age range. Not that I saw many children in the audience when I went to see it. They were probably in one of Cineworld’s thirteen other screens, pledging allegiance to Pixar, Dreamworks or Disney. I tip my hat to them.

The problems with ‘TBITSP’ are several. Like ‘The Reader’, it has a director who wants to be serious and challenging but just doesn’t have what it takes to engage with the material. His previous outings, the aforementioned ‘Brassed Off’ and the terminally confused ‘Little Voice’ (is it a comedy? is it a drama? is it meant to be realistic? is it meant to be theatrical? does Brenda Blethyn have to screech all the time?), are not the work of a director ready to tackle the Holocaust.

Never mind if you’re doing it from a child’s point of view, if you’re making a film about the Holocaust then you’re making a film about the Holocaust. That carries as serious a responsibility as any subject a film-maker can pick. A responsibility, first and foremost, to historical accuracy. And yes, John Boyne’s novel is narrated in a deliberately naïve ‘voice’, the better to show the scales falling from his young protagonist’s eyes as he realises the lies his high-ranking SS officer father has told about “Outwith” (his mis-heard name for Auschwitz) are just that – lies – but a novel is a construct of words. Film is visual. So if you’re showing a concentration camp through the eyes of a child, then you’re still showing a concentration camp.

This is where the disconnect occurs in Herman’s film. All of the key scenes between the SS officer’s son and the young Jewish boy, an expanse of barbed wire separating them, take place in some forgotten corner of the camp where no guards patrol, no-one notices anything from the watchtowers, the boy can skive off work detail for long periods at a time and the other inmates in his work gang are unsupervised by guards.

And yet ‘TBITSP’ at least tries to do something, I think. More so than ‘The Reader’, which just says look at me, I’m a profound and important film about a thorny subject, I’d like to thank God, the Academy, my agent … ‘TBITSP’ at least tries to use its child protagonists to make accessible (if that’s the right word) to a younger audience a subject they probably haven’t encountered before and likely have no foreknowledge of. Also it boasts some good performances, most notably from Vera Farmiga – her work here is the equal of anything by this year’s quintet of Best Actress nominees.

Ultimately, though, in the current climate of German cinema demonstrating the fearlessness to tackle its own difficult history, ‘The Reader’ and ‘TBITSP’ suffer from being English-language productions with British directors and chiefly British casts. Had they been made by German directors, I have no doubt that the results would have been a lot more interesting.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

There’s a scene early in ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ in which a group of German citizens are protesting a visit to their country by the Shah of Iran. Although theirs is a peaceful demonstration, the Shah’s supporters start in on them. The ensuing clash attracts police attention and things really get nasty. It’s all truncheons and jackboots and water-cannons and fired shots.

It put me in mind of Jim Sheridan’s ‘In the Name of the Father’, a powerhouse movie but one so determined to stir up outrage in the viewer that the cumulative effect is like being lectured by a coke-fiend for two hours while occasionally getting beaten around the head with a blunt instrument. Heads down, see you at the end, I thought to myself; this one’s going to be a long haul.

Two and a half hours later, still glued to the screen as the end credits rolled, I was in a different frame of mind. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ impressed and provoked me. But it left me with mixed feelings. Subtle it isn’t – with Uwe Edel directing, it was never going to be – yet somewhere beyond Moritz Bleibtreu’s sneering, swaggering rock star take on Andreas Baader and numerous scenes of brutally realistic violence, some unexpected nuances emerge.

Martine Gedeck’s portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof is one of the film’s grace notes. She effortlessly maps Meinhof’s transition from outspoken journalist to political activist as well as inhabiting her vulnerability, particularly in the trial sequence which provides a gruelling final act.

Bruno Ganz’s thoughtful turn as Horst Herold, seeking to understand the reasons behind the Red Army Faction’s outrages even as his colleagues in the government call for swift and harsh countermeasures, demonstrates the film’s even-handedness. Nor does Edel lionise the Baader Meinhof gang. Their actions are brutal. There are casualties – on both sides. Although Edel lends weight to their ideologies and motivations, he doesn’t try to present a revisionist version of the Red Army Faction as noble, pure-minded freedom fighters. Make no mistake about it: this is a film about a terrorist organisation.

Nor is it all about politics. While Ulrike Meinhof comes across as a woman of intellect driven to desperate action after she discovers that words alone won’t change the world, Andreas Baader is shown as being equally in it for the good of the cause and the perks of the lifestyle: statuesque blonde on his arm*, gun in his hand, cool leather jacket and joyrides in stolen Mercs. Oh yeah, and a few acts of terrorism.

I know very little about the Baader beyond his leadership of the gang. But if the film is even partially accurate, he must have been an insufferable arse. Scene after scene has him throwing a wobbly, either refusing to listen to reason when Meinhof posits ideas and proposals contrary to his (never mind if hers are better thought-out), or getting into a slanging match with PLO members at a guerrilla training camp in Jordan where the Red Army Faction’s free-living ways angers their hosts. It’s beautifully ironic – whether an intended irony or not – that the Red Army Faction seems to get more motivated, and their campaigns more focused, after Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof are arrested and held pending trial.

There’s almost as much nudity and free love as there is revolutionary activity, and it would be almost too easy to accuse Boll of edging into exploitation territory. But I’d like to think it’s part of the aesthetic. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ is set in the ’70s, and it has an authentic ’70s look and feel to it. Not ’70s-by-design à la Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich’, but something much more in tune with the edgy, on-the-streets style of film-making of that decade.

Based on Stefan Aust’s non-fiction study of the Red Army Faction, ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ hurtles through a decade of civil unrest, making few concessions to anyone who doesn’t have a decent working knowledge of that period of time. Yours truly, for instance. Supporting characters pop up for key scenes and then disappear. I’m sure some of them aren’t even name-checked. Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), a major player in the second generation of the Red Army Faction, doesn’t take the stage until the movie is nearly over.

I’m looking forward to seeing the film again when it makes its appearance on DVD in April, but I’ll be sure to have read Aust’s book first. With the timeline and the key players more firmly defined in my mind, I’m sure I’ll get a lot more out of ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ second time around.



*Gudrun Ensslin, played by Johanna Wokalek - actually co-founder of the group, longer before Meinhof’s involvement.

The Lives of Others

Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a Stasi surveillance and interrogation expert. Want a house bugging? Want to know a suspect’s movements? Want that suspect broken when you finally bring him in? Wiesler’s your man. He knows that the innocent will reformulate their answers while the guilty will recite the same cover story, the same lies, word-for-word. He knows how to pace an interrogation. He knows just how much sleep-deprivation to apply. He’s so good that he gives classes to the next generation of Stasi agents.

He speaks in quiet, precise tones. His face is devoid of expression or emotion; impenetrable. He’d be a shit-hot poker player if he weren’t such a Party man. Wiesler is in it for the ideological purity of it. Not so his boss, Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), a pragmatic career man whose latest promotion sees him beholden to Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme).

Hempf is the corpulent, corrupt politician in excelsis. When he orders Grubitz to dig up some dirt on playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch), it’s not because Dreymann has been known to associate with reactionary writer Paul Hauser (Hans Uew-Bauer) or is a close personal friend of recently blacklisted director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) – for all his association with these individuals, Dreymann remains at one remove from their politicking, and tows the party line – no, it’s because Hempf wants him out of the way so he can stake his claim on Dreymann’s actress girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martine Gedeck), a woman he’s already co-erced into sexual favours.

This is East Germany, 1984, where They (ie. the Minister Hempfs of this world) decide who writes plays, who directs them, who acts in them; where They revoke even the privileges of the artist to practice his or her art – in a shockingly cynical scene, Grubitz tells Wiesler about a report he’s received on the most effective punishments for artists; ‘effective’ meaning a total eradication, post-release, of their artistic capabilities – should that artist fall out of favour.

Naturally, it’s Wiesler whom Grubitz entrusts with surveilling Dreymann. Wiesler’s not too happy when Grubitz reveals that the operation isn’t political, it’s simply about “getting a rival out of the way”. This isn’t what Wiesler joined up for. Nevertheless, he follows orders … for a while, anyway. It doesn’t take him long to realise that Dreymann’s as clean as a whistle. Hempf’s oleaginous pursuit of Christa-Marie sickens Wiesler and eventually he intervenes, persuading her away from a rendezvous with Hempf and back to Dreymann.

Hereafter, Wiesler’s professionalism nosedives as he falsifies reports and turns a blind eye when the hitherto unmotivated Dreymann rails against the system following Jerska’s suicide.

Essentially, ‘The Lives of Others’ is the story of two awakenings. Dreymann’s is political and takes the form of an article, which Hauser helps him get published in the West, about the high incidence of suicide in East Germany and how the Department of Records haven’t catalogued any statistics on suicide since 1977. Wiesler’s is emotional/humanitarian; a falling from his eyes of the scales of blind adherence to the Party. It takes the form of an exponential realisation, as he listens in on the world of an artist, that there are ideas and concepts and a whole world of art that expresses them which it has never occurred to him before to believe possible.

This realisation – which takes root just as his disaffection with the job, personified by Hempf and his abuses of power – leads him to a course of action which will have serious ramifications. Meanwhile Grubitz, under mounting pressure from Hempf to discredit Dreymann, takes matters in hand by having Christa-Marie arrested.

And that’s all I’m going to reveal of the plot. Not only does the film move inexorably forward with the momentum and inevitability of a Jacobean tragedy, but writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes it into unexpected realms in the final reel. The majority of the action takes place over a short period of time in 1984. An extended coda leaps forward to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, then to 1991, then to 1993. It’s a little disorientating on first viewing, but it’s done for a purpose. With its scenes of surveillance, secrets and clandestine meetings, it’s all too easy to latch onto the voyeuristic undertones of ‘The Lives of Others’ – particularly with the gorgeous Martine Gedeck in a major role – but the coda, a mirrored study in aftermath, reinforces what the film is truly about: the invisible yet parallel relationship between Wiesler and Dreymann.

And while it’s as politically and historically charged as ‘Downfall’, ‘The Lives of Others’ transcends, in its final stretch, the merely political and says things about art, inspiration and the human condition. It’s von Donnersmarck’s first film, he was just twenty-eight when he made it, and it’s a straight-up masterpiece.

PERSONAL FAVES: Downfall

Bernd Eichinger is shaping up quite nicely as the enfant terrible of German cinema having produced two controversy baiting epics – ‘Downfall’ and ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ – in the last five years.

‘Downfall’, directed by Oliver Hirshbiegel, was always going to be a hot potato. Not enough that it was the first German film to depict Hitler onscreen, Eichinger and Hirshbiegel drew fire from critics who questioned their portrayal of Hitler in what they saw as a sympathetic light.

Which begs the first question that needs to be asked of ‘Downfall’: does it? I’m not convinced. Hitler (Bruno Ganz in a performance that descriptions like “barn-storming” and “full-throttle” were invented for) is variously shown as a stroppy old git with a hair-trigger temper; an utter delusional, issuing orders for the defence of Berlin and the defeat of the Allies to troops who are either in retreat or have been wiped out; and a pitiful wreck, bent double, hair unkempt, hands shaking.

No, what ‘Downfall’ does is portray Hitler not sympathetically but as a person. And people are fallible. They kid themselves, they fall out with other people, they lose their rag. They fuck up. Adolf Hitler fucked up on a global scale at the cost of millions of lives and untold human suffering. That’s the difference.

Next question: isn’t it a better decision, morally and intellectually, to depict a man like Hitler as just a man – albeit one with a sociopathic disconnect from any standard of normal or responsibly functional behaviour – and not some impenetrable force of darkness with a bristly ’tache and a bad comb-over? Isn’t the usual filmic depiction of Hitler – a scowling, stentorian, fiery-eyed, Hadean presence – actually a cheap and easy way out? Doesn’t this approach effectively reduce him to the status of a pantomime villain, and by extension lessen the enormity of his horrific legacy?

Better by far a film brave enough not to treat the Führer as a set of visual clichés and a square of glue-on bum-fluff on the upper lip. Better by far a film that seeks not to demonise, but neither sympathise; not to try to ‘understand’ Hitler and his actions, but neither deny or obfuscate them; a film, instead, that portrays him. As accurately as possible*.

Working from the books ‘Inside Hitler’s Bunker’ by Joachim Fest and ‘Until the Final Hour’ by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller, Hirschbiegel charts the final catastrophic days, both in the bunker and on the shell-scarred streets of Berlin, leading up to – and beyond – Hitler’s suicide. That ‘Downfall’ continues for a good 40 minutes after Hitler and Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) take their lives is telling. And it prompts the next question: is ‘Downfall’ necessarily about Hitler?

In one respect, it can’t not be. Hitler is the hub around which the action of the film moves. Even when he’s not centre-stage. And there are large amounts of screen time where he isn’t. Which is to say: Hitler is a major character, but none of the events are seen through his eyes. I don’t think a film could achieve that – not without straying into morally dubious territory.

‘Downfall’ is told from the perspectives of Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), Hitler’s secretary**; humanitarian physican Professor Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel); and a young boy drafted at an absurdly young age as part of an anti-tank patrol operating on the streets of Berlin and under almost constant fire from the approaching Russian troops. The title doesn’t refer just to Hitler’s downfall – his and Braun’s suicide is just one of many; the film is awash with high ranking officials, as well as mid ranking officers, putting guns to their heads or pulling the pins on hand grenades; the most unflinching scene has Goebbels’ wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch) poison their five children before he shoots her then turns the gun on himself – it’s the downfall of a government, a Reich, a monstrously misconceived political ideal; it’s the downfall of a city and its inhabitants; it’s the downfall of, to quote a line from Wilfred Owen, “half the seed of Europe”.

It’s bitterly and brutally honest; utterly unforgettable. It’s a German film.



*To the best of my knowledge only the final scene, detailing Junge’s escape through the Russian lines, is purely fictional.

**The opening scene, for me, defines the film. A group of young women are marched by soldiers through woodland to a heavily-fortified base. They are there for a job interview. Traudl Junge just happens to get the job. It could have been any of the others. Thus the film-makers neatly avoid the pitfall of giving every scene, every line the portentous relevance that only hindsight can bestow. Yes, they seem to be saying, much of this movie owes to Frau Junge’s testament, but her presence at such history-defining events was pure chance. She went for a job interview; simple as that.

Good Bye Lenin!

Part 1: A few words on “high concept” (or: The Tao of Don and Jerry)

My son, would you be a writer on film?

Father, I would aspire to the status of a blogger. Also, a paying gig with ‘Sight and Sound’ would be good.

My son, do you consider yourself well-versed in film?

Father, my tastes in film are diverse, eclectic and wide-ranging.

My son, do you know what a ‘tautology’ is?

No, father.

Evidently … My son, are you a keen viewer of mainstream fare?

Father, I … I have seen ‘Transformers’.

I will hear your confession later –

But father, I only went to see it for Megan Fox who I believe to be a talented up-and-coming young actress and –

I said I will hear your confession later. For now, my son, can you explain the term “high concept”?

Yes, father. “High concept” is when a film has one single idea; usually an idea that can be expressed so succinctly that it serves as a pitch, a plot synopsis and a marketing campaign all rolled into one.

My son, whose films exemplify this most explicitly?

Those of Messrs Si—

My son, do you know what a lawsuit is?

Yes, father.

Then stick with first names only.

Yes, father. The films of, ahem, Don and Jerry are perfect exemplars of “high concept”.

My son, can you cite an example?

A street-talkin’ black cop from Detroit finds himself partnering a buttoned-down white cop in Beverley Hills in a culture-clash comedy thriller.

My son, is “high concept” a predominantly Hollywood phenomenon?

Not necessarily, father. European films can also be “high concept”.

And being European, are they generally better?

I believe so, father.

Can you cite an example?

Yes, father, I can …


Part 2: … and here’s how the Germans do “high concept”

It’s the late ’80s and Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika are moving inexorably towards the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of a four-decades’ divided city. But not in the utilitarian apartment of staunch socialist Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass). Since the departure to the West of her husband, the Party has been her life; her loyalty is unswervable.

Her children, already under the influence of Western culture, don’t toe the line quite so enthusiastically. In fact, her son Alex (Daniel Brühl), doesn’t toe the line at all. “On the evening of October 7 1989,” Alex explains in voiceover, “several hundred people got together for some evening exercise and marched for the right to go for walks without the Berlin Wall getting in their way.”

Naturally, the authorities intrude upon said perambulations. Naturally, there’s a clash. Alex scuffles with a cop before a truncheon to the midriff and a ride in a police van effectively curtail his involvement. Unfortunately Christiane, on her way to a Party function where she’s to be honoured for her work, witnesses this and the shock proves too much for her. She collapses of a heart attack.

Released from his holding cell on the basis of his mother’s good standing and her current hospitalisation, Alex visits Christiane only to find her in a coma. Eight months later, she wakes up with no recollection as to the circumstances that engineered her heart attack. Her doctor warns Alex and his free-living sister Ariane (Maria Simon) that any further shock to the system could kill her.

Such as: Ariane having redecorated the apartment and moved her new boyfriend in. Such as: Ariane having quit her studies and taken a job at Burger King. Such as: there actually being a Burger King in East Berlin thanks to the Wall having been pulled down, reunification underway, a fiscal changeover from old currency to Deutschmarks in progress, and signs of Westernization on every corner.

Those kind of shocks.

So Alex, aided by his friend and colleague Denis (Florian Lukas), a wannabe film-maker, hatches a plot to keep his mother in the dark. Step one: redecorate the apartment. Step two: scour Berlin for pre-reunification branded goods. Step three: initiate some of her friends and colleagues into the conspiracy in order to navigate a potentially awkward birthday party.

And for a while it all goes swimmingly. Until Christiane, bed-ridden, complains about the lack of entertainment and demands a TV in her room. Suddenly it’s not enough that Alex has concocted a time-capsule DDR within the four walls of his mother’s bedroom; now he has to get really creative. And when a “drink Coca-Cola” advert goes up on the wall of the high-rise opposite, that’s when his troubles really start …

‘Good Bye Lenin!’ – the title refers to an iconic shot of Lenin’s statue being helicoptered out of the city – is high concept meets high art … but it’s never artsy. It’s incredibly cleverly written and structured … but never comes across as clever-clever. In fact, the visual language of ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ – from speeded-up footage to edits designed for maximum comic effect to gleefully re-contextualised archive material (Alex and Denis’s videos pre-suppose the dime-store ingenuity of ‘Be Kind Rewind’) – is pure mainstream cinema.

All of which would make for a satirical slice of subtitled entertainment, except that director and co-writer Wolfgang Becker anchors his story with a beautifully understated emotional core. The finale is poignant and resonant; the metaphor is unforced: reunification, the family as a microcosm of the city.

PERSONAL FAVES: Das Boot

In an opening scene unparalleled in war movies, The Captain* (Jurgen Prochnow) is driving along a coast road with Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), a war correspondent despatched to accompany U-96 on her next voyage, when a group of drunken sailors appear, blocking the road. They obligingly reposition themselves onto a small promontory by the roadside and from this vantage point relieve themselves all over the captain’s Mercedes. Werner is aghast. The Captain blandly identifies them as his crew.

They complete the drive without further urination incidents and at the Bar Royal, where a blowsy singer is gyrating on stage. This is the venue of a party in honour of the newly promoted Captain Thomsen (Otto Sander), the u-boat’s former 1st Lieutenant. Here, The Captain meets Thomsen’s replacement (Hubertus Bengsch), a haughty type with a rod so far up his own arse that it’s playing the xylophone on the fillings of his teeth. He complains that “the men harassed me”. Prodded for details, he stammers haplessly. “You mean they pissed on you?” The new 1st Lieutenant nods. “Me too,” The Captain says.

The party degenerates into drunkenness, lewd conduct with the singer, vomiting and the discharge of a firearm into a mural decorating the walls of the bar. Thomsen gives a profane speech, karate chops the cork out of a bottle of champagne and guzzles it like it was lemonade.

Thus the first quarter of an hour of ‘Das Boot’. A short sequence follows as The Captain addresses his men before they board the U-96, then the remaining three plus hours – with the single exception of a short stop for refuelling – play out at sea; or, more specifically, play out in the cramped compartments and tight corridors of the u-boat. Much of the action takes place beneath the waves. ‘Das Boot’ is steeped in sweaty claustrophobia and Wolfgang Peterson’s genius as director is that he portrays this state of being – fifty men breathing second-hand air and living in each other’s pockets as they wait for a cry of “ALERT” or the confirmation of a convoy nearby. War is hell; but much of war is also ennui: waiting around, killing time, time ticking away and wearing at your nerves; wondering when you’re going to see some action, never mind that you could die as a result of that action.

When the U-96 first sets sail, Werner flits around the conning tower with his camera. The Captain admonishes him to take the men’s pictures when the u-boat returns hope, explaining that they’ll have beards by then. “It would shame the Brits to see mere boys give them hell … I feel ancient around these kids, like I’m on some children’s crusade.”

A measure of Peterson’s commitment to realism is that he shot ‘Das Boot’ (at the time – 1981 – the most expensive German film ever) in sequence over the period of a year. To quote the highly readable Wikipedia article on the film’s production, “this ensured natural growth of beards and hair, increasing skin pallor, and signs of strain on the actors, who had, just like real U-boat men, spent many months in a cramped, unhealthy atmosphere.” The interiors were life-size reconstructions built from original u-boat blueprints. Likewise exteriors. The reconstruction used for exterior shots was rented out, during production, to Spielberg and makes a cameo appearance in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. (The Wikipedia article provides a wealth of information on technical aspects of the production, as well as the different versions of the film, including its incarnation as a six-hour TV mini-series. My review is based on the 209-minute director’s cut theatrical print.)

Although Lothar-Gunter Buchheim (on whose technically precise but prosaic novel ‘Das Boot’ is based) blasted Peterson for what he saw as an over-reliance on Hollywood style effects and set-pieces, it’s hard to imagine a less Hollywood-like war movie. It’s not just the length (three and a half hours) or the proliferation of non-action scenes (the sheer frustration of inactivity becomes as effective an exercise in agonising tension as anything Hitchcock achieved); it’s the fact that the captain and crew of the U-96 don’t act the way the movies have taught us they should.

Only the 1st Lieutenant spouts the party line, which The Captain mocks by leading the crew in an English-language rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ (“surely the song won’t offend your ideologies”). Everyone else comes off as apolitical. The effect is brilliantly reductive: you never really think of them as Nazis, consequently you quickly stop thinking of them as Germans; ultimately, they’re simply men, most of them awfully young, crammed together in a tight space and thrust into the middle of a war they’d rather not be fighting.

If the ‘Tipperary’ scene challenges national identities and stereotypes – ie. the very nature of being on one ‘side’ or another – two other moments, one raucous, one subdued, reinforce the challenge. There’s Thomsen’s speech, in which he excoriates Hitler and Churchill (basically, a front-line veteran’s fuck-you to the leaders whose decisions put him on that front-line); and there’s Werner’s conversation with Cadet Ullmann (Martin May), a young man terrified that his French fiancée, who’s pregnant, will suffer at the hands of partisans if it’s revealed that her child is half-German. This is not the usual stuff of war movies. It is, however, the stuff of human drama.

And that’s what ‘Das Boot’ is: great human drama. The finale – a heavy-handed statement on the futility of war – threatens to tip over into melodrama, but it’s the only niggle in a rivetting, intelligent film. Because it sidelines politics and causation, ‘Das Boot’ perhaps doesn’t shine a torch into the darker corners of Germany’s still-recent history the way ‘Downfall’ does, or ‘The Lives of Others’, but it’s still a milestone in German cinema, a weighty entry on the personal faves list, and unsurpassed in Wolfgang Peterson’s filmography.



*The character, based on Captain-Lieutenant Henreich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the real-life captain of the U-96 (who served as a consultant on the film), is referred to only as “Captain” or “der Alte” (“the old man”). Several other characters are referred to solely by their rank.

Wilkommen zuruck

The new job is going well. The last couple of days the office has been something of a ghost town, with staff either ill or unable to make it to work owing to the current adverse weather conditions. Today is proving the worst day for snow thus far – certainly in my neck of the woods – with a heavy fall overnight and the stuff still coming down with a determined sense of purpose.

Whither the snow-ploughs? Whither the gritting trucks? Buggered if I know. Leaving the house at 7.30am to drive a paltry four miles to work, I made my way out of the estate – the snow a good five inches deep, the road and pavement having merged into a single drift of white – very slowly and in first gear. The road I turned onto carries a considerable volume of traffic and is a main bus route. It hadn’t been cleared or gritted. Traffic was at a standstill. I covered 200 yards in 40 minutes, and even that was like driving on sheet ice. Ahead, in the distance, cars had gone off the road and their hazard lights were blinking. Approaching traffic fishtailed and skidded.

I turned off onto the nearest side street and made my way back home. That took another ten minutes, some of the streets in the estate having been blocked by cars that had got so far then been unable to proceed or reverse and had simply been left there, hazard lights flashing away. My car is white over on the driveway now, its erstwhile tyre tracks completely covered.

I called the agency and left a message reporting my non-attendance at work. They rang me back a few minutes later to say the office is being closed today anyway.

So, with no sign of the snow abating and no reason to even attempt to venture out again, I’m declaring the German film-fest now open on The Agitation of the Mind. Two articles are already written, and I started sketching out a piece on ‘Downfall’ last night. I’m going to watch ‘The Lives of Others’ today, as well as marshalling my thoughts on ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’.

When I originally had the idea for this mini-season, it was in context of ‘Downfall’, ‘The Lives of Others’ and ‘The Baader-Meinhof Complex’ as exemplars of how German cinema is currently examining some of the darkest moments of its recent past, and how a spate of mainstream English-language films seem to have latched onto this movement. Then it occurred to me to include ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ for a bit of light relief. (Watching it again two nights ago, yes, it’s definitely funny, but it’s also acidic in its satire and incredibly poignant in its closing scenes.) Then I remember that Wolfgang Peterson had, more than twenty years before ‘Downfall’, shown the war from a German perspective – a human perspective, moreover, not a political one – in his masterpiece ‘Das Boot’.

So please join me tomorrow, and prepare to dive with the crew of the U-96.

Blogger's commentary / preview of coming attractions

Work, as Oscar Wilde inimitably put it, is the curse of the drinking classes. It’s also a necessary evil for those of us who have a mortgage.

Mid last year, I jumped ship from a firm that was going rapidly downhill and, through an agency, landed a temp-to-perm position with a salary that would have cured my financials worries. At the end of the four weeks’ temp part of it – and just a week before my wedding – they decided the role wouldn’t go permanent after all and I was left with my you-know-what hanging in the wind.

Six months of temp positions followed, mostly data entry; repetitive, boring as hell. The last position was a reception/admin gig at a grim industrial unit. The firm provided training services to a rag-tag clientele including individuals referred over by the Probation service.

On the plus side, I was left alone in the office for most of the time and I had full internet access. Blogging a-go-go! On the minus side, there was insufficient training, no support and no security and I felt more than a little vulnerable.

Just under three weeks ago, when I was threatened with physical violence, I figured that an hourly rate less than 50 pence above minimum wage didn’t cover that kind of shit, and walked out.

Result: a week and a half without work. Pros: getting up late; lounging around the house; blogging a-go-go. Cons: no income; necessity of signing on. I’d just steeled myself to register a benefits claim when the temp agency I was registered with called me: an admin job, immediate start, decent rate of pay, placement until end March at least.

That was Monday afternoon. I’ve spent the rest of this week integrating myself into the new job (and, I must admit, quite enjoying it). Evenings have been spent working on the novel, which currently stands at 33,000 words (closing in on the halfway mark).

But The Agitation of the Mind has not been forgotten. In the last fortnight, I’ve seen ‘The Reader’ and ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ on the big screen. The latter got me thinking about how German cinema has developed a muscular and fearless capacity to re-examine its own dark history; and the latter has convinced me that mainstream cinema has identified this movement and decided to jump on the bandwagon.

Accordingly, February on The Agitation of the Mind is going to kick off with a German mini-season (including two personal faves), ending with an overview of how ‘The Reader’ exemplifies the current mainstream US/UK fascination with the holocaust. It won’t all be heavy sturm-und-drang film-making, as I’ll be throwing inspired high-concept satire ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ into the mix.

And once I’ve got the whole German thing out of my system, finished off the Becks Vier and got back to drinking Batemans and Newkie Brown, and ousted the bratwurst in favour of the Full English, I’ll be hosting a six-film Hitchcock-fest including another personal fave. Crop-dusting planes, mistaken identities, Mount Rushmore and Bernard Herrmann’s most memorable score will be high on the agenda.

Give me a week to finish getting to grips with the job and immerse myself in the DVD collection, and it’ll be business as usual.

See you next month.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Straight Story

It was David Lynch week on Out 1 last week, an occasion fittingly marked by some of the best writing Out 1 have yet published. My commitments to the Diane-fest meant I couldn’t join in at the time; however, this week’s Personal Fave is a belated salute to Out 1’s assessment of American cinema’s most idiosyncratic of auteurs.

I’ve seen me some weird stuff in the oeuvre of David Lynch. I’ve seen dancing dwarves talking backwards. I’ve seen Dennis Hopper snorting oxygen and getting medieval on some guys ass the moment Roy Orbison comes on the radio. I’ve seen nightclub acts to slit your wrists to in the Club Silencio.

But I ain’t never seen anything as weird as the opening credits to ‘The Straight Story’:

WALT DISNEY PICTURES PRESENTS

A FILM BY DAVID LYNCH

Think about that for a while. Really think about it. As Lula observes to Sailor, “This whole world is wild at heart and crazy on top.”

‘The Straight Story’ is easily the most non-David-Lynch David Lynch film, and yet it’s quintessentially Lynch. No-one else could have put such a quirky and individualistic spin on the story.

Let’s start with the title. ‘The Straight Story’. It’s a statement of intent: the film is straight (ie. the narrative has a traditional beginning, middle and end – man needs to go on journey, goes on journey, arrives at destination), whereas Lynch normally employs fractured or curiously circular narratives (I’m convinced the true beginning of ‘Mulholland Drive’ is about twenty minutes before the end credits) … and that’s only when he can be bothered to pay lip-service to narrative.

It also tells a story – a true story. A huge departure for Lynch: everything from ‘Eraserhead’ to ‘Inland Empire’ by way of ‘Twin Peaks’ has played out within its own self-contained and nightmarishly internalised boundaries. Twin Peaks, for example, isn’t a place – not like the Iowa of ‘The Straight Story’ is a place – it’s a state of mind. Its director’s mind – and that’s a way scarier place to be than anywhere in the U S of A.

‘The Straight Story’ recounts the odyssey of 73-year old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) from Iowa to Wisconsin, desperate to mend bridges with his stroke-victim brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) before time runs out for either of them. Not in the best of health himself, and unable to drive a car, he opts to undertake the journey on a ride-on motor mower.

En route, he meets with bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, the kindness of strangers, memories of the past and reminds of his own mortality. Everyone he encounters is won over by his homespun wisdom and hard-earned experience.

I am soooo glad David Lynch directed this film. In the hands of almost any other director (except possibly Michael Bay, who would have made the lawnmower turn into a robot and blow shit up), ‘The Straight Story’ would have been two hours of saccharine whimsy. Imagine Spielberg calling the shots! Christ, being force-fed treacle for the entire running time would be less sickly!

Lynch channels the essential quirkiness of the story; his sense of the bizarre, coupled with Farnsworth’s perfectly nuanced, slightly irascible but ultimately dignified characterisation, are the reason ‘The Straight Story’ is such a gem of a movie. Take Alvin’s abortive first attempt, his ages-old Rehds mower conking out on him before he’s reached the next town. The mower roped down to the back of a pick-up truck, he’s unceremoniously driven home. Cut to: daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) and next door neighbour Dorothy (Jane Galloway Heitz) sitting at the kitchen table. “A man in a pick-up brought my dad back,” Rose recounts. “What kind of pick-up?” Dorothy asks. Alvin comes limping through the kitchen, shotgun in hand, a perfectly deadpan man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do expression on his face. He heads for the screen door; goes outside. They watch him in silence. The door closes behind him. “A Ford,” Rose replies tonelessly, glancing through the window as Alvin raises the shotgun and fires both barrels into the mower.

(He buys a John Deere as replacement and it gets him to his brother’s. As ‘The Italian Job’ was the best advert the Mini ever had, so is ‘The Straight Story’ to the John Deere company.)

Or take Alvin’s encounter with the hapless motorist who, on an empty stretch of road with nary a sign of life to either side of it, manages to plough into a deer – “my thirteenth in seven weeks”. Alvin asks if there’s anything he can do. “There’s nothing anyone can do,” she wails. “I’ve tried driving with my lights on. I’ve tried sounding my horn. I scream out the window. I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud ... and still every week I plow into at least one … And I love deer.” Hysterical, she stomps back to her car, slams the door and accelerates away. Cut to: Alvin roasting a chunk of deer meat over a campfire, any number of the deceased’s herd gathering accusingly behind him. (A pair of antlers decorate his trailer for the rest of the trip.)

There’s humour here, too, another unusual ingredient for Lynch. The screenplay (by John Roach and Mary Sweeney) is a masterwork of dryly-observed and absurdist wit. A scene in a hardware store – where Alvin haggles over a grabber the storekeeper doesn’t want to sell because it’ll take him weeks to get a replacement on order – plays out like Oscar Wilde gone rural and getting no further sartorially than a pair of dungarees.

The emotional core of the film, however – and I’m willing to stake a tenuous claim that in this respect Lynch channels the aesthetic of Sam Peckinpah – is its treatment of the protagonist as anachronism. A man out of time. Alvin is among the last of his generation. Indeed, many of his contemporaries died in World War II. In the film’s quietest – and most devastating – scene, Alvin and another old-timer share reminiscences of the war. Alvin recalls that he still sees “my buddies’ faces … they’re still young”. The longer he lives, the more acutely aware he is of how little time they had. And it’s not just his dead comrades he mourns. The loss of life transcended national boundaries. “By the end, we were shooting moon-faced boys,” he says of the supposed enemy. A dozen times or more I’ve seen this film, and that one line has me in tears.

But Lynch never milks it. “The worst thing about getting’ old is remembering when you were young,” Alvin muses at one point, and there’s nary a hint of the weeping violins that would swamp the soundtrack on a Spielberg or Zemeckis film. Here, it’s a statement of fact, delivered with the conviction of one who knows.

Richard Farnsworth was 80 when he played Alvin Straight. A stuntman for 40 years before becoming an actor, he was debilitated by arthritis and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when ‘The Straight Story’ went before the cameras. And he gave a performance of such grace! Of such beautiful characterisation! His Best Actor nomination was well deserved (unfortunately he had uncharacteristically strong competition, including Russell Crowe for ‘The Insider’ and Kevin Spacey – the winner on the evening – for ‘American Beauty’).

Richard Farnsworth died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (and I’ll step outside and raise fists with anyone who makes a judgemental comment about suicide) shortly after the film was completed. ‘The Straight Story’ stands, alongside Dirk Bogarde’s ‘These Foolish Things’ as perhaps the loveliest, most elegiac swansong any actor could hope for.



I’ve reached 1,250 words. Enough is enough, even though there are still so many things about the film to be said. I saw it at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema when it was first released in 1999 and loved it completely and wholeheartedly. I love it more every time I watch it. It’s David Lynch’s most open and emotionally perfect film as director. The more I think about it – and having now written so indulgently on it – the more I think ‘The Straight Story’ might just be my favourite film of all time.

Unfaithful

Discounting his 1976 short ‘Mr Smith’ and 1990’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ as exceptions to the rule, there’s a definite thematic through-line to Adrian Lyne’s work as a director. Here’s a list of his films, accompanied by a thumbnail synopsis and a brief encapsulation of the subtext:

‘Foxes’ – in which a group of teens experience growing pains/rites of passage/sexual maturity. Subtext: if it’s pleasurable, you pay for it.

‘Flashdance’ – in which a welder pursues a second career as an exotic dancer (occasioning the classic ‘Full Monty’ line “hope she dances better than she welds – them joints won’t hold fuck all”). Subtext: ‘woman in a man’s world’ as a cloak for sexual objectification a-go-go.

‘9½ Weeks’ – in which repressed woman meets shag-happy but dangerously unpredictable stranger. Subtext: if it’s pleasurable, you pay for it.

‘Fatal Attraction’ – in which a rumpled middle-aged bloke married to the eternally gorgeous Anne Archer inexplicably decides to indulge in a bit on the side with a demented bunny-boiler. Subtext: dumb bastard had it coming.

‘Indecent Proposal’ – in which a hard-up couple agree to a $1 million/one night/one off carnal agreement with a rumpled middle-aged über-rich bloke. Subtext: sleeping around isn’t good for your marriage.

‘Lolita’ – in which a rumpled middle-aged academic gets hot under the collar for a somewhat-under-the-age-of-consent nymphet. Subtext: this kind of behaviour is a really bad idea. Seriously. Don’t go there.

‘Unfaithful’ – in which the wife of a rumpled middle-aged boring corporate dude does the wild thing with a hunky Latino bookshop owner and all manner of complications ensue. Subtext: sleeping around isn’t good for your marriage.

So, in summation, the World According to Adrian Lyne operates on the fundamental principle that fornication is the venal curse of the human race and only regret, recrimination and disharmony can ever come of it.

Which should make Adrian Lyne the most presbyterian director in the history of cinema. Except that he revels in it. ‘9½ Weeks’ in particular comes across as little more than a Zalman King (who co-wrote ‘9½ Weeks’) or an A. Gregory Hippolyte production but with a bigger budget. A case could be made that King and Hippolyte are more honest in that they acknowledge the sexual content of their films as the raison d’être and – with the possible exception of Sherilyn Fenn’s weepily confused heroine in ‘Two Moon Junction’ – depict it as pleasurable.

There’s a whiff of hypocrisy to Lyne’s work. Whereas European directors depict sex as natural and erotic (Julio Medem’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Sex and Lucia’ is an ideal example), sometimes complicated and maybe destructive, but always pleasurable, Lyne wants to have his cake and eat it. Or rather have his soft focus trouser-arouser scenes and make his characters pay for them.

‘Unfaithful’ would be easy to dismiss but for Diane Lane. If she transcends the material in ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, she positively reclaims it here.

The stand-out scene takes place before Constance (Lane) has even embarked on her affair with Paul (Oliver Martinez). So torn-up with guilt just for visiting him (even though nothing, at this point, happens between them), she goes to see her husband Ed (Richard Gere) at his office and takes him a gift she’s just bought. They talk but Ed breaks off to take a phone call, during the course of which he throws his toys out of the pram and harshly berates a flunkey. The reaffirmation Constance has been looking for crumbles as Ed shows his true colours. Lane communicates the emotional crux of the scene through her eyes and it’s a good, subtle piece of acting.

‘Unfaithful’ isn’t all that much of a film, nor is Lyne all that much of a director (he shoots everything in the bland tightly-framed style of a commercial for designer kitchens), but he fell on his feet with his leading lady.

Hollywoodland

George Reeves has some notable credits on his filmography: ‘Gone With the Wind’ (the event movie of 1939), ‘Blood and Sand’ opposite Rita Hayworth, ‘The Fighting 69th’ and ‘From Here to Eternity’.

So you can understand why it was galling for him, returning from a wartime stint in the army and finding it difficult to resume his big-screen career, to don a padded suit and a pair of tights to play Superman in a popular TV series. That TV was, at that time, derided by film-makers and movie actors as a novelty at best and a bastardisation at worst, would only have added salt to the wound.

Reeves died on 16 June 1959, of a gunshot wound to the head. A verdict of suicide was arrived at, though controversy and unanswered questions continue to linger. Indeed, Reeves’s mother engaged the services of a private detective to look into the circumstances surrounding his death.

This fact provides the jumping-off point for Allen Coulter’s slow-burn drama ‘Hollywoodland’. The private eye here is a fictional character, Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), whose burgeoning obsession with the case is comparable to Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal)’s obsession with the Zodiac killer in David Fincher’s film.

Simo is two-bit operator, struggling to maintain a relationship with his troubled son and keep things civil with his ex-wife (Molly Parker). A recent case has gone pear-shaped, his client murdering the allegedly unfaithful spouse he’d hired Simo to follow – a woman Simo dug up no dirt on.

Hired by Reeves’s mother (Lois Smith), this new investigation gives him something to focus on; to delve into; to get too personally involved with. Simo’s sleuthing plays out in counterpoint to a series of flashbacks which chronicle Reeves (Ben Affleck)’s life, beginning with his chance encounter with Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a woman a decade his senior who enjoys an open marriage to MGM troubleshooter Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins) – ie. they both consort with other partners and Eddie’s only going to get pissed off with you if you don’t treat his missus right.

Which makes Eddie a suspect when Reeves splits up with Toni the better to enjoy the attentions of younger society playgirl Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), leaving his former – and eminently supportive and generous – mistress distraught. But as Simo comes to understand just how volatile Reeves’s relationship with Leonore was, he begins to wonder if the solution isn’t significantly closer to home …

Kudos to Coulter and screenwriter Paul Bernbaum: they don’t try to impose a solution on the film. ‘Hollywoodland’ is a mystery sans resolution, like the aforementioned ‘Zodiac’, or Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’. In fact, like that latter film, it’s more a rumination on image and perception. At three key points, Simo finds himself drawn back the house Reeves died in, standing sepulchrally outside while a different possibl scenario plays itself out inside (ie. in Simo’s imagination).

Brody, playing very much against type as a wiseacre P.I., channels the likes of Jack Nicholson in ‘Chinatown’, before peeling back the layers and finding the lost soul within his character. Affleck does some of his best work onscreen, his matinee idol looks and slightly artificial air of suavity ideally suited to a 1950s leading man. Hoskins’s American accent wavers occasionally, but he’s suitably pugnacious as Eddie Mannix; you have no trouble believing that when this man deals with things, they stay dealt with.

The ladies of the cast excel: Lois Smith gives a potent performance as the grieving but irascible mother; Robin Tunney goes all out for white trash high camp as a floozy with a mouth as loose as her morals; and Diane Lane provides the human core of the film, a glamorous and intelligent woman just beginning to fear the future as she edges into middle age. Lane projects grace and dignity, which makes her profanity-spiked comment about Reeves’s new squeeze all the more shocking. It’s the best line in the film and it’ll make you wince. (It’s about smoke rings, by the way.)



Tomorrow: the Diane-fest concludes with 'Unfaithful'.

The Big Town

To the best of my knowledge ‘The Big Town’ is the only feature film helmed by prolific TV director Ben Bolt. Which is a shame since it’s one of the better American movies of the ’80s, free of the artificial visual stylisations which render much of that decade’s filmic fare hideously outdated. To indulge in a sweeping generalisation, it was a decade marked by high-profile directors seeming hell-bent on generating indulgent and excessive throwbacks to the Hollywood of old – ‘The Cotton Club’, ‘One From the Heart’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ spring to mind – and ending up with costly flops that marred reputations and even bankrupted studios.

‘The Big Heat’ pays homage to old school Hollywood – the films noir of the ’40s – but manages to be small scale, reined-in and focussed on telling a pacy story. Bolt’s direction is clear-sighted and unpretentious. He loses no time in establishing character and location. The opening credits, playing out to Johnny Cash’s mournful rendition of ‘Home of the Blues’, sets up not-quite-hero-not-quite-anti-hero J.C. “Cully” Cullen (Matt Dillon) as a small-town boy from a farming community, holding down a grease-monkey job in an auto shop by day and proving himself a craps shooter extraordinaire by night.

Equally swiftly, Bolt and scripter Robert Roy Pool (adapting Clark Howard’s novel ‘The Arm’ have him blow Nowheresville for the big town (Chicago). Sponsored by hard-nosed businesswoman Ferguson Edwards (Lee Grant) – whose embittered husband, referred to only as Mr Edwards (Bruce Dern), was a renowned dice shooter until he was blinded in an acid attack by a vengeful opponent – Culley breaks every game in town, strikes up a non-committal romance with hometown girl Aggie (Suzy Amis), and enjoys the easy money, flashy clothes and the cachet that comes with the Edwards’s protection.

But it isn’t enough. Cleaning up with their money is one thing, but Culley wants to make a big score with his own stake. He hears tell of a game run by club-owner and mobster George Cole (Tommy Lee Jones). He attends, flashes his money around and wins big. In doing so, he rubs Cole up the wrong way. In a further complication to his continued personal safety, he falls hard for Cole’s exotic dancer mistress Lorry Dane (Diane Lane). They are soon conducting a full-blown affair.

With Cole out to bring Culley down a peg or two, and Lorry leading him a merry dance, into the picture comes Phil Carpenter (Tom Skerritt) who swiftly replaces the Edwards as a mentor of sorts. But is Carpenter the man Mr Edwards has been dreaming of revenge against all these years? And to what lengths will he go to get that revenge?

With its naïve but corruptible protagonist, duplicitous femme fatale, sardonic gangster, tangle of divided loyalties and milieu of back rooms, bars, shadowy streets and gaudy neon, ‘The Big Town’ is straight-up film noir. Perhaps only the ending, where Culley at least gets one of the girls (as well as the chance to resume his old life), hits a wrong note – the happy ending. The rest of it, though, is compellingly cynical, particularly when Culley realises just how thoroughly he’s been used.

Dillon captures both sides of Culley: the wide-eyed country boy suddenly exposed to a flashy, addictive lifestyle; and the inveterate money-grubber for whom materialism is everything. Jones, Skerritt and Dern are on top form. Suzy Amis, in only her second film appearance following a bit part in ‘Fandango’, is luminous as the romantic heroine with a chequered past.

And then there’s Ms Lane: seductive, smouldering, fantastically foxy in her show-stopping fan dance. In the pantheon of great burlesque routines in the movies – after singling out Rita Hayworth’s immortal “Put the Blame on Mame” turn in ‘Gilda’ for the number one spot – Lane’s fan dance is definitely Top Three material alongside Lolita Davidovich’s voluptuous bit of bump ‘n’ grind in ‘Blaze’*. She’s everything a femme fatale should be, viz. enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained-glass window.



*Davidovich (billed as Lolita David) has a small role in ‘The Big Town’ as, presciently enough, a stripper.


Tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘Hollywoodland’.

Under the Tuscan Sun

As a non-fiction literary sub-genre, the moderately-successful-writer-buys-old-house-in-picturesque-European-village-befriends-the-locals-and-writes-bestseller-about-it is a fairly narrow field. Three titles pretty much define it: ‘A Year in Provençe’ by Peter Mayles, ‘A Valley in Italy’ by Lisa St Aubin de Teran, and ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ by Frances Mayes.

There have been two attempts at capturing Mayles’ summery prose onscreen: the ill-advised BBC adaptation with John Thaw, and Ridley Scott’s ‘A Good Year’ starring Russell Crowe. I mean, come on – Russell Crowe as a fictionalised Peter Mayle! Lounging around in a vineyard! (“At my command … uncork another bottle.”)

St Aubin de Teran’s book, perhaps the most elegant literary work of the three, has yet to be subjected to the big screen treatment.

‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ was filmed in 2003, writer-director Audrey Wells’ only film to date apart from 1999’s ‘Guinevere’, a decent enough rites-of-passage movie starring Sarah Polley. ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ is middlebrow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive and somewhat pedestrian in its direction.

It would be so easy to criticise this movie. You could call it a chick flick (if you wanted to be really cruel, you could call it a middle-aged chick flick). You could call it chocolate box film-making (cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson’s camera positively bathes in the glorious scenery). You could accuse it of revelling in cliché (if you don’t see the last half dozen scenes coming like the QEII on a duckpond, you’re clinically dead). You could write off the last half hour as an excess of saccharine (seriously: the final reel isn’t just sugar-coated, it’s wound in clayfloss, dipped in whipped cream and drizzled with melted chocolate).

But I’ve got to admit … and it’s not just because of Diane Lane’s presence … I have a soft spot for ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’. And with my recent movie-viewing including ‘Che – Part One’, ‘Hell Drivers’ and ‘Emperor of the North’ – dark, intense films – ‘UTTS’ provides a pleasant change of pace: light-heartedness, sweeping sunny vistas, the laughter of friends, the flowing of wine and the transient joie de vivre of a May-to-September romance.

Having said that, the romantic subplot is probably the worst aspect of Wells’ fictionalisation of Mayes’ memoir, giving the film its clumsiest scenes and its single most awkward visual image.

On the whole, though, watching 'UTTS' it is like sinking into a bubble bath or getting that slight fuzzy feeling from your second or third glass of wine (or your second or third bottle, depending on your personal tolerance levels). It clears the palate before you reach for, say, ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘Deep Red’.

And to give the film its dues, it owns up to its clichés. My favourite scene comes fairly early on. Novelist Frances (Lane) has divorced her cheating bastard of a husband and moved into a gloomy apartment (“you’re a writer?” the realtor says; “you can help the others [tenants] write their suicide notes”); her best friend Patti (Sandra Oh) endeavours to cheer her up by treating her to a package tour of Tuscany. One of her fellow tourists, stumped at what to write on an obligatory postcard to his mother, calls upon Frances’ literary talents. She glances around the piazza, sees a gaggle of nuns eating ice cream, an expatriate British woman chatting with the locals, a small car weaving non-too-discreetly through a throng of pedestrians, a couple of bronzed and oleaginous types checking out women, people buying food and two small boys positively drooling over a gleaming red Ferrari. “It’s market day in Cortona,” she writes; “the piazza is an ongoing party and everyone is invited. Clichés converge at this navel of the world. You almost want to laugh, but you can’t help feeling these Italians know more about having fun than we do.”

It’s a nice moment, slightly self-deprecating. Much of the first half works on this level: a patchwork quilt of gently played-out scenes, such incident as there is deriving from character and observation without the need to force anything resembling a narrative arc on the proceedings … until, that is, the last forty minutes or so. Still, it’s just about forgivable. Wells might be a pedestrian film-maker, but her cast are perfect: Diane Lane transcends the material time after time, Sandra Oh makes an excellent foil and Lindsay Duncan is memorable as the expatriate British actress still living in a fantasy world of Rome à la Fellini. There’s a nod to ‘La Dolce Vita’ that could easily have been cringingly embarrassing, but comes off as curiously poignant.

My advice: crack a good bottle of Italian wine as the movie starts, enjoy a terrific first half with its celebration of female unity, then drink yourself into a pleasant stupor wherein the convergence of clichés no longer detract from the sheer gorgeousness of the Tuscan locations … and of the delectable Ms Lane.




Posted to coincide with Diane Lane’s 44th birthday. Up tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘The Big Town’.

A rare political interlude (2)

He cleared his desk ...

... and he fucked off.

PERSONAL FAVES: Emperor of the North

Robert Aldrich was an action director with the soul of a nihilist. From his brutal mid-50s film noir ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ to his big-star, big box office successes of the ’60s, ‘The Flight of the Phoenix’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen’, a streak of the cynical, the embittered, the pessimistic runs through all of his films. Imagine Bergman looking around the wintry Swedish landscape and going, “Fuck this, I need some hard-ass types with guns on a suicide mission; that or a fucking big plane”, and you’re half way there.

Aldrich entered the 1970s – his last fertile decade as a film-maker (he would direct just one movie in the very early ’80s before his death in 1983) – in typically cynical fashion with ‘Too Late the Hero’, ‘The Grissom Gang’ and ‘Ulzana’s Raid’, the middle part of that little triptych one of Aldrich’s darkest and most joyless enquiries into the ugliness of the human psyche.

Then he made ‘Emperor of the North’. Which is full-on, attitudinous and brutal – of course it is: this is Robert freakin’ Aldrich we’re talking about – but is also kind of fun.

Kind of.

(Regarding the title. It was originally released as ‘Emperor of the North Pole’ – a self-deprecating moniker used among the hobos to denote the most daring and legendary of their kind (an emperor of the North Pole would be an emperor of nothing) – then later re-released as ‘Emperor of the North’. It was under the latter title that I first saw it on TV as a kid (one of those rare movies dad would let me stay up to watch); likewise the DVD copy I now own. I understand that in America, it’s still more commonly known as ‘Emperor of the North Pole’. Sorry. What can I say? I’m a limey.)

‘Emperor of the North’ kicks off with grizzled, world-weary hobo A-Nº 1 (Lee Marvin) fending off an attempted robbery by Cigaret (Keith Carradine), a fellow transient who talks big but wouldn’t score highly in an arse/elbow differentiation test. Dealing peremptorily with him, A-Nº 1 hops a train only to find Cigaret following him and drawing the railroad guard’s attention to the freight car they’ve holed up in.

Which is bad news since this particular train is the Old 19 and the guard who presides over it is the sadistic Shack (Ernest Borgnine), a man whose dedication to keeping his train free of hobos is messaniac in its intensity. “I’m gonna show you what happens to people who ride on my train with a ticket,” he snarls at one point. He’s hefting a bloody great hammer as he says it.

Ernest Borgnine is splendidly over-the-top as Shack. And I mean over-the-top in a good way. He scowls, he growls, his face glows red and veins beat in his forehead and his eyes threaten to pop out of their sockets. He doesn’t just take professional pride in his work - he enjoys it. Sure, his mission statement is that nobody rides his train without a ticket. But he still wants them to try. Just for the sheer pleasure of beating the crap out of them or hurling them to their death.

The three-way battle of wills between A-Nº 1, Cigaret and Shack begins after A-Nº 1 sets fire to the freight car Shack has them trapped in, hurling himself through the charred timbers to make his escape. Separated, Cigaret talks up his encounter with Shack and boasts that he rode the Old 19 for free. A-Nº 1, incensed at this interloper’s bullshit braggadocio, determines to ride Shack’s train all the way and prove that he’s emperor of the North Pole, not Cigaret.

Naturally, Cigaret can’t leave be and A-Nº 1, boarding the Old 19 under a heavy blanket of fog, finds his antagonist sneaking onboard alongside him. This takes place about a third of the way into the film; the remainder of its running time, with the exception of two bits of comic relief along the way (one at a riverside baptism, one in a hobo camp), is given over to the tense and, finally, brutal train journey.

The simplicity of its narrative gives ‘Emperor of the North’ its power. There’s no backstory. We never learn why A-Nº 1, with his obvious smarts and wily determination, became a hobo. Nor is Shack’s sadistic hatred of hobos given any provenance. These two men simply do what they do and what it comes down to, in the edge-of-the-seat finale, is a no-punches-pulled slug-fest involving fists, chains, axes and lumps of wood.

The cast give it their all, Aldrich keeps the pace brisk and the cinematography (by Joseph Biroc – who notched up over 100 credits including ‘Blazing Saddles’ and – also for Aldrich – ‘The Flight of the Phoenix’, ‘The Grissom Gang’ and ‘Ulzana’s Raid’) is just glorious. Only Marty Robbins’s hideous theme song ‘A Man and a Train’ lets things down (“a man ain’t a train and a train ain’t a man” - no shit, Sherlock!), but you can always mute the opening credits and play some Wagner instead: ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ while A-Nº 1 rides the rails.

Hell Drivers

“Psst! Wanna see a movie starring Number 6, 007, that stiff-upper-lip lieutenant out of ‘Zulu’, Dr Who, Inspector Clouseau’s boss out of the ‘Pink Panther’ films, “Bootsie” Bisley, George Cowley off ‘The Professionals’, one of the blokes in ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ and the guy with the dirtiest laugh in the ‘Carry On’ films?

“Yeah? You’re interested? Got just the thing for you, guv. The genuine article. Nice little 1957 British B-movie. Black-and-white and sharp as a knife. Pop in the back room and I’ll sort you out with copy. Cash only, like. Where did it come from? Fell off the back of a lorry, didn’t it?”

(Authorities arrive.)

(Trenchcoated, fedora-wearing spiv is carted off.)

(Normal service resumes at The Agitation of the Mind.)

But, to be fair, our newly nicked friend – presumably falling down some stairs at a nearby police station even as I type this article – has a point. Imagine it: a movie starring Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery, Stanley Baker, William Hartnell, Herbert Lom, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum and Sid James.

An all-star cast, right?

Hmmmmm, sort of. An all-pre-star cast might be a better description. Connery was still five years away from his star-making turn in ‘Dr No’, Hartnell was six years away from being the first incarnation of a certain still-active time traveller, McGoohan and McCallum were seven years away from – respectively – ‘Danger Man’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ … and it would be another three years after that before McGoohan, who died two days ago at the age of 80, gave British television its finest hour (or rather its finest 13 hour-long episodes) with ‘The Prisoner’, a satirical, subversive, surreal, genre-defying and truly original masterpiece of the medium.

(Parenthetically, Jackson and James had probably had the most notable careers at that point, both starring in perennial Ealing favourites – ‘Whisky Galore’ and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ respectively – and James delivering a scene-stealing performance as Knucksie the barman in Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Small Back Room’.)

Was it serendipity that brought all these soon-to-be-greats together for ‘Hell Drivers’, or did director Cy Endfield have a unique eye for talent? It really doesn’t matter. The point is, ‘Hell Drivers’ is a hard as nails, tough-talking, two-fisted, pedal-to-the-metal B-movie that breaks the mold. B-movies were often referred to as “the little picture”. Not this one. ‘Hell Drivers’ stands tall in post-war British cinema and throws a long and enduring shadow.

Although Stanley Baker is the headliner (he and director Cy Endfield went on to form a production company together to bring ‘Zulu’ to the screen), it’s Patrick McGoohan’s ballsy, menacing performance that defines ‘Hell Drivers’.

The plot, in a nutshell: recently released ex-con Tom Yately (Baker) goes to work for a two-bit trucking company managed by the irascible Cartley (Hartnell) and whose lead driver “Red” Redman (McGoohan) is a truculent bully forever brawling, chewing on a cigarette and downing Guinness at the wheel. Yately is still stewing over a road accident he caused, in which his younger brother Jimmy (McCallum) was injured. Discovering the corruption, swindling and dangerous driving conditions his fellow truckers are coerced into, Yately is compelled to make a stand.

It could almost be a western. And to be honest, the narrative doesn’t matter. It’s Endfield’s commitment to gritty realism that makes ‘Hell Drivers’ a bona fide classic. My father was starting out in the road haulage business in the late fifties and all of his recollections, as well as details he’s pointed out to me whilst watching the film, identify the film as being the real deal, with the (obligatory for the day) exception of the language being considerably toned down.

‘Hell Drivers’ inhabits a milieu of truck stops, digs and haulage yards. There is camaraderie, but also rivalry. The drivers – pulling in long hours and driving recklessly fast to make up their runs – live for booze, birds and brawling. Outside of the films of Sam Peckinpah, it’s one of the most nihilistically accurate portrayals of how men interact. Particularly when that interaction explodes into violence. The inevitable punch-up between Yately and Redman is brutal and intense, anticipating the visceral hand-to-hand of the Bourne films by fifty years.

Everyone wears their role like a threadbare donkey jacket. Endfield directs with the speed and velocity of one of the Dodge trucks. And Patrick McGoohan, a decade before he re-defined what the small screen was capable of, tears up the big screen like a man possessed.

i.m. Patrick McGoohan (19 March 1928 – 13 January 2009)

Che - Part One

Q. When is a biopic not a biopic?

A. When it’s Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che – Part One’.

But before I get into the whole biopic discussion, some thoughts on the title. Early word, when Soderbergh premiered the film(s) at Cannes, was that he’d made two stand-alone but thematically connected films (shot in different aspect ratios) entitled ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’. Then I heard that a limited American release offered film-goers the opportunity to experience the whole thing in a single four-and-a-half-hour sitting – a “roadshow” edition called ‘Che: A Revolutionary Life’. Now it shows up in the UK as ‘Che – Part One’ and, opening next month, ‘Che – Part Two’ – which, according to some of the American film sites I follow, are the titles of the two halves of the “roadshow” version.

So why, particularly when they’re being released a month apart, aren’t the UK showings going under the titles ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’? With different aspect ratios, and occupying different timelines and geographies (the Cuban revolution of 1958-59 in the former; the failed Bolivian revolution of 1967 in the latter), it’s clearly only a film of two halves if seen in the “roadshow” format, nor does it seem quite as simple as saying one film is the sequel to the other.

But enough! Two paragraphs and 200 words on the title alone!?!

To business: ‘Che – Part One’ is not a biopic because it tells us absolutely sod bugger all about Che Guevara the man, apart from the fact that he trained as a doctor before becoming a revolutionary (which I already knew from ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’) and he suffered from asthma. Nothing else. His background – nada. His motivations – zilch. His personal life – a single line of dialogue mentions a wife and child in Mexico; nothing beyond that.

It would be easy to say, by this definition, that the film fails. But that’s not the case. Putting aside a disjointed first 15 minutes and some intrusive voiceover (specifically during the action scenes; voiceover should not be used during action scenes), it’s an emphatic success. And it’s a success as a biopic. It’s just not a biopic of Che Guevara (a performance of gravitas and control by Benicio del Toro).

‘Che – Part One’ is a biopic of a revolution. Soderbergh’s direction, as controlled and unflashy as his leading man’s performance, concentrates on minutiae; you could almost say this is a film about logistics. Recruiting men? Make sure they bring their own rifles. Half your fighting force illiterate? Establish a school within the camp. Anyone wounded? Establish a field hospital as well. Any renegades amongst your men, taking advantage of those same oppressed peasants you’re fighting for? Use discipline – execution if necessary.

Soderbergh and his cast (good naturalistic acting here) build up a wealth of detail, keeping you entrenched in the hills and forests with Guevara’s men for much of the running time, finally taking the revolution to the streets in a superbly orchestrated and sustained set-piece at the end.

Thus the film coheres: it’s not the story of a man – it’s the story of his actions.

Posted to coincide with Steven Soderbergh’s 46th birthday. Many happy returns, sir.