botavuan Reviews

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Yet another dud prizewinner.

[4/10 · 16 March 2024]

When I start to read a novel, I expect it to get into gear and grab my attention within 50 pages. Many do so in the first paragraph.

With film, the attention needs to be aroused within 15 minutes at most.

This movie, along with another of this year's prizewinners at the corrupt Oscars (Oppenheimer) was singularly boring, woodenly acted (except by the dog) and badly fpaced/cut/ilmed. It was not remotely shocking.

We all know about the Death Camps, and if we are interested in the subject we will have read graphic details by Primo Levi and others, plus some very good novels.

'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' is a much better film with a much better sense of place, which this film almost entirely lacked. I am pretty sure that the double-glazed windows (to block out the constant noise and occasional screams of the KL just metres away) were plastic-framed. A child was told that a dahlia was a rose. I keep noticing such discrepancies in modern films for which directors simply don't do the easy homework.

The best actor was the excited and largely-ignored black retriever, who appeared for some reason in about half the scenes.

The best quote is surely: "Rudi tells me I'm the Queen of Auschwitz".

It is almost an unbreakable rule that a book is much better than the film made of it. The rare exceptions are Of Mice and Men and Harlan Coben's grisly Speak No Evil (Flemish) & Tell No-one (French).

Fallen Leaves (2023)

Perhaps his best yet.

[9/10 · 1 February 2024]

This is the only Kaurismäki film at which I have laughed out loud - several times, especially near the end. It has lots of jokes and satire - and even self-parody - in his usual bleak background of Helsinki's sad (but brave) precariat.

I also found it delightfully unnerving; some of the rebuffs and rejections so truly depicted here had quite strong resonances with my own younger experiences of being 'out of it' in a world invaded by pop music, heavy machinery, and deep cynicism.

Apart from references to Godard and Bresson, I had a feeling that Fassbinder might have been lurking ghostly in the background: there were some hints of 'Fear eats the Soul.'

And it has a happy (but not false) ending, which was very pleasant. Plus a lovely little dog, called Chaplin.

2023 turned out to be a great year for cinema - with 'Anatomy of a Fall' preceding this film by a few weeks.

If only Ken Loach had some of Kaurismäki's black, dry humour!

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

'The Banality of Evil'

[10/10 · 3 January 2024]

In the early 1990s I was emotionally disembowelled by Bresson's 'Mouchette'. I didn't feel strong enough to watch AHB until 2024, just after reading Paul Lynch's harrowing novel 'Prophet Song'. Like the Lynch novel this is an essay on the illusion of freedom of thought and will. As another reviewer wrote, this is the most depressing and hard-to-watch film you'll ever see. - even more so than Tarkovsky's' Stalker'. (But it's still much more watchable than the dreadful, prize-winning tripe that issues from Hollywood in the name of entertainment.)

To summarize the simple, awful plot: Two children persuade their father to buy them a donkey which they name (and formally christen) Balthazar. The donkey suffers a working life of abuse, neglect and *random* torture as he is passed from one owner/exploiter to another.

The title was obviously chosen carefully. Balthazar was the name of one of the three Magi (or Wise Men) who came from the East to acknowledge the baby Jesus. (The other two were Caspar and Melchior). Au Hasard' means 'by chance' or 'at random' and indicates the suffering of the donkey by the cruel or thoughtless caprice of semi-articulate people, starved, beaten and utterly stoic. Near the end of the film he is referred to as 'a saint', and, like Mouchette, can easily be seen as a martyr to the nastiness of vacuous and mindlessly-vicious humans. Donkeys are often equated with Jesus because of the cross of dark fur on their backs, and it was on an ass that Jesus entered Jerusalem prior to his arrest.

To pile on the agony, the sound track to the film is Schubert's last piano tunefully-agonising sonata, D.960 (not D.959), which itself is shatteringly sad.

The final scene, however, is a kind of apotheosis which completes the stripping-away of any possible sentimentality or overt judgement in a film about kids, animals, Pyrenean poverty and cruelty.

Never Look Away (2018)

Specious cinema.

[2/10 · 24 November 2023]

At a basic level this film aims to show how Nazism slid almost imperceptably into East German Communism - with, as we know, the same people in the middle and lower ranks. Three decades of a black and then red eastern Germany, pounded by two destructive ideologies, before being 'sold down the river' to consumerist-monopolist capitalism.

The Nazis dramatically banned 'modern art'; Stalin suppressed it in favour of the dreariest kind of 'realism'. But we should remember that the Art Business has become a shameful and shameless racket where some of the most talentless get the greatest plaudits - and incomes. We also have censorship by financial prospects. To have financial prospects in our current art world, quality is of no account. What matters is Recognisability, which means that a painter or sculptor has to churn out the same sort of stuff. No experimentation, at least not until you get into the Top League of painters such as the achingly superficial (and recognisable) David Hockney, or Jeff Koons.

There are perhaps dozens of excellent films highlighting the horrors of Nazism, but very, very few which deal with the (numerically greater) horrors of Stalinism from the mid-twenties to the early-fifties. Russia has never apologised for Stalinism, nor was the regime crushed by force, so Russians have very little guilt. But why has no-one in the whole wide world taken something of (for example) Solzhenitsyn and put it on to film ? Where is the post-Soviet Tarkovsky ? Why has no-one in the former Soviet Satellites attempted to show what life was like under Russian 'Communism' ?

German cinema produced the light-hearted 'Goodbye Lenin' and 'The Lives of Others'...

However, the film surprised me by pointing out that the Nazis recognised that Mother Earth had 'limited resources' - hence their Eugenic Programme, in opposition to those who assume that Mother Earth was limitless in its resources for humans to pillage, and come out with hideous statements such as one human life is the world. (So we save a few 'glamorous' hostages and sufferers of rare and romantic diseases, yet let whole peoples, such as the Rohingya simply disappear. Are we better than the Nazis ?)

Food for thought there in just a few seconds of this tedious movie. Blink, and you'd miss a subject well worth pondering.

Only the Animals (2019)

An old trope rehashed.

[2/10 · 24 November 2023]

A film which (for me at any rate) combined the nasty, the incomprehensible and the horribly ridiculous all at the same time. Of course it had the obligatory and gratuitous sex-scenes, in deference to current Western 'moral totalitarianism'. The acting was fine, the filming adequate, but the 'atmosphere' was deeply unpleasant, though not in an instructive or enlightening way.

Film is an essentially voyeuristic and superficial entertainment medium - because it is seen in real time, without occasion for the voyeur to think; but surely French cinema could have engendered something less wallowing-in-rural-nastiness fifty years after the great works of (for example) Resnais; something that did not repeat and drag out (like a very unrealistic corpse from under a bale of straw) the sad old French bourgeois trope of bitter and murderous French agriculturalists ?

Operation Hyacinth (2021)

Confusing and unhealthy fantasy.

[2/10 · 13 November 2023]

This film seemed to me to be a rather sick heterosexual fantasy of violence with little connection with reality. It was also very difficult to work out what was going on. Why did we have that (as usual, offensive) bit of heterosex at the beginning ? It seems that every film now has to include sex and violence (usually with guns).

I cruised in toilets in countries where homosexuality was illegal, and where there were occasional police raids. I cruised in East Berlin in 1986, which turned out to be a better experience than any I had in West Berlin.

Heterosexuals seem to be taking ownership of queerness as American cinema has taken over the whole world. I have met over 100 queers and none of them had had problems with the police.

There have been stories of police acting as agents-provocateurs in 'cottages', and certainly this did occur.

The main problem for queers (especially those who looked vulnerable) was drunken or homophobic or otherwise-disturbed youths and young men in twos or threes - or, occasionally, gangs.

I think that there is some tiny bit of truth in the fascist "Cold Winter Theory" as evidenced in the thousands of films that have issued and are still issuing from European (American, Australian etc) film makers whose films almost all contain enacted sex, violence and (slightly less often) firearms. This supposedly LGBTQ-supporting film had all of them...appealing not to LGBTQ people but to thrill-seeking heterosexual 'normals'.

This film seemed to me to be a cynical exploitation/exaggeration of situations that occurred on either side of the Iron Curtain. In my country (Ireland) 'homosexual acts' weren't legalised until 1987, and public toilets, such as 'mushrooms', 'cottages', 'tasses', etc were much used by men seeking partners, pals, friends for life - or instant relief. From 1966 to 1996 I never once encountered a policeman, except once or twice IN UNIFORM as a warning in Belfast's Botanic Gardens.

The Graduate (1967)

Satire or distressing Horror-film ?

[3/10 · 29 October 2023]

I wonder what I would have thought of this film when it came out...when I was 25. At 82 I found it completely baffling, and actually rather disturbing.

Is it a satire on the American Nuclear Family and the oppression of parents ? Or is it a comment on the mores of a country beyond decadence ? Or is it a simple horror-film to frighten queer men like me away from the hideousness of rapacious and compulsive heterosexuality ?

The epicene but randy wimp Dustin Hoffman is quite unbelievable. As an ex-autist I could quite understand the things he said and how he said them, but not his actions, which were Pavlovian.

The beginning was good: student almost driven mad by his ambitious-for-him parents and their rich white bourgeois friend tries very ineptly (and unbelievably) to avoid the ghastly celebrations they have organised to mark his graduation and his birthday.

Then came the Harpy: Mrs Robinson, one of the creepiest monsters in all cinema. Chilling, scrotum-freezing bedroom-scenes ensue.

The most distressing scene in the film, however, was that of the two traumatised chimpanzees trembling and cuddling each other in a hideous, brutal zoo which I hope has since been closed. (But it probably hasn't.)

I couldn't watch it through to the end. Any ending would have been bad, given the nasty story.

This sort of sneakily-pornographic film (shown in Iran not so long after it came out) was surely one small ingredient in the socio-economic-cultural-amoral-political entity which the Appalling Ayatollah called The Great Satan.

Purge (2012)

Brutally edited.

[6/10 · 12 October 2023]

This film has wonderful photography and staging. I had already read the book, but I still found the film very hard to follow because of the brutal editing. Moreover, the young Aliide is so different in appearance (much too glamorous) from the old one we see at the beginning, that it is hard to connect them.

It is also unclear that Linda (Aliide's niece) has been trafficked from Siberia to sex-slavery in Berlin by a pair of thugs. Her escape from their clutches in an Estonian town south of Tallinn is very muddled.

Aliide saves her own skin by sacrificing her sister and niece (Linda) to the soviet Russians, while harbouring a Nazi sympathiser. It is poetic justice that she ends up protecting her niece from the new kind of Russian threat: sex-slave traffickers.

I'm sure that just an extra 5-10 minutes could have elucidated the plot.

It is such a pity that the script does not match the indoor photography that recalls Tarkovsky and early Bergman .

Flame & Citron (2008)

Crass and Inauthentic.

[2/10 · 29 April 2023]

I was born at the beginning of the second world war. I remember black-out curtains. On fine nights, Copenhageners and Elsinoreans could look from their dark shores across the Sound and wistfully see the unquenched lights of Hälsingborg and Malmö. This Hollywood action movie "made in Denmark" at enormous expense had no black-out curtains or blinds and none of that feeling - actually no feeling of menace or occupation at all. I guess it was made by people who had no experience of war or deprivation, of informers and mistrust of neighbours.

Copenhagen was a city of trams/streetcars - like most European cities of the time. We didn't see a single one. Despite being one of the most expensive Danish films ever made, it was short on atmospheric locations. Apart from a few well-chosen views over rooftops there was little indication of where we were.

While I watched, my attention wandered to Carol Reed's 'The Third Man' which was everything that this film is not.

Mads Mikkelsen's beautifully ham acting is really the best thing about this woeful, gun-loud (for the American market) movie.

National Theatre Live: Twelfth Night (2017)

Gobsmacked.

[10/10 · 27 April 2023]

I was completely stundered by this production. Considering that it was a live performance (with audience) on a revolving stage in London's National Theatre, I found it miraculous. To achieve so much with so little *cinema* was utterly amazing. For éclat it beats any multi-million Hollywood production I have seen, while actually borrowing from the tired and tiring old tradition of The Musical.

I have a problem with Shakespeare. He's terrific on the page, but on the stage, there is usual far too much 'business', far too much speechifying. Give me Ibsen any day (especially the NT's production of A Doll's House). But I had no problem with this, even though (not having read it at school) most of the time I couldn't work out what was going on. That didn't matter, however, the fun and games, the capers, quips and jokes, the mind-boggling gender-swaps carried me along upon a sparkling tide of sheer enjoyment. Definitely a production fo happy queers of all genders. Surely the mis-called Bard of Avon would have loved it - and would have applauded when suddenly erupted The Speech from Hamlet to annoy the groundlings and the purist critics.

Because I'm hard of hearing (and the sounds of the production came from the stage, with slight echo) I needed subtitles, and, though they were better than most, there were some lapses and anomalies and peculiarities. Why was 'prithee' written 'primes' ?

This film goes at the top of my very select fave-list, along with Tarkovsky's Stalker, Svankmajer's Faust, Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf, The Iranian Makhmalbaf's Two-legged Horse, and the National Theatre's production of A Doll's House.

The Eighth Day (1996)

Sentimentality of the worst sort.

[1/10 · 18 February 2023]

I was a fan of Daniel Autueil before watching this nasty film '. It started out very well, very Belgian - but then descended into a ludicrous story which became more and more rididulous.

What was the director trying to tell us ? That a frighteningly-shallow salesman of selling-techniques and a guy who has Down Syndrome can "bond" ? (Spare me the pseudo-egalitarian psycho-babble!) Sure, they might- but not as in a completely false scenario that even Hollywood would not cook up.

The whole film seemed to me to be a disturbing and patronising caricature which ran on sadistically far too long. It made me wonder about the people who combined to make this bourgeois-petting insult to Outsiders of all kinds, and especially those with Down Syndrome. At this point I should declare that I am 'on the autistic spectrum', and a 'maladjusted' child in 1950s Belfast. I am still prone to sudden outbursts of rage, especially against people of authority or their minions..

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

The Embarrassment of Boguserin.

[2/10 · 30 January 2023]

Male solitude has been a serious social issue in rural Ireland (where I lived most of my life) and in France (where I now live). I have visited farmhouses where the lone farmer had hanged himself, leaving a cow to die and mummify in the barn. This film trivialises that sad situation.

With pretensions of Greek tragedy (think Medea) this film is an embarrassment of fakery. Set in the Aran Islands in 1922, twelve years before Robert Flaherty's famous 'Man of Aran', it is a mishmash of inauthenticity and pointless horror. The script is simply unbelievable, the dialogue completely inauthentic and the indoor décors are about 50 years later than the Irish Civil War, gratuitously referred to. Being a rural Irishman myself, in the 1970s I visited people whose 'humble, thatched dwellings would have been much the same as those in the Aran Islands in the 1920s - apart from the wonderful novelty of bottled gas. I visited people whose sole means of cooking was an open fire, with kettle, griddle and hanging pot - and a collie nearby.

When I was a child in the 1940s, it was quite common for chickens (another essential to life) to be in kitchens, but the makers of the movie obviously thought that a pony and an ass would be more of a laugh.

'Black comedy' it is not. If it is a satire, it is of the crudest and most pointless kind. Allegory ? If so, impenetrable.

Being filmed mostly on the Aran Islands, the 'scenic' shots and backgrounds are wonderful. They would have needed to be in thick fog not to be!

Most of Ireland was in the grip of extremely pious Catholicism at the time, so the confessional scenes are simply grotesque. The swearing is not only inauthentic but in-your-face gratuitous. Nobody could have said 'It takes two to tango' on the Aran islands. 'Anyways' is a modern Americanism. No island policeman would have behaved in the way portrayed here; he would have been found drowned had he done so. And that's another huge flaw: there is no mention of the actual and crucial livelihood of fishing, upon which everyone on Irish islands depended. Did no-one associated with this film read the detailed books about precarious life on the Blasket Islands by Maurice O'Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain ?

I don't know why excellent actor Brendan Gleeson agreed to take part.

The clothing is wrong. The bar very wrong ('whiskey' spelled 'whisky' !). (It is only recently as a result of Anglo-American cultural pressure that Irish bars have started calling themselves 'pubs'.) It was interesting that a postbox changed colour from bright British red to Free-State green during the action. The cottage interiors are far too luxurious. All the décors (and the actors) are far too clean. Most furniture would have been home-made, except of course in the priest's house. The character of the priest is simply a ridiculous New York caricature. As the title warns us, the whole gom film is a cheap burlesque with a good dose of ludicrous horror to increase the takings.

13 Tzameti (2005)

'Testosterone' might have been a better title.

[8/10 · 21 January 2023]

Unlike most other reviewers, I didn't find this film particularly shocking. After all, it's only actors in a black-and-white film which was definitely not meant to horrify in a cheaply-gory Hollywood way.

It's a film about masculinity, wealth and class. 'Testosterone' might have been a better title, because it shows how childish mere masculinity can become when unchecked.

The gamblers are all very rich, as, presumably are the organisers. The rest are all lackeys who are tossed little parcels of money to keep them happy. But the main character is working-class, poor and out of his depth. To me, the whole film is an allegory on the perniciousness of unbridled wealth and creepy machismo.

The Meetings of Anna (1978)

Pure cinema with time to reflect.

[10/10 · 14 January 2023]

Unlike most reviewers I did not see this as a movie about loneliness but a film about independence, not least the independence of Akerman herself to take wonderfully long, slow shots. The wonderfully-long train-sequences (mostly and significantly, a stopping-train from Moscow to Paris via Cologne and Brussels) are the best that I have ever seen and are rich with unusual shots and details.

I didn't feel that Aurore was traumatised or desensitised. I felt that she moved through this film rather in the way I move through my days: as an interested onlooker . I really identified with her; I was captivated. I'd say that it is one of my favourite movies, and I am going to watch it, revel in it, again tonight.

Another reviewer has pointed out how the 'meetings', rendezvous or encounters (with both men and women) are so very contrasting in terms of emotion, while flowing along (passing through railway stations) and seeming so natural.

The bleak, treeless, sub-industrial, suburban landscapes are underlined by continual background noise of traffic and railways, which starts off being intrusive. By the end of the film, however, we hardly notice it - just as city-dwellers blot it out all the time 'in real life'. Aurore makes an almost serene (or at least unreactive) journey through the physical and moral wasteland left by the second world war and re-industrialisation, the spiritual bleakness of consumerism.

The final sequence is a radio-play of answering-machine messages which show that this very independent, creative woman is little more than a cog in a relentless social machine.

As a comment on inner experience seen as outer life, it is as good as Samuel Beckett - and less pretentious than Béla Tarr. Indeed, it is the unpretentiousness of this film which makes it special, and specially 'unmasculine'. It is immersive 'pure cinema' that gives you time to think (and be yourself) while watching.

Godland (2022)

Three cheers for the dog.

[1/10 · 1 January 2023]

This film is a mess. Firstly the title in English is an unenlightening non-translation of the Danish and Icelandic title, which means Lost, Disappeared and/or Forbidden land.

Secondly, the subtitles of the version I watched in the cinema came 9 seconds after the speech...meanwhile, the film had (depressingly) moved on. Moreover, the subtitles constantly referred to the anti-hero as a 'priest', when he was a Lutheran pastor.

Some films have differently-coloured subtitles to avoid confusion when different people are speaking, but this one didn't. In any case, the 9-second delay might have made them even more problematic. It may have been slightly more confusing for me because I understood some of the Danish, but had to wait 9 seconds to be sure I understood correctly, by which time the film had ground on semi-comprehensibly in really-depressing landscape, like the bleakest possible parts of Ireland. There was a lovely dog who had a good part (no subtitles required), the horses played themselves superbly, and a volcano cheerily erupted. Not a single tree appeared.

People drowned, horses fell, God was invoked, it rained a lot.

I am an admirer of the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, and it is likely that any attempt to render, for example, his great 'Salka Valka' into film might well end up like this. (What a pity nobody has tried to make a film of the exciting, bloody, epic *and* bleak Njál's Saga!)

I stuck it for an hour before leaving - and fell over a woman as I did so, sprawling on the floor. I picked myself up and fled certainly the dreariest and one of the worst films I have ever seen.

I want to complain to IMBDb that all too often a half-written review disappears completely from the review pane...and I have to start again.

Joker (I) (2019)

Dostoyevskian masterpiece.

[10/10 · 25 December 2022]

My village of 2,000 liberated souls here in France has a cinema which shows films that Americans would deride as "art house"...films from Iran, Finland, Argentina, Iceland, Ireland, Turkey, Romania, Britain, Czech(oslovakia)... At last, after 100 years, Hollywood has finally caught up with pretentious, foreign, 'art-house' cinema.

What immediately came to mind when I started watching, was Szabo's splendid 1981 'Mephisto',a political film about the age-old artistic dilemma of collaboration. But this film is much, much darker, and deals with several political themes simultaneously. It is very Dostoyevskian, with elements of 'Crime and Punishment' as well as 'The Idiot'.

A Joker is both a fool and a wild card. Traditionally, he stands for the rebellious underdog. He can be Schweyk in Hasek's masterpiece; he can be the laugh-out-loud hero of Catch-22 or One Flew Over the Cucoo's Nest, or he can, as here, be a hapless anarcho-nihilist eruption in the fetid bosom of bourgeois respectability.

The anti-hero (wonderfully played) has a Tourettish tic of highly-disconcerting manic laughter. But this film incorporates and deals with it far better than did 'Amadeus' in its stupid trivialisation of Mozart. Moreover, the composed sound-track in Joker is excellent.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the Full Experience leaves you somewhat perplexed, disturbed - maybe a little soiled. There is rather too much gore, but, hey! American films have to have sex and gore, preferably both, and this one at least spares us the gratuitous and mechanical sex that has overwhelmed the film industry since 1950.

Last week I watched for the third time the film that the clique or claque of Critics hail as The Greatest Cinematic Masterpiece, which I found boring, despite the wonderful photography. I couldn't get all the way through - the ham acting and the non-plot... Joker is a far, far better, deeper, broader artistic creation than Citizen Kane.

The Quiet Girl (2022)

A quiet, thoughtful - but flawed - film.

[8/10 · 23 December 2022]

The title of this film harks back to 1952, when Ireland was overwhelmed by a film called 'The Quiet Man', set and filmed in Ireland and starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.

Although the story is slight, it is haunting. We never learn what this young girl suffers (mentally or physically) from her dysfunctional parents and the horrible atmosphere of her home. Emotionally, she is amputated, and rendered largely speechless. In the Ireland of 1981 we can be sure that the Catholic Church will continue that repression.

I well remember from my own childhood in a different part of Ireland that feeling of inexpressible impotence, so beautifully rendered here by Catherine Clinch.

Did I detect the influence of the great Mike Leigh ?

The acting is terrific, the photography mediocre.- but it nevertheless tellingly calls up the dreariness of rural Ireland with its ugly buildings and overgrazed fields - in contrast to the dishonest Hollywood image conjured up by the 1952 'blockbuster' which gave such a boost to the Irish tourist industry.

This girl has been severely damaged, and we don't know what will happen to her. Will she be clawed back into the hostile world of her unpleasant father, (not to mention the horrible neighbours) or will she be allowed to blossom slowly with the loving couple who see her as a sweet replacement for the son whom they lost ?

Most of the film is in Irish, subtitled. But, unfortunately, no subtitles appear with the completely unintelligible and muttered English dialogue. Moreover, the subtitles to the Irish dialogue often disappear into the light background because someone has not learnt that white subtitles require a black edge in order to be seen throughout a film.

Citizen Kane (1941)

On Third Viewing : "A so-so film"

[3/10 · 19 December 2022]

I first saw this film in the 1960s and enjoyed it greatly. I watched it again in the 1990s and hated it.

Before my third viewing in 2022 I had listened to an hour's radio discussion on the film.

My mature and considered opinion is that the mise-en-scène and camera-work are fantastic, the acting fine (except for Welles' bombastic performance) and the story-line mediocre to poor. I didn't finish the third viewing, I was so bored.

The film suffers from the 'loudness' and vulgarity that infects most Hollywood films (and U. S.society in general). The tropes are trite, and not one of the characters is sympathetic. Welles was a showman. As an actor he was egoistic, and his embarrassing ad lib. About Switzerland in 'The Third Man' displayed his pompous ignorance.

In sum: I couldn't have cared less who or what Rosebud was.

Amadeus (1984)

The best 'thing' about this 'costume drama' was the music.

[3/10 · 12 December 2022]

I was induced to watch this film by one of the actors. I had avoided it for over 30 years, but finally one winter's evening I decided to 'give it a go'.

Extravagant, glitzy, trashy, vulgar (very Hollywood), it bore very little resemblance to reality. The only actor who impressed me was Jeffrey Jones as the Emperor Joseph II : not an easy role to play. The script was witty in a very superficial way, but was enlivened every now an again by a snippet of Czech directorial genius.

The part of Mozart was cringe-worthy. Hollywood wouldn't dare to portray coprolalia (if indeed Mozart suffered from it) on screen, so instead he made silly little giggles which were neither convincing nor shocking. This interpretation, like the whole script, seemed to me meretricious.

It is a tragedy when brilliant directors are bought over to Glitzland to have their talents diluted with crap. First Polanski, then Forman. Let us rejoice that Jan Svankmajer remained in Bohemia and made some of the best films ever, and that Tarkovsky got diluted only by the Swedes.

I know that the main script-writer was the dramatist of the original and celebrated stage play, which I never saw (living 300 miles from a posh theatre), but shame on him if Forman and co. Corrupted his text, and shame of him if they did not.

For anyone wanting (a) good entertainment, and (b) Mozart's music (not in snippets), I would recommend Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni.

'Wolfie' (Wölfling) may have had Tourette's, or BPD or 'autism' (a condition which is now widely-enough defined to include the whole human species plus some dogs and other creatures in captivity), but this portrayal of him did him no favours.

Thank goodness that Peter Schaffer didn't get to triviialise Brahms!

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Bland, slight and not very funny.

[3/10 · 9 December 2022]

I was finally induced to watch this film after reading favourable remarks on it in one of Simon Callow's memoirs. I didn't have high hopes, so they weren't dashed when I watched.

Like almost all Hollywood films, it was form without substance - slight, bland and superficial. I thought the acting atrociously over the top; in fact the only good acting came from Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself. There was the usual excess of alcohol laced with lame wise-cracks which pass for humour in American cinema. There was almost no plot, no depth of character, The unappealing William Holden was evidently taken off the shelf for his role, and Gloria Swanson was merely grotesque.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Only one potato.

[6/10 · 4 December 2022]

I watched this film over two evenings. I loved the pace. (Béla Tarr, eat your heart out!)

Everything was bleak : the flat with its horrible wallpaper, her routine, the tasteless meals shared in silence.

The movie gave me time to ponder and reflect while it was still running.

If only more films dispensed with music!

I loved the details: she had only two minutes a day to read her book; she took the daily newspaper only to clean her son's shoes on; the bottle of beer on the dinner table was never opened; she neatly folded her son's pyjamas after he had gone to school; the pecks on each cheek when her son left for school, and when he came back in the late afternoon; she went to four different haberdashers to look for an elusive button, rather than buy a new set of buttons for her dress.

All her actions were neatly and efficiently carried out: the washing-up brush had its hook above the shallow porcelain sink and the small, thin, white towel presumably impregnated with bodily fluid(s) was carried straight from the bed to the laundry-basket.

What sort of middle-class cook in the 1960s discovered that she has only one potato left ? (in a bag on the balcony because the flat, typically enough, had neither refrigerator nor television). This was a time when people saved paper and string (as I still do, having been born at the beginning of WW2). I remember the kind of décor and I even knew 'housewives' who carried out their 'domestic duties' in a similarly-impeccable manner.

Everyone will have noticed that the one sensual moment in the movie was the loving and long manipulation of a half-pound of minced beef.

The movie conveyed what soap operas pretended to, but never did and never have.

It was made not long after Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour and could be seen as a salutary feminist comment on it. The protest at the Miss World contest in London in 1970 also came earlier.

So I really enjoyed this film (even the later longueurs) right to 5 minutes before the end, when for me, it gave up the ghost and simply collapsed into banality. If only the '5 seconds of action' had been cut out, and we had gone straight to the final sequence of Jeanne, the dutiful four-kisses-a-day mother staring into space, into another kind of bleakness, it would have supplanted Tarkovsky's Stalker as my favourite film.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Inimitably-American Grotesque.

[9/10 · 13 November 2022]

Because of the Psycho(tic) music, this extraordinary and relentless film is impossible to take seriously - except as a very particular comment on the USA, and Hollywood which largely created it.

Baby Jane herself (a pastiche of the ghastly Shirley Temple) is (to me) obviously the personification of the paternalist (and patristic) infantile narcissism (due in no small part to Hollywood) of the USA, itself.

Blanche (superbly under-acted by brown-haired, slightly-swarthy Joan Crawford) might be interpreted as Baby Jane's "collateral damage", the social paralysis resulting from greedy narcissism.

The handsome, caring "colored cleaner" symbolises the victimhood of millions of non-WASP Americans who actually keep the country going as 'menials'.

The Edwin (think of Liberace) side-show (with fake English accents) makes me think of Tony Blair's Britain futilely clutching the USA's bloody petticoats.

The dramatic confession at the end is, a tricksy and completely irrelevant add-on.

Nil by Mouth (1997)

Double-dose Mike Leigh.

[9/10 · 5 November 2022]

I thought that Mike Leigh had plumbed the depths of English working-class misery with "Meantime" - until I watched this amazing film. I approached it with trepidation, since I'm something of a snowflake with regard to violence, misery and nasty sex. I was prepared to turn it off after 10 minutes - but I was grabbed.

What makes this "Candid Camera" film so good is the incredibly smooth editing. It's like having an unusually coherent dream in which you are a sober onlooker constantly wondering how people can behave like this, how they feed their emotional captivity and negativity from each other's negativity, dependency and desperation. Yet every moment has the ring of truth. It is hard to believe that these are actors, so authentic do they seem.

Mike Leigh is famous for a directorial method which produces raw and gritty performances from his actors. But Gary Oldman has, if anything, done even better with this sociological study.

Death in Venice (1971)

Splendid hats.

[5/10 · 4 November 2022]

I saw this film in (I think) 1972, and was bowled over, in rather the same way that I was by Zeffirelli's 'Romeo & Juliet'.

Fifty years later, at home rather than in a cinema, I found it lushly creepy. Certainly it was beautifully shot - as, indeed, most movies are. It was certainly atmospheric.

But just as the only appeal for me in the nastily violent and viciously heterosexual 'The Godfather' was the amazing array of 1950s cars, what appealed to me most in this sickly film was the splendid display of ridiculous hats. I meditated on the appalling difficulty of existing as a woman in Edwardian times, with all the frippery, the stays, the compulsory postures, restraints, taboos and rules of etiquette. No wonder there were so many female 'hysterics'; life for the well-to-do was a bizarre mixture of luxury and torture, crowned with compulsory and competitive headgear which made me think of bower-birds.

7 Prisoners (2021)

Ibsen in São Paulo.

[8/10 · 12 April 2022]

I think that the great Norwegian dramatist would have been proud to be associated with this gritty and powerful drama which scrapes at the malignant cancer which is capitalism. Marx and Engels would also have endorsed it.