EauDouce Reviews

Annie Laurie (1927)

What a score

[9/10 · 24 March 2015]

I saw this film at the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema with a specially commissioned live score by Shona Mooney that was so mind- blowingly good that it's hard to separate out the film itself from the combined experience. However that's silent films I suppose, they are new each time in a way that talkies aren't. Although I've just had the best night out at the cinema for a long time, the film as a stand-alone item isn't perfect. That said it's pretty damn good and, note, one of those ones where you'd be foolish to decide whether to go and see it based on a You Tube clip. Like a Scott novel, you might dip into it and think it ludicrously antiquated, but accept its own rhythms and logic and you get hooked. The film really is Annie Laurie, it's her (Gish) and not any of the men who is the pivot, who makes the important choices good and bad, deals with the consequences, drives the narrative and has a full physical part in the very well-done and action-packed finale. It's funny at times, romantic or suspenseful at others.

The music though, in the performance I saw: simply stunning, and the best live film score I've experienced. The performers were, appropriately, Scottish traditional musicians and aside from being good music, pure and simple, the score was pitch perfect at every point in interpreting and enhancing the action. As one small example, one of the film's big problems, for a modern audience, is that the male love interest Ian MacGregor (this is the old story of the Campbells and the MacGregors leading up to Glencoe) is hard to take seriously. Unlike the character of his brother, who gets the 'other' girl and could probably pass muster in a current Hollywood film in a Paul Rudd kind of way, the way Kerry plays Ian, and the way his character looks, are just not what we are conditioned to expect and initially seem comic. However Mooney's music believes in him, just as Annie Laurie does, and it's the music that, building up to a climactic and decisive mid-river kiss, made us feel the moment as Annie Laurie does and, at that point and thereafter, buy into the deal that she does.

Even a ridiculous Hollywood postscript comes, rather nicely, in colour when all else is in black and white; whatever the actual explanation, it felt like a cool, self-subverting marker that we'd shifted realities, and made for a great close - reminded me of a similar effect from the extending of the aspect ratio in Dolan's Mommy - which I'd recently seen.

All in all, go to see Annie Laurie at any point, but if you get a chance to see it with the Shona Mooney score (the HippFest audience were told it would be touring at least to the Barbican in London), you should go considerably out of your way not to miss it.

Broken (IV) (2012)

British cinema at its worst

[2/10 · 15 March 2013]

I found this a very difficult watch at the 2013 Glasgow film fest. Not particularly because of the subject matter, which involves "difficult" themes (bullying, abuse, mental illness), but because of the worthy, dull, predictable and o so British way with which they were dealt. Some of the acting from the established actors is quite good, but really the plot is dire. A critical scene, which sums up the film, involves a character in a coma envisaging a dream world in a church where they are being called to death on one side, while a character appears in the light of the church door and urges them instead towards the light of life. If that appeals to you then I suppose you may enjoy this film.

Angels of Sex (2012)

Feel-good and sexy

[9/10 · 15 March 2013]

I went to see this with low expectations as a filler between more apparently heavyweight films at the Glasgow Film Festival but it turned out to be the best film of the festival. A lot more than just a gay romance, it's very funny, very sexy and clever. Although not apparent from the English subtitles, the film flows between Catalan and Spanish as comfortably as it flows between sexualities and the Galician outsider, who is neither quite Castillian nor Catalan, effortlessly occupies a hitherto undreamed of aspirational space which acts with centrifugal force on the other characters. I loved the peripheral characters and their world - something rang very true about them. With the main plot there is drama, there are plot twists, and an ending which is somehow so lovely that you will leave the cinema with a smile on your face. Go see.

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

Intense and wonderful

[9/10 · 3 July 2012]

A film which is profound, perfectly paced, and beautiful. It is six hours long (shown without a break, at the director's request) and on one level little happens and what does happen happens very slowly, yet this is no extended Le Quattro Volte, and the better for it. Nothing is just image, everything matters and rather than starting to feeling drowsy by, say, hour five, I felt more and more alert as the film builds to its intense conclusion, both hopeless and full of hope. The two parallel story threads involve a young woman who is prostituted by her father and, elsewhere, two men who are searching for buried treasure on their family land. The threads are linked, though we do not know how for a long time.

The shots are beautifully composed, often static and sometimes gently panning, and keep a physical distance from the individuals which accords with the distance the narrative maintains from the characters. Some of the compositions are stunning, both in themselves and in relation to each other; the initial shot of a (dry) road, brought into revised perspective when we realise that there are tiny figures coming toward us, mirrors the later shot of a farmer advancing towards us not alongside, but along the bed of a watercourse, subtly working on both visual and metaphorical levels at the same time. Likewise a gecko's departure across a pool prefigures a similar scene when the farmer also departs through the flooded fields. There is a sublime extended sequence where a character, Juan, searches for this gecko rather than for the treasure, which again is both beautiful, freighted with significance and far more powerful because it is given time by the film to assume its meaning.

The final scene changes the register entirely, the distance from the characters swept away by an intense monologue (fimed close-up and to camera, though as an address to another character). Like the epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the change in register has the greater impact coming at the end of such a length of time. In a moment for which we realise Florentina has been preparing all her life (and preparing us for throughout the film), her eloquence, as well as what she has to say, means we are still reassessing her, ourselves and our reading of the film long after the film has ended. Go out of your way to catch this film; it's six hours very well spent.