rolls_chris Reviews

Howl (2010)

Franco charms as Ginsberg

[7/10 · 28 February 2011]

If it weren't for James Franco's winning involvement, this biopic would be less of a howl and more of a whimper. The film is a combination of three strands: the 1957 obscenity trail for publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights bookshop; a candid interview with the poet himself; and Franco/Ginsberg's reading of the poem.

This last strand is sometimes accompanied by pseudo-mystical animation, at others by a modishly monochromatic reconstruction of Ginsberg's original Six Gallery reading. This took place, coincidentally, in San Francisco two years before the trail.

As for the animation – it doesn't work. Poetry is never best served on film by being decorated visually (despite Ginsberg's own involvement with the illustrations). We end up watching an urban fantasia of mawkish 'beat' spirituality, sentimentalised poverty, and psychedelic sex.

When Daniels tells the courtroom that poetry is poetry because you can't translate it into prose, we might add that it hardly lends itself to cartoons either. It's a lesson Julie Taymor might have learned before giving us her CGI-fest 'Tempest'.

Casting John Hamm, America's four-square straight guy, in the role of Jake Ehrlich, Felinghetti's defence lawyer, leaves us in no doubt as to which way the verdict will blow. The presence of Bob Balaban as the judge, Marie-Louise Parker in a cameo, and Jeff Daniels as a priggish professor also give this slight film a somewhat over-produced sheen. Was it only due to these big hitters' involvement that the film got made?

Howl the film is not an appraisal of the 'Beat Generation' in all its wonderful squalor and, frankly, un-selfconscious mediocrity. For that, you'd be better off reading James Campbell's wonderful 'This is the Beat Generation'. Campbell is superb on the more marginal figures of that loose group – the likes of Herbert Huncke, Burroughs, and the fascinating 'fallen angel of the beat generation', Lucien Carr. I longed for more of the Beats in the film.

The two figures that haunt 'Howl' the poem, however, are its dedicatee, Carl Soloman, who Ginsberg got to know in a mental institution, and another psychiatric patient – his mother. It's that relationship, which Ginsberg found too painful to talk about, that I wanted more detail of. In its narrow concentration on Howl the poem, Howl the film tantalisingly narrows its scope.

When Ginsberg tells us "there's no such thing as the Beat Generation. Just a bunch of guys trying to get published" we might remember that it was Allen himself who was the most ambitious of those guys. It was he who personally invited important poets and publishers to the Six Gallery reading, including Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure. Howl was second to last on the bill, and the not-yet 30 year old poet knew this was his chance.

In response to Ginsberg's reading, McClure wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America..." Allen couldn't have planned it better.

What, half a century later, would Ginsberg have made of James Franco playing himself? I can't help thinking he'd sooner have Franco playing with himself. Franco is a latter-day picture of the angel-headed hipster Ginsberg eulogised and adored. Somewhere, up there, the old mystic must be smiling.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Intelligent, haunting and beautifully produced

[7/10 · 20 February 2011]

Perhaps it's perverse to review something with an eye to how bad it COULD have been. 'Never Let Me Go', the film version of Kazo Ishiguro's Booker-shortlisted 2005 novel, manages to escape being a mawkish, sentimental and rather formulaic thriller through the subtlety of Alex Garland's sensitive, nuanced screenplay.

Like Ishiguro, Garland let's the world of Hailsham and it's fey child inhabitants unfold slowly on screen, pulling us into their strangely altered reality. The schoolchildren wear electronic tags, are sternly encouraged to be as physically healthy as possible, and have a paranoid fear of the outside world.

If, like me, you don't know before you watch what's going down in the boarding school, you find yourself intrigued, saddened and not a little sickened by the sinister truth. Much of the film's impact lies in not knowing the set-up before it's revealed. There'll surely be some though who know the novel or who'll have have heard spoilers.

The strength of Kazo Ishiguro's vision lies in not letting the characters at the heart of his story be Orwellian victims desperate to break free from the omnipresent tyranny of a state which persecutes them.

There are countless examples of this 'Trueman Show'-type genre. A more insensitive writer, or faithless producer, would undoubtedly have ramped up the jeopardy and had the protagonists running for their lives in a bid to be human.

Ishiguro, on the other hand, meditates on how far the characters themselves are complicit in their situation, and to what extent they're the unwitting ciphers of an uncaring, health-obsessed society.

Thus we're spared the 'bad' version of this story and treated to a somewhat philosophical, character-driven narrative.

But the chief thing that struck me watching 'Never Let Me Go' was the sheer beauty of Mark Romanek's production design. The screen constantly evolves in a muted palette of blues and soft autumnal browns, counterbalancing the uglier truths at the the heart of the society being depicted.

Clever.

Two English Girls (1971)

Flawed and tender

[7/10 · 30 December 2009]

The actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, the child star of Truffaut's breakthrough '400 Blows' and who plays the protagonist Claude in 'Deux Anglaises et le Continent' symbolises the flawed and tender charm at the heart of this 1971 film. Leaud can't act. Nevertheless, by dint of his solemn Gallic charm and beauty, there is something deeply moving about this turn-of-the- century cross-Channel menage-a-trois.

The story is an adaptation of a novel by Truffaut's beloved author Henri Pierre Roche who also wrote the novel which inspired 'Jules et Jim'. 'Deux Anglaises et le Continent' is written in diary form from the points of view of three characters, Anne, Muriel and Claude who make up the narrative's central love triangle. The story is basically one of thwarted love. Both English sisters develop strong feelings for their French 'brother' Claude, which eventually turns into destructive sexual passion. As such, the film is an inversion of 'Jules et Jim', which was a comic celebration of love between two close male friends and one girl. Stories of doomed love appealed to Truffaut.

When it appeared in cinemas, the film was a critical and commercial flop. In '71 society was in the grip of sexual liberation, and here was Truffaut, who had reflected the zeitgeist so perfectly six years earlier with a whimsical celebration of liberated passion in 'Jules et Jim' serving up a period piece more reminiscent of the buttoned-up prudery of a Bronte novel.

There are many things wrong with the film. There is an odd tension between the acceptance of Claude's promiscuity as a French fait accompli on the one hand, and the sisters' chaste Victorian values on the other. The film also contains anachronisms throughout which it's fun to spot, including modern electricity pylons. The first half of the film is set in Wales but you can tell it was filmed in Normandy (Truffaut didn't want to travel to a non-French speaking location.) There are several scenes in English in which the dialogue makes you squirm. And, in my opinion, it was an error of judgement on the film maker's part to record the voice-over narration himself in such a hasty, lacklustre tone.

And yet, and yet... There is something moving and wonderful at the heart of this film because it is naive. When it was made, society had moved on and women were taking the pill and changing history; the last thing it wanted was a pastel mood-piece about two thirty year-old virgins. But there is an innocence at the film's heart which is not sentimental but you could call it very male. On the one side you have Leaud's truly shocking moments of ham acting, stilted dialogue, unbelievable period settings and a generally plodding tone, but in the balance these are outweighed by the beauty of the cinematography, the fine performances from Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter, the music, and Truffaut's genuine feeling for the intricacies of love in all its colours.

The White Ribbon (2009)

A careful and ambiguous analysis of evil

[8/10 · 18 October 2009]

Fans of Michael Haneke's more morally shocking films such as 'Funny Games', 'Benny's Video' or the draining 'Time of the Wolf' might find themselves surprised by the quieter and slower analysis of evil in his latest work 'Das Weisse Band'.

The action takes place in a North German village shortly before the outbreak of the First World War and in structure presents a number of subtly drawn individual characters as they are caught up in a mysterious series of violent events.

In the hands of a mere moralist this could be an unbearable few hours. But it's credit to Haneke's skill as a film-maker that we are utterly caught up and absorbed by a large cast of children and adults.

One of the on-going arguments in Haneke's films appears to be the origins of human evil, or perhaps more precisely put, individual acts of evil behaviour. Are such acts an individual's responsibility or do they spring from a climate in which particular energies are at work? This is the question Haneke appears to be exploring here (just as was a central question relating to French society in 'Cache').

One of the most disturbing things at the heart of the film is the fact that we do not know why particular acts of evil take place (including the maiming of a disabled child and the beating of a nobleman's son), or even who commits them. However, this is no 'whodunnit', although with its retrospective voice-over from the School Teacher's p.o.v. we are let to believe for a long time that were in a crime/thriller genre.

Throughout his body of work so far, Haneke has suggested that looking for the sort of easy answers films and TV all too readily supply is partly responsible for our misunderstanding how violence in society occurs. (Funny Games).

'The White Ribbon' bypasses the usual dramatical devices of motivation and blame and instead softly focuses on an environment (in this case Germany in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century) in which certain unhealthy energies are at work.

These energies include an emotionally repressed and joyless Protestantism, the mistreatment and oppression of women, the familial abuse of children, the fetishism of strong masculine and patriarchal values, and the un-breachable divide between the rich and the poor. Set over all this, like an umbrella, is the fact that the small provincial society depicted in the film is all but completely isolated from wider society.

Another poster here has pointed out that Haneke is using his village as a microcosm to reflect Germany as a whole, and I would agree with that. Haneke's Dorf, whilst having an individual character, is a relative of Von Trier's Dogville in the sense that it stands for a larger set of national values. In this respect Haneke seems to be diagnosing German society in the run up to the 'Great' War as one of authoritarianism, religious doubt, intolerance, and fear.

What is remarkable in such a film is how little human joy or love is to be found in such a seemingly idyllic rural landscape. The love strand (between the narrator Teacher and the dismissed 17 yr old children's nurse) has a rather strained aspect. It is as though the film maker is suggesting that affection might also be down to available opportunity.

One of the most moving scenes in The White Ribbon is when a young child brings his father, a Priest, a caged bird he has nursed back to health. The father's beloved pet canary was killed (by his daughter as a protest against the bleak, loveless household she's been reared in - a home in which a father shows more affection to a small bird than his own children.

Thus the scene symbolically depicts a child demonstrating the love that the parent himself is unable of showing. Tears fill the priest's eyes. It is a tiny moment of love and hope in an otherwise emotionally barren wasteland. It is also a symbol of how a new generations of Germans have dealt with, and healed, previous decades of pain.