British Cinema: Cracks (2009)

Cracks, 2009.

Directed by Jordan Scott.
Starring Eva Green, Juno Temple, Maria Valverde and Imogen Poots.


SYNOPSIS:

A diving team of adolescent girls at a boarding school adore their inspirational teacher, Miss G (Eva Green), whose favourite is team captain, Di (Juno Temple). But when an aristocratic new girl arrives, focuses shift, and tensions begin, leading to dark places...


Director Jordan Scott is right to call the boarding school story a genre, and this one is much akin to Heavenly Creatures. Both are early 20th C English language dramas about intense relationships between teenage girls on an island that ends in tragic and criminal acts. Both begin with a hymn being sung in assembly, and then the tension begins with a foreign new student who gets special treatment.

But the New Zealand film that gave Kate Winslet her first starring role is about a real life 1950s event, and the intensity between two schoolgirls; Cracks is about a fictional teacher/pupil triangle in 1930s, filmed in Ireland.

Cracks does not lend itself to the special effects creating Pauline Parker and Juliette Hulme's imagination which have become a Peter Jackson trademark; but Cracks is cinematic, with emblematic, brooding shots of Irish lakes and hills. When a storm gathers over the landscape, it is symbolic of emotional tensions. The water is also a motif of freedom and views from under it show a spiritual ecstasy. It isn't mentioned in the film, but I wonder if Michael Symmons Roberts' Anatomy of a Perfect Dive is insinuated. Miss G does speak of the poetry of separating mind and body as one dives perfectly; and how being between heaven and earth brings freedom and desire makes anything possible.

Her philosophy of physical education is unsurprisingly inspiring to the team of pupils she takes special interest in – two in particular.

This is another creepy mad story about same sex unrequited love. Like Heavenly Creatures it also joins The Talented Mr Ripley and Notes on a Scandal, although I don't think the intention is to suggest homosexuality is crazy or unhealthy; but rather to explore the dramatic possibilities of an enclosed and intense existence which boarding schools on islands lend themselves to.

As Miss G unravels with her frustrated love, her bohemian headscarf copied by her girls disappears and so does her makeup: her face is gaunt, the colours of her clothes go until in the scene where her love dies, she wears beige. Only smudged dark eye makeup remains.

I have a query that Di – who must be under 16 – manages to escape the school and find the means to travel alone in that era. I was also sad that Miss G seems to go to a kind of Phantom Zone, being trapped in a living prison of death and no hint that, like Di, she will break free and live a new life. In that way, the film does end like Heavenly Creatures where both the girls are sent to prison, never to meet again. The love interest here is dead and so is the relationship between the original side of the triangle, and her idolising diving team have rejected her.

I agree with The Tamarind that Eva Green is reminiscent of Charlotte Rampling in this role, especially as I first encountered Charlotte in her early 70s role as Anne Boleyn – an alluring exotic woman who careers towards her downfall.

I read the short novel directly after, and see why it is called by a critic 'Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Lord of the Flies.' Set in sensuous hot South Africa, author Shelia Kohler puts herself in the story, telling it in collective first person but no-one identifies themself as the narrator. Inserting a modern day reunion, there are many changes – dark Spanish Fiamma (Maria Valverde) is Italian, and both she and Di are blond; the setting is not an island and the diving team never try to send Fiamma home. We know of Fiamma's disappearance all along, but her end is so horrible I cannot bear to hint at it, but I am very glad that the film changed this significantly.

I stopped believing in the romance and characters in the story. I also noted the strange contradiction between the blatant physical crush the girls had on their female teacher, their explicit wish that Fiamma and Miss G would 'do it' and their re-enactments of that during the Feast of St Agnes where some girls were in drag – and then their horror at lesbianism.

I note on the author's website that she immediately explains that real life events led her to violent and dark stories – which cannot be over exaggerated here. Ultimate darkness is not of interest to me and I do not believe it to be more real than hope and redemption.

As someone twice their age, I also find such young sexuality alienating , and also such exploration uncomfortable – particularly with an older woman who is not only in a professionally taboo relationship but whose advances are not consensual.

I felt that was film well crafted and enjoyed it enough to watch it again before returning the DVD, but remain unhappy with the ending. I would like Miss G (who curiously never has a full name) to have been given hope; and instead of the insidious Di breaking free, whom I disagree with Jordan Scott - we never fall in love with – I would like downtrodden, more caring Fuzzy (Clemmie Dugdale) to have been the heroine of the story, the one set free to see new horizons.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Movie Review Archive

Cult Classics - Barbarella (1968)

Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, 1968.

Directed by Roger Vadim.
Starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law and Anita Pallenberg.


SYNOPSIS:

In the distant future a beautiful space-age heroine is tasked by the President of Earth with capturing an evil scientist who threatens universal peace.


See films differently, say Volkswagen on their adverts to promote their sponsorship of independent cinema.

I have always held a view on Barbarella which might seem as if it belonged with these quirky takes.

Barbarella's cult status seems to not come because it's good, but because it's bad. We might pause to ask what makes a film bad? Barbarella has a plot; and as required with action films, new threats continually appear. It keeps to the traditional screenwriting structure in that there is an inciting incident, something to begin to story. The strip in space opening titles certainly provide a hook and conform to the notion that the opening scene should set the tone of the film; it's silly, sexy and very 1960s. There's a climatic grand battle at the end and then the story resolves.

Its type does not suggest that thrilling tension, great acting or personal development arcs are expected or appropriate. Watching the trailer, it's clear that a kind of psychedelic saucy camp piece of fun was what was intended. I would add, profundity is also not expected – but yet I believe it is there.

Before discussing the profound, I'd like to spend a moment on the sexuality portrayed in Barbarella. It takes place in a warped world of no sunlight or plant life, often in cramped rooms. What makes Barbarella strange is that the sexuality is juxtaposed with innocence. She recalls Bettie Page in that mix. Barbarella might also be the transition of the 1950s girlhood into the swinging sixties woman. SoGo, the debauched planet she visits, sounds very much like Soho, the epicentre of London's sex industry at the time. Barbarella frequently shows body parts but covers the ones so freely shown in the French comic from which she is based. There is plenty of nudity – such as the bodies trapped in the labyrinth and in the city - but the sex is cut out. The scenes that most disturbed me are when innocence and terror mix with sexuality. Dolls symbolise childhood and yet these are turned into demons who eat at Barbarella, exposing more flesh - and then blood. Budgies are sweet birds, kept as pets, yet here they swarm and peck her – to the same result. It is also disturbing that the children enjoy preying on adults for pleasure - who are more innocent than they - as if child molesting is reversed. Now the most important segment of society, these children are wild, to be rounded up – with a hint of child labour ('servicable age'). It recalls the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, also of the 1960s, and Philip Pullman's Golden Compass. But the child catcher in Barbarella is not the villain and our sympathies not with the children, and nor is this written for children.

Barbarella's innocence and naiveté is what wins her the day. Her willingness to step into a chute that leads her into the bird torture or to allow the children to capture her - expecting the best – means she is always rescued from the various near deaths. Her resignation to rather than relish of sexual encounters hardly makes her the predatory nymphomaniac that some commentators have made her.

To Barbarella, sex opens eyes as some have suggested of the Garden of Eden. She has hers opened by a man, but then opens another's – not literally, for Pygar remains the blind angel – but his will to fly returns. A form of what the Hindus call Shakti – feminine force – helps her to better the orgasmatron machine and ruffle the hair of a revolutionary. Interesting she uses both forms of making love – the way that earth rejected and the way it is now done with pills.

Her comment – only the poor do it the old way – shows that sex is a money industry and that even that came be something which has economic ramifications. The Pill of the cartoon cleans up the messy, distracting act into a few moments hand touching. It involves charts and measurement – the psychocardiogram – and official sanction, though it does also imply compatibility and foreknowledge - none of which Barbarella's encounters involve. Barbarella's last encounter is not with a person but a machine – a hint to self sufficient sexuality. Reproduction is not mentioned and in citing why earth gave up physical love, it is about self esteem and reliable pleasure.

Academics have discussed how Grace Kelly and Kate Winslet have been action heroines, saving men. Jane Fonda is saved by men but she also saves – Pygar whom she then guides in flight, and it is her sent to rescue Durand Durand, alone, representing earth. The men – and Queen – want sexual favours but Barbarella's first thought is always to offer money from the government as a reward.

The magma under the city feeds on evil. Law of Attraction believers say that the universe feeds on our thoughts and therefore Barbarella's purity means she escapes the fate of Durand Durand because he is given over to the force of the planet while Barbarella resists it. Pygar says more than once that an angel doesn't make love; an angel is love – as if love is something you are rather than something you do. It is often asserted that the Highest Being is Love, personified. And the last line of the film (and first comic) is when for once Barbarella questions why an evil person is treated in a way they don't deserve. Pygar's reply: "An angel has no memory." The wedding speech passage of the Bible, 1 Cor 13 states that "love keeps no record of wrongs." Margaret Attwood's book on debt, Payback, says that for a debt to continue, a memory of what is owed (in the widest sense) is needed. The ultimate act of mercy is to wipe not only what is owed but the record that such obligation and shortfall ever existed.

As the three fly over the Sodom and Gomorrah like city as it destroys itself, there is also a hint of Cold War/ning, a world destroyed by greed but reclaimed by free love – the dual themes of that decade. Thus Barbarella ends on Liberty and forgiveness – and in all its dystopian silliness, the film becomes a worthy one after all.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Movie Review Archive

Thoughts on... Possession (2002)

Possession, 2002.

Directed by Neil LaBute.
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle and Lena Headey.


SYNOPSIS:

Roland's discovery of an undiscovered letter of a famous poet changes the course of his life - and scholarship. It leads him to Maud, an expert on a hitherto unconnected poet. They retrace the Victorian bards' lives and footsteps in a race against other academics to discover the result of those letters - and the will-they-won't-they relationship between the two scholars.


This is a story that I have mixed feelings on because it involves ideas in my own writing. I am both drawn to it for that similarity, but then annoyed as it does not go where I would have hoped. I suspect all lovers of this or any book share this in essence, when it comes to adaptation. We are all crafters of our idea of how the story should be, and we have to watch someone else's interpretation.

Did American Neil LaBute have the right to take this much loved English highbrow novel by A.S. Byatt into a Hollywood blockbuster?

According to LaBute's director's commentary, Warner were after the rights to the book the year it won the Booker prize. But it took 12 years to make, with various people being attached then unattached. So why did LaBute's presence and script get the green light where others had not?

He says he's a fan of the book, and perhaps he should feel he as much right to his admiration of the book and his vision of it as a film as the next director. Scrolling through online reviews, it's clear that both book and film have fans among those enjoying simply a passionate love mystery. (I have discussed the elitism of the book on Associated Content).

This film goes too fast and I believe it must have been a longer film, now shorn too far. Note to filmmakers - do not assume a 90 minute film is more successful and palatable to an audience and put pressure on filmmakers to make shorter features. We need, as a viewer, to be satisfied by the film, and I think that few stories are truly told in under two hours. Surely the kind of audience interested in Possession would wish for a film that was also erudite and thoughtful, which may also mean longer?

Making Roland (Eckhart) an American felt like a conscious effort to woo an American audience - which apparently it is not. But what director Neil LaBute saw as transatlantic tensions, for me felt like clichéd commercialism. I wonder if some of LaBute's thoughts are reflected in the comment by Roland to an Englishman: 'What's your problem with Americans?' Were those silly obvious remarks about Roland's nationality paraphrases of LaBute's experience? Did LaBute also attempt to deal with international feelings when Maud (Paltrow) criticises Roland for taking the letters - as Americans assume everything is their right? But the film plays down that American Professor Mortimer Cropper wants to take all the special acquisitions they find to the US. In the book, the drive of the rivalry and chase is to keep British treasures in our own country. Yes I am aware of the Elgin marbles and I know we have the Rosetta Stone and did have the Stone of Scone. I do feel countries should retain their own treasures, though I know British and Irish architecture have been shipped West - and that makes me mad.

Changing Roland's nationality does nothing for the film; and there was an interesting American character - Leonora Stern - who was finally cut from the film, whom I missed. I felt that by cutting Roland and Maud's lovers, we loose some of the parallel between them and their research interests.

As Sight and Sound's review points out, in changing Roland's personality, you change an important point of the story. The dynamic of a shy moley man with a woman on more money and with more confidence is important. Whereas Val chose the reverse - she ends up with the rich, confidence male lawyer. And Maud, who had been wooed by successful Fergus Wolfe, chooses Roland instead to fall in love with.

In my first recent re-viewing of the film, I thought that the letters and poems of the book came through. Now I have finished the book and rewatched the film, with and without director's commentary. My view has changed - too much of the poetry and letters have gone.

This novel is difficult to translate because words are so important to it; and poems do not translate to imagery; the nature and order of the words are so important. Expressions of an actor do not convey all we need to know - another prevalent misconception.

I wondered if the Mesulina might have been interesting to film - or would that seem too bizarre? Perhaps that too is interesting - that myths on the page are absurd when made actual.

I felt that the movie Scooby doo-ed the literary novel, but the cartoon mystery team is there in Byatt. Cropper does grave rob; he and Fergus are simply enemies; Lord Bailey does tell Fergus to get off the line and hold a gun to him and Cropper. But the silliness came in the fight between Roland and Cropper. In the book, a great wind prevents Cropper escaping, which is far better.

The ending is as it is in the book, and I hadn’t expected that coda about Ash (Northam) meeting his child - I assumed it must be Hollywood-sation.

I felt that there was not enough of the relationships. We needed to see more of Blanche (Headey) and Christabel (Ehle), for as LaBute says in his commentary, we never see them as happy and pre-Ash. I wondered in the novel whether they were lesbians as we'd understand them or if their relationship was closer to that of Ash and Ellen - an non physical companionship. The novel is very vague about Christabel's "shared solitary existence" and I never found a point where she tells Ash about Blanche. Her suicide note is also important as it links to her belief on séances and that her death was not the end of her, but only of an unhappy earthy existence.

Like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I never believed in a short adulterous affair that could last in the lover's minds so long. Its short duration is what made it special; for fires go out - that kind of love rarely lasts and gives the kind of steady satisfaction that Blanche and Ellen's companionship brought. I didn't like the coldness of Christabel and contrasted her hardness with the sparkling eyes of Ehle when she played Eliza Bennet. She turned off all sparkle here to be an calculating adulterer, not caring who she hurt.

We did not see enough of that first meeting: the party and séance discussion that were 'extraordinary' as in the first draft of Ash's letter.

The séance is far more dramatic in the book and I though it would be good to have it so on screen - where Ash is angry it seems due to the farcical nature of a séance, but we believe it is because his child has been murdered by its mother.

I was also sorry that the symbolism of going into the garden and the cats was missed out of the film; and that Roland is finally able to write his own poetry and gets a lectureship at the end.

I found myself wanting to like the film more than I could. Having just seen sweeping, high brow Italian I Am Love (2009), I wonder how a European director might have tackled Byatt's book and kept more of the intelligence and power.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

British Cinema: Nowhere Boy (2009)

Nowhere Boy, 2009.

Directed by Sam Taylor Wood.
Starring Aaron Johnson, Kristen Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff.


SYNOPSIS:

This is the story of teenage John Lennon and his three loves - his music, his Mum, and his Aunt.


The sign of a really good film is when you walk out of the cinema and into a bookshop to find out more, and that several hours later, your are still immersed in the subject. Nowhere Boy has caused me to rekindle my Beatles/Lennon interest, and I am already considering a second viewing. This is a period of John's life I knew little of and not the era of his music that I like. But I allowed the film to tell its story without concerning myself with my musical tastes or the biographical truth.

I love that both women - Aunt Mimi and Julia his Mum - have moments of warmth and sympathy, and there is no judgment of either. It's too simplistic to say that Mimi is uptight and posh and trad, whilst Julia is the crazy freespirited one. How can Mimi be so respectably conventional when she is a chain smoker with an illicit affair? The family relationships hinted at are somewhat unconventional if not shocking. I wondered what was meant by John's relationship with his Uncle - the way they collapsed on the stairs and at his funeral, John says that George was 'more than an uncle'…? Julia behaves as if her son is also her toyboy, kissing him repeatedly and flirting in front of him.

At the end he particularly shows a trait that he candidly owned and lamented later in his life: violence. But he is also a very loving person, someone who does awful things but somehow you like him and want him to like you. Aaron Johnson's portrayal of John has so much character, making everything he says and does distinct and charismatic, and a natural leader. As Julia, Anne-Marie Duff is amazing yet again, handling another fascinating complex multifaceted character; as is Kristen Scott Thomas as the contrasting aunt - credit to her for ensuring she is not just a dichotomy. There was another member of the cast that I enjoyed watching and would like to see again - the great city of Liverpool.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Nowhere Boy trailer:

Tragedy or Triumph? Amelia and Changeling

Elspeth Rushbrook provides her thoughts on recent cinematic offerings...


This week, I have seen three films about strong women in the 1920s: Small Island is how Jamaican Hortense leaves one small island for another - and fulfils her dream of coming to Britain. But this is the odd one out as it's an adaptation of a fiction, broadcast on television, and about a black woman.

The other two are about white, real life Americans, and are cinema films. Changeling is how Christine Collins's son goes missing - but has the wrong boy returned to her by the police; and her fight to expose this and get her real boy back. Amelia Earhart was the aviation pioneer whose firsts included flying the Atlantic.

Christine fought a corrupt system on and by people, mostly the police. Amelia's battles were more with nature and technology, although some believe there is a cover up to yet be uncovered about her disappearance. If they are right, then Amelia and Ms Collins have much more in common.

Hilary Swank, who starred as Amelia, had recently worked with Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby. His gentle and calm directing contrasts with the sad and intense subject matter of both these films. Last time, Swank played a female boxer; now, she is a pilot. Changeling is angering, unsettling, and actually rather disturbing in its scenes of mental health procedures and execution. (The latter matched Dancer in the Dark and was unnecessary to the story, as well as probably being distressing to act out). Amelia is a much gentler film, whose tensions feel more like action movie thrills than the stomach curdling feelings of watching Changeling.

Are either happy endings? It depends on what you call happy. The synopsis I heard of Million Dollar Baby sounds like a definite 'no', and was told to me in a way that sounded utterly negative. You could tell Christine and Amelia's stories negatively too.

You could also tell Keats' story as a failure. That was my other watching this week: Bright Star. John Keats dies young and poor, before he marries his sweetheart and before the world has appreciated his poems. But most of us have heard of Keats and probably read his poems - even just by having done English literature beyond GSCE level; and whether you personally like him, it is hard not to acknowledge the quality of his work. So the very abrupt ending of Keats's story with his death in Jane Campion's film could be taken as a celebration of the melancholy; or an ode to one whose seemingly unsuccessful life led to posthumous ongoing fame and admiration. To me, it felt more like the former.

The negative reading of Changeling is: For making public that she can prove her 'son' is not her boy Walter, Christine Collins is sent to a mental institution where horrid things happen to her. She never marries, never has another child, never gets a better job or becomes rich. She doesn't really appear to have any friends. And she never gets her son back. She spends her whole life hoping she will, though evidence seems to say he was likely to have been hacked to death along with 19 other abductees.

Amelia Earhart often struggled to gain recognition, and then the funding, for her flights. She had competition from other pilots, male and female. And her trip round the globe ended in a mysterious disappearance - we assume, eventually, death. She did not complete her mission.

But that's not how I read either of those women's lives in the films. Christine Collins (an excellent Angelina Jolie) reveals the corruption in the police, the mayor and the mental health system in her city. She wins her legal case. The murderer is caught and hanged. If she did lose her son to him, she has the knowledge that he was last seen going back for a friend, thus making a very brave sacrifice. The parents and friends of all those 20 dead boys could know that in their tragic and horrific loss, their children led to the exposure and stopping of a wider corruption. The mayor doesn’t run for office. The other women held in a psychiatric ward for upsetting the police are set free. The Pastor who helped her continued to fight for justice. The Chief of Police is demoted and the police Captain who was so cruel to Christine is sacked. And the city and beyond knows the truth about the deliberate swap. There were many moments where I wanted to cheer and clap - as many as when the intensity and unpleasantness were unbearable.

I did not know Amelia's story which is why that last flight was so exciting. She was being urged to retire by her husband, as was Margot Fonteyn - another drama I watched recently (the BBC version with Anne Marie Duff). I knew that Amelia would go one of two ways. She'd either be like Margot, doing her craft into senior years; or she'd die fairly young doing it. As flying is more dangerous than ballet, I feared for the latter. But then, how else would an aviatrix chose to die? Timothy Treadwell, subject of Grizzly Man, spent a life with bears, died by being mauled by one. I could see that fittingly, Amelia was going to die doing her best attempt yet.

When Hilary's voice came over the clouds, I knew that Amelia did not make it home. There were many lovey words spoken by Hilary over images of the real Amelia, but the phrase I remember ended the cloud speech: "Dreams have no bounds". Amelia said several times that she did not take impossible for an answer.

I went out of the cinema feeling a deep joy - not the misery of Revolutionary Road, or the flatness or lowness or Bright Star. I really did feel bright; the same deep satisfaction and profoundness I feel after My Sister's Keeper.

My overall view of Changeling is also triumph; the feeling I remember most was the desire to stand and clap with the others in the courtroom, that in adversity comes one's greatest achievements, and that Hollywood knows that happy endings do not mean 'happily ever after' - in this world.

Related:

Mamma Mia and Doubt: Two Faces of Meryl Streep

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

British Cinema: Dorian Gray (2009)

Dorian Gray, 2009.

Directed by Oliver Parker.
Starring Ben Barnes and Colin Firth.


SYNOPSIS:

Think Peter Pan meets Dr Faustus - oh, and a painting - and a lot of maggots…


Another devil and soul barter! Why is this absurd premise attractive and a plot of many stories? It's set to feature in Terry Gilliam's next [Heath Ledger posthumous] adventure, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, also out soon. This Faustian theme does not appeal, and neither does the beauty and youth worship behind the eponymous portrait that absorbs its subjects growingly sinister nature - and why is 'the portrait' missing from the title, as if film audiences can’t cope with more than a person's name?

As I grow older (which isn’t very) I increasingly see the attraction in the twinkle of a mature citizen's eyes, in the lines of age. Dorian isn’t handsome - only in that supposed classical perfection; he's very boyish, and not charismatic. And unlike Dorian, I am happy to age and change.

So I am bored and in disagreement by the very hypothesis behind this tale to start with. I totally disagree with the blurb on Matthew Bourne's balletic take on the book, which says that the themes of the corruption of beauty are 'never more contemporary.' The cynicism of Dorian's friend Lord Henry and his supposed intelligent, shocking platitudes were so stupid and negative that they are unworthy of the presumably desired debate they are meant to incite.

I was ready for something deeper than the source level emotions and innocuous wit of Oscar Wilde's plays, but this is a horror story. The sex becomes darker and mixes with the bloodier elements which begin from the first scene. There's nothing more moving and deep here than in Wilde's lighter works. Debauchery is too cold to be enticing and the true loves and friendships are not convincingly important enough for me to care.

I don’t know the book, but glancing at it, this rendition has upped the horror into almost camp. The over loud sound of a maggoty fiend in the portrait becomes a special effects showcase, but this is one of the few times when I agree with cinema's overused maxim 'less is more'. The climax is made into a greater crescendo than the book, but its augmentation simply becomes overkill to the point of silliness.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Thoughts on... Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Synedoche, New York, 2008.

Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman.
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Tom Noonan and Hope Davis.


SYNOPSIS:

A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.


How to categorise or explain this film? A theatre director, a daughter, a few decades and a cast of thousands in a giant warehouse in his play on despair, death, loves lost and found, and blurring what's real as art represents life. I took it to mean that we can explore ourselves and communicate better through our art - though Kaufman seems open and encouraging of multiple and personalised interpretations.

I was very excited by Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, being such a fan of his screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry. It is with regret that I have a poor report to bring of a writer much admired.

Perhaps Michel Gondry and Kaufman need each other. Gondry's next sole work, The Science of Sleep, was a disappointment. The quirky and the amazing and unconventional special effects of Eternal Sunshine were there in Sleep, but the story and ideas were missing. Without Michel, Charlie Kaufman brings a work that seems to spiral away with the writer's own ideas and scope.

Others have hailed Synecdoche epic, complex and multilayered. It began as a wry look at a disintegrating family, with (I thought) a satire on how illness and death are so much in the media - even for children. The film elicited several laughs from the audience in its earlier stages - including from myself, though I couldn’t see how it was multilayered yet. It felt Woody Allen-esque in its self deprecating, hypochondria ridden creative hero and fast but natural dialogue; but then it became confusing and dull. My pity went from the protagonist, Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Sprawling rather than epic comes to mind as we got lost in who is playing who in this huge play that never gets seen by an audience. The nihilism and negativity are bleaker than anything I recall seeing (and I often choose difficult films) - and it is worse in that it seemed to feel that its statements of meaninglessness and hopelessness were brave and profound.

It reminds me of Richard Kelly's follow up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, in that his next film after something complex and thought provoking ultimately becomes… not too ambitious (I never deduct marks for that) but trying perhaps too hard to top an earlier success with something that feels its cleverness is lost in its creator's mind. At first, I felt that I was missing something but was not sufficiently engaged to rewatch to find out what it was. But by the end - which I hastened - I felt it was the film who was missing something. It is our choice whether we see life as hopeless and meaningless; and stark nullity is not courageous and true, it’s sad.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Classic Movies - Titanic (1997)

Titanic, 1997.

Directed by James Cameron.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.


SYNOPSIS:

A wreck-salvaging bounty hunter finds not the Heart of the Ocean jewel but discovers an old lady, Rose (an excellent Gloria Stewart), who claims to have worn it in 1912. Through Rose's own story of inter-class love severed by disaster, Brock connects with the human tragedy of the Titanic.


I've enjoyed a love hate relationship with this film over the past 10 years. When I first saw the film in February 1998 shortly after the British release, I was so angered that I went home and wrote three sides of paper on why I disliked it. It was that the Hollywood success formula seemed to have been applied too literally to an inappropriate subject. I felt the framing device of the modern treasure hunt with Bill Paxton to be irrelevant and made the very human drama of the world's greatest ship to be one about money. Yet I had partly missed the point, because the story is how a man obsessed with a materialistic object and the excitement of its recovery learns to see the Titanic disaster as a moving story of human loss and bravery. Perhaps it was because I could not imagine how anyone could see the Titanic in any other light.

Having studied the film on two occasions and now preparing to teach on it, I now see many things in it which I had missed. The butterfly motif - the decoration on Rose's hair combs - is vital to the story. It’s about how a young, unfettered man, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) assists a passionate but curtailed young woman Rose (Kate Winslet) escape her unwanted marriage into a dull life. Academics have amused themselves discussing the sexuality of Jack, mostly making ridiculous comments which belong more in the tabloids than in scholarly journals. My own masters essay responded to these and looked instead at that angle in Kate Winslet's character. Jack is not a forceful man (my objection initially being that he looked far too young to be called a man at all). He lets Rose come on to him and make her own choices. French and Saunders laughed at the fact that Jack says 'Never let go' as he and Rose grasps onto wreckage, and then she does. But he meant, metaphorically. He knew that only one of them could live (though the F&S observation about the 'single' piece of wood is valid). Jack bravely chose to end his life which had already been full so that his love, Rose, could begin hers.

In 1998, I felt Jack too young and the romance to rushed to have worked out. Whether it would have is not the point. It is one of those times when a person comes into your life for a short time and has a profound effect. Through Jack, Rose lived to be over 100 and accomplished all the things that they talked about but which, before Jack, Rose felt were impossible for her in her stifling existence. I did feel that feigning one's death to one's family was rather cruel and wondered if Rose ever regretted that. I never will accept the intended extra tension caused by Jack being locked up as the ship sinks, although this did lead to one of the best action sequences by a female lead - and done in a frock. The valet, Lovejoy, was to caricatured. And the theme song went on, but not in way intended!

I've come to really admire the leads and Kate Winslet is among my favourite actresses, and my interest in the ship (which proceeded the film) prevails. Although I've come to see the amount of vision, thought and emotion in the film, I still feel that sadly much of this is not appreciated by many viewers. Many, I think, saw it once and didn’t have any wish to analyse the story - it felt perhaps as if it wasn’t the kind of find that repaid deeper thought or second viewing. And though it told a valid and powerful story, it didn't tell the only one about that disaster - and it will come as no surprise that I have written my own.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr

Mamma Mia and Doubt: Two Faces of Meryl Streep

Elspeth Rushbrook provides a comparison of Meryl Streep's two latest movies, Mamma Mia and Doubt...


In my view, the former is only worth seeing as a contrast to the latter. In a week, I saw middle aged Meryl leap on bed and roll on the floor and squeal; and then don a fearsome bonnet and play one of these serious award winning roles that I associate with her.

Not being one for hype or having an especial love of Abba, I eschewed the summer blockbuster come winter warmer and saw it only with my mother as post cancer cheer up at home. I quickly realised that I would need a glass of wine to cope with the cavorting and loosely sewn hits from the Swedish band to make a semblance of a story. I say again how much the squealing of the women - both older and young - struck me and made me recoil. That was when I first got up and flew to the fridge for solace. The story is that a young girl is about to marry and wants to invite her Dad - but her mum had three flings close together and the daughter does not know which led to her birth. So she invites all three old flames of her bohemian single mother, without warning, to their Greek island for singing mayhem to ensue. The spectacle was not the hoards of dancers bursting into quite tangent songs to fit Abba's repertoire in; it was the woman known for Oscar nominated epics doing something so daringly different.

I kept blinking to think that the brilliant, brilliant drama Doubt was the same woman in the same year. For I had last seen Meryl in a beautiful old repertory provincial cinema playing a nun headteacher who battles the winds of change (literally blowing though her window) and yet mixes austerity, judgment and conservatism with warmth, humour and sympathy. The trailer and synopsis for Doubt led me to believe that I would probably simply hate Sister Aloysius as this obstacle to progress: a racist and accusing woman who wages an reasonable personal vendetta against her warm, caring superior, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. But despite Father Flynn's early comment that she is a hungry dragon, I found her more of a Beauty and Beast kind of monster - one that you kind of pity and even rally for. When wonderful younger Sister James feels bound to report that Father Flynn and the school's lonely only black student are spending inappropriate time together, Sister Aloysius believes the Father is being abusive. Even that is too crude a description of the story and misses out other characters, such as the older nun who's going blind but no-one will admit this. Father Flynn is not simply the good, victimised, forward thinking one. We are given a creeping suspicion that Sister Aloysius isn’t wrong. Reviews have said 'she has no proof but her certainty' but that is not a truly reflective statement. And Father Flynn is not always more appealing.

Without wishing to spoil it, the drama does not go into the corners I expected. Amy Adams' character (Sister James) also deserves a special mention. When she teaches her heartfelt class on American presidency, it made me want to go and research the subject, although I have never cared about it before. Perhaps we applaud those performances that show only melancholy or evil or disability and illness; but Sister James combines many emotions including a guileless warmth and positive regard which makes her award nominations well deserved.

Doubt is one of the best written dramas (by John Patrick Shanley) that I recall having ever seen. From the opening homily serving as a prologue, the quality of the story - its themes, dialogue - was clear. It is rare that I sit in a cinema so savouring a film that I do not want it to end. Unlike Mamma Mia, when I was rather relieved.

Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr