I’ve watched quite a few of the shorts at BIFF this year, but most of them haven’t really caught my imagination. This one did. It has a genuine story – an incident with an outcome and recognisable characters. Esther Weary doesn’t enjoy her birthday, which falls on a schoolday that is also Halloween. She imagines herself being persecuted — and then she is. Her nose is too big according to a dreadful little princess. To her consternation her first period arrives on the same day . When she gets home her family are waiting for her. There’s King Henry the pug and her grandfather (played by the great Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent), who is kind and thoughtful but seemingly isn’t prepared for menstruation. All will be well because Esther isn’t ugly and her family love her. That’s it really, except that the story is told again through an animated pop-up picture book which forms the basis of the credits. It’s 14 mins long and director Stephen Dunn tells the story with real imagination and most of all through images. That’s what I want from a short – a whole story, told with imagination in as short a time as possible. I don’t mind a little sentimentalism thrown in as well if it’s tempered by the dark stuff. Most of the other shorts I’ve seen in BIFF are either avant-garde formal experiments (fine in their own right but not always a good complement to a feature) or they are good ideas without a story or a story without good ideas.
Two of the ‘users’ for whom the daily visit to the pharmacy is part of a social routine.
This screening offered a double bill of recent films from the Canadian independent film producers MDFF or ‘Medium Density Fibreboard Films’. Trying to research the group online I’ve found http://www.mdfproductions.com/ a ‘crossplatform production company based in Toronto’, which I think is connected and a Facebook page which certainly is. I think I need to put my cards on the table here. I’m a fan of many aspects of Canadian culture and I’m always happy to when I see that Bradford has programmed something Canadian since it’s often hard to find the films elsewhere. So I’m pre-disposed to look kindly on this double-bill. But there are some things that can put me off.
The first film screened was East Hastings Pharmacy (Canada 2012) by Antoine Bourges. This a 46 minute fictionalised observational documentary. In other words what we see is a ‘drama’ played out by a pair of actors playing the pharmacists in a dispensary for methadone users in Vancouver. The users are ‘real’ and members of the local community (which, according to the Montreal Documentary fest is the district in Canada with the highest proportion of drug users). The pharmacy was built as a set a few doors down in a shopfront close to the real pharmacy (see an interview with the director here). So, while the film looks like a classic slice of the Direct Cinema school of US documentaries of the 1960s it’s actually much calmer with some of the stress taken out of the encounters at one level, allowing the audience to gradually understand what is happening and reflect upon the lives of the methadone users – which aren’t all grim, even if they are stories of loss. Shauna Hansen as the dispensing pharmacist is very good. She has both strength and vulnerability and we get to understand what the job entails as well as what is happening with the users. The whole film is non-judgemental about the issue of drug dependency and I found watching it a rewarding experience. Here is a brief trailer that conveys the calm observational style (you can also use this link to see the a trailer for the next film, Tower:
Tower (Canada 2012) is rather different. This is the first feature-length film from MDFF at 78 mins and it has been seen in cinemas, first at the Royal in Toronto. It’s directed by Kazik Radwanski, one of the founders of MDFF with Dan Montgomery. I had no problem with the subject matter of the film but I found it almost unwatchable because of the visual style. Now this may also be associated with watching the film on the IMAX screen, i.e much bigger than it would usually be (standard format films take up roughly a third of the IMAX screen, still much bigger than in a small arthouse screen). Radwanski films everything and everybody in Tower in medium close-up/close-up, even BCU, in shallow focus using a handheld camera. There are just the occasional mid-shots and perhaps a couple of long shots in the whole film. I can see that there is a logic to this and it takes us into the cheerless world of ‘Derek’ a thirty-something man, losing his hair and getting nowhere in terms of work or his social life. We spend the entire film with Derek, still at home with his parents and working part-time for his uncle in the construction business when he isn’t painstakingly creating a computer animation in his basement. We follow him to clubs, desultory dates and social gatherings and in his war against a raccoon which is attacking the dustbin at his parents’ house.
A rare composed MCU of Derek (played by Derek Bogart)
Several of the reviews contrast Canadian cinema’s approach to characters like Derek with their Hollywood equivalents, who would either be ‘redeemed’ or there would be another kind of real ‘closure’ of the narrative. Derek is also compared to literary fiction’s anti-heroes. Again, I can see the connections but I found the visual style so alienating that I couldn’t engage at all. Towards the end of the film I found myself very worried that something bad was going to happen – and I feared most for the raccoon. I should mention also that in the opening scenes Derek gets drunk at a club and when he comes to on the floor of his parents’ home he has a deep gash near the bridge of his nose. This stays with him as a livid scar (as his mother predicted) throughout the rest of the film (i.e. over several weeks). Alas, poor Derek! I think I’ll pass on Tower. The filmmakers clearly have talent and ambition, so it’s probably my loss. The film was presented in English with French subtitles. I wondered if this was a requirement for screenings in certain Toronto or Montreal cinemas? Anyway, it meant that I could practise translations when I found the screen image too off-putting.
A producer may have pitched this as a high concept film where Kanal (Poland, 1953) meets Schindler’s List (US, 1993) without the latter’s saccharine. It’s the true tale of a Polish sewage worker who was paid to look after Jewish refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto. Robert Wieckiewicz plays Leopold Socha whose motivation, at least initially, is wholly pecuniary. It is a strength of the film that the protagonist is represented as a ‘warts and all’ human being and it doesn’t stint upon the Nazi’s atrocities. Both the lead characters are played by charismatic actors new to me, Wieckiewicz plays Lech Walesa in this year’s biopic of the Solidarity union leader; Benno Fürmann plays a German-Jew who doesn’t trust Socha.
The film’s portrayal, based on Robert Marshall’s book In the Sewers of Lvov, of people living in extreme conditions is psychologically acute. For example, the characters’ need for sex is emphasised despite them being ensconced in confined spaces with many others, including children. Jewish racism against the ‘Polacks’ is also shown. The set design, both above and below ground, is immaculate.
The pitch I imagined at the start of the article was, of course, jokey. The film took 22 years to bring to the screen – see this excellent article. The film not only takes us into the darkness of the sewers but also into the darkness of fascism (have you seen the film Mr Di Canio?); this is one of the key functions of cinema: to take us to places we don’t want to go. In doing so it not only helps us appreciate what we have got but also, viscerally (I was blubbing by the end), helps us to feel the history. It is very difficult, for example, for young people to understand the misery that Thatcherism inflicted (and continues to inflict) upon many people; as a historical figure, the first female British PM, she can seem laudable.
I realise that this is the first film I seen directed by Agnieszka Holland so I have some catching up to do. Her use of the roving steadicam in the sewers conveys the stinking claustrophobia brilliantly and although there a few longuers, in a 145 minute film, they are necessary for the portrayal of human resilience in the face of human evil.
Parvati (Shriya Saran) and Saleem (Satya Bhabha) are two of ‘Midnight’s Children’ with magical powers.
I approached this screening with some trepidation. I read Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children in 1982, identifying strongly with its central theme. It felt like the cutting-edge of a fiction in tune with the cultural shifts towards post-colonialist literature. But only a few years later I started to go off Rushdie. I remember a key moment being the attack he made on Black Audio and Film Collective’s film Handsworth Songs in 1987. It’s ironic that Handsworth Songs is now rightly recognised as an important intervention in the development of a Black aesthetic in Britain, whereas Rushdie has lost some of his cultural status. That status appears to have been diminished further with the reception of the film adaptation of Midnight’s Children – scripted by Salman Rushdie who also provides several passages of narration. On its second week of release in the UK, the film was screened only once a day, in the afternoon, in the Vue multiplex at The Light in Leeds. There were just five of us in the audience. This already looks like a lack of confidence from its distributor eOne Entertainment, the new Canadian major .
So, is it as bad as all that? Well, no. I decided not to go back to the book before the screening and I watched in as objective a manner as possible. I was surprised to find myself in tears at the end of the film. That probably says more about me than about the film but in most respects this is a very impressive production. The Indian director Deepa Mehta who makes her films from her Canadian base has achieved what many thought was the impossible feat of adapting Rushdie’s novel with a wonderful cast drawn from the vast array of Indian performers working in India and North America in all forms of cinema. More than sixty location shoots in Sri Lanka stand in for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mehta has said many things about the production and my guess is that she chose Sri Lanka for two reasons. First she had previously suffered from protests by Hindi fundamentalists when she made Water (Canada 2005), the third film of her ‘elements trilogy’. (See my earlier posting about this film.) She moved that production to Sri Lanka where she discovered that Columbo and its environs has preserved much more of the ‘heritage buildings’ from the colonial period than equivalent cities in India. Midnight’s Children was a much more demanding shoot in terms of locations so Sri Lanka was very attractive. Rushdie’s novel has also been controversial in both India and Pakistan and the shoot was interrupted for a few days when the Iranian government tried to pressurise the Sri Lankans to withdraw permissions. It will be interesting to see what happens when the film finally opens in India (there were protests after its screening at the Kerala International Film Festival). PVR are going to distribute the film in India with a release date of February 1st. I suspect the Indian release will create a stir. I’m not sure if critics and audiences will like the film, but at least they will know the history. It is, of course, unlikely that it will be released in Pakistan except on pirated DVDs. I’m not sure yet whether it will make Bradford – where street demonstrations and a book burning were part of the reaction to Rushdie’s later novel, The Satanic Verses in 1989.
Outline
Rushdie’s long novel (500 pages of dense text in the paperback edition) tells the story of two characters born within seconds of each other at the stroke of midnight on August 14/15 1947, the moment of the end of the British Raj and the birth of two new nations separated by Partition. For reasons explained in the plot, the babies are switched at birth (in Bombay) with the poor child given to the wealthy (Muslim) mother and named Saleem and her ‘real’ son going to the poor Hindu father after his wife dies in childbirth (and named Shiva). As the two boys grow up knowing each other (but not their true identities) in the same district, they gradual discover their special powers, individual to each of the Midnight’s Children born at that one moment across the old Raj. We follow the boys through the major events of the next thirty years when they are separated only to be re-united in very different circumstances towards the end of the story. Rushdie also provides us with further background in the form of the story of Saleem’s Muslim family since his grandfather first met the woman he was to marry in Kashmir in 1915. This means that we have a story that covers 62 years of tumultuous history in South Asia with the birth of three new countries (i.e. Bangladesh in 1971) and a host of important characters. It shouldn’t be difficult to work out from this brief outline that a ‘magic realist’ treatment of these events enables Rushdie to create symbols, metaphors and allegories for much of ‘Indian’ history in the 2oth century. The story is essentially about the failure of the children with magical powers to help create India and Pakistan as viable democracies. Rushdie was writing at a time when Indira Ghandi had just been deposed after the period of ‘Emergency’ in 1977.
Production and reception
Rushdie’s novel was seen to be unfilmable, although a stage production was mounted in 2003 (see this review) and Wikipedia suggests that a BBC five part serial was considered in the 1990s (ironically featuring Rahul Bose who appears in Mehta’s film) but not developed when it was feared that there would be protests in Sri Lanka where it was to be shot. Deepa Mehta and Salman Rushdie share a background as diaspora ‘creatives’. Mehta was born in 1950 in Amritsar, Punjab province close to the Indo-Pakistani border created by Partition. Her 1998 film Earth is one of the best Partition films. She and Rushdie worked very closely on the adaptation of Midnight’s Children, agreeing on how much to cut from the novel’s plot to enable a runtime of 146 minutes. It would also seem that Mehta urged Rushdie to write and perform the narration – and that he agreed with some reluctance. I think that on the whole the script works (though I did feel that the last section of the film was less satisfactory in that there were ellipses that seemed to suggest cuts having been made). For me, the one big mistake was the narration. I’m not one of those who never like narration. On the contrary, I like narration when it’s done well and when it fits the narrative style of the film. But Rushdie’s voice is so well-known and his delivery for me was so flat that I winced each time it came on the soundtrack. I think an actor could have ‘performed’ the narrator’s role much more successfully.
The other criticisms of the film seem much less valid to me. Partly, I think, critics in the UK and North America don’t know the history well enough to understand the somewhat schematic presentation of some of the events and they don’t necessarily know much about the different types of Indian cinema or are familiar with the acting talent on display here. Just to take a couple of examples, Kate Stables in what is otherwise a perceptive and balanced review in Sight and Sound (January 2013), refers to “snapshots of Indo-Pakistan wars and cross-border wanderings”. There are two major wars shown in the film, the India-Pakistan War of 1965 and the conflict of 1971 which saw Indian forces crossing into East Pakistan to help secure independence for what would become Bangladesh. I’m not sure what she means by ‘cross-border wanderings’. The Guardian‘s film editor Catherine Shoard refers to “actors perfectly cast to the point of blandness” and music in which ”wooden flutes, xylophones and wind chimes patter about on the soundtrack”. The actors include Seema Biswas, Anupam Kher, Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and many more known in India as well as the American-based Satya Bhabha who makes a good job of the lead. Perfectly cast, yes. Bland? I don’t think so. Mehta works in a form of parallel cinema that requires actors to work largely (but not completely) in English and to deal with scripts quite unlike those which they would find in mainstream Indian popular cinemas such as Bollywood or Tamil/Telegu. The overall effect is not necessarily as ‘coherent’ as we might expect in the commercial cinemas of South Asia or Hollywood/Europe. It is usually more ‘realist’ but sometimes more expressionist. The fantasy elements of this particular property (largely achieved without CGI) make this seeming contradiction more noticeable. The music in Midnight’s Children is by Nitin Sawhney. If Catherine Shoard doesn’t like his music that’s fine but as a world-class musician, a British Asian with an international reputation, he deserves not to be treated with disdain.
Midnight’s Children is not a perfect film by any means but it is a decent attempt at a literary adaptation that will please the more open-minded of the novel’s many admirers and would also please many new audiences – if they got the chance to see it. Its message of protest about what has happened in India and Pakistan over the years is still something that needs to be shouted out. I think I cried at the end because the film brought together memories of many of my favourite stories from India, partly by reminding me of the films I’ve seen and the novels I’ve read. I’ll try to keep track of what happens to Midnight’s Children in India.
Rachel Mwanza as Komona and Serge Kanyinda as Magician in War Witch
Cornerhouse in Manchester starts a season of Francophone films from Europe, Africa, the Antilles and Quebec today. It’s an interesting programme compiled by Rachel Hayward and supported by Alliance française de Manchester and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. I’m helping to teach an associated evening class and I’ll be blogging on some of the films being screened. The Cornerhouse season includes the following titles:
It’s Not Me I Swear! (C’est pas moi, je le jure!, Canada 2008)
Thu 18 Oct at 18:30
A rare opportunity in the UK to see an earlier film by Philippe Falardeau, director of the wonderful Monsieur Lazhar.
Preview Laurence Anyways (Canada 2012)
Sun 21 Oct at 15:30
The new film by enfant terrible Xavier Dolan which will be on release in the UK and Ireland in December.
Black Shack Alley (Rue cases nègres, Martinique-France 1983)
Wed 24 Oct at 18:30
Another rare opportunity, this time to see a classic film no longer available in the UK. Directed by Euzhan Palcy and based on the book by Joseph Zobel this was a milestone film. I’ll be introducing this screening and posting material on the blog.
War Witch (Rebelle, Canada 2012)
Wed 7 Nov at 18:30
Canada’s entry for the Best Foreign Language film entry for the next Academy Awards. A prizewinner at festivals across the world, Kim Nguyen’s film about a girl forced to become a child soldier in an unnamed African country is one to seek out.
La pirogue(Senegal-France-Germany 2012)
Mon 12 Nov at 18:20
Another of this year’s festival favourites – Moussa Touré’s film about migrants from Africa hoping to reach Europe in open boats.
Preview Our Children (À perdre la raison, Belgium-Switzerland-France-Luxembourg)
Thu 15 Nov at 20:40
A starry cast: Niels Astrup, Tahar Rahim and Emilie Dequenne in Joachim Lafosse’s film based on a real story about a mother and her children faced with a difficult family situation. The UK release will be in 2013.
Sister(France-Switzerland 2012)
On release during November, please check the Cornerhouse listings.
Ursula Meier’s film about a young boy and his sister starring Gillian Anderson and Martin Compston alongside Lea Seydoux and Kacey Mottet Klein has both English and French dialogue. Meier’s realist style in this film has been compared to that of the Dardennes Brothers.
Michelle Williams in TAKE THIS WALTZ, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
So, my third ‘Best Movie of the Year’ and the score is Canada 2 Hong Kong 1 – I wouldn’t have predicted that in January. (See Monsieur Lazhar and A Simple Life.) Perhaps it isn’t so surprising. I was bowled over by writer-director Sarah Polley’s Away From Her in 2006 (and she acts as well – it isn’t fair is it?) and Michelle Williams is arguably the finest actor of her generation. In the space of a year she made Meek’s Cutoff, My Life With Marilyn and Take This Waltz. Three very different roles, all nailed with precision. I thought I also caught a trace of a Canadian accent in this one.
On the other hand, there appears to be a host of gainsayers for Take This Waltz. Reading reviews, user comments and bulletin board posts on IMDb reveals a tirade of, I’m guessing, mainly men, (possibly young American men?) and audiences generally who apply a moral stance on romance which seems to blind them to what is actually on the screen. Fortunately there are plenty of others who see the film more clearly for what it is. What it isn’t is a romantic comedy – not even an indie, ‘alternative’ rom-com. Instead it’s a romantic drama with some comic moments. It might be a melodrama but I need to think about that. I shed a tear in the last ten minutes but not a flood. Having never seen a Hollywood ‘bromance’ or indeed a Seth Rogen film before, I didn’t have the preconceptions that some audiences may have held. (Rogen, by the way, is Canadian and this was his first Canadian film.)
Outline
Michelle Williams is Margot, 28 years old in August 2010 and married for five years to Lou (Seth Rogen). They are happy in their domesticity. She writes (after a fashion) and he, more specifically, writes cookbooks – entirely about cooking chicken. It’s an interesting premise. On the one hand the film is quite gritty and real about relationships – on the other it’s a romance fantasy taking place in a sweltering Toronto summer of primary colours. It’s quite tricky keeping these two ideas in play at the same time and that may be the reason that some audiences misread the film completely.
On a trip to Louisbourg in Nova Scotia to write notes for a tourist guide, Margot meets Daniel (Luke Kirby) who turns out to live across the street from her in Toronto. She’s never noticed him before, but she falls for him immediately. She and Lou love each other and they have an intimacy, but the passion has gone and they don’t talk to each other. There are other potential problems as well. Margot and Daniel clearly have an erotic charge between them. Will they allow it to become real rather than imagined? How will Margot deal with her relationship with Lou?
Margot’s world
The narrative focuses completely on Margot and Michelle Williams is hardly ever off the screen. She acts with every inch of her body and wears an array of shorts and sundresses that have been described as ‘vintage’ and ‘cutesy’. I’m no judge of fashion but they certainly look traditional. I’m not sure that they are flattering but they are oddly sexy in the way that she wears them. Her face is wonderfully malleable – and it’s shown as hot and sticky, embarrassed and happy and often stunningly beautiful. The care and attention given to the presentation of suburban ‘Little Portugal’ in Toronto and the mise en scène of Margot’s house is just as striking as the costume design. It’s matched too by the camerawork from Luc Montpellier (who also shot Away From Her) and the soundtrack of folk/indie/Americana. It’s a very affecting soundtrack – and strikingly Canadian, both in the origin of several tracks and the overall feel/tone. The film’s title is taken from a Leonard Cohen song based on the poem ‘Little Viennese Waltz’ by Federico Garcia Lorca and Polley has said that she played the song incessantly while developing her script for the film.
Commentary
There are many interesting aspects to the film, both in terms of how it creates meanings and the kinds of controversies it has created for different audiences. One such controversy is the nudity in a scene in which Margot and her sister-in-law Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) are showering after an ‘aquatic aerobics’ class. Sarah Polley shoots the scene mostly in long shot and both women are naked – as are the other women in the class, of different shapes and sizes and ethnicities, but mostly older. The bodies on display are those of ‘ordinary’, ‘real’, not Hollywood women, none self-conscious and all in different ways, beautiful. At one point Geraldine asks herself, out loud, “Why do I shave my legs, who is it for?” Another, older, woman comments that “What is new will become old.” All this seems to be part of the lesson that Margot isn’t learning (yet). It’s a crucial scene and not gratuitous. No one would bat an eye if it appeared in a European film but in puritan North America it may be a problem. There is a montage of sex scenes later in the film, again in long shot, but in the UK the film has been given a ’15′ Certificate which seems about right. IMDb shows that in Quebec and British Columbia the film is certificated 13 and 14 respectively, yet in Manitoba, Alberta and Ontario (Polley’s home province) it’s an 18 and in the US it’s an ‘R’ .
The second ‘controversy’ appears to concern morality. Outraged commentators see Margot or Daniel decried as ‘marriage wreckers’ and characters with whom an audience can have no sympathy. Alternatively, Margot is ‘stupid’. I genuinely find these comments bizarre. The film is presumably not mainstream because, in fact, there are no good guys and no bad guys – and the ending of the film is ambiguous as to how Margot feels about what has happened. This is the strength of the film. Michelle Williams is so good at presenting Margot to us that we feel she is just like someone we know. OK, she still has plenty to learn about being in a relationship, but we all do at such a tender age. This is a great humanist movie – and probably a melodrama (music, coincidences, ‘excessive’ colours, use of symbols are all there – you’ll notice just how important the Buggles song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ is.) When Margot and Lou go out to the movies on their fifth wedding anniversary, they go to see arguably the most celebrated film in Canadian cinema – Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971). Ms Polley knows her cinema.
There is a ton of stuff on YouTube about the film including clips and interviews. This is the best trailer, I think:
Sophie Nélisse as Alice and Mohamed Fellag as Bachir Lazhar
Nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar, Monsieur Lazhar lost out to A Separation in February this year. No contest, you might think – but I wouldn’t have liked to choose between them. A Separation was the film shown in the UK last year and I don’t begrudge it any prizes. But Monsieur Lazhar is my film of this year so far. We had a quartet of star films from Cannes 2011 that opened here a few months ago, but they all signalled their qualities from afar. Monsieur Lazhar seemingly promises little – a new teacher takes over a class in a Montreal primary school after the sudden death of a popular classroom teacher in rather unfortunate circumstances. Against all the odds, the new teacher will triumph with his class and all will be well. Not quite. From the same producers who brought us last year’s Canadian triumph Incendies, this shows that Quebec cinema is on a hot run at the moment.
The triumph of this film is that it attempts a great deal with two strong central narratives – one about the school and one about the new teacher’s own story – which it succeeds in bringing together through a tight discipline of constraint. The script utilises five familiar types for the individuated pupils in the classroom but in the hands of director Philippe Falardeau the child actors (all excellent) are allowed to perform in an unrestricted way. The point about social types is that we recognise them for a good reason – we do commonly find them in society. Who can’t remember in their childhood the overweight klutz who is the butt of jokes, the kid who is always suffering from nosebleeds, the very bright one with obnoxious pushy parents? Occasionally Falardeau teases us with the possibility that the typical character will complete the typical behaviour and we will groan with the inevitability of it all – but each time he just stops as if the punchline is the restraint itself and then moves on to something else.
The school community itself is extremely well observed and the teachers are well cast, especially Danielle Proulx as the Principal. My viewing partner, with long experience of primary classrooms, said she would have loved to work in this school – a perfectly ordinary inner-city school with a nice mix of children from different backgrounds. For UK audiences caught up in the nightmare of the current government’s assault on the education system it’s fascinating to be offered a view of education seemingly from another time. It was only afterwards that we realised that here was a school in which there were classrooms with conventional desks, no sign of children with mobile phones – and no computers! The new teacher finds a laptop on his desk and immediately tries to put it into his desk drawer (it doesn’t fit). I’m not sure if the school is meant to be representative of the Quebecois school system, but we haven’t seen classrooms like this for many years in the UK. But this doesn’t mean that the classroom issues aren’t still relevant – the layout of the desks, the appropriateness of reading material, discipline and most important of all the policy that doesn’t allow teachers to touch children in any way whatsoever.
I should explain that the reason why these all become issues is that the replacement teacher is Bachir Lazhar, an Algerian migrant who appears in the principal’s office like an angel when she is convinced that a replacement teacher is not going to be found immediately. Bachir tells her that he is a permanent resident in Canada and that he has many years of teaching experience. Unfortunately neither statement is true. But he is clearly a decent man with an engaging personality and he gets down to work without any fuss.
The sudden death has upset the children in the class, especially Alice and Simon. Bachir finds himself at odds with the school in how they should deal with the trauma experienced by the children and with the children themselves over his very traditional ideas about classroom activities. What he decides to do is in some ways pedagogically conservative and he finds himself needing to adapt for a group of contemporary young Canadians. He sets them a dictation exercise reading from Balzac – perhaps a reference to Truffaut and the classroom in 400 Blows? On the other hand, his ideas about discussion of his predecessor’s death (which is still clearly an issue for the children) seems quite progressive compared to the strict use of sessions with a psychologist for the children at which he is not present. You may disagree, but this is the point, Bachir Lazhar is only like an angel in his ability to materialise when needed. Like everybody else in the school he has some ideas that work and others that don’t. This is carried through to the film’s resolution, which seemed fine to me – there is no feelgood Hollywood moment.
Monsieur Lazhar has a backstory that I won’t reveal but it means that his interactions with the other staff are sometimes a little difficult – i.e. there are other issues as well as his unfamiliarity with aspects of Quebecois culture. In her otherwise supportive review in Sight and Sound (June 2012), Hannah McGill suggests that the script is clumsy in the way some of these moments are handled and she implies that the plot needs contrivances to enable certain themes to develop. I disagree. I don’t mind plot contrivances – if the events themselves are believable and they all felt very recognisable for me.
The film is conventional and possibly ‘literary’. It’s based on a play written by Evelyne de la Chenelière, who has a small part in the film as Alice’s mother. The origins are evident in the limited locations used (mainly in the school or the homes of a limited number of characters). As I’ve indicated, the school itself may be a little anachronistic, but otherwise this is a straight realist drama. There was just one moment when I thought the film deliberately moved into fantasy (I’m probably remembering it wrongly, but I don’t think it matters). M. Lazhar is marking books at his desk in the school. It is evening and a general hubbub of voices, laughter and music is coming from a school party. M. Lazhar gets up, stretches and with his back to camera starts to dance. At this point, non-diegetic Algerian music comes on the soundtrack and his dancing becomes more sure in its movements. Pure magic! See the film if you can.
Here’s the official trailer (pretty good – doesn’t spoil the film):
Sabina (Keira Knightley) takes notes as she and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) play Wagner's Die Walküre to an audience in Jung's clinic
When I mused on the possibility of showing A Dangerous Method to A Level students a few months ago, it was suggested to me that it was too wordy – with the implication that students would be bored. Now I’ve seen the film, I wouldn’t worry about the dialogue at all. The narrative seemed to race along to me. If the film has a flaw it is in the closing stages of the narrative when I felt I was being rushed through some short scenes which spanned several years and in which a great deal of narrative development needed to be inferred. For such weighty subject matter the film is actually quite short (99 minutes) and at the end I was enjoying it so much that I could happily have taken another 30 mins. As usual, I read an interview with director David Cronenberg (in Sight and Sound March 2012) after seeing the film. Perhaps I should have read it first because the interview explained several points I’d puzzled about during the screening.
The ‘Dangerous Method’ is a reference to the ‘talking cure’ constituted by the nascent medical practice of psychoanalysis as practised by Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) in Vienna and taken up by the psychologist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) in Zürich in the early 1900s. At first there is almost a father/son, master/pupil relationship between Freud and Jung – something which events will ultimately undermine. The two confer over the case of a young Russian-Jewish woman, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who arrives at Jung’s clinic suffering from ‘hysteria’ but who will eventually become a leading psychoanalyst herself. Sabina is a historical figure who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941.
The film does seem to have provoked a very hostile reception from fans of Cronenberg’s earlier work in ‘body horror’ and from others with a strong interest in either Freud or Jung or both. As a squeamish film watcher I avoided Cronenberg’s earlier films and only began to be interested in his work at the time of Crash (1996). I was painfully aware of Freudian ideas when they were fashionable inside film studies in the 1980s and I’m aware of him as a historical figure but I’ve never read Freud and I know even less about Jung. I’m not sure if this is an advantage or a disadvantage in watching A Dangerous Method, but I think some of the criticism of the film that I’ve read is plain silly.
Here are just a few observations about the film narrative. The screenplay is by Christopher Hampton who wrote a play The Talking Cure first performed in 2003. There was also a book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method (1994) and various historical documents that also informed the screenplay. This review of Hampton’s play by the Guardian‘s Michael Billington is interesting in that I had the opposite response to that of Billington (an excellent critic) when I watched the film. I noticed, but didn’t think too much about, the points Billington makes as I was too busy enjoying the spectacle. Billington argues is that the play is about ideas but that an over-fussy set is distracting and that perhaps a film would be better. However I saw a film about characters in a particular historical context. Cronenberg creates a world of order in Vienna and Zürich. The sun is nearly always shining, the houses, rooms and, most of all, the formal gardens are beautifully designed, clean and sparkling. The clothes are exquisite (and Knightley and Fassbender wear them beautifully). The cinematography by Cronenberg’s long-term collaborator Peter Suschitzky uses the settings to create a composed world. The film deals with the period between 1904 and 1912 when the five great empires in Europe were at their height (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Britain). Only a few years later and the five would be at war and in Central Europe (apart from in Switzerland) the certainty of outlook and status of rich scientists like Jung (the money was from his wife’s family) would be severely questioned. The insights that Freud and Jung has into the psyche would become potentially even more important in the aftermath of the ‘Great War’.
Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross
(Some spoilers in this para)
The ideas in the film are about sexuality and mental health, about social status and about anti-semitism. Freud needed Jung because his Swiss Protestantism diluted the Jewish Austrian identity of the Viennese group of psychoanalysts. Freud was also disturbed by Jung’s class position and possibly felt undermined. He despaired when he learned of Jung’s interest in the possibilities of parapsychology, having hoped that Jung would help psychoanalysis achieve status as a scientific discipline. Hampton’s strategy in the screenplay is to explore these ideas first through Jung’s treatment of Sabina’s hysteria. Hysteria (literally a condition associated with the uterus) appears to have been a socially constructed ailment afflicting young middle class women whose sexuality was severely repressed in polite society. Sabina has to ‘face up’ to what has caused her physical ailment and she does so through the talking cure when she finally admits to Jung that she became sexually excited after being beaten by her father and felt a desire to masturbate. In order to represent the symptoms of hysteria Keira Knightley ‘gurns’ (pulls very exaggerated facial expression), squirms and shouts excitedly in a performance that some viewers have interpreted as ‘over the top’. As far as I can see Knightley and Cronenberg researched this and I think her performance is terrific. I think she is well-cast and certainly matches the two male leads. When Sabina asks Jung to spank her as the final act of her abreaction, the narrative leads us into a potential sexual relationship with Jung. He is in turn egged on by a provocative and dangerous psychotherapist, Otto Gross – played with enormous brio by Vincent Cassel. Gross is all in favour of therapists having sexual relationships with their patients and discovering more about human sexuality. Cassell reminded me of the figure of the satyr or the god Pan – all hair and testosterone. As an actor he has always reminded be of Michel Simon – this time perhaps as the tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning. Our interest in Jung’s possible infidelity also prompts us to think about Mrs Jung, seemingly always pregnant (and serene) played very well in such a difficult role by the young Canadian, Sarah Gadon. What we should also remember is that Otto was recommended to Jung (as a patient) by Freud and that Sabina will eventually move to Vienna when she has qualified as a psychoanalyst herself.
The film narrative is essentially about the triangle of Jung, Sabina and Freud, although Jung and Sabina are the main focus. I found the first 80-90% of this narrative fascinating but lost it in the final stretch. There is an interesting sequence on the liner taking Jung and Freud to New York – which tells us a great deal about the state of their relationship, but frustratingly little about why they were going to America and what happened when they got there. Otherwise, I think this is a great watch and I’ve praised many of the others so I should finish by congratulating Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as well. I’ve seen many reviews by disappointed Cronenberg fans who think that the film is ‘staid’, ‘conservative’ etc. but I think that they miss the point. Cronenberg, Suschitzky and production designer James McAteer have created a representation of a world of sexual repression and bourgeois respectability within which some intellectual breakthroughs are achieved through and perhaps in spite of some interesting personal relationships. Now, perhaps I should read that book on Jung and Film (Hauke and Alister 2001) that has remained unopened for so long? We’ll see.
I’ve watched quite a few of the shorts at BIFF this year, but most of them haven’t really caught my imagination. This one did. It has a genuine story – an incident with an outcome and recognisable characters. Esther Weary doesn’t enjoy her birthday, which falls on a schoolday that is also Halloween. She imagines herself being persecuted — and then she is. Her nose is too big according to a dreadful little princess. To her consternation her first period arrives on the same day . When she gets home her family are waiting for her. There’s King Henry the pug and her grandfather (played by the great Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent), who is kind and thoughtful but seemingly isn’t prepared for menstruation. All will be well because Esther isn’t ugly and her family love her. That’s it really, except that the story is told again through an animated pop-up picture book which forms the basis of the credits. It’s 14 mins long and director Stephen Dunn tells the story with real imagination and most of all through images. That’s what I want from a short – a whole story, told with imagination in as short a time as possible. I don’t mind a little sentimentalism thrown in as well if it’s tempered by the dark stuff. Most of the other shorts I’ve seen in BIFF are either avant-garde formal experiments (fine in their own right but not always a good complement to a feature) or they are good ideas without a story or a story without good ideas.
