Coco avant Chanel (France 2009)

Coco (Audrey Tautou) demonstrates her understanding of the erotic charge offered by the 'orphanage dress' she creates as fancy dress for her friend, the Parisian actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos).

Gill Branston described this film as a ‘chick flick’ given the majority of the audience in Cardiff were women. I’m not sure there was the same majority in Hebden Bridge, but then Hebden doesn’t follow conventional demographics. I was pleasantly surprised by the film and I enjoyed it throughout. I can see why some audiences, expecting a straight biopic about Chanel were disappointed, but Anne Fontaine, director of a script she co-wrote does exactly what the film’s title suggests and offers us a young Coco before she became the iconic haute couture designer  – although there is a strange coda to the film which shows the more mature Chanel at some indeterminate time in the future when she clearly is famous.

The film is interesting in terms of its take on that French take on the ‘heritage drama’ that developed across the Channel at much the same time as its British counterpart. The houses and costumes look very good and all the performances are fine. The narrative worked well for me (some find it slow) and though I can see that Coco might be an unappealing character for some, I found her interesting and intriguing. It isn’t really a biopic as such as it offers only part of a life – and that the life before the subject had gained the height of her fame. I guess that the principal generic repertoire is really the romance. But it is also in a way a history lesson. I know little about fashion and care less, but the film certainly showed me why Chanel could be considered as innovative in costume design in France before 1914.

The major impact for me was the star performance of Audrey Tautou. I think she is one of the few contemporary stars who bears comparison with the great stars of classical cinema. Tautou has a distinctive face and the kind of slim body that shows off the clothes to perfection. Unlike most youngish Hollywood female stars, Tautou has her own star image – the modern gamine with a sense of determination. It seems to be working here as the film is doing reasonable business in markets across Europe. It has taken over $3 million in the UK , $2 million in Germany, $2.2 million in Spain and $1.6million in Italy to go with the $6 million plus in France. With the smaller markets chipping in and the US to come, the final total will be near the Warner Bros investment in production costs. With a reasonable afterlife on DVD and TV this might make up for some of the losses on A Very Long Engagement from the same star and studio.

Blue Eyelids, Mexico 2007

Victor and Marina on a muted picnic date.

Nick thought this was one of the worst films he’d ever seen. I’m not sure. I did find some passages excruciating, but then the story involves two socially inept people attempting to create a relationship and their awkwardness is effectively represented. My main difficulty with the film is that I’m not sure exactly what kind of film it is meant to be  – it contains social comedy, romance and drama and has some kind of relationship with melodrama as well as a sense of surrealism and possibly mystery. There is no reason why a classification should be easy to make but here there is an uncomfortable mixture that needs a highly skilled director to keep everything in check. Ernesto Contreras is a first time feature director (of his brother’s script) and I wonder if this is the problem?

The two protagonists are Marina, a 30-something sales assistant in a store selling uniforms for catering staff and Victor, a man of a similar age working as an office assistant in a large insurance company. Their meeting and subsequent conventional dates – a picnic, cinema trip, dancing etc. could have formed the basis for an uneventful courtship drama, but one given an emotional charge by their desperation and the opportunities for a kind of grim comedy. However, the story is framed by another narrative, that of Marina’s elderly employer, a woman who was herself saved from a desperate marriage by her ‘magical’ discovery of sewing skills and an entrepreneurial spirit. The ‘inciting incident’ in the narrative is the employer’s decision to offer a prize draw for all her employees with a two-week beach holiday for two as the prize. Marina wins the draw (made by a pet caged bird) and has to find a partner for the holiday.

As I struggled to read the film, I was troubled by two concerns. The first was the overall filming style. It did look as if director, cinematographer and editor had a specific approach in mind that involved fairly muted colours for the interiors, a play with shallow fields of focus and occasional pull backs to long shots. But quite a lot of the time, this didn’t work. In the picnic scene I waited for some significance to the long shots of traffic, but apart from showing what a poor choice of picnic spot it was, I couldn’t see any reason for the shot selection. In other restaurant scene, I have to agree with Nick that camerawork and editing were simply poorly executed.

My other problem is perhaps tied up with my own perceptions of Mexican cinema – my expectations have been heightened by films that are generally melodramas, political satires or horror/thrillers. The device of bookending the narrative with the employer’s story (heavily dependent on the caged-bird metaphor) meant that I was looking for the slightly surreal/mystery element that you might find in one of Saki’s short stories or in one of Buñuel’s Mexican films. Probably it isn’t there, but I’m still not sure.

Blue Eyelids (Marina wears make-up for the climactic date) won a couple of festival awards and several reviewers have praised the film highly. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I suspect that it wouldn’t stand too much close scrutiny in a second viewing.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Spain/US 2008)

Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall

I don’t think I’ve seen a Woody Allen film since the early 1990s and I wouldn’t have gone to this one if my partner hadn’t suggested it. I enjoyed aspects of the film but overall it was a bit of a mess. Trying to make sense of what Allen was trying to achieve, I could only think of 1930s/40s musicals and romantic comedies. I’m not sure why, but I thought of Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and Jesse Matthews in First A Girl. I also thought about something that might be directed by Max Ophuls, perhaps La Ronde? But all these references are to films with a sureness of touch that seems to have evaded poor Woody. He has four excellent actors, a beautiful city, one of Spain’s greatest cinematographers in Javier Aguirresarobe and some beautiful guitar music. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have done too much work on the script.

The voiceover narration has come in for a lot of stick. I have no problem with it as a device and it could work in this context, but not delivered by the rather ugly voice here (which I believe comes from someone best known for US cop shows). The narration is also ungrammatical and I spent a couple of scenes re-running the lines in my head. The plot is ridiculous in parts and insulting to the intelligence of the audience. I think that Bardem’s character is at some point referred to as a ‘Catalan artist’, yet he comes from Asturias. Vicky is supposed to be doing a Masters in ‘Catalan identity’ but she can’t speak Castillian very well and seems unaware that Catalans speak a different language (or rather the whole script seems to ignore this local peculiarity). OK, if this was a Hollywood romcom we wouldn’t worry about this, but it’s a Spanish co-production and the script insists on several scenes in which Javier Bardem has to keep telling Penelope Cruz to speak in English, so language is an issue.

So, it’s a mess, but there is still plenty to enjoy. Bardem and Cruz are wonderful (and make me want to watch Jamon, Jamon again) and Scarlett Johansson is perfectly fine. The revelation for me was Rebecca Hall. At first, I found the character irritating but as the narrative developed she got more and more interesting and I thought that there was a real sense of sexual tension in the way she tried to resist Bardem, but really wanted him very badly. I’ve not seen her before and now I’m looking forward to the UK TV plays set in Yorkshire in the 1970s (Red Riding 1974) and written by David Peace in which she has a role.

Woody Allen works in his own way, but I think if this had been written by someone else and Allen had directed it in a particular style suited to its genre, it could have been very successful.

Smart People (US 2008)

Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page in Smart People

Smart People offers mildly diverting entertainment, but overall is possibly a disappointment. It’s the story of widowed Eng Lit lecturer Lawrence (Dennis Quaid), something of a pompous windbag, his children Vanessa (Ellen Page), the straight A high school student and James (Ashton Holmes) the university student who feels his father has forgotten him, and finally Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), the no-good adopted brother of Lawrence. The ’smart’ people of the title are arguably Lawrence and Vanessa who are brilliantly learned but socially inept. (Chuck and James just get out of the way much of the time.) 

The ‘inciting incident’ is an accident that takes Lawrence to ER where the head physician turns out to be an ex-student who swapped to biology and then medical school. This is Janet played by Sarah Jessica Parker. I think this is the fault line in the narrative. The ‘romantic comedy’ that follows is conventional and not particularly comic, whereas the other antics of the family quartet are worth watching. This isn’t a criticism of Ms Parker, rather of the writing which creates a relationship I didn’t find believable.

The most entertainment in the film comes in the opening section when Lawrence is being curmudgeonly and horrible to his students who give back as good as they get. I’m not sure that there is a filmic equivalent of the literary genre of the campus novel, but that’s the repertoire that this narrative should have drawn from. The nearest equivalent film from recent years is Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. (Which used the same university, Carnegie Mellon in some scenes, both films being made around Pittsburgh – does West Pennsylvania have a significance I’m missing?) Wonder Boys scores by keeping its plot much more clearly linked to university life. In the UK, we’ve had two great TV series based on campus life – The History Man (1981, based on Malcolm Bradbury’s novel) and A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) – plus adaptations of David Lodge novels. In America there have been Alison Lurie novels and others based on the politics of campus life. These make great comedy. Smart People tries hard to be literate but wastes the opportunities that scholarly bickering throws up. In a Lodge novel, the Sarah Jessica Parker character would have been an academic carving up Lawrence’s reputation – and perhaps taking him to bed for fun. A limp romantic comedy isn’t a substitute.

Ellen Page is remarkable, but wasted here, I fear. Dennis Quaid has a wonderful sloblike demeanour – I spent most of the film wondering if his paunch was prosthetic. In the end, perhaps I’m being harsh on a new director and a new writer. It is entertaining, but could have been more. As is often the case, the most fun is to be had reading the IMDB user comments and the ratings. As usual, the most positive ratings come from ‘Females under 18′, but the lowest ratings are given by ‘Females aged 30+’ – perhaps, like me, they found the Janet character too underdeveloped.

Backbeat (UK 1994)

The Beatles on stage in Hamburg

I decided to take another look at Backbeat following my recent work on Control. I was amazed to realise that it’s fourteen years since I saw it last. There are SPOILERS in what follows, so if you don’t know the story and want to watch the film, better stop now. 

Backbeat is the story of the ‘fifth Beatle’. There are many claims to the title, but the story of Stu Sutcliffe is the really tragic one. He was the art school friend of John Lennon, a talented painter who played bass in the first true Beatles incarnation, the band that went to Hamburg in the early 1960s when another claimant as fifth Beatle, Pete Best, was on drums. The story is tragic because Sutcliffe, who stayed behind in Hamburg to be with the German girl he met, Astrid (a photographer), then died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage. The possible original cause of this was a blow to the head which the film’s narrative shows as a result of a pub brawl at the start of the film.

Backbeat was written by its director, Ian Softley with help from Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward. Softley was still a small child when the events of the film took place, but I have to say that what he and his colleagues conjure up works on my nostalgia nerve. I was around 12-14 in the early 1960s and I certainly got a whiff of something that makes me think of the period – or at least of a couple of years later when the Beatles hit and I was nervously fingering a pack of 10 Gold Leaf in some seedy coffee bar or dancehall.

Overall, I think the film works, although I think it feels quite slight. My big problem is with Stephen Dorff as Stu Sutcliffe. I’m sure he is a good actor, but I don’t believe he’s a Liverpudlian art student. What makes it worse is that he is opposite Ian Hart on full throttle as Lennon. Hart is completely believable and it’s a stunning performance. Sheryl Lee is also good as Astrid Kerchherr (but not up to Hart in full flow.

The narrative concentrates on Hamburg with a brief introductory sequence in Liverpool and one or two later scenes at the Cavern. This way, we get very little of either Lennon or Sutcliffe’s home life in Liverpool – apart from when Cynthia Powell (who would later become Cynthia Lennon) sees them off by ship. I think a little more of the early life would have helped the credibility.

My second viewing was prompted by Control and the strangely parallel story of the meeting with the more sophisticated girl from Northern Europe. It certainly was the case that ‘continental girls’ seemed somehow sexier and more sophisticated in those repressed times of the early sixties and it was interesting to see that Bardot is mentioned (and seen in poster form) in Backbeat. In my adolescence, I remember Françoise Hardy as the ultimate in teen sophistication.

I think I’m disappointed by Backbeat only because I don’t think it explores the whole question of social class. Lennon and McCartney appear to me as lower middle-class boys who seem slightly more confident in a European milieu than the working class lads of Joy Division and I was rather hoping to see something more about this. I’m grateful to DVD Times for pointing out some of the issues with the film. For instance, I didn’t know that the music which the actors mime to was supervised by Don Was and featured several well-known American musicians of the early 1990s. Suffice to say that they made a good job of sounding right for the period. More to the point perhaps is the comment that the costume for Cynthia Powell (played by Jennifer Ehle) places her as too out of date to keep John Lennon.

If we turn to a genre analysis, I think Backbeat, like Control, steers away from the music biopic. Unless I missed it (it was a late night viewing!) there is no real explanation of how the Beatles end up backing Tony Sheridan for Polydor during their Hamburg stay. As in Control, the focus is on Ian/Stu and his relationships. The intriguing difference is that Stu has to choose between Astrid and John. The film dances daintily around the intense relationship between the two men and attempts to construct the narrative as a tragic romance, whereas Control opts for melodrama. The structure doesn’t work because Stu and Astrid are just not interesting enough next to the explosion that is Lennon and that retrospection urges us to consider the underplayed personalities of Paul and George. I wonder what Pete Best thinks of his representation in the film? I think I need to check out the DVD extras to see what Ian Softley has to say about it.

I’d like someone now to make a film about the ‘beat group’ explosion of the early 1960s – not just in Liverpool, but, I presume, over the whole North of England (and the rest of the country too, but my horizons were a bit limited in 1963-5).

Romcoms outside Hollywood

I don’t watch Hollywood films that often, but sometimes I do get to see a romantic comedy. I do find, however, that many of them are just not attractive in terms of theme or they have stars I would usually want to avoid. It’s in this context that I watched two ‘alternatives’ – a French/UK co-production and a genuine American independent.

I’ve already posted on Pot Luck and I did get to see the sequel Les poupées russes (Russian Dolls) (France/UK 2005). I thought the original film was interesting as well as enjoyable in the way that it exploited the phenomenon of the Erasmus scheme that brings together young graduates from across Europe in Barcelona. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there was enough in the possible narrative extensions of the first story to warrant a second. That isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty here to entertain audiences.

Although the sequel was made only three years later, the characters have aged five years or more and the central character, Xavier, is now coming up to 30. He is still struggling to become a writer and is not in a long-term relationship (but still close friends with Martine, the Audrey Tautou character from the first film). The main thrust of the narrative is to propel Xavier through a series of sexual encounters, including one with Wendy, the Englishwoman from the Barcelona flat. There is a wedding (one of the staple features of the romcom), but it involves Wendy’s brother and a Russian ballerina.

The film is well made and I particularly enjoyed the St. Petersburg sequences, which seemed less touristy than those in London (but that’s probably because I know London well, but haven’t been to St. Petersburg). Ironically, the film seemed to be like a Eurostar ad with Xavier shuttling between Paris and London. Eurostar have actually put money into the new Shane Meadows film, marking the move to St Pancras as the London terminal – but Xavier alights at the temporary terminus built at Waterloo.

Xavier's fantasy image . . .

In the modern style, this romcom is upfront about the sexual encounters of its late twenty-somethings and overall is less coy and childish than Hollywood. I thought that the playing was generally good and Kelly Reilly turned the rather gauche character from Barcelona into a sexy woman – she was well dressed by the costume department and wore the clothes with real panache. This was emphasised by a scene in which Xavier obsesses about a model whose ‘autobiography’ he has to ghost-write. The model is objectified by a tracking camera shot which focuses on her legs as she walks in front. Kelly Reilly wears a similar dress much more successfully.

. . . when he should be thinking about Wendy

I’m not sure what I made of Romain Duris as Xavier. Since he is so good in everything else I’ve seen him in, I have to conclude that he is brilliant at playing a character who is really rather silly (perhaps this is how French audiences see Hugh Grant type characters in British films?) Xavier is never convincing as a writer and although he is still potentially a good-looking man, here he often grins like a demented hamster.

I’m not the target audience for this film and it may well be that twenty-somethings today will respond to the film and identify with the characters. It’s worth noting that romcoms now seem to assume a younger audience (whereas the classic Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s were for a general audience). For me, Xavier’s behaviour would be understandable for someone in their early twenties, but not approaching thirty. But I know I am out-of-date, so, a change in society generally is followed by filmmakers keeping up with trends. A posting on IMDB asks if this film is similar to some of the Antoine Doinel films made by François Truffaut. This is an interesting observation and I can see that it is similar to Love on the Run (France 1979). As a young man, I enjoyed the the first three Antoine Doinel films, but not the late 1970s one, by which time I thought Truffaut had lost it. (See the post on Anne and Muriel for more on Truffaut.)

Director Cédric Klapisch continues the use of split screens and tricksy editing from Pot Luck – possibly increasing the overall effect. I’m not sure it works, but again I think it probably serves to alienate older audiences in an attempt to be fresh and young? I think, however, that I preferred the approach of a recent American independent, In Search of a Midnight Kiss (US 2007).

Vivian and Wilson and the LA skyline

Written and directed by Alex Holdridge, In Search of a Midnight Kiss feels like a genuine low budget independent. The pitch is very simple, Wilson (Scoot McNairy) is virtually broke and due to be alone on New Year’s Eve. His housemates in LA (a couple) persuade him to post on Craig’s List as a ‘misanthrope’ in search of a midnight kiss. He does and meets Vivian (Sara Simmonds). Will they hit it off and stay together through the New Year celebrations?

As the image shows, Holdridge chose to shoot on High Def video and print it as black & white on 35 mm film. I thought the film looked terrific and I really enjoyed the scenic tour of downtown LA and the city that we don’t usually see (including a peek inside an ornate theatre). I was particularly interested in the sequences on the LA rapid transit system. It doesn’t usually feature in Hollywood films, but it gives a completely different feel to the city – making it more like New York and European cities. Overall, I thought the film prompted memories of a host of Hollywood films from the 1950s, partly because of the black & white images and partly because of the way in which the city was presented.

As in Russian Dolls, the film utilises the conventions of modern Hollywood romcoms (and television) in its depiction of sexual embarrassment and potential ‘gross-out’ moments. The difference is that because there are no stars, I did warm to the central characters as real people. I cared about them and by the end of the film I could even forgive the lead character his haircut. I’d recommend this film to anyone jaded by mainstream Hollywood.

Zhou Yu’s Train (China/Hong Kong 2002)

Gong Li as Zhou Yu

I distinctly remember the shock of seeing Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum when it opened in London (in 1988, I think). I was prepared for the look of the film after Yellow Earth, but not for the emotional and physical violence, nor the impact of Gong Li’s first appearance as a star of Fifth Generation Chinese films. Twenty years on, I was drawn to the DVD bargain bin to watch Gong Li again in Zhou Yu’s Train. I’d seen a trailer for the film on Apple’s website, but it wasn’t released theatrically in the UK and the DVD was eventually released in the UK in 2005. Magnificent in Zhang’s Curse of the Golden Flower and wasted in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, I was intrigued as to how ‘the most beautiful woman in China’ would look in a contemporary Chinese film.

Gong Li plays the title role of Zhou Yu, an artist in a ceramics factory who travels twice a week by train to be with her boyfriend, the poet Chen Ching (played by the Hong Kong actor, Tony Leung Ka- fai). On one of her train journeys she meets Zhang, a rural vet (played by Sun Honglei from Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home). A fourth character is also played by Gong Li (with short, curled hair) – a woman who is seemingly searching for Chen Ching, perhaps in a different/parallel time period? The film offers this odd triangle with a possible ‘third dimension’, in a non-linear narrative which jumps backwards and forwards in time.

The film seems to have confused and irritated some American audiences (and reviewers), unwilling to look beyond its undeniable beauty – the only sensible and considered comments I found were generally from IMDB’s users and bulletin boards rather than the professional critics. Surprisingly, I found only one reference to the Chinese film which it most resembles – Suzhou River (China/Germany 2000). There is a direct connection in that the same cinematographer, Wang Yu, shot both films. For Suzhou River he created a romantic and timeless vista of the river in Shanghai, but for Zhou Yu’s Train the emphasis is on the train and the landscapes of both rural China and its provincial cities (the named cities are Sanming and Chongyang, although according to Derek Elley in Variety the actual locations were elsewhere). In fact confusions over geography only add to the mystique – Sony’s press pack says the location is North West China, but the named cities are in Central/South Eastern China and some 600 or more miles apart. In Suzhou River, the two central female characters are again played by the same actor, Zhou Xun. However, Suzhou River was judged to be a small, ‘independent’ Sixth Generation film only getting an international release via its European co-funding. It proclaimed its ‘postmodernity’ through a calculated mix of memory and reproduction and a direct nod towards Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Zhou Yu’s Train is a much bigger budget film from a more prestigious production context. The director had previously worked with Gong Li on Breaking the Silence (2000) and the music is by Umebayashi Shigeru. Although it doesn’t bear comparison with Umebayashi’s great work on In the Mood For Love or for Zhang Yimou (Curse of the Golden Flower), it still adds greatly to the film. There is another Wong Kar-wai connection in the presence of editor William Chang and a further indication of ambition is the presence of producer Bill Kong, another collaborator with Zhang Yimou, as well as Ang Lee. Kong was also a producer on Tian Zhuanzhuang’s remake of Springtime in a Small Town (2002) which was another title that came to mind as I watched Zhou Yu’s Train.

The prestigious nature of the film and its presentation in the West, possibly drew audiences who might not have seen the other films I’ve mentioned here. Perhaps because it seems to offer a straightforward romance, there is less chance that the audience will be prepared to consider it as an ‘art film’? I’m not sure. I enjoyed watching the film but I can see that its non-linearity was perhaps more confusing than in a similar film, like Suzhou River, where the generic clues (film noir etc.) lead us to expect twists and turns and mysteries.

In thematic terms, I took the film to be dealing with some interesting issues. Zhou Yu is clearly a modern woman, unmarried in her thirties and without dependents. She represents a challenge to Zhang and something of a threat to Chen, who takes himself off to Tibet, perhaps afraid of her energy in trying to make a long distance relationship work. The distance that Zhou travels for her twice-weekly trysts is a feature of a society which to a certain extent institutionalised separation/exile from the 1920s onwards. The railway takes on quite a different role from that it has in North American and European contemporary cinema (but perhaps it is shared by Indian cinemas?). The lack of family and ‘tradition’ (and really of ‘authority’ in any form) is quite refreshing, though Zhou is following in her father’s footsteps (he worked on the railway) and the use of poetry in the film does refer back to traditional modes of romance in Chinese fictions.

As well as the remarkable Gong Li herself, there is a great deal of attention paid to landscape and conventional shots of trains. If nothing else, the film does refer to the obvious connections between rail travel and romance. Mostly, the train works as metaphor – its constant toing and froing and the sense of movement between urban and rural life. I was also struck by the use of wide-angle lenses in the indoor scenes and of compositions in long shot for the train and city environments.

But for me, the most pleasure came from Gong Li’s performance. I was taken with the striking difference created between the two characters she played, achieved by changing hairstyle, costume and body movement/gesture. Several commentators admit to being confused about time periods in the film and I think that this might be triggered by Gong Li as the fourth character, who in her denim jacket and short, but styled, hair seems much more ‘modern’ than Zhou. As Zhou, I realise that Gong Li was dressed as I’ve never seen her before – in simple, timeless dresses (rather than the traditional dress of period Zhang Yimou films or the ’smart’ business dress of Miami Vice. The simple dresses allow her to move more freely and there are several shots/sequences in which the director seems to emphasise this (especially when she is shown running after the train in slow motion). Dress and movement allow her to seem ‘girlish’ (and a mature woman at the same time). In short, she is terrific and well worth pursuing through the bargain bin. I hope she gets more contemporary roles in Chinese Cinema. With her only serious rival, Maggie Cheung, seemingly in retirement, she is sorely needed. Unfortunately, she seems to be mainly employed on American-financed films – I hope the Americans learn how to use her skills and star persona effectively.

Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, Sweden 1951)

Henrik (Birger Malmsten) and Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) on the island

At the high point of what is now considered as 1960s ‘modernist cinema’, Ingmar Bergman was perhaps the central figure in the European art cinema movement. In the early 1970s I made several attempts to watch Bergman films, but I’m afraid I didn’t really enjoy the experience and my attention was drawn instead towards that now almost forgotten figure of a romantic political cinema, Bo Widerberg. I found Bergman’s films both bewildering and frightening. Their combination of psychology, philosophy and the crisis of belief didn’t appeal to my sense of youthful idealism and romanticism. A few years later, Bergman was still ‘important’ but often the subject of parody and satire. It wasn’t until Bergman’s death last year and the suggestion that we might mark it in some way that I thought about watching some of the earlier films that I had recorded but not watched (a common occurrence for film teachers?). I remembered that Jean-Luc Godard had been a big fan of Summer With Monika (Sweden 1953) and that Antoine Doinel and his friend steal a lobby card of Harriet Andersson in the film in a scene from Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (France 1959).

I watched Summer With Monika with a sense of astonishment. Here is the prototype for Godard and Truffaut’s nouvelle vague youth pictures. This is Bergman in Rossellini mode revelling in his young protagonists’ summer romance on the island around Stockholm. True there are indications of the darker Bergman to come, but overall, I found the film to be full of youthful vitality. So, when Film Four in the UK announced a Bergman season, I resolved to try and watch some of the films – the first one I caught was Summer Interlude.

Summer Interlude comes across as a genre film – a romantic melodrama that could sits alongside late 1940s Sirk and Ophüls for me. It tells the story of a tragic summer romance, recollected in flashbacks by a prima ballerina during an enforced break in rehearsals. A messenger leaves a packet for her that prompts these memories of thirteen years earlier, when she met a young man on holiday in the islands and the fell in love during the long summer evenings. In this sense, it seems like a precursor of Summer With Monika. But it is a more complex film in some ways, with its nods forwards to Bergman’s later concerns about memory, death and lost faith. It’s an enjoyable film for anyone, but the auteurists must love it because of the familiar Bergman traits: the focus on the woman, the environment of the islands in the archipelago, the meeting with a wizard (the leader of the ballet troupe), the contrast of age and youth, confrontation with death etc. (and even a much parodied bird-call under the titles). It was Bergman’s original story, inspired by his own youthful experiences, but cut and shaped by the experienced Herbert Grevenius.

Film Four certainly found a good print – the black and white location photography by Gunnar Fischer (who worked consistently with Bergman until 1960 when Sven Nykvist took over) is excellent. It contrasts with some of the expressionist use of lighting and set design in the interiors of the theatre and the summer houses on the island.

For more on Bergman and Summer Interlude, see:

The late (and much missed) Philip Strick’s notes for the Tartan Video release

Hamish Ford’s essay on the Senses of Cinema website.