Les neiges du Kilimandjaro (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, France 2011)

The opening shot of Snows of Kilimanjaro – the union meeting in which the 20 men to be made redundant are chosen.

I’d almost forgotten about Robert Guédiguian – which is a terrible admission since I like his films very much. This one left me in tears and emotionally drained with just a small nagging doubt about the politics. My emotional response suggests that this is a very effective family melodrama and I do think that it is a perceptive and intelligent film about contemporary political ideas. The whole enterprise has been undertaken with love and a clear principled stand.

The basic premise is not unlike the beginning of Couscous (La graine et le mulet, 2007) with an older worker made redundant in a dockyard and the consequent issues around marriage/partners and family conflicts. In this case however, Michel is also a union steward faced with redundancies that the union can’t (or possibly won’t) fight. He puts his own name into the lottery to decide which twenty men will go and duly picks himself as one of those to go. We learn that Michel is a lifelong socialist whose hero is Jean Léon Jaurès (the great French socialist leader from the turn of the century who was assassinated in 1914) but now he is contemplating retirement in his late 50s.

At first everything is fine and Michel and his wife Marie-Claire are given a wedding anniversary present of a safari holiday in Tanzania including a trip to Kilimanjaro by their children. But then something very disturbing happens that shakes up the couple and their closest friends, Raoul (Michel’s closest workmate) and his wife Denise, who is also Marie-Claire’s sister. I won’t spoil the narrative, but what happens certainly puts Michel and Marie-Claire into a difficult position and forces Michel in particular to question his own actions. Did he really fight for the jobs of the younger workers who were made redundant. Has he become old and complacent, just another passive member of the bourgeoisie? What he and Marie-Claire do then (she has her own concerns and takes her own line) causes a rift with their grown-up children, both of whom have families, in a scene that has echoes of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. At the same time, a potential rift between Michel and Raoul also hinges on what we might see as traditional working-class politics and the response to moments of crisis.

Robert Guédiguian is perhaps the nearest French equivalent of the Ken Loach-Paul Laverty school of filmmaking. He has made several films set in the working-class districts of Marseilles. All of these films feature Ariane Ascaride (Guédiguian’s wife) and often Jean-Pierre Darroussin – and here the two play Marie-Claire and Michel. Like Loach, he also has a regular script collaborator, Jean-Louis Milesi. Guédiguian also sometimes makes specific use of his own Armenian ancestry, here represented by the references to Jaurès who was also part Armenian. The other inspiration for the film was a poem by Victor Hugo. The poem and a speech by Jaurès can be found in the Press Pack from Mongrel Films.

The political observation at the centre of the film is that in Guédiguian’s view there is no more a ‘working class’, at least as a coherent entity. Employment has changed in France as in most of Western Europe so that unionisation has been weakened by the loss of large-scale employment in factories, shipyards, mines etc. Younger workers especially have only experienced the individualist ideologies of the modern workplace. Subjected to consumerism, de-regulation and all the other soul-destroying aspects of modern capitalist culture, they have never experienced the solidarity of the unionised workforce, nor realised what those working-class movements won in terms of employment rights. It isn’t their fault and in many ways they do face a tougher world.

Milesi’s script and Guédiguian’s direction produce a film narrative that manages to be both provocative in terms of asking difficult political questions and also warm-hearted and celebratory of the central loving relationship between Michel and Marie-Claire. I think that you could argue that the ending is still in some ways ‘open’ and that not all issues are tidied up, but certainly on a sunny day, eating outside on a terrace overlooking the port, Marseilles isn’t quite like a wet Wednesday in Greenock or Salford which might be the location in a British social realist equivalent.

My nagging doubt is the omission of any analysis of the reasons for the collapse of unionised employment – or real engagement with what the union needs to do to support and educate younger workers. The film isn’t really interested in the work of the men – we never learn what exactly they do, whether they are dockers, ship-repairers or whatever. Perhaps I’m asking for too much. This is a romantic melodrama with a leavening of contemporary political concerns – and it is very enjoyable. The title has a double meaning referring to the dream of visiting the mountain, and a popular chanson which has memories for Michel and Marie-Claire.

 

LFF 2012 #7: Mahanagar (India 1963)

The young women recruited by ‘Autonit’ listen to the manager explaining the work. Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) is 2nd from the left and Edith (Vicky Redwood) is on the far right.

It’s great news that Satyajit Ray’s 1963 masterpiece is to be re-released in the UK on a new digital print in Summer 2013 and it was a privilege to be able to view the new print in the ‘Treasures’ strand of the LFF. This restoration goes back to the original film negative and looks very good. The only slight disappointment is that this isn’t one of Ray’s more location-based films. The title translates from Bengali as ‘The Big City’, but much of the film uses sets and back projection. No matter, all the other ingredients are there: a beautifully written story, fantastic performances and a riveting theme of tradition, women’s freedom outside the home and the economic realities of modern Calcutta in the 1950s.

At various points, calendars and diaries tell us that it is 1953. Because we see little of the city, the only other contradictory signifier of time period is a rather more modern motor vehicle that looks early 1960s. The time period matters perhaps only in respect of one of the narrative strands concerning the Anglo-Indian community in the city – see below.

The story by Narendranath Mitra focuses on the Mazumdars, a single family of three generations. Subrata and Arati live with his parents and their own child plus Subrata’s younger sister – still a young teenager. Money is becoming scarce for this middle-class family. Subrata works as an accountant, but his salary is barely enough to support the extended family group and he feels ashamed that his father, a retired teacher with an MA, is reduced to seeking favours from his ex-students who have ‘made good’ (this is one of the separate narrative threads in the film as the old teacher visits his students). When Arati suggests that she might get a job, her husband at first refuses (and doesn’t tell his father) but the prospect of a second salary is far too tempting in the economic circumstances. Arati applies for a job and after an interview is appointed as a ‘salesgirl’ or ‘canvasser’, making housecalls in order to interest upper middle-class housewives in the purchase of a knitting machine. Her immediate boss is a successful Bengali manager. Presumably the machine itself is imported or made in India under licence. I’m not sure why I think this, but I suspect that Ray used his own experience of advertising agencies in London to design the company logo. This film isn’t about industry as such (that becomes the focus of Company Limited in 1971) but the Bengali manager makes several comments about being free of foreign control.

The film works mainly because of the riveting performance by Madhabi Mukherjee as Arati. She was only 20 when she worked on the film, but convinces as a married woman a few years older. The film narrative depends on her believable transformation into a working woman who can stand up for herself.

The ‘Anglo-Indian question’ is significant with the film set in the early 1950s, only a few years after independence. One of the other four young women appointed as canvassers at the same time as Arati is Edith, an Anglo-Indian in her early twenties about to get married and needing the income. The Anglo-Indians (defined here as mixed race families, rather than as Europeans who remained in India after independence) faced a difficult position when the British Raj ended. Many sought a new life in the UK, Canada or Australia. Those who remained, mainly in Calcutta or Madras, could no longer rely on the more prestigious jobs in railway administration. Edith is depicted as a modern young woman in Western clothes who speaks English in all situations. She befriends Arati, who is open to new experiences, and this friendship is central to the narrative, both in the influence of Edith on Arati and in the conflict created by the behaviour of the women’s boss who demonstrates his prejudice towards the Anglo-Indian community and Edith in particular. The manager is quite an unpleasant character and several commentators have linked this attack by Ray on the ‘new business types’ in the city to his similar criticisms of older business leaders in his previous film Kanchenjunga.

Despite the prejudice shown by the manager and some rather ungracious behaviour by one of the old teacher’s students, overall Ray sticks to the rule of his mentor Jean Renoir and characters are presented as ‘human’ in their behaviour. This is especially true within the family situation. Subrata has the education but he is not as bright as his wife. He is bound by tradition, but he loves his family. The ending of the film has been criticised by some as too optimistic – in a film about the economic realities of life in the city. But really it is optimistic about the marriage. I guess I’m an old romantic, but I thought that there were grounds for optimism. Often rated slightly less highly than Ray’s most famous films, Mahanagar is for me right up there amongst the best.

Fifties British Cinema: Woman in a Dressing Gown (UK 1957)

Yvonne Mitchell (foreground) as Amy in Woman in a Dressing Gown with (from left) Andrew Ray (Brian), Roberta Powell (Christine) and Anthony Quayle as ‘Jimbo’

Woman in a Dressing Gown was re-released on a DCP (digital cinema package) and Blu-ray/DVD discs in the summer. This re-release is slightly more significant than most since the film has been out of circulation for some time – not seen in cinemas, nor as far as I know, on DVD. It’s an important film, representing commercial British cinema of the 1950s at the Berlin Film Festival where its lead actor Yvonne Mitchell won a Silver Bear. Its director and cinematographer Lee J. Thompson and Gil Taylor were leading figures of mainstream genre cinema at a time when the UK’s industry was still operating a studio system. This marked the film out as a different kind of submission to a film festival to which it was usual to send ‘quality pictures’ from David Lean, Carol Reed or Michael Powell – or perhaps Ealing Studios.

However, Woman in a Dressing Gown also marked the beginning of the end of ‘studio British cinema’. UK cinema admissions started to nosedive in 1956 with the appearance on TV screens of ‘commercial television’ and this film was an adaptation of a TV play by Ted Willis previously seen on the new ITV channel. It isn’t evident from the film which is imaginatively shot (although it is possible to imagine it as a TV play in terms of the limited number of locations).

My main reason for writing about the film, apart from wanting to encourage readers to watch it if they can –  because it is very good – is to question the assertions around its status. Very well received and well-reviewed, the re-release has been most often taken as giving us a chance to see a precursor to the ‘British New Wave’, usually argued to begin with Room at the Top just over a year later. I can see that this makes sense, but I’m more open to the argument that it is part of a much longer-running idea about ‘kitchen-sink drama’ related to theatre and TV during the 1950s and 1960s. A few weeks ago I introduced a screening of the film on this basis and you can download a pdf of the notes for that session here: WIDGNotes

Since the screening I’ve had a look at the new digital archive for Sight and Sound magazine (which perhaps we’ll review in the next few weeks). I went to the online viewing copy of the journal from Autumn 1957 and read John Gillet’s contemporary review. I was interested to see that he immediately picked up the TV connection, which must have been ‘live’ at the time since Hollywood films were just beginning to appear on television. He notes that Ted Willis had clearly learned from the Paddy Chayefsky plays that had made the jump from US TV to cinema films (Marty (1955) with Ernest Borgnine was probably the best-known). Gillet likes the film, but he’s not as enthusiastic as critics today. He thinks that Yvonne Mitchell tries too hard at times and he doesn’t like the ‘tricksy’ camerawork of Gil Taylor and Thompson’s cluttered mise en scène. Ironically, the formal properties of the film are now what make it stand out as a good example of 1950s commercial cinema with a real sense of adventure. (The film was shot in academy format 1.33: 1 – which marks it as visually different to the New Wave films that followed in 1.66:1.) I think that serious film studies is also now more accepting of melodrama and therefore Mitchell’s performance.

The DVD of the restoration is well worth getting and the interview/presentation by Melanie Williams of the University of East Anglia is one of the best I’ve seen on DVD. She discusses some of her own research into the responses of female audiences to what was an important film offering a discourse about women’s lives in the period.

The milieu for the film is not ‘working-class’ as many of the reviewers of the re-release suggest. Nor is it a ‘middle-class’ block of flats as Gillet suggested in 1957. Instead, the couple at the centre of the story are lower middle-class – an important distinction in British society. You can see this in the clip released by StudioCanal on YouTube in which Amy, shocked by her husband’s demand for a divorce, rings him at work – where the ‘other woman’ (Sylvia Sims as Georgie) answers the phone. It’s an odd clip to choose as none of Taylor’s cinematic style is evident:

Le gamin au vélo (The Kid With a Bike, Bel/Fra/Italy 2011)

Samantha (Cécile de France) with Cyril (Thomas Doret)

I think I need to watch this film again. The latest production by the Dardennes brothers rather took me by surprise. Much has been made about the decision to shoot in the summer and to offer a story that seems much more optimistic than their earlier work. Even though I knew this was the case, I still found myself slightly bemused. The other ‘difference’ in this production is the presence of a major star in Cécile de France. She is terrific in the role of a hairdresser living above her shop. Since she grew up in Namur, not much further along the Meuse Valley from the Dardennes’ usual location of Seraing, she must have felt quite at home. Jérémie Renier, who has a small part as the mostly absent father in this film and has appeared in other Dardenne Brothers’ films, is also arguably a star name, but not perhaps with the glamour of Ms de France. I guess the UK equivalent of this would be Samantha Morton turning up in a Ken Loach film.

Like all the Dardennes’ films, The Kid With a Bike has a simple idea drawn from contemporary culture in Wallonia. Cyril, a pre-teen boy has been taken into care because his father has abandoned him. The boy has lost his bicycle which he believes has been stolen. In one of his many attempts to find the bike (and evade his carers) he literally runs into Samantha the hairdresser. She takes to him and finds his bike which she buys back from someone on the local estate. Eventually, she offers to look after Cyril and he agrees – but he still seeks his father. Although the woman and boy are good together, he has been messed up by his experiences and he almost inevitably becomes involved with a local drugs dealer/gang leader.

As in the other Dardennes brothers’ films I’ve seen, the narrative simply ends without a clear ‘resolution’. However, the overall tone is brighter than in the previous films – though it has its dark moments as well. The Dardennes have spoken about the genesis of the film as coming from a desire to use ideas from fairy stories in an everyday setting. Cécile de France would of course make an ideal fantasy godmother, but here she is ‘ordinary’ (but still breathtaking). The final element in the mix in terms of changes is the use of music. Instead of a conventional score, music – a few bars of Beethoven, I think – punctuates the narrative at key moments. The austerity of the Dardennes’ usual style eschews music and for me this new addition didn’t work. Reading about it afterwards, I can see what they were trying to do and perhaps it will work when I watch the film again. (I’ve seen its usage quoted as a nod to Robert Bresson.)

I want to say at this point that I was totally gripped by the film and swept along by it. I was shocked by the abrupt end of the film and I left the screening feeling that I’d seen another example of superlative filmmaking – but not sure what to say about it. I’ve read a wide range of reviews and some interviews with the brothers, but in a sense the brilliance of these films is never really analysed. Perhaps this slight change of direction will provide an opening?

Is this naturalism or social realism? Is it ciné verité? These are all referenced in reviews. Many reviews also seize on the bicycle and make the obvious link to Bicycle Thieves. A bicycle is actually a very good ‘narrative device’ in this kind of film. It gives a character mobility and it keeps them close to the realities of life in a particular community. It also places characters in situations which make them vulnerable – they can easily be pushed off a bike and it can easily be damaged or indeed stolen. Throughout this film we do get a sense of Cyril’s energy and restlessness and we are constantly fearful about his safety – and that of the bike. In one sense this is social realism. By making films set in their own backyard of the post-industrial belt in the Meuse valley, the Dardennes do ground themselves and their characters in a specific social situation. However, they don’t (at least in the films I’ve seen) attempt to represent the culture of their region in terms of its politics and economics. The comparison with Ken Loach earlier was deliberate. The Dardennes are, I presume, admirers of Loach – their company Les Films du Fleuve is a co-producer of both The Angel’s Share and Looking For Eric, films which are similarly rooted in specific communities. But whereas Loach and writer Paul Laverty create forms of social melodrama which always appeal to issues of class politics and forms of social justice, the Dardennes brothers films seem more concerned with distilled stories of individual moral dilemmas/struggles and personal relationships. (The Dardennes seem not to offer any social context or ‘back story’ for their characters.) Both Loach and the Dardennes use non-actors alongside professionals cast because they ‘fit’ the social realism of the specific region. The other difference comes in camerawork – Loach’s ‘observational documentary’ style against the Dardennes’ more invisibly choreographed style ((which I certainly need to look at more closely) – and use of humour and popular culture. Loach often tends towards the earthy. I clearly need to find the earlier Dardennes’ films that I haven’t seen before I can complete this comparison.

One last point. The summer shooting does create something magical for me, especially in the nighttime scenes. The limited locations include streets with summertime bushes by the roadside and hidden areas in the woods. There is a strong sense of ‘adventures of a summer night’ and the slightly disturbing feel of summer sun in an urban/suburban setting. One reviewer refers to the ‘poetic realism’ of the Dardennes in this film – and he may be right. It certainly feels different from the austerity of The Silence of Lorna or L’enfant.

I’ve just come back from the Meuse valley in Belgium, so I’ll try and write some more about cinema in Wallonia. In the meantime, here’s the trailer for Le gamin au vélo from Cannes 2011 (where it won the Grand Prix):

The Angels’ Share (UK/Fra/Bel/Italy 2012)

The four young offenders at a whisky auction in ‘The Angels’ Share’ (l-r: William Ruane, Jasmin Riggins, Paul Brannigan and Gary Maitland)

The ‘Sixteen Films’ crew have triumphed again, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and chalking up a significant box office success with The Angels’ Share. Sixteen Films as a company was formed by Ken Loach with producer Rebecca O’Brien and writer Paul Laverty to make Sweet Sixteen in 2002, but the partnership between Loach and Laverty goes back to Carla’s Song in 1996. Rebecca O’Brien missed out on that film but she was with Loach on earlier productions going back to Hidden Agenda in 1990. The West of Scotland and Scottish culture has featured in six of the groups films in all (My Name is Joe in 1998, Ae Fond Kiss in 2004 and Tickets in 2005 alongside Carla’s Song, Sweet Sixteen and the current film.) I think it’s fair to say that while the earlier films were all located in a recognisable urban Scotland and dealt with aspects of contemporary urban Scottish culture, none have ‘played’ so openly with ideas about Scottishness (without losing track of a strong central narrative).

‘The Angels’ Share’ refers to the small amount of liquid which is lost during the long process of maturation of whisky. With whisky as the centrepiece and four young working-class Glaswegians deposited in the Highlands, clad in kilts and carrying bottles of Irn-Bru, Loach and Laverty are clearly teasing us with thoughts of Whisky Galore and Trainspotting – as well as several films by Bill Forsyth including Local Hero and Comfort and Joy.  Some reviewers seem to think that comedy is something new for Loach. They’ve already forgotten Looking for Eric but, more importantly, they’ve forgotten that dramas set in believable working-class communities often feature comic characters and comic sequences. Ricky Tomlinson, later star of The Royle Family sitcom on TV, started making us laugh in Loach’s Riff-Raff (1991). In most cases, however, laughter in a Loach film co-exists with tears and pain, not least in a film like Kes (1969). And it still does in The Angels’ Share. The difference is perhaps that the obvious pain is contained within the first part of the narrative so that the second part becomes closer to a conventional ‘caper movie’ narrative – and the film’s resolution is quite different in feel to something like Kes. In fact it could almost be described as upbeat.

Outline (no spoilers)

The protagonist in The Angels’ Share is Robbie a young Glaswegian with a violent past, once more in court but this time offered a way out via 300 hours of ‘community payback’ because he is about to become a father and the birth of his child might bring him to his senses. (Robbie is played by Paul Brannigan, a very talented non-professional who obviously has great potential as an actor.) Robbie does try to change, keeping off drugs and trying to avoid fights. He makes good friends of three other young offenders on the programme and forms a bond with his supervisor (the wonderful Jon Henshaw) who is lonely and missing his own family. It is by chance that Robbie discovers that he has a natural talent, a ‘nose’ for whisky, and this will lead him into a seemingly crazy scheme to make money. But to do so, he needs the support of his three willing but not necessarily accomplished fellow miscreants.

Commentary

The film narrative is cleverly thought through and encapsulates several political observations that we might expect from Loach and Laverty. A 100 minute film perhaps does not have the length to allow the gradual development/transformation of a character like Robbie, who does seem to go from extremely violent youth spaced out on drugs to astute schemer and smooth operator rather quickly. On the other hand, because of its subject material, the film does have the possibility to engage with debates about Scottishness and representation as outlined above and this makes what is otherwise a seemingly ‘light’ comic tale into something else. In interviews, Loach and Laverty have spoken about the waste of young people’s talents and the disease of unemployment in the increasingly unequal society that is modern Tory Britain (and which the SNP in Edinburgh can only ameliorate but not radically alter). Here are young Glaswegians who have probably never tasted whisky, the national drink of Scotland, and who never visit the beautiful landscapes of their own country (from which their own families may well have been ‘cleared’ by rich landowners a hundred and fifty years or more ago). That same whisky (and the rivers and glens used for game hunting) is now valued by collectors who can pay extraordinary sums of money for something created by craft workers who don’t receive the remuneration that is their due. In this analysis, stealing the angels’ share seems a just venture if the proceeds are recycled in the Scottish economy.

One of the most important debates in Scottish film culture focuses on the representation of what is termed ‘tartanry’ – the romantic attachment of a Highland past that is commonly found in Hollywood’s celebration of Braveheart or Rob Roy. In fact, much of the mythology is a creation of romantic novelists and Victorian gentry – and it has little meaning for the Scottish working-class of the central lowlands, whose culture has been derived from mining and heavy industry. Whisky has an ambiguous position in this context – ironically, I read a magazine article on the boom in the Scottish whisky industry only a few days before seeing the film. Unfortunately a new distillery in the highlands will only create around 150 jobs – whereas the closure of factories and shipyards loses thousands. For readers outside the UK, it’s worth pointing out that Irn-Bru, bottles of which play a key role in the narrative are iconic in Scotland as the brand is claimed to be one of the few local products to match the popularity of Coke and Pepsi.

The Angels’ Share was released in the UK and Ireland by the Canadian mainstream distributor e-One. They have followed the usual practice on Loach’s films of a limited specialised cinema release starting with 73 screens. After four weeks the film is still going strong, passing $2 million. It opens this week in France and Belgium where Loach is usually guaranteed a bigger audience than in the UK. The biggest box office winner from Sixteen Films has so far been the Palme d’Or winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (boosted by a massive Irish box office response) but The Angels’ Share might top it.

I enjoyed the film very much but I probably need to see it again. There have been the usual silly certification problems about the way that working-class Glaswegian youths use profanities – often as words of endearment as much as hostility but fortunately the film got the ’15′ Certificate it needed. I should warn anyone who isn’t familiar with Loach-Laverty that some of the early scenes are disturbing (and emotional) before the caper elements take over but what follows will I think attract a new audience as well as satisfying existing fans. I’m intrigued as to how an American release will deal with the profanities in the subtitles which will surely happen for that market. Here is the trailer to whet your appetite (it gives away more of the plot than I have done, so be warned):

BIFF 2012 #10: Volcano (Eldfjall, Iceland/Denmark 2011)

Hannes watches as the boat given to him by his father is lifted from the water with the hole in its hull clear for all to see – a metaphor for Hannes’ state of mind?

Volcano is a recognisable Nordic drama, harrowing in parts and occasionally uplifting – never sentimental, always intelligent. As several trade reviewers jokingly put it, this isn’t a ‘date movie’ – but for older audiences it will ring very true or perhaps start some re-evaluations of family relationships.

At the beginning of the film Hannes is experiencing the pain of his last day at work, aged 67 and after 37 years as a school caretaker and before that as a fisherman living in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. The 1973 volcanic eruption of Eldfell forced him to move the family to the mainland. Retirement does not come easy and it’s clear that for some time Hannes has become estranged from his wife and family. On a topical note, his daughter Telma has just been promoted as a loans manager in a bank – to the disgust of her father. His son Ari is divorced, but usually has his small son in tow. Most long-suffering is Anna, the matriarch of the family. After nearly sinking in his old fishing boat, Hannes begins to soften and he and Anna have a rapprochement – which is almost immediately halted by tragedy when Anna has a very severe stroke.

What follows is a deeply moving study of how Hannes comes to terms with what life has given him. Written and directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson as his first feature after several shorts, the film is a remarkable achievement for a young man in his thirties. Part of a Danish film initiative the film was shown in Cannes in 2011 and has won awards around the world. I wish I’d seen more Icelandic films because the handfull I have seen do have several recurring elements such as choral singing, windswept landscapes and of course, the sea. Although the film is essentially social-realist, there are many symbolic references and at first I assumed that the title refers to the two devastating events that change Hannes’ life so dramatically. At the end of the film he will find himself back in ‘the islands’ as he calls them – perhaps wondering if he should have returned earlier. I’m also wondering if the couple’s favourite ‘halibut soup’ means more than just a tasty dish. Googling it suggests that it is one of the oldest Icelandic dishes – here’s a recipe. In an interview available here, the director says that the ‘volcano’ is actually Hannes himself, a seemingly cold and grey man with his emotions in tumult within about to erupt. Certainly he is a classically masculine working man in his dealings with others. The performances in the film are universally good and especially the lead couple, Theodór Júlíusson and Margrét Helga Jóhannsdóttir.

Volcano is in competition at BIFF and alongside Arrugas it makes a strong case for films which deal with issues for older audiences, although there is no reason why they shouldn’t appeal to younger audiences as well. Can we have a UK distributor for this excellent film please?

Trailer with English subs:

Tyrannosaur (UK, 2010)

Ye canna get grimmer than me!

Peter Mullan + council estate = it’s bloody grim. This is in the tradition of realist British cinema but I wonder if there’s a tendency to try and make the slice of working class life even grimmer than the last one we’ve seen. To be fair the writer-director Paddy Considine balances the portrayal of class by ensuring that Hannah (Olivia Colman) is abused on a posh estate, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen enough of grim representations of ordinary people’s lives.

It is part of the excellence of the film, performance and script, that Mullan’s Joseph can be introduced kicking his dog to death and become likeable. These characters, even Eddie Marsan’s ‘respectable-but-scumbag’ James, are all human; there is no caricature. Best of all is Colman, who’s churchy-charity shop character is devastatingly portrayed. Without spoiling: I thought the climax contrived and unnecessary to the drama.

I look forward to a realist film about working class life that isn’t grim. Made in Dagenham showed how class solidarity can take on the ruling classes. That was set, however, in the 1960s and it could be that Thatcher’s legacy was to destroy working class cohesion. If so, then battered and disturbed characters may be all we have left.

The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (China 2006)

Siqin Gaowa and Chow Yun-fat photographed against the modern Shanghai skyline.

My second bargain from YesAsia turned out to be an intriguing film displaying a creative tension between its presentation and its title. What did I expect from the title – a quirky comedy of modern manners? I remember other East Asian films that seem to fit the Western conception of postmodernity including the work of Kim Ki-duk in Korea and the Chinese film Suzhou River (1999). By contrast, this film seems much more Chinese in conception – although ironically its approach seems more in line with my own take on pomo.

Director Ann Hui is a celebrated figure from the Hong Kong New Wave of the late 1970s. Trained in London at the International Film School and learning her trade in television in Hong Kong, she had a major international success with her 1982 feature Boat People, the final film of a trilogy about Vietnam and Hong Kong. Like her fellow New Wave director Allen Fong, Ann Hui helped to bring approaches to documentary and social realism into Hong Kong Cinema and to foster a grittier Cantonese language film culture in an industry previously dominated by transplanted mainlanders producing traditional Mandarin language films.

Hui was born in North East China in 1947 and taken as a child first to Macau and then to Hong Kong. Now back producing films in mainland China, she is able to draw on experience of a much greater range of production approaches than many of her contemporaries. The Postmodern Life of My Aunt is based on a popular novel which I haven’t managed to find so I don’t know if it was Hui who decided that the central character comes from the city in Manchuria where she herself was born.

Plot outline

Ye Rutang (Siqin Gaowa) is a middle-aged woman living on her own in an apartment block in Shanghai. Eventually we will learn that she is divorced and that there is a daughter and ex-husband still living in Manchuria. In the course of the film Mrs Ye meets a number of characters, most of whom in some way exploit her loneliness, humanity and civic responsibility. Her adventures have lighter and darker moments, but overall the story is about coping (or not) with modern Shanghai living from the perspective of someone born at the time of the founding of the PRC in 1949.

Commentary

I’m not sure where to begin. Perhaps with the DVD. I have the Hong Kong version (Region 0) with both the original Mandarin track and a Cantonese dub. It’s easily the best quality HK DVD I’ve acquired. The cinematography is excellent and beautifully presented and the score by Joe Hisaishi, composer of all of Miyazaki Hayao’s films, is delicately emotional and absolutely right. Siqin is very impressive and the supporting cast includes both Chow Yun-fat and Vicky Zhao who both offer strong performances.

More problematic is any attempt to categorise the film. It has elements of what I term ‘the comedy of embarrassment’ – those excruciating moments when you know what is going to happen and you feel for the characters. Mrs Ye is a wonderful creation. In many ways an irritating woman, but drawn with such humanity that I couldn’t fail to care for her. So, what begins as possibly light comedy moves through a quite touching romance and then finally to, if not tragedy, a downbeat social realism. This mix of genres and aesthetics is what explains the ‘postmodern’ reference in the title. On the ‘Extras’ DVD (it’s a 2-disc set) someone suggests this directly – although I can’t be sure. The English subtitles for cast and crew interviews are very poor.

The different aesthetic is clearly evident in the visual representation of Shanghai compared to later scenes in Manchuria. I was conscious of how beautiful Shanghai looked. The actual locations have been chosen to show traditional apartment blocks with the new Shanghai evident in the background and occasionally (and crucially) in the form of walkways and flyovers. The old part of the city looks clean and glowing with a golden nostalgia and the new buildings shimmer on the skyline (see the image above). By contrast the Manchurian cityscape is grey, cold and industrial. The two locations are linked by a fantasy shot of an enormous yellow moon which fills the window of the bedroom, first of Mrs Ye in Shanghai and then of her nephew come to visit her in Anshan.

In one sense, this is a very traditional narrative – ‘country mouse’ comes to the big city where she is dazzled by the possibilities, duped by the sophisticated town mice and begins to long for the security that she left behind. But in Hui’s hands it becomes humanist drama and a telling commentary on the ‘New China’. The ‘new Shanghai’, which over the last ten years has often been singled out as the prime example of the postmodern cityscape is, as I’ve indicated, presented in literally glowing terms. We see it from Mrs Ye’s perspective and I was intrigued by how many incidents and locations I recognised from the detective novels of Qui Xiaolong in which Chief Inspector Chen attempts to solve crimes in the new China. So we have older people with their complicated social histories and their sense of civic duty alongside the new young entrepreneurs and the traditional noodle stores alongside the new palaces of leisure and entertainment. (There is a particularly painful scene when Mrs Ye visits a swimming pool in her red knitted swimsuit that she has made herself.) The complex social background is intriguingly set up by two incidents that only released some of their potential when I reflected on the film after watching it. In the first, Mrs Ye applies for a job teaching English to the small boy of an aspirant middle-class family. But after the first few sessions she is released. The parents explain that although her teaching is first-class (they have had it checked by experts!), Mrs Ye speaks British English and they want their son to learn American English since this is what he will need in his school career. As the father says, British English is very beautiful but, like Classical Chinese, nobody needs it anymore. This seems like a sad but true observation and I wondered about the film’s plot – how does Mrs Ye know British English? Later on her daughter during a family row remarks that her mother ‘married a worker’ – implying that perhaps this skilled and resourceful woman came from a middle class family and perhaps married a worker during the Cultural Revolution?

I read a number of reviews and ‘user comments’ on the film and it strikes me that the modest box office returns in China reflect differences in the appeal across the generations and between popular and arthouse audiences. Younger audiences may not find Mrs Ye such an interesting figure and if they approach the film expecting Chow Yun-fat in an action role or the kind of slapstick seen in some Chinese New Year comedies, they’ll be sorely disappointed (even though there is one such moment featuring Chow and a watermelon!).