shezan's Reviews

Les camisards (1972)

10/10

2 June 2007

Fantastic movie, with certainly the only script written in believable 17th-century French, about the rebel Huguenots of the Cévennes. It takes place after Louis XIV revokes the Edit de Nantes which had allowed Protestants freedom of religion in France for a few decades, and shows the persecutions waged against them.

The movie is shot in the still wild mountainous areas of Central France where the rebels took refuge.

It earned a well-deserved prize at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival.

It's simply-made with excellent actors who don't ham it up, packs an amazing emotional wallop, and should be available on DVD.

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The Glittering Prizes (1976)

10/10

Absolutely brilliant - need this on DVD!

19 December 2006

This series was the kind of thing that made TV worth it a quarter century ago. Written by the English novelist Frederick Raphael from his book, it was more than a little autobiographic, and carried the flavour of the 50s and 60s, while avoiding many of the clichés this period evokes.

The TV series was Intelligent, wry, literate, subtle, with brilliant acting.

In post-war England, it followed a group of students at Cambridge, with their hopes, affairs, confrontations with life, and, later, disillusionments and achievements. It's impossible to explain how truly intelligent the writing is; this has to be experienced.

We NEED it on DVD!

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Match Point (2005)

1/10

Woody Allen has really, really, really lost it (mild spoilers)

5 December 2005

Warning: Spoilers

Well. And what a waste of 8 euros "Match Point" turned out to be. As it happens, Woody Allen couldn't get financing in the US, or at least without strings attached, so he's decided to go and milk the BBC instead. Which means, in effect, that he recycled a story he'd written for a New York setting straight into a London setting, without any attempt at any significant rewrite. And "written" is a loose term. "An American Tragedy" meets "A Place In The Sun" meets "Room at the Top" meets "The Talented Mr. Ripley" meets (but let's not get carried away) "Le Rouge et le Noir." Ambitious poor boy courts aristocratic rich girl then gets torn between rich in-laws and poor girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. If you think this is too generic a summary, that's the whole point: "Match Point" is nothing but generic.

It's not just that Jonathan Rhys Meyers' young Irish tennis pro speaks like a 1950s BBC presenter without a hint of an explanation of how it came to him; it's that when he meets an old tennis acquaintance in the street, or when he bursts into a rage, his accent doesn't change. (Everybody in the movie speaks RP, except for the Scot-and-Cockney-coppers-as-comic-relief, and the property agent right at the beginning, probably because he was initially written as yammering in broad Brooklynese.) It's not just that sugar-daddy's country house is totally unconvincing if he's old money (wall-to-wall carpeting?), or his accent is if he's Alan Sugar. It's not just that somehow, I can't imagine a London copper calling someone a "schmuck", or a Sloane Ranger, however arty, mention that a couple is made in heaven because "their neuroses match". Or another Sloane boasting of getting good invitations because she was "born in Belgravia." Or that the country house set would welcome their daughter marrying a tennis instructor. Or that the cocktail-swilling son of the house, all public-school accent and Jeeves-and-Woosterish quips, could get away with calling even the hired help "Hey, Irish", meaning it to be affectionate. (Although the initial meeting between said son, played on automatic pilot by Matthew Goode, and JRM as his tennis coach at the Kensington Queen's Club, plays like nothing more than a gay pickup, all "Oh, you like opera? My father gives a tonne of money to Covent Garden, can I take you to Traviata tomorrow night?" for entirely too long for his sister to look like anything but a beard for the rest of the movie.) Or that even Richard Branson could just snap his fingers and said tennis pro becomes magically a business wizard. Or that a would-be American actress with only a commercial under her belt would audition for a part at the Royal Court.

It's that nobody has a real backstory, or even edges. (Scarlett Johansson does wonders with what little she's given. JRM is pretty - when he panics, you can't quite tell whether it's because he's afraid of handling a gun, or because he's just read the rest of the screenplay.) As for London, Allen tries for the postcard effect he perfected in "Manhattan" (complete with self-reference to the River Café shot), but he entirely misses the texture of the city: there isn't a single London scene set in a house, for instance, it's all flats (it's summer but Allen's London practically has no trees); people shop in Mayfair (at Aspreys and Ralph Lauren, natch), not Sloane Street; and when JRM, early in the movie, takes his posh totty for a romantic walk, it's to watch the changing of the guard at Buck House.

To be honest, there is a lovely plot twist right in the last five minutes. It's contrived, yes, but very clever. But it's not worth waiting two hours for.

And apparently, the Beeb has done it again: Allen's next movie, also starring Johansson, is also set in London. Chaps, this is your licence fee money that's being wasted.

It probably won't surprise anyone that the same French critics who found Existentialist genius in Jerry Lewis simply loved the movie, ranking it as high as Annie Hall in Allen's oeuvre. Le Monde called in "pungent social criticism with...a deeply-felt clinical study of class relations conditioning men's [*] behaviour and destiny in the...deterministic social system." And you were wondering why we had those riots.

[*] Nah, this isn't a feminist take - Le Monde's critics have no qualms about using "men" when they mean "human."

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Spring (1947)

8/10

A rarity but very nice

4 October 2001

Can you imagine a Stalin-era musical shot in 1947 in which Muscovites own cars and telephones (which *work*!) and single lady scientists live in large apartments with their own housekeeper? Oh well, Hollywood didn't exactly show how real people lived in New York either.

"Vesna" (Spring) is a cross between "Ninotchka" (mannish Soviet career woman discovers silliness and sophistication) and "The Prince and the Pauper" - Shatrova, the singer-actress, exchanges roles with Nikitina, the renowned scientist whom she's supposed to portray in a lightweight movie, and each woman (both played by Lyubov Orlova, a real Soviet film star who's not especially glamorous but plenty talented) finds love in the other's universe.

None of this is very serious, but spotting the differences between this and similar formulaic Hollywood romantic comedies of the same era is half the fun. The make-up scene, in which Nikitina's thick spectacles are discarded, eyebrows plucked, lips made up, etc., by the movie-in-the-movie's makeup department, is the exact parallel, in a slightly provincial way, of a hundred such Hollywood scenes.

The film-making process (shot on location in Moscow's studios) is another world altogether: Mukhin, the saturnine and *very* seductive director, is the Stanislavski-like uncontested master of the set, expected to rule on form and content alike, giving an actor playing Gogol the right scansion for one of the writer's poems, or requesting imperiously the studio's source material on "love." (Huge leather-bound books of poetry and literature - take *that*, Louis B. Mayer!) No producer in sight (the director assumes part of those tasks); but the sound stage is cleared mid-afternoon when another film is scheduled to be shot for a few hours there: there's a charmingly academic style to this State-run view of film production.

The musical numbers are a hodgepodge to anyone used to ruthlessly calibrated Broadway-goes-Hollywood musicals; but the talent is no less than the Bolshoi ballet blending operetta with the real thing. Orlova sings like a dream and tap-dances alone à la Eleanor Parker; the camera tries (and doesn't quite succeed) for a Busby Berkeley effect; but the scene that stays in one's memory is the most Russian one: academics and scientists gathered round the piano during an improbably glamorous evening, singing together.

In the West, a romantic comedy like "Vesna" would belong to an earlier, pre-war era (Nikitina's monumental lab is true Art-Déco): by 1948, when it was released, Gene Kelly was dancing in the streets of New York on Leonard Bernstein's glorious score for "On The Town", changing the face of musicals. Still, it has a lot of charm, not least to show us a glimpse of what was expected to make Soviet viewers dream. See it if you can.

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Conspiracy (2001 TV Movie)

10/10

Brilliant - what television should be like

24 September 2001

This is exactly what television should be like: intelligent, thought-provoking, brilliantly written and acted. The Wannsee Conference, held on January, 20, 1942, was convened by Reinhard Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh), Himmler's second in command of the SS, near Berlin: it gathered 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. Heydrich and his deputy Eichmann (Stanley Tucci) kept minutes, so that this teleplay is based largely on historical fact. The genius of the actors, the director and writer Loring Mandel is to make us understand how ordinary top bureaucrats could be pushed into accepting the ultimate horror - and to make this into an entertaining, and sometimes even very funny movie. The writing is so crisp you want to remember every line - can't *wait* for the DVD.

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The Marquise of O (1976)

10/10

A marvel of Romantic literature, utterly charming.

8 September 2001

If the romantic poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist (who wrote almost at the same time as Goethe) could have imagined the cinema, he would have approved of Rohmer's filming of his novella. What we see here are not 20th century characters in costume, but early 19th century Romantic sensibilities reacting according to their way of looking at the world. It is as strange as time travel, and utterly charming. Rohmer frames them in sets like Caspar Friedrich or Fuseli paintings. This movie is a marvel.

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