BENJAMIN

BENJAMIN is an autobiographical romantic dramedy from writer-director and British comedian Simon Amstell.  Set in contemporary London, the title character is one-time feted young film director filled with anxiety about his second feature, and too scared to receive the love that young singer Noah is offering.  It's a strange mix of awkward British dating and soft satire on the media types the cling onto the indie art scene.  I found the rom-com bizarrely uninteresting. Maybe this is because Colin Morgan (most recently seen as Bosie to Rupert Everett's Wilde in THE HAPPY PRINCE) gives a very low-key performance.  So much so that in early scenes the combination of his Northern Irish accent, anxious mumbling, and the background noise of the nightclub scene meant I was struggling to follow what was happening.  In fact that this sort of indifferent lighting and direction stretches to the rest of this presumably very low budget film.  On the other side of the romance Phenix Brossard's Noah is similarly a bit of a one-tone fantasy waif. In the words of Benjamin's best friend Stephen (a scene stealing Joel Fry - Game of Thrones' Hizdahr), Benjamin just likes boys who are "well lit and weak".  If that's not your thing, this may not be your thing.  And so the movie wends its way along its slight running time at a slow ambling pace.  There's an attempt at satire, mostly in a cameo from Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick as a dancer.  It's funny but it's no Nathan Barley.  All in all, this film is highly missable. 

BENJAMIN has a running time of 85 minutes and is rated 15 for very strong language and drug use.  The film played the BFI London Film Festival 2018 and is now on release in cinemas and on demand in the UK and Ireland.

THE HAPPY PRINCE

Oscar Wilde is one of our great playwrights, poets and wits, but his work has rightly been overshadowed by the significance of his life.  He has become a symbol of the hypocrisy of Victorian England - apparently happily married and a father, Wilde embarked on a series of homosexual affairs that were tolerated by polite society while they were with people lower down the social ladder and discreet.  But when Wilde dared to have a highly publicised affair with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, son of a boorish, violent, aristocrat, he ended up in prison.  This tragic fall, from feted and celebrated writer to spat upon criminal was harsh - from luxury to hard labour - from beloved father to exile.  When Wilde was released from prison he gave us two great works - The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis - but nothing of substance thereafter. He lived a rakish life on the Continent, cut off from his family, alienated his remaining friends with a temporary reconciliation with Bosie, and descended into poverty, ill health and death. 

Understandably the many film adaptations of Wilde's life have refrained from putting this often sordid tale on screen. They conveniently end when he enters or leaves prison, or reconciles with Bosie. We therefore remember Wilde as young, in love, and hopeful.  THE HAPPY PRINCE refuses to let us off the hook that easily.  The handsome Rupert Everett allows himself to transformed with a fat-suit, false teeth and make-up into an old, weathered, ashamed, drunk and hopeless man.  There are occasional flashes of Wildean wit, but really this is the story of a man broken by love, hypocrisy and simple lack of funds. He cannot write - whether because of the trauma he has experienced, or the stress he still endures, or because of the distraction of Bosie.  He knows his life is ending but cannot stop hurtling himself toward self-destruction, spending freely, loving freely, until the end.  Even a romantic death bed is interrupted by violent vomit. We cannot escape all the contradictions - seemly and unseemly - of Wilde.

Everett's performance is magnificent and unflinching in a way that feels eons beyond the more manicured performances of previous films. And he is ably supported by a cast including Emily Watson and Colin Firth as Wilde's wife and good friend Reggie.  We are also fortunate in the casting of Wilde's warring lovers - Edwin Thomas as his devoted and loyal literary executor Robbie Ross, and TV's Merlin, Colin Morgan, as the beautiful but selfish and fickle Bosie. The performances demand to be seen.

My regret is that Everett did not succeed in finding a more seasoned director to helm this wonderfully acted, daringly non-linear script.  He makes another daring choice to have an almost verite style to his filming, with a handheld camera and lots of POV shots. It's effective in some places - and many costume dramas can feel stuffy and old-fashioned when they match a static camera with restrictive costumes. But I found the camera too distracting, drawing my attention away from the superb performances. There are also certain cuts and juxtapositions that felt too on the nose, or too forced which I felt a more seasoned director might have avoided.  So this is a flawed film, but a deeply earnest, compassionate and well-acted one nonetheless.

THE HAPPY PRINCE has a running time of 105 minutes.  The film played Sundance, Berlin and BFI Flare 2018.  It opens in Germany on May 24th and in the UK on 15th.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH - LFF14 - Day Nine

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here:



TESTAMENT OF YOUTH drips in heritage quality. It feels like it should be a miniseries shown on ITV before Downton Abbey. It’s all beautiful people in gorgeous costumes full of earnest good intentions. There aren’t any bad people or real arguments. And the misery of the trenches is only briefly shown. Rather, in these memoirs from the real-life pacifist author Vera Brittain show the experience of World War One through the eyes of a woman necessarily at one step removed from the horrors of the front line. And if we occasionally see a soldier suffering from the blisters of mustard gas or an amputation it is done with utmost delicacy. For this is war diary as romantic drama - all soft light and longing glances and thwarted love.

I don’t mean to belittle the subject matter but it’s hard to take it seriously when the director James Kent (tellingly a TV director) seems so loathe to truly engage with the substance of the film. He is keenly interested in the love story but blunts the radicalism. Vera Brittain was an intelligent woman who had to fight to gain entry to Oxford University at a time when women couldn’t formally receive a degree. But on the point of her firebrand feminist speech she falls for dreamy Roland Leighton - a schoolfriend of her brother’s - and abandons Oxford to become a nurse. At this point her politics and aspirations are shifted very firmly to the back of the film, where they appear in a short coda. They feel utterly out of character for what has turned out to be a rather conventional character. A nurse at the start of her training tells Vera that she may have joined the nursing corps with the romantic ideal of being a ministering angel. Well, that’s precisely what this movie shows.

I find myself trying to think how radical Brittain’s memoirs must have appeared at the time, especially if (as in the film) they hint at homosexual love, feminism and the sheer waste of lives that World War One entailed on both sides. We are told in the programme notes that her book was considered to be “the voice of a generation” and was immensely popular. One can’t imagine that such a radical generational voice was really depicting events in the manner of grand heritage drama. And that is a great shame.

Are we are going to go through the centenary of the First World War refusing to look it squarely in the eye - refusing to pull back from the individual love story to the wider view? Indeed I can sum up that hesitancy on the part of the director in one shot around half way through the film. Vera comes out of her nursing hut to the back of the building where many victims of a mustard gas attack have been laid out. It’s a scene crying out for the director to crane up from Vera’s personal fears to the wider context of immense human suffering. But James Kent doesn’t have the guts to pull back wide enough to make this visual and historic point.

In other words, this is a highly conservative film pandering to World War One nostalgia - brave and decent men and women thwarted by war. It seeks no greater insight nor any greater cinematic style.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH has a running time of 130 minutes.  The movie played the London Film Festival and opens in the UK on January 16th, and in Denmark on April 30th.

HOW I LIVE NOW

HOW I LIVE NOW is a deeply odd film - half teen angst romance, half dystopian road movie.  In the first half, precocious teen actress Saoirse Ronan (ATONEMENT) plays the rebellious American teen Daisy who is shipped by her uncaring father to stay with her country bumpkin cousins in England.  At first, she's cool and aloof but is soon won over by their ramshackle charm - especially that of the brooding eldest son (and her first cousin) Edmond, played by George Mackay (SUNSHINE ON LEITH).  The backdrop to this sunkissed coming-of-age summer is an impending war.  What I really like is that because these kids are in the country, rather than in some sprawling urban metropolis, we're not seeing those standard shots of terrorist bombs in London. Rather, we're seeing fighter jets fly over head and small kids say, "wow, that's cool" before running off to a picnic.  

Once the war comes, the surrounding topsy-turviness allows Daisy and Edmond to have a taboo relationship and to commit, in their narcissistic teen angst, to make their way back to the farm if they are split up, which naturally they soon are.  What then follows is a kind of road movie through wartorn Britain, where we see the standard, rather lazy shots of cars overturned on motorways, and troops rounding up civilians.  There are hints at how the terrorists have brought England to its knees - and apparently much of Europe too - by poisoning the water supply, for instance.

Each part of the movie worked well enough on its own terms.  Ronan is a good enough actress to bring greater authenticity to the love story than the kids in TWILIGHT ever did.  And I liked the hints and glimpses of the dystopian England and found them to be truly sinister.  I even liked the fact that director Kevin Macdonald was allowing his heroine to be spiky and selfish rather than an instant maternal figure for her little cousin.  But the two halves of the film just didn't cohere.  And despite some strikingly gruesome visuals, I never felt the heroine was in genuine peril - or at least enough peril to make the final road movie genuinely thrilling.

All in all, a rather disappointing film, then - bulging with interesting ideas but lacking in follow through. 

An audio review of this movie is available below:

HOW I LIVE NOW has a running time of 101 minutes and is rated 15 in the UK. It played the Toronto Film Festival in 2013 and is currently on release in the UK, Ireland and Hungary. It will be released in the USA and Russia on November 8th, in Greece on November 14th and in France on February 19th. 

Random DVD roundup 1: WHAT A GIRL WANTS

From the writer of THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELLING PANTS comes a teen romance so schmaltzy and low-rent that it made both me and its target demographic (my god-daughter) cringe. All this despite its stellar cast of British character actors - Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins - and the central performance from Amanda Bynes who has real comic ability.

The story is pure schmaltz. Back in the day, American hippie Libby Reynolds (Kelly Preston) fell for British aristo Henry Dashwood (Colin Firth). They got married but after a misunderstanding, Libby left Henry to the responsibility of running his estate. Years later and unbeknownst to Henry, he has a teenage American daughter who rocks up and causes havoc. Henry's fiancee and future step-daughter are being upstaged and Henry's political career is threatened by his new daughter's gaffes. The daughter, Daphne (Amanda Bynes), decides to become more conservative to please her father, and so dumps her new British boyfriend. But in the end, of course, we learn that it's better to just be yourself.

All rom-coms contain a huge dollop of unreality but WHAT A GIRL WANTS just goes too far. There are scenes where Daphne is hob-nobbing with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip! But the really excruciating part is the final scene when the father finds the daughter again and declares that he wouldn't change her and loves her dearly. It's written as a straightforward rom-com love scene which is just icky when played between a father and a daughter.

Definitely one to avoid.

WHAT A GIRL W liver james, romance, teen ANTS opened in 2003 and is available on DVD an on the iTunes store.

THE DREAMERS - less Tango more self-indulgence

In a week when Bertolucci's greatest film, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, is released again in the UK, let's take a look at his 2003 release, THE DREAMERS. Both films deal with self-realisation through transgressive sexual relationships and put cinephilia cetre stage. But, separated by thirty years, Berolucci treats the subjects rather differently.

TANGO is a 100% Bertolucci product mediated by Brando. The sexual obsession with a random younger woman stems from his own fantasies, as does the need to put a film-maker centre stage. The brutality and the refusal to opt for easy choices (up until the final scene) are pure anti-Hollywood, as is the visual experimentation.

THE DREAMERS is a different beast, not least because Bertolucci is mediating the memoirs of Gilbert Adair. He tells the story of a young American (Michael Pitt) who arrives in Paris on the eve of the 1968 riots. He is taken up by an eccentric brother and sister (Louis Garrel and Eva "Casino Royale" Green). Soon they are abandoned in their parents decadent apartment and enter into an incestuous menage a trois while Paris burns outside their window. At first, the American is entranced by their chic and cine-literacy. When he asks the sister how old she is, she responds, a la Jean Seberg, "I entered this world on the Champs-Elysees, 1959. La trottoir du Champs Elysees. And do you know what my very first words were? New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!" The American is flattered and seduced by the siblings declaration that "We accept you, one of us! One of us!" As their relationship deepends he realises that he may not be as accepting of their transgressive behaviour as they are. To be one of them is to be, to some extent, a freak. Their relationship is, then, ultimately doomed.

THE DREAMERS is as courageous in portraying sexual relationships as TANGO but lacks the emotional depth. Furthermore, unshackled from the intensity and brutality of emotional discoveries made in TANGO, Bertolucci is free to indulge his love of the French New Wave. THE DREAMERS is a web of references to and re-enactments of seminal scenes from cinema history. To that end, it's a joyful puzzle for cinema fans, but I suspect something of a bore for casual viewers. It's not just cinema history that's under the 'scope, but the very means by which we take in moving images. In a key scene, the American takes the Sister to the cinema. She instinctively goes to the first row, where the cinephiles sit. But the American wants her to sit in the back row, like on a real date, where the point of being there is to kiss rather than watch the art.

"Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they'd been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist's cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us... from the world."

Overall then, THE DREAMERS is a cinephile's delight. The lush photography and production design; the cinema references and the decent performances from the leads make it a worthwhile experience. But it does not have the profound impact of TANGO.

THE DREAMERS was originally released in 2003 and is available on DVD.