COLETTE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Two

Wash Westmoreland switches gears from his wonderful STILL ALICE to a period drama about the French Belle Epoque novelist Colette, and her marriage to the literary impresario "Willy".  As the movie opens we see the charming, avuncular Willy come to rural Burgundy to woo the girl over a decade younger than him, but our expectations over-turned as this apparent innocent meets him later in a hay barn for a quickie.  They then move to Paris and begin their married life. She is frustrated by his affairs and flirtations - he says it's just what men do.  But the real conflict will come when Willy enlists Colette to be on his "factory" of writers. They provide the words - he the brand name and marketing.  Colette pours her childhood memories into books that effectively create a new genre - coming of age stories with a hint of subversive sexuality for young women.  Combined with Willy's carefully orchestrated PR machine, the books are a success. But all under Willy's name....

What's wonderful about this film is its recreation of a fascinating period of history - one of bold ideas, beautiful art, freedom and flirtation.  The costumes and sets are beautifully done, and even Thomas Ades' score introduces what would then have been cutting edge compositions. After all, it's this artsy salon crowd that would first have embraced Satie's Gymonpedes. I also love the completely unflamboyant way in which the film embraces colour-blind casting, and its straightforward depiction of gay relationships and gender fluid living.

As for the main strokes of the story, the script (Wash Westmoreland, the late Richard Glatzer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz) commits sins of omission rather than commission.  It is very true to the life of Colette and Willy, and especially to their facility with words. What might have been quite a dirge-like film about a woman exploited by a man is thus transformed into something very smart and witty, and often laugh out loud funny. To that end, Dominic West - who has been getting away with rogueish behaviour since THE WIRE - is perfectly cast as the "fat arsehole".  Indeed, after a rather triumphant speech by a career-best Keira Knightley, one feels rather uplifted and hopeful at the end of the film - something confirmed by end title cards that tell us how happy and successful Colette was, and of her position as the premiere women of French letters.  

My only slight complaint is that the film wants to subtly shoe-horn the Colette story into having an ending that's more streamlined and progressive than the reality would prove.  If you knew nothing else about her than what you saw in the film, you might suppose that she fought for and won all the rights to be seen as the sole author of her work and that she had a long and happy relationship with Missy.  By contrast, the relationship with Missy ended (Missy ended up committing suicide after the war) and Colette married a man and had a child.  And while she did win the rights to be sole author after Willy's death, after HER death, Willy's son contested the authorship again. 

COLETTE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance, Toronto and London 2018. It went on limited release in the USA on September 21st and will be released in the UK on January 25th 2019.

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.

JOHN CARTER - Disney's ginger stepchild

JOHN CARTER is a movie so unloved by its studio that before it was released it was almost possible to recast it in its own Hollywood "underdog story".  Over the past six months, articles in the trade press have bemoaned Disney's lack of marketing strategy - the pre-commitment to the 60 second Superbowl ad (which was underwhelming at best) - dropping the "OF MARS" from the title.  The studio chief seems to have been backing his way out of the door, pushing blame for this fiasco on his predecessor - and, make no mistake, this movie IS a fiasco. A tent-pole movie whose budget is a reported £250m plus marketing, with no A-list stars and no brand-name recognisable source text.  Even a superbly made movie would struggle to earn this kind of money back, and JOHN CARTER isn't superbly made.  For that, I guess we have to blame writer-director and Pixar golden-boy Andrew Stanton (UP, WALL-E, TOY STORY, FINDING NEMO).  A director who has come across as so defensive on his UK press tour as to alienate his potential audiences.  His basic stance seems to be "we make the movies we wanna make: so screw the audience and the studio.  Steve Jobs told me we were hired for our taste."  Sub-text: if we, the humble ticket-paying audience don't like the movie, it's on us - we just aren't tasteful enough. It's also completely disingenuous to suggest that Stanton makes movies without studio pressure. If so, why the extensive re-cutting, the expensive re-shoots, the change in title, the retro-fitted 3D?  All of which are the studio's desperate attempt to get back more cents on the dollar than investors in Greek sovereign debt.  (Prognosis - probably about the same i.e. 30 cents on the dollar.)

All the negative press had made me perversely desperate to like JOHN CARTER - to become its champion. But sadly, the movie didn't give me anything.  It was just dull over-produced nonsense - a sort of trashy sci-fi B-movie that, despite its egregious budget, still managed to look pretty cheesy - a movie that hinted at action-adventure serials in the FLASH GORDON or INDIANA JONES or STAR WARS style, but failed to live up to any of them.  (Not that there's anything wrong with B-movies - we all love FLASH GORDON - but there's no need to spend more than, say, £70m, on a B-movie).  Apparently, the movie is based on an early twentieth century serial by Edgar Rice Borroughs (he of TARZAN fame) that ran to some 13 instalments. I have no interest in seeing any more.

So what's it all about, Alfie?  John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a Confederate cavalryman, mysteriously transported to Mars where he uses his new super-strength (thanks to low gravity) to intervene in the war between Helios (good guys) and Zodanga (bad guys). He does this by enlisting the help of the hitherto neutral Tharks (the Ewok/Na'avi of this flick).  In the process, Carter falls for the Helios' Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins) saves her from a forced marriage to the Zodanga Prince Sab Than, foils the manipulations of the mysterious Thern (Mark Strong) and brokers a reconciliation between a Thark father and daughter (Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton). Not bad, huh?!

This is your basic sci-fi, space-romance story in the B-movie style.  All good fun.  So what went so horribly wrong? Well, for a start, it just isn't fun to watch! The dialogue and delivery is remarkably po-faced and earnest.  The only actor who looks like he's having any fun at all is James Purefoy as a Helios General in the HBO Rome Mark Anthony mould.  Purefoy is a scene-stealer, and left me wondering what this movie had been like if he had been cast as John Carter instead of pretty boy and ex-Friday Night Lights star, Taylor Kitsch. Purefoy would've been more age-appropriate for a start, and has so much more charisma than Kitsch, who comes across as a whimpering pasty bouncing ball.  

Which brings me to the next problem: the look of the actors.  The movie is set on Mars, so of course, the Martians have to have red skin. Problem is, they just look like they've have had Essex-style bad fake tans (orange-heavy) and their costumes are so plastic-fantastic they look like cheap action figures.  Which brings me to the next problem.  Poor Lynn Collins - the female love-interest - is made to where a series of revealing costumes that are clearly catering to the same teen-boy fantasy as Princess Leia's bikini.  This sits ill with the fact that Collins is not a conventional beauty. I applaud that casting - it makes the fact that the Princess is a science geek more credible than, say, casting Megan Fox - but it seems hypocritical to make so much of her brains and fighting smarts, while dressing her like Martian Barbie. 

And this uneasy juxtaposition brings me to my final, and biggest problem with the film: its need to bely its B-movie status my pumping up the emotional gravity. Do we really need the father-daughter angst in the Thark storyline, for instance? Cutting that could've got the movie down to a 90 minute run-time for a start. And worst of all, the most crass scene is one where John Carter in battle is inter-cut with a flash-back to him digging his wife's grave on Earth.  No-one needs that kind of crass emotional manipulation in the midst of a good old-fashioned punch-up.  The inter-cutting was utterly unearned and utterly unsuccessful. Much like the rest of this unloved ginger stepchild of a movie.

JOHN CARTER is on global release in all bar Portugal, where it opens next weekend, and Japan, where it opens on April 13th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 14 - THE AWAKENING

Dominic West (Robert) and Rebecca Hall (Florence) star in THE AWAKENING.

THE AWAKENING is an intelligent, adult horror movie that sees Florence (Rebecca Hall), a notorious debunker of spiritualism, invited to a boy's boarding school by Robert (Dominic West) to investigate an apparent haunting. This sets up a classic haunted house movie, in the manner of Alejandro Amenábar's The Others - but with the refreshing site of a clever, independent woman as the protagonist, and the pervasive air of  post-war mourning hanging heavy over proceedings. The resolution is satisfyingly complicated and there were enough genuinely unexpected scary moments to make this good horror - particularly the pivotal bathroom scene. Admittedly, there is nothing particularly innovative in the set up (Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk), but first time feature director Murphy creates and sustains a genuinely tense and morbid atmosphere that completely sucked me in, largely thanks to superb cinematography from DP Eduard Grau (A SINGLE MAN, BURIED) and a desaturated colour palette.

THE AWAKENING played Toronto and London 2011. It opens in the UK and Ireland on 11th November.

London Film Fest Day 5 - FROM TIME TO TIME

Writer-director Julian Fellowes has transferred his familiar obsession with characters trapped in the British class system to the children's adventure genre, in his faithful adaptation of "The Chimneys of Green Knowe". I must confess that I did not read the book as a child, so I take the fidelity on faith and the overall style of the film, which is "heritage" film-making in the manner of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN without any vulgar American influence. The movie looks and feels traditional and heartfelt: indeed, it got a little dusty in the theatre toward the end.

The plot occurs in wartime England, both World War Two and the Napoleonic wars, hence the unhappily vague title of the film. In 1944 a young boy called Tolly is sent to stay with his Granny in her old manor house while he waits for news of his father, Missing In Action. Granny fears she will have to sell the house, and the movie has that air of pining for a lifestyle that can no longer be maintained, a little like Brideshead. The family jewels were, you see, lost in the fire that destroyed half the house in the early nineteenth century. Tolly periodically escapes into this world and meets kind Captain Oldelknow, his lovely daughter Susan, and her helper, an escaped slave boy called Jacob. Together they fight the evil butler Caxton and Susan's resentful brother Sefton. Along the way, Julian Fellowes draws a parralel between Mrs Oldeknow of C19, shut out by her social betters, and Tolly's mother, deemed "common" by Granny.

FROM TIME TO TIME is a charming little movie, well-made and well-acted by a sterling British cast. It's not going to set the world alight, but as honest family entertainment it works just fine.

300 - truly a spectacle

300 is truly a spectacle. It dazzles the viewer with stunning images of finely-hewed, red-caped Spartan warriors; decadent Persian courtiers; a gold-flecked, jewel-bedecked god-king; and enough stylised spear-fights to satisfy the most ardent Total Warrior.

The movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel which told the story of the Battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae is a narrow pass in Greece, and in 480 BC King Leonidas of Sparta defended that pass with a small army of his own Spartans and other Greeks against a vastly larger Persian invading force.

Writer-director Zach Snyder beautifully renders Frank Miller's graphic novel: feeding our imaginations with the sort of old-fashioned glamour, excess and epic sentiment that old-fashioned big-studio Hollywood used to specialise in. The director uses the same techniques as in SIN CITY - mixing live-action with CGI to create highly stylised visuals that approximate the graphic novel. Famous plates are re-created closely - specifically Leonidas pushing the Persian ambassador into the well; the Spartans herding the Persians off a cliff; and the final spear throw that grazes Xerxes face. The casting closely matches the facial features of the characters in the graphic novel too - especially the case of the effete Xerxes and Leonidas himself.

The plot is also fairly close to the novel, with no key scenes ommitted. The key difference is that the role of Queen Gorgo is massively enhanced, perhaps as a sop to Hollywood's need for a strong female character and a love-interest. (They did the same thing with the role of Arwen in LOTR). Thus, the film breaks away from the battle-scenes to Gorgo's struggle to get the Spartan council to send the full army in support of Leonidas.

So much for what 300 is. What 300 is not, is a history lesson. It is not a political tract. Nor should we beat it up for failing to give us an exact rendering of the key battles and fighting styles or for simplifying the clash between Persia and Greece as one of freedom versus tyranny. (Although, in its defence, Dominic West's Spartan politican rightly points out to Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo that not all men are born equal, even in Sparta.)

300 does not pretend to be a serious politico-historical discourse. It is, simply-put, epic, fascinating, sensually-luxurious entertainment. The concubines, giant-mutant beasties, scabrous priests and other exotica pander to our most basic desire for the strange and exciting. I defy anyone not to take pleasure in the finale to Gorgo's council speech or Gerard Butler's Connery-like drawl as he refuses to kneel to Xerxes on account of his "cramp".

Moreover, exotica aside, the battle scenes do give us a sense of the scale of the battle and the key tactical necessity of forcing the Persians to abandon an open assault from the beach and attempt to pass through the narrow gorge at Thermopylae. I doubt whether Frank Miller's novel or this film would have been successful as they are without this key central fact: dress it up how you will, the true story of a small band of men defending their home against a mammoth invading army and inflicting disproportionately large injuries upon it is, in a word, quite literally: awesome.

300 is on release in the Philippines, Greece, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, the US, South Korea, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Turkey, the UK, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands and Russia. It opens in Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Romania and Spain tomorrow. It opens in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Slovakia, Slovenia on the 29th and in Brazil, Denmark, Latvia and Venezuala on the 30th. 300 opens in Sweden on April 4th and in Australia, Germany, Israel and Portugal on April 5th. It opens in Austria and Finland on April 6th and in Japan on June 9th.