BREATHE - BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Opening Night Gala

As predicted, and in keeping with a long line of banal, pretty heritage products opening the BFI London Film Festival, Andy Serkis' directorial debut BREATHE is a deeply dull and forgettable drama about a very nice couple.  There isn't any dramatic tension or any surprises. The story proceeds as expected and then comes to a neat end.  It's all done in a perfectly competent manner, but the big emotional set pieces failed to move me (although Meester Phil was successfully emotionally manipulated despite himself.) 

The plot is based on the true story of Robin and Diane Cavendish. In the late 50s, the blissfully married couple were living in Kenya in sun kissed perfect imperial gorgeousness.  And then, just after Diane fell pregnant, Robin contracted polio, rendering him paralysed from the neck down and unable to breathe without an artificial respirator.  Such was the state of medical science at the time that Robin was condemned to a short and depressing life chained to a respirator in a hospital ward. (Although as we see later, in the one genuinely moving scene in the film, the poor bastards in a German sanitarium have it far worse.)  

But this being upper class British heritage drama, nothing is going to stop our heroes from triumphing over this adversity.  Bottom lips quiver, tears are suppressed, and they just keep calm and carry on.  Luckily, although pleading poverty, Diane can still afford a nanny and a stately pile in which Robin can convalesce and their best mate happens to be an Oxford professor who designs the first ever artificial respirator cum wheelchair. And so it all continues.  Even when they need money for chairs for some other patients they find a helpful rich aristo to dole it out.  

There are never any emotional outbursts or arguments, because they love each other perfectly. Even their teenage son (who in real life went on to produce this film) never has an angry frustrated teenage strop.  And so we merely perambulate earnestly toward a conclusion that comes half an hour later than it really needed to.  The problem about making movies about paragons is that they are dull. Maybe the couple were really this unflappable and lovely.  But ye gods, you can't power 120 minutes of cinema out of that. 

BREATHE opens in the USA on October 13th, in the UK on Oct 27th and in Australia on Dec 27th. The film is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 114 minutes.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 6 - MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Salman Rushdie, Shriya Saran, Deepa Mehta and Staya Bhabha
at the UK premiere of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Oh dear. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a wonderful book - vibrant, mysterious, magical, all-encompassing, particular.  There is a richness in the text and an elegance of phrase that not only won it the Booker Prize of that year, but also the Booker's Booker and the Best of Booker.  It is, then, judged by the English literary establishment to be the best novel published in the last 40 years.  To adapt such a novel might be assumed to be a daunting task, and although many were relieved to see that Rushdie himself had taken on that role, I suspect that it is one of the reasons this movie fails.  

For the movie feels almost too tame, too faithful to the key plot points of the book, and yet entirely missing its mischievous magic and political wisdom.  I suspect that a more independent screenwriter might have had more luck taking a fresh perspective. Maybe a director like Joe Wright with his bold (if ultimately over-powering) theatre-conceit for his recent ANNA KARENINA could've matched Rushdie's daring style.  Maybe Wes Anderson could've brought that sense of childhood magic to the film?  And we will shortly see if Ang Lee has better luck with his adaptation of the heavily magic realist, THE LIFE OF PI.  Instead, what we get with this adaptation is a lusciously filmed, rather stickily sentimental, aimless movie, that gets us from A to B, from the 1920s to the 1970s, with faltering energy, pace and interest. It is, sadly, a failure.

The movie tells the story of a boy called Saleem Sinai, born in 1947 on the stroke of midnight as India gains her independence.  He is raised as a prosperous Indian Muslim, but is sent to Pakistan, where he sees first hand the military coup and the war that saw Pakistan forfeit Bangladesh.  He returns to Mumbai a slum dweller, suffers through Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Emergency, before finally creating a kind of family of misfits.  Such a plot makes the book sound much simpler than it really is, of course.  For Saleem is an imposter - a baby switched at birth with another "midnight's child" - a boy called Shiva who will grow to become a gangster and an Army officer - the dark backing of Saleem's life. Furthermore, all of the "midnight's children", born at India's independence have magical powers, but Saleem's are the greatest, because he can summon them all in a kind of mystical conference.

There are small delights in this film - the prologue which tells of how Saleem's grandparents met in Kashmir is beautifully told - thanks largely to a superb cameo performance from Rajat Kapoor.  Darsheel Safary was enchanting as the young Saleem, perplexed at his "father"'s sudden rejection and his cold upbringing by the hilarious Major Zulfikar (Rahul Bose).  But as Saleem becomes an adult the movie loses all its energy and pace.  I don't think that's the fault of the casting - just the rather 1066 And All That approach to the storytelling - history as a series of disjointed events whose meaning and context we don't really understand.  In other words, the tragedy of this film is that it has transformed a  history of India that was numinous and magical and rich and textured into something rather plodding and banal.

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN  played Telluride, Toronto and London 2012 and opens in the USA and Canada on Oct 26th. The running time is 148 minutes.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - PURE

PURE is an oddly sentimental movie about a very nasty subject: a small boy coming to terms with his mother's heroin addiction. We first meeting him cooking up her "medicine", lashing out as nasty neighbours who call her what she is - a junkie. Later, he'll try to nurse her through cold turkey. Scenes where she tells him she wishes he'd never been born are almost unbearable to watch.

Molly Parker turns in a brilliant performance as the addict mother who undoubtedly loves her son. David Wenham is quite scarily convincing in his cameo role as the sinister dealer. But the real star is a young Harry Eden, seen recently in FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL. He's utterly convincing and heart-breaking as the young boy old before his time with worry, eager to do right by his mum.

What stops this movie well short of greatness is its tendency towards mawkishness, as reflected in Nitin Sawhney's score. The other great flaw is Keira Knightley trying her best with a chav London accent but failing miserably to convince as a pregnant working-class junkie.

PURE played Toronto and London 2002 and Berlin 2003 where Gillies Mackinnon and Harry Eden won awards. It was released in the UK in 2003 and in the US in 2005. It is available on DVD.