London Film Fest 2011 Day 14 - WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

Andrea Arnold (RED ROAD, FISHTANK) is an exceptional British director - a woman whose films take us under the skin of the characters she is portraying. She isn't a director of dialogue but a director of sensory perception. We hear the wind; dogs scuffling; kisses. We can almost feel the texture of worn clothes; curled hair; ruffled blankets; the mist on our face. We feel the relationship between two people from the way they are in each other's presence, not from the dialogue. And every emotion felt by the characters is mirrored in nature, brought to us with startling clarity by Robbie Ryan's award-winning cinematography. In short, Andrea Arnold echoes the authenticity and heightened sense-perception of Terrence Malick - high praise indeed - but justified. All these qualities make Andrea Arnold the perfect director to take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - a movie whose characters are so much embedded in the wild beauty of the Yorkshire Moors. Working in collaboration with screenwriter Olivia Hetreed (GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING), Arnold has taken a bold approach to the source novel. She only portrays the first half of the novel, takes away the framing device of Nelly recounting the story to a traveller, as well as the gothic vision that opens the novel.  What this does is allow her to take her time over establishing the central characters and conflicts.  

The Earnshaw family live in a ramshackle farmhouse on the Moors in the early nineteenth century.  The puritanical father brings home a poor young black boy, later baptised as Heathcliff, throwing the elder son, Hindley into brutally violent jealousy and contempt and the young daughter Catherine into a kind of selfish, selfless profound love.  When the father dies, Hindley brutalises Heathcliff; and his poor, rough person stands in sharp contrast with the smooth refined Linton family.  And so, when Edgar Linton proposes, Cathy accepts, though feeling she is betraying both herself and Heathcliff, who overhearing, runs away. So ends the first hour of the film.  In the second hour, Heathcliff has returned a rich man, and Cathy is now married to Edgar.  Their love is hemmed in by Edgar sending his sister, Isabella, as chaperone, and when Heathcliff learns Cathy is pregnant, he returns this apparent "betrayal" by seducing Isabella, so setting off a nervous reaction in Cathy.

The story is, then, powerful, passionate, violent - filled with supposed and real slights, revenge, and a love so painful to bear it results in self-destructive behaviour.  For it to work on screen, we have to feel that visceral connection between Cathy and Heathcliff - we have to believe that their every breath and decision is coloured by the connection.  In the first half of the film, I absolutely believe that thanks to some exceptional casting, the portrayal of young Cathy and young Heathcliff sets a new benchmark among the tens of film adaptations. Shannon Beer and Solomon Gave quietly, powerfully, portray a real and charismatic connection - they are quite simply magnetic. Sadly, the movie is let down by indifferent casting in the later scenes, with Kaya Scodelario (Effy in TV's "Skins") and James Howson.  I didn't buy into their relationship - Howson was too milksop, too little darkly enjoying his revenge on Hindley, not malicious enough with Isabella - and Scodelario simply didn't have the look of a wild bird tamed, caged - she looked to Isabella-ish!   Also, I know we are meant to suspend our disbelief, but the two Cathy's look utterly dissimilar. One feels that better casting would've provided the continuity seen in the Young and Teen Kevins in Lynne Ramsay's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS played Venice (where Robbie Ryan won Best Cinematographer) and Toronto 2011. It opens in the UK on November 11th; in Spain on November 25th; in Slovenia on January 26th; and in Poland on March 23rd.

BRIGHTON ROCK (2010) - A noble failure

When writer-director Rowan Joffe introduced the preview screening of BRIGHTON ROCK at the BFI last night, he was apologetic. He apologised for daring to take on the Boulting Brothers' classic adaptation, but argued that his movie was borne out deep respect and love of Graham Greene's novel. In the production notes he went further, arguing that Greene's novel was so great, that it DESERVED more that one interpretation. I thought this was a rather odd introduction. Good art should never apologise for itself. And how can one separate the novel from the film in the case where the novelist actually wrote the screenplay?

At any rate, taking Joffe at his word, this is what is likely to happen in any broadly faithful version of Brighton Rock. A violent teenage racketeer called Pinkie murders Fred Hale, a member of the most powerful gang in town. He has to seduce an innocent young girl called Rose in order to find out if she really does know who did it, and prevent her squealing to the police. And while he's trying to placate this needy innocent girl, despite his inward disgust at her masochistic nature, he's trying to out-wit the local gang-boss, Collioni, and avoid the interfering meddling of Fred Hale's friend, Ida. The tone of the film should be menacing, unnerving, sometimes terrifying, but always taut. And running in the background is a debate about the nature of good and evil. Is Ida's simplistic categorisation of herself as good and Pinkie as evil, through and through, like the lettering in the stick of rock, true?  Or is Grace far more complicated and far more grand than her vulgar mind can fathom?

So how does Rowan Joffe's adaptation stack up? To start with the positive, it is a handsomely made film with beautifully observed production design. It takes us from the peeling walls of Kite's house via the faded grandeur of Ida's tea-rooms to the glossy, pretentious interiors of Collioni's Cosmpolitan hotel. DP John Mathieson's (ROBIN HOOD, GLADIATOR) photography captures that watery sunshine of the British sea-side and there is a beautifully lit climax on the cliffs. As for the acting, Andrea Riseborough (NEVER LET ME GO) is an effective Rose, making her delusional belief in Pinkie believable and heart-breaking. She is ably supported in the minor roles by a fine cast, with British actors of the quality of Phil Redmond (ANOTHER YEAR), Sean Harris (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE) and Steve Evets (LOOKING FOR ERIC) playing Spicer, Hale and Rose's father respectively. Moreover, there is an air of earnest respect and delicate care that overlays the entire project. Joffe claims he loves the novel and is respectful of the original film. Well, you can feel that.

And maybe that's the problem. Because this film just never takes off. It feels turgid. There is no pace, no sense of menace, and for all the nightmare visions of Pinkie at the end of a rope and scenes of Rose praying, no real sense of the stakes - whether literal or metaphysical. The film feels too safe, too sunlit, too designed somehow. It's as though the effort of getting the 1964 costume designs just right - the perfectly appointed suite in the Cosmpolitan Hotel - has resulted in a series of beautifully framed still shots. But where is the seedy menace of Greeneland? I simply wasn't scared of Sam Riley's Pinkie.

If we're looking for culprits, I guess the decision to set the film in 1964 rather than the late 30s would be one. The "pop" clothes and music, the mods and rockers, are a distraction, and far less menacing than the lurid clair-voyants and fair-gound freakishness of the original film. Maybe the youth angst theme is just to temporary - too situated - for a film about mortal sin. I also think some of the performances are too broad and perhaps the writing too reductive. Helen Mirren's Ida is shorn of the 1947 Ida's vulgarity. She comes off as a simplistic "tart with a heart" - and the use of these simplistic tropes is something I noticed, and disliked, in Rowan Joffe's script for the awful George Clooney thriller, THE AMERICAN. Andy Serkis' Collioni is a caricature - and maybe there is some sense in which those glamorous Italian mobsters are self-consciously caricatures - but you don't get the feeling that Joffe and Serkis are playing with that level of sophistication here. 

Just as some of the performances are very broad, the movie also has an incredibly intrusive over-worked orchestral score by Martin Phipps, never ceasing to bring out the Catholic material with its use of religious texts. In fact, the treatment of the movie's religious content is altogether reductive and crude.  Do we really need Pinkie's wooden bedroom to have the paint-stripped in just the pattern to reveal a cross? Do we really need Pinkie and Rose's first kiss to be shot from over-head, Pinkie holding her uncomfortably by the hands in a kind of martyred crucifix pose? Do we really need to see Rose in Church praying before an altar, shot from above the head of Christ? This ham-fisted handling of the religious content is best seen in his choice of final scene - the true test of any screenwriter claiming that he has adapted the book out of love. Admittedly, it was a test that Greene himself partly failed, but that is no excuse.

BRIGHTON ROCK played Toronto and London 2010 and will be released in the UK and Finland next Friday. It opens in Germany on April 21st.

LOOKING FOR ERIC - The crowd call your name: They love you all the same

LOOKING FOR ERIC is one of the best films I have seen this year. It has everything - by turns laugh-out-loud funny and desperately sad - beautifully acted - utterly authentic - a middle-aged rom-com and a telling depiction of life in modern England - not to mention an insightful analysis of modern professional football. Oh yes, and it contains a touching set of cameos from legendary centre-forward, sometime actor and incomprehensible philosophe*, Eric "King" Cantona.

The core of the film is a brilliant performance by Steve Evets as Eric Bishop, a middle-aged post-man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He abandoned his beloved first wife, Lily, thirty years ago and is still riddled by shame. His second wife has abandoned him, leaving him with two surly teenage stepsons, entangled in gun-crime. In desperation, his sub-conscious summons up Eric Cantona - an inspirational leader who will give him the courage to re-connect with Lily and save his sons, chiefly by holding onto his friends and "trusting his team-mates".

The resulting film is a marvel of tight and courageous scripting. Writer Paul Laverty doesn't shy away from grief, or from bawdy British working-class humour. Somehow, the sentimental scenes never seem schmaltzy, the dramatic scenes never seem unrealistic or forced and the political commentary is handled lightly. Most impressively, Ken Loach had so carefully entwined the peril and the fantasy elements that I utterly bought into the rather fantastic and cathartic denouement.

Overall, LOOKING FOR ERIC is a wonderful and memorable film. People who don't know about soccer, or about Cantona, need not shy away from it. It's a deeply human, warm, dark, film. If I see a better movie this year, I'll be very surprised.

LOOKING FOR ERIC played Cannes 2009 but was beaten by Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON for the Palme D'Or. It is currently on release in France and opens in Belgium and the UK next week. It opens in the Netherlands on September 17th, in Norway on October 16th, in Brazil on December 11th and in Spain on January 8th 2010.

*"When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."

Rather than CHANGELING, why not watch SUMMER and see some authentic emotion and social injustice?

After a long day in the office I wasn't looking forward to what I presumed would be an earnest but dull look at gritty British working class life. I couldn't have been more wrong. SUMMER is a marvellous film - it's certainly a bracing look at wasted lives but the bleak subject matter is offset by a wicked sense of humour founded in the little absurdities of life.

It's the story of three friends who grew up in working class England in the eighties and where life took them. Shaun is a kid with learning disabilities in a school and an era where people just thought you were being arsey when really you were frustrated and angry. His best mate is Daz, another kid consigned to no future by an educational system that streamed kids into those worthy of taking exams and those destined for the dole queue. The two kids hang out with a girl called Katy against the better judgement of her parents. After all, Katy's clever - she has a future. (If you want to see how institutions victimise innocents then this movie is far more subtle and realistic than CHANGELING - even though I know CHANGELING was based on a true story that just happened to be absurd.)

The story of their summer as teenagers is inter-cut with their adult lives. Shaun (Robert Carlyle) is now a disheveled petrol pump attendant who also acts as a carer for Daz (Steve Evets) who's now consigned to a wheelchair and drinking himself to death. Daz' son Daniel (Michael Socha) is following in his footsteps. And then there's Katy - who went on the university and reached dizzying heights as a provincial solicitor.

You'd think all this would add up to a pretty grim movie - and there are scenes that are as anger-inducing as CHANGELING wants to be. The social injustice drips from the screen. And Robert Carlyle's performance is as emotionally affecting and heartbreaking as anything Angelina Jolie conjures up. But the great thing is that despite seemingly shitty circumstances both Shaun and Daz retain their sarcastic sense of humour and can still take pleasure in life. And the same could be said for the movie as a whole. SUMMER doesn't have the manicured production values of a big-budget Oscar contender but it feels more real, more humble and it's all the more engaging for that.

SUMMER played Rome 2008 and is currently on release in the UK.