Andrew Haigh's 45 Years (2015)

Forty-five years is the length of time Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) have been married, and are due to have a celebratory dinner at the Assembly House, Norwich. Then Geoff receives a letter written in German telling him that the body of Katya, his girlfriend who died fifty years before, can now be seen in a melting glacier (global warning) when she fell down a crevasse. Now surely questions should start here: how did whoever sent the letter know Geoff's address after all this time?; how could they possibly know the body is Katya's?; etc, etc. The script is already more full of holes than a colander.

Kate doesn't know about Katya (and note the name resemblance), doesn't know that Geoff keeps a scrapbook of memories of his relationship with Katya in the loft, so has no idea that she died with her and Geoff's embryo inside her, but she sees numerous slides of her that Geoff has kept and she looks like Kate. So all this time Geoff has harboured the secret that Kate is really a substitute for Katya, has kept the same interests the young couple had? And as Geoff drenches himself increasingly into the past Kate secretly delves into it too and becomes increasingly alarmed. Instead of comforting her deranged husband she gets increasingly jealous: of a woman who died fifty year before! Is an audience still out there?

The anniversary party takes place, and Geoff gives a good speech and says he's always loved his wife, blah, blah, but is he really thinking of Kate, or Katya, when he says that? And after ninety minutes of bland, impossible to believe script I was expecting that Geoff would kill himself, just die, or at the very least confess his undying love for Katya in front of all the guests.

This truly drab film won a host of awards and nominations and it's true that the acting is excellent. But it's all for no purpose, and I certainly won't be watching any more films by Andrew Haigh.

Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox (2013)

 

Anyone unaware of the Mumbai dabbawalas soon becomes enlightened in this film of India, where much is made of the dabbawalas picking up lunches from restaurants and homes to be delivered to (usually husbands) at work. This is how widower Saajan (Irrfan Khan), who's shortly due for retirement, comes into epistolary contact with the much younger Ila (Nimrat Kaur). Ila is trying to spice up her married life by cooking wonderful meals for her husband, although the (apparently virtually impossible) happens and Saajan receives (with huge pleasure) the lunch prepared by Ila. Soon Ila and Saajan are sending notes to each other via the lunchbox, and the notes become increasingly friendly.

Ila's husband is having an affair and she tells Saajan that she's thinking of moving to Bhutan where the cost living is about 80% less than Mumbai, and Saajan bravely suggests that he move there too. In her reply, Ila suggests that they meet in a local restaurant. Unfortunately Saajan goes there but only looks at her from a distance, finding her beautiful but considering that he is far too old for her. In the end, there is no definite end.

Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behaviour (2015)

 

Appropriate Behaviour is Desiree Akhavan's dazzling first feature, in which Akhavan herself stars as a young bisexual Iranian-American Shirin trying to rebuild her life again in Brooklyn  after breaking up with with  Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).  She's also now homeless and jobless, although she has wealthy parents and finds no problem with accommodation and soon gets a job teaching very young kids in Slope Park how to make a movie.

The difficulties Shirin has are not only in establishing to herself who she is, but also to her parents who she is sexually, and after a very weak confession to her mother she's in denial. The poster above might indicate drug problems, but she's just in the toilet of a bar, surrounded by comments such as 'Brian is a stupid dick', 'Fuck you', 'Suck it', 'Kiss me', etc. She's just sitting on the toilet cover pissed off, but not pissed or anything worse.

Sasie Sealy's Lucky Grandma (2019)

 

This prime slice of (brilliantly acted) hokum is highly unusual in that the main character Grandma (Tsai Chin) was almost 85 at the time it was made, and she is in almost every scene: in fact, the film wouldn't exist without her. 

Grandma smokes her way through most of the movie, and lives a very dangerous life. Her husband having left her with almost nothing, she draws out that almost nothing and takes a bus to an Atlantic City casino because her fortune teller has told her that 28 October will be her lucky day. 

It is and it isn't, as she loses all her money, but on the way back the stranger sitting next to her dies, his bag falls into her hands, she keeps it, and finds that the bag contains a fortune. Trouble is, this gets her involved with the Chinese mafia, she has to employ a bodyguard, go through a great deal of potentially life-threatening episodes, but well, she has to come out intact, even if it means moving in with her son and his wife in the end.

Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance (2006)

 

Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance is a history of mass hysteria from the Middle Ages through to today, and includes nuns miaowing and biting like cats; dancing mania in Germany; people dancing to cure themselves of tarantula bites; students in Louisiana with a twitching leg supposedly infected by the water; an outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanzania; fainting fits in Blackburn, Lancashire; in China, mania caused by people believing that their genitalia were disappearing; in Belgium, people experienced nausea on consuming a fizzy drink. This is told by Maxine Peake acting as a professor, but the message is that madness is contagious and can be experienced by perfectly, er, 'normal' people.

Carol Morley's The Fear of Trilogy (2006)

 

The Fear of Trilogy is (perhaps) a deliberately pretentious title for a film, particularly as it's only three minutes long. It inevitably comes across as mock-documentary, especially as the po-faced Maxine Peake tells us what she knows of the dangers of birds (Hitchcock had to get in there), things that can fall on your head (best to wear a crash helmet), and sleep-walking into a bar, or even into a cock.

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour (2004)

 

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour is, perhaps needless to say, about trauma, although this is fictional. Annie (Alicya Eyo) is obviously traumatised: whatever the interviewer asks her in this east London environment, Annie (suffering from a kind of dissociation illness) is only prepared to talk about the general local history of the area, about Ghandi, Stalin and (significantly) the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing: anything but the death of her younger sister, for which she feels guilty. Death, trauma, disappearance, all haunt Carol Morley's films.

Carol Morley's Return Trip (2001)

 

This twenty-four minute short is a reconstruction of a trip to India which the teenage Carol Morley made with her friend Catherine Corcoran (or 'Corky').  There are a great number of impressionistic shots here – including a very irritating sequence when the ping-pong background 'music' almost drowns the comment – although the film soon settles into the real subject of the film: trauma. During the original visit Corky had fallen into a well-like structure, had to receive hospital treatment, and in fact almost died.  Both mothers comment on the event, and Corky reveals that she still hasn't completely recovered after all the years, but Morley is obviously trying to put an old ghost to sleep.

Carol Morley's Everyday Something (2001)

 

From Carol Morley's collection of newspaper cuttings of unusual events comes this film reconstructing often obsessive forms of behaviour: a man makes hooting sounds and thinks an owl is returning calls, although it's just his neighbour playing games; a man is hit by a double-decker bus while stepping into the road eating a pastie; a man 'saved' from drowning is annoyed because he was attempting suicide; a shopper is punched and kicked in a supermarket; a woman stabs her husband six times (but not fatally) because he obsessively made her take exercises because she was overweight; a man is granted a divorce after 38 years of living with his wife who can't stop herself moving furniture around the house; after four unsuccessful attempts at repairing her washing machine, a woman holds the fifth man prisoner for three hours; a man obsessed with the model Claudia Schiffer forces his parents to answer questions about her and hits them if they give the wrong answers; a woman hides her mother in the kitchen for three years after she died of natural causes.

A very strange fifteen-minute short.

Carol Morley's The Week Elvis Died (1997)

 

Elvis Presley died the year this film was released, although this film is nothing to do with him: even the opening song 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?', well-known as a Presley one, is sung by Russell Churney. No, The Week Elvis Died really refers not to the singer, but to the name of the beloved pet rabbit of Karen (Jennifer Williams).

Karen lives in a working-class world where the Elvis-figure father seems to be missing, where the rest of her family seem not to understand her, and of course they don't realise that she is being bullied by three awful girls who are obviously jealous of her academic achievements, particularly that she has been chosen to represent the school in the musical group and is to have the privilege of speaking to Tony Blackburn, DJ.

But Elvis dies, and it appears that her school enemies are responsible. On the night of the radio programme, the great occasion when she meets her DJ hero, she answers that her favourite book is the Wombles, but when Blackburn asks her if she has any friends she freezes, and continues to freeze through the following questions, which include if she has a pet: in the end she grabs the mike and lets out a huge scream of horror, all across the airwaves.

Carol Morley's I'm Not Here (1984)

The title of this short from Carol Morley comes from a shameful ranting letter by Alex Guinness which was published in The Times in January 1970, in which he complained about the lack of attention shop assistants paid to customers: it's 'I'm Not Here' that was chosen as the title. Morley collects news items, and the initial mention in this of Linda Sheridan ('Miss London Stores 1970) was found in the nineties in a scrapbook found in a skip in Finsbury Park.

Edith here mentions the film 'Full Metal Jacket' as a criticism of the fascist behaviour of the management, although I particulary note the obvious influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien, with its long tracking shot of supermarket counters, as a tribute to the great director. This is so glaringly a political film, no matter what the original intention.

Carol Morley's Secondhand Daylight (1983)

 

Secondhand Daylight is Carol Morley's second graduation film, and is set in a fastfood restaurant. Against a backdrop of the restaurant's wares, young people (normally in the bottom right corner of the screen) talk about their problems, mainly their problems in (or out of) relationships. We are only party to some of what is said by the interviewees, it is clear that there is some confusion in their minds, although nothing specific is mentioned: as so frequently with Morley's films, something is missing.

Carol Morley's Girl (1983)

 

Girl is one of two of Carol Morley's graduation shorts, and is about loss. Through suicide. Suicide is devastating because it's not a natural occurrence through illness or age, but something very often inexplicable, even if there's a death note: narrators are very often unreliable even in reality. If suicide itself is caused by truama, it in itself causes trauma to those living, and this trauma can last for the rest of the lives of the people concerned. My first cousin Charles Pembleton killed himself in 1990 at about the age of forty, by carbon monoxide poisoning. I was told that he left no death note, just a brief collection of self-published poems under the title Living in a Timewarp from sixteen years before. I occasionally read a few of these poems, and although the meaning in these often opaque abstractions eludes the reader, the obvious existential anguish is written large, and the suggestion of suicide as an end can't be written off.

Suicide haunts the Manchester Morley family, and did so long before the journalist Paul Morley wrote a book about his father who killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning: Nothing (2000). The first short of two of Paul's younger sister Carol's graduation films was released as Girl in 1993, lasts just seven minutes and reconstructs the relationship she had with her father, the initial mystery of his death to her, and attempts to relive the time in memory.

This reconstruction is done in shots of her father taking her to school, shots of the staircase, and the bizarre background sound of a sketch from television's 'The Morecombe and Wise Show', involving the 'singing' of 'Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta' to 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?': this partly serves as a background to part of the film, and the viewer understands the memory of the young girl too. Interestingly, the shots often reveal only a partial shot of the whole object, as if to underline that this is only a partial memory, and memory can only ever be partial. Significantly, 'Are you Lonesome Tognight' – a song of yearning and loss – is the opening song to another short by Morley: 'The Week Elvis Died'.

A good start.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Gone Too Far! (2013)

 

This is Destiny Ekaragha's first feature, only the third feature made by a black woman, and is set as her impressive Tight Jeans short was in Peckham, London. Adapted by the director from Bola Egbaje's eponymous play (2007), Gone Too Far! toys with the petty rivalry between various non-whites in the community, but displays it in an essentially humorous way.

Yemi (Malachi Kirby) meets his older brother Iku (OC Uyeke), whom he's not seen for many years and doesn't even recognise. What's worse, Iku dresses in an uncool way, such as wearing socks with sandals, and speaking a mixture of English and Yoruba. Obviously, Yami is embarrassed, all the more so as he's sent by his mother to go with Iku to buy okra.

On the way they meet many characters, including the half-Jamaican girl Armani (Shanika Warren-Markland) Yami has the hots for, but who isn't interested in Yami and makes a fool of  him: she's a prick teaser. In fact she's the girlfriend of Razer (Tosin Cole), who likes to think he's the main man of the neighbourhood: cue for fights, misunderstandings, etc.

I winced a few times – when the comedy tilted towards farce, and when the acting let things down a bit – but this is a hugely promising debut feature, probably introducing issues which British cinema hasn't touched on before.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Tight Jeans (2008)

Destiny Ekaragha’s first short feature Tight Jeans, set in Peckham, London, caused considerable interest, and led to Ekaragha becoming the third black woman to direct a feature film in England. This eight-minute film has a surprising amount to say. Three young black guys sit on a wall in a housing estate waiting for a lift to Battersea. A young white guy in tight trousers walks past and one of the guys on the wall asks why he hasn't got tight trousers. The answer? Because black guys' dicks are too big. Is this true? Well, you can go back to when the white man raided Africa and had to get rid of the black guys as the white guys' women would be too fond of them. Uh? Black guys populated the world, five continents! Then a white guy in a tee-shirt goes by, and... oh, shut the fuck up.

A quietly brilliant short with lots of playful jokes about racial stereotyping: a great debut.

Kieran Evans's Kelly + Victor (2012)

In 2000 Niall Griffiths published Grits, a powerful novel of marginals in Aberystwyth, and this was followed the year after by Sheepshagger, also a very powerful story, written in the vernacular, of marginals in Wales. One of Griffiths's influences is Ron Berry, although I'd guess that there is also an attempt to write like James Kelman in another locality. It seemed that a very promising, very talented new novelist was immerging, and then Kelly + Victor, set in Liverpool, was published in 2002. I found this very disappointing compared with the previous two novels, but then Griffiths was writing at the pace of a novel a year. His friend Kieran Evans chose to make a feature film of the third novel.

This is certainly an improvement on the book, although there are inevitably many differences. Kelly meets Victor at a club, they go to her place, snort coke and have sex, during which Kelly bites Victor. But Victor can't get Kelly out of his mind and when they next meet they go to Sefton Park,  the Walker Art Gallery, and seem like a perfectly normal love-struck couple.

But then there's the next sex session, in which Kelly displays her sadistic tendencies by drawing 'K + V' glass on his back with a piece of broken glass. It's hardly surprising that he breaks off with her, although with great difficulty for Victor, who even tries out his own masochistic tendencies by practising auto-erotic asphyxiation.

It's when Victor finds Kelly in the street after being beaten up by a former boyfriend that he rushes her to hospital and they briefly become partners again. Briefly, that is, because during sex she keeps half-strangling him, which is a great pleasure for them both until she reaches the moment of no return and accidentally kills him. I was wondering how Victor would die in the film, as I couldn't imagine Kelly playing with his internal organs by fisting, as in the book.

As I said above, the film is an improvement on the novel, although billing this stuff as a modern love story seems to being going way too far.

Cimetière de Montmartre (continued): #5: François Truffaut

'FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

1932 – 1984'

The tickets left on François Truffaut's grave speak volumes about his popularity. But how could I have missed this, the grave of the director of Jules et Jim, Les  Quatre Cents Coups, Baisés volés, L'Enfant sauvage, L'Argent de poche, L'Homme qui aimait les femmes, Le Dernier Métro, etc, etc.

The Kinema in the Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

The Kinema in the Woods in Coronation Road, Woodhall Spa was originally a farmhouse, then a concert pavilion, and later the cricket pavilion for the nearby Petwood Hotel (then called Petwood House), and has been functioning as a cinema since 1922. Kinema Too was added in 1994. It is open every day throughout the year.

'KINEMA IN THE WOODS

England's unique rear projection Kinema

Films have been shown

here continuously since

August 1922'

Paris 2015: Claude Chabrol, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #28

'CLAUDE CHABROL

1930 . 2010'

 

For some reason, among the many graves I've taken a photo of in Père-Lachaise, I'd missed out on Claude Chabrol's, although it may be because I was concentrating mainly on writers.