Farhadi’s “The Past” Boasts Immaculate Performances from Young and Old.

April 4, 2014 by 1 Comment
The Past.

The Past.

Asghar Farha­di is one of the few gen­uine­ly excit­ing film mak­ers work­ing any­where in the world. The Past is his sixth film and the first he’s made out­side of his native Iran.

After the huge and entire­ly mer­it­ed suc­cess of his pre­vi­ous film A Sep­a­ra­tion, reviewed here, The Past was one of the most keen­ly await­ed films at the 2013 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. But it only end­ed up get­ting the con­so­la­tion prize of Best Actress for Bérénice Bejo. Quite cor­rect­ly Blue Is The Warmest Colour won the Palm D’Or, and was reviewed here

The good news is, The Past is a lot bet­ter than that would sug­gest. Bejo has asked her estranged hus­band to come back to France to sign the papers on their divorce, with­out fill­ing him in on the details as to why she now needs it.  And over the course of the next few days he and we slow­ly learn of why it is that Bejo’s teenage daugh­ter is so unhap­py with her moth­er, her new man, and how they came together.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

As with About Elly and A Sep­a­ra­tion, Farhadi’s abil­i­ty to care­ful­ly tell his sto­ry, slow­ly reveal­ing its metic­u­lous­ly posi­tioned plot points is unri­valled. And all the per­for­mances are out­stand­ing. Bejo, who shot to fame in 2011 in the inex­plic­a­bly laud­ed The Artist reviewed here, is a rev­e­la­tion. Ali Mossafa is superb as her for­mer hus­band, but most remark­able of all is Alyes Aguis who plays the 5 year old son of her new man.

All three chil­dren – the two chil­dren plus the teenage Lucy – give the kind of extra­or­di­nary per­for­mances that French cin­e­ma some­how excels at. And The Past is part of that proud tra­di­tion of films from the likes of Fran­cois Truf­faut and Louis Malle which explore the world of adults through the eyes of chil­dren, ren­der­ing their vis­tas all the more mov­ing  because of the per­for­mances they man­age mirac­u­lous­ly to coach from them.

Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows.

But it would be disin­gen­u­ous to pre­tend that The Past weren’t ever so slight­ly dis­ap­point­ing. The momen­tum dis­si­pates in in its final quar­ter as the focus shifts from the for­mer hus­band to the new man. And instead of build­ing to some sort of con­clu­sion, it qui­et­ly comes to a halt.

By any oth­er stan­dards though, this is a must see. Even if in years to come it’ll be looked back at as a minor Farha­di, rather than one of his key works.

You can see the trail­er for The Past here.

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5 Worst Films To Win The Oscar For Best Film.

March 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

5. Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby (2004). For its first 90 min­utes or so (most films’ actu­al length), Clint East­wood’s box­er chick flick shuf­fles along as a poor man’s Rocky. But then, with what’s laugh­ably described as a plot “twist”, it sud­den­ly veers off into the final scene of Bet­ty Blue, which it man­ages to drag out for a fur­ther ¾ of an hour.

Nei­ther one thing nor the oth­er, it man­ages to be dull and tedious twice over. Incred­i­bly, it tri­umphed at the expense of the right­ly laud­ed Side­ways, the charm­ing Find­ing Nev­er­land, and Scors­ese’s under­rat­ed The Avi­a­tor.

Hav­ing to write Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby was obvi­ous­ly the price that Paul Hag­gis had to pay for being allowed to direct Crash, which quite cor­rect­ly won the fol­low­ing year.

4. The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King (2003). The final install­ment of Peter Jack­son’s mag­num opus affords a third oppor­tu­ni­ty to spend yet anoth­er three hours (3 hours and 20 min­utes actu­al­ly…) watch­ing one set of com­put­er gen­er­at­ed char­ac­ters in a series of increas­ing­ly noi­some bat­tles with A N Oth­er set. Which, inex­plic­a­bly, they occa­sion­al­ly do with subtitles.

Watch­ing a video game with­out being able to par­tic­i­pate is the cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of being treat­ed to a lap dance with­out being allowed to touch. For hours and hours. Oh and it beat Lost In Trans­la­tion and Clint East­wood’s superb Mys­tic Riv­er.

3. How Green Was My Val­ley (1941). Is John Ford the worst film mak­er of all time? Or is that Kuro­sawa? They are, as they say, well met.

Either way, just in case you thought that get­ting it mon­u­men­tal­ly wrong on Oscar night was a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, Ford’s oh so dull and typ­i­cal­ly lead­en tale of, yawn, a Welsh min­ing town was duly award­ed the gong in 1941. And at whose expense?

Well, for one there was a cer­tain Cit­i­zen Kane. Then there was John Hus­ton’s enig­mat­ic and gen­uine­ly quirky noir clas­sic, The Mal­tese Fal­con. And William Wyler’s ice-cold but razor-sharp Bette Davis vehi­cle, The Lit­tle Fox­es (which, like Kane, was shot by Gregg Toland). As well as Hitch­cock­’s Sus­pi­cion, star­ring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.

2. Titan­ic (1997). Our very own Ford and Kuro­sawa rolled into one (see above), the first thing you want to do with James Cameron’s mes­mer­i­cal­ly tedious  3 hours and 17 minute film is to take each and every one of its shots and chop off their open­ing and clos­ing 25%. That would bring it down to just over an hour and a half.

You’d lose noth­ing. You would how­ev­er see even more clear­ly that it’s lit­tle more than a shot by shot remake of the 1958 film A Night To Remem­ber, but with­out any of the lat­ter’s charm, social graces or under­stand­ing of eti­quette. And as for those spe­cial effects. Well, they’re cer­tain­ly spe­cial all right.

1. The Artist (2012). Any­one who’s ever done any of those Hol­ly­wood screen­writ­ing cours­es will know that there are a cer­tain num­ber of arche­typ­al plots. One of which is the Iron­ic Plot, a clas­sic exam­ple of which goes as fol­lows; he does some­thing to avoid being caught, and hide his true iden­ti­ty, only to dis­cov­er that what he does is pre­cise­ly the thing that leads to him being unmasked.

The one thing that Hol­ly­wood is obsessed with, is prov­ing to the rest of the world that, con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion, it is not in fact peo­pled by philistines. So they fell over them­selves in their haste to lav­ish The Artist (reviewed by me here ear­li­er) with ill-con­sid­ered praise on the grounds that a) it’s French, b) it’s in black and white, and c) it’s silent.

But by fail­ing to spot its com­plete absence of dra­ma, or to notice that it’s made up of one-dimen­sion­al card­board cut-outs, albethey beau­ti­ful­ly drawn ones, whose nar­ra­tive arc could be com­fort­ably pre­dict­ed by most below-aver­age­ly intel­li­gent 9 year olds, they have, need­less to say, con­firmed all our worst sus­pi­cions. So there you are then, QED.

Appro­pri­ate­ly enough I  sup­pose, Hol­ly­wood itself has become a clas­sic exam­ple of one of its own genres.

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“The Artist”- Michel Hazanavicius

January 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This year’s smash hit at Cannes… Silent and in black and white… Clas­si­cal­ly French…  Charm­ing per­for­mances… And the dog…! Hmmn, what? Oh I’m sor­ry, I think I might have dozed off there.

There have of course been some gen­uine­ly won­der­ful films about Hol­ly­wood. Bil­ly Wilder’s Sun­set Boule­vard (’50), Vin­cente Min­nel­li’s The Bad And The Beau­ti­ful (’52), Robert Alt­man’s The Play­er (’92) and David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve (’01) being the four most memorable.

All depict a pitch black world bereft of a moral com­pass, where blind­ly dri­ven char­ac­ters devote their lives to sac­ri­fic­ing their tal­ent on the altar to per­son­al ambi­tion. The result is a land­scape where any­thing can hap­pen, and every­one’s care­ful cal­cu­la­tions are for­ev­er under­mined by the whims of the non-exis­tent but mis­chie­vous Gods. They are all in oth­er words Euro­pean films, that just hap­pen to use Hol­ly­wood as their backdrop.

They reek of the Old World, with its iron­ic insou­ciance and casu­al cyn­i­cism, and are free entire­ly of that unshak­able cer­tain­ty and bound­less opti­mism that make the New World so appeal­ing and give it its veneer of invincibility.

Mul­hol­land Dri­ve might look like Hol­ly­wood, but its cor­rect title, as David Thomp­son so per­cep­tive­ly point­ed out is Mul­hol­land Dr., and the that Dr stands for “dream”, as in night­mare. The pow­ers that be that gov­ern this world are neb­u­lous, nefar­i­ous and hope­less­ly inscrutable. This might be the dream fac­to­ry, but these are the wrong kinds of dreams.

The Artist is the exact oppo­site. It’s an all too con­ven­tion­al Hol­ly­wood film clum­si­ly dressed in Euro­pean art-house chic. Sure, if you’ve nev­er seen, say, a Madon­na video (it’s in black and white!!) or a for­eign film (what, sub­ti­tles!!! (well, titles actu­al­ly)), then you might but briefly mis­take it for some­thing mild­ly un-con­ven­tion­al. But you’ll very quick­ly tire of the film’s un-rip­pled progress, as all the char­ac­ters duti­ful­ly make their way down all too well worn paths.

The fact of the mat­ter is, The Artist isn’t a pas­tiche of those ear­ly Hol­ly­wood films, it’s one of them. And it’s every bit as dull, drea­ry and pre­dictable as those kinds of films have always been. That’s why, both then and now, we grav­i­tate towards the likes of Méliès and Eisen­stein, Lang, Mur­nau and Chap­lin. Their con­stant inven­tion and daz­zling bril­liance are a glo­ri­ous cor­rec­tive to the bar­rage of end­less tedi­um we’re for­ev­er forced to put up with from main­stream Hollywood.

Still. There is of course one part of the world where they’ll see The Artist as a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly coura­geous attempt to buck the pre­vail­ing trend of drown­ing every­thing in a cacoph­o­ny of wide screen, sur­round sound 3D Tech­ni­col­or noise. Roll on the Acad­e­my Awards.

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