Patti Smith, Music for Chameleons, and Ghibli being all weird again – #Reviews 261

Here's a blog I wrote about getting to go behind-the-scenes at Brian Pern: A Tribute, one of this year's televisual triumphs.

And here are reviews of the other cultural things I've ingested recently: three books, a movie and a couple of TV series.

BOOKS



Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010) – At its best, Smith’s beautifully-titled memoir of her life with idiosyncratic, doomed artist Robert Mapplethorpe is uncommonly insightful, raw and moving, as a trio of fateful encounters blossom into romance, which in time becomes an epic love that endures even as their lives begin to diverge: Smith graduating from artist to poet to pioneering rock ‘n’ roll frontwoman, Mapplethorpe admitting his homosexuality to himself as he turns from a collagist and painter into one of the era’s defining photographers. The passages detailing his death and then flashing back to their early acquaintanceship and their construction and then abandonment of a self-contained world are extraordinarily powerful, shining a light into the corners of Smith’s soul and revealing the importance that her upbringing, her faith and her commitment to creativity and visionary artistry have played in dictating her life’s course.

And yet the book becomes decreasingly revelatory and compelling as it progresses, Smith traversing into pretension with increasing frequency and intensity, as well as boringly listing which thrift shops she visited, which trinkets people gave one another, which outfits she wore every day and what she had to eat. As a fashion icon, it seems obvious in retrospect that she must have spent time and energy crafting her visual identities, but it doesn’t make for great reading, that blissful middle-ground of relatability, frank emotion and economic but literate prose vacated entirely for long stretches, as we oscillate between posturing and pointlessness.

Even then, though, Smith has a way of snapping back to a truthfulness and precision that's immediately and startlingly effective, and while reading between the lines we can deduce that perhaps Robert wasn’t the saintly, selfless figure that his great defender contends, you would have to be a psychopath not to be moved by the pair’s deep, mutual and unstinting dependence, at times breathtakingly evoked by this flawed but distinctive and heartbreaking elegy – not just for an artist, but for a man, and for the heyday of the grungy, bohemian, dangerous, filthy, accepting, unforgiving and enrapturing New York City that was his. (3)

***



Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Peterson (2014) – I don’t want you to develop any preconceptions about this book’s contents, based on this image: if only there were a saying that succinctly crystallised this thought.

Anne Helen Petersen’s book isn’t the tawdry, sensationalist rehashing of age-old scandals it appears from the cover, rather it seems that this is the only way you can get a book like hers published. Instead, it’s a collection of blogs from this ‘doctor of gossip’ (she has a PhD in the history of the industry, from the University of Texas) which examines Hollywood scandals or tragedies, how they were managed (or not) by the studios, and what the events, their handling and the fall-out tell us about American society. Each chapter is around 13 pages long (a couple are much longer), beginning with Mary Pickford’s affair with Douglas Fairbanks, closing with the hysteria around James Dean’s death, and in between looking at everything from the tragic lives of screen sex sirens Clara Bow and Jean Harlow to Bogie and Bacall’s romance, and Montgomery Clift’s ‘long suicide’.

The quoted sources are almost all gossip and fan magazines, a fascinating prism through which to view this history, but also somewhat limiting, if the sections on Bow and Harlow are representative of the whole. Though Petersen alludes to David Stenn’s book on Harlow, she either misinterprets or deviates from his impeccably well-sourced, well-argued narratives of both lives, with an alternate vision that seems myopic and incomplete, with no understanding of (or even reference to) Bow’s tortured upbringing. The contrary assertions it does make aren’t attributed to any sources and so seem more like supposition. Though most of the other essays crackle with energy, as we get a witty, accessible and cleverly contextualised whistle-stop tour of a star’s life, usually zoning in on a controversial, widely-covered scandal (Fatty Arbuckle) or tragedy (Carole Lombard), or – more often than not – the ongoing ‘scandal’ that was their self-destruction (in the case of Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando), or their side-lining by censorship (Mae West) or racism (Dorothy Dandridge), as a result I began to question their veracity of completeness. Doubtless some elements are difficult to fact-check through the fog of time and the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood publicity, but her constant get-out of “the accuracy of this claim matters less than…” is frustrating, and there are quite a few typos and errors (Carole Lombard dies in 1941, then signs up to do war work in 1942). That’s a shame, as the Arbuckle section is spot on, the Clift one is a decent effort, and the chapters on West, Dandridge and heroin-addicted silent star Wallace Reid are – at least on the surface – gripping and eye-opening pieces about stars I’ve seen a bit of, but knew little about beyond the headlines.

There’s also certainly no doubt that Peterson is an expert on fan magazines and studio publicity, and it’s a fascinating angle from which to approach these stories. Now and then she'll even turn something you thought you knew about – like Kazan's On the Waterfront, one of the first films I ever loved – so you see it as if for the first time, appreciating how Eva Marie Saint's transformation in the film is fundamentally achieved through Brando's reactions to her. On the other hand, Petersen is writing for an audience with little to no knowledge of these stars and their work, which means that if you’ve read Patricia Bosworth’s book on Clift, Stenn’s definitive works on Bow and Harlow, or even seen – say – Paul Merton’s documentary on Arbuckle, you’re having to sit through an awful lot of familiar (but simplified) material in order to get a little more insight. She’s also somewhat curbed the waspish, sweary tone of her earlier Hairpin articles, which is understandable (I sometimes soften my own writing depending on the audience), but a little disappointing.

It's not that I didn’t enjoy the book. It’s a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit, but it left me a little unsatisfied. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by Karina Longworth’s superb You Must Remember This podcast, which covers these sorts of stories with such skill, insight and journalistic rigour – and at such length – that she leaves most other film historians trailing in her wake. (2.5)

With enduring thanks (and sincere apologies for my usual ungratefulness) to my friend Soph for sending me this one.

***



Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote (1980) – A book of extraordinary grace, incisiveness and honesty which further bolsters my impression that Capote remains one of the most important, original and underestimated writers of his era. Fuck his artificial image as a catty, trivial, morbid starfucker, and study the work: dark, devastating, morally decent work shot through with his actual character, the shadows of an encroaching darkness creeping across the sun-dappled idyll of his New Orleans childhood. Even fans tend to lean on a popular narrative – pushed in last decade’s cinematic biopics – that sees him in terminal decline after the trial of In Cold Blood, but while it’s true that he degenerated into substance abuse (an affliction dealt with in breathtaking fashion in the last of these 14 pieces), and that with it his work-rate slowed, this book may well be his creative zenith.

In Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, he explains (entirely preposterously) that in the late ‘80s he found a new way to sing: a mathematical formula that has enabled his voice to endure his Never Ending Tour (please post your punchlines below). Here, Capote does much the same, denigrating his entire back catalogue as he seeks to articulate exactly why, and how, he’s developed the new style premiered in this book. Unlike Dylan, who is talking through his silly cowboy hat, Capote is sincere. His style here is so clean, precise and economical, yet to formally inventive, that it takes the breath away. Every decision he makes, from delayed gratification, to leading with dialogue, to drifting into remembrance and reminiscence, seems right, and his evocation of emotion, of nature, and of character is remarkably specific and so uniquely powerful.

There are six short stories and seven conversational portraits, alongside a non-fiction (?) centrepiece about a serial killer, and each is remarkable in one way or another. Perhaps my favourite piece is Dazzle, a multi-layered story with a time-shifting perspective that’s about love, fear and guilt, as Capote relives the story of his paternal grandfather, a fortune teller and two terrible secrets: one comic, the other tragic. It is flecked with wonder, touched by horror, and redolent with an unstudied compassion for his younger self, before a climactic sucker-punch that knocked me sideways. But it’s just one masterpiece among many. The other short stories are rich in irony, but unwaveringly sincere, as they deal with self-loathing, denial and the secrets (or unspoken truths) that dominate the book, while his egalitarian ‘portraits’ take in a weed-smoking cleaner, Marilyn Monroe, pastoral novelist Willa Cather and amoral Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil: though you could class the first of those as ‘hilarious’ and the last as ‘chilling’, that’s to reduce them from the multi-faceted, playful, probing, touching, humane and sad works that they are. The only piece that doesn't quite work for me, at least not unequivocally, is Handcarved Coffins, the lengthy true crime chapter at the book's centre. It has passages of great insight – on sexuality, obsession, delusion – but at times its language is oddly forced, and ultimately I'm not sure exactly what the point is that Capote is constantly circling and yet never quite landing upon.

It makes sense, perhaps, that when the book does malfunction, it's in both style and content, for it's the balancing of form, viewpoint and revelation, both overt and within the reader, that is the book's great strength. Music for Chameleons is beautifully-written, but even Capote’s admirers often stop right there, and it’s much more than that. His swaggering, elegant, stylistic brilliance – even as a supposed has-been, with a pickled liver and a nose stuffed with coke – is really a way of packing as much wit, pathos and meaning into each line as possible. His style is not an end in itself, it's the way he carries truth to the reader. (4)

See also: I wrote about In Cold Blood here, and some earlier Capote works here.

***

FILM



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – It only took me 16 years to see Spirited Away, and what a wondrous, spectacularly odd film it is: Ghibli on an epic yet intimate scale, as a little girl named Chihiro gets waylaid while moving house, and Hayao Miyazaki’s imagination goes into overdrive.

We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. It carries on in a similar vein from there, as you can see from this short paragraph lifted from Wikipedia:

While visiting her parents' pigpen, Sen finds a goodbye card addressed to Chihiro and realizes that she has already forgotten her name. Haku warns her that Yubaba controls people by taking their names and that if she forgets hers like he has forgotten his, she will not be able to leave the spirit world. While working, Sen invites a silent masked creature named No-Face inside, believing him to be a customer. A 'stink spirit' arrives as Sen's first customer. She discovers he is the spirit of a polluted river. In gratitude for cleaning him, he gives Sen a magic emetic dumpling. Meanwhile, No-Face tempts a worker with gold, then swallows him. He demands food and begins tipping extensively. As the workers swarm him hoping to be tipped, he swallows yet another two greedy workers.

The film takes a little while to begin to weave its magic, but without warning you find yourself enraptured, lost in its peerlessly weird universe, spellbound by its animation – by turns serene, frenetic, opulent, disorientating, immersive and repulsive – and touched by its understated but profound emotional core. Its characters are notable for their complexity, duality and depth – often achieved with minimal exertion – as well as for their malleability. Whether by witchcraft or kindness, they can be corrupted or reformed – these are not the one-trait ciphers often fed to animation audiences – and yet there’s a simplicity in the emotional exchanges that’s completely beguiling, and surprising for a film with such a complicated story, and such a wealth of subtext. Miyazaki’s nostalgic vision acts as a commentary on a modern Japan that has lost its way, betraying its national identity and its environmental responsibility with a greed that’s evoked with both subtlety and a crude, in-your-face literalism. This, it says, it what happens when you only have a yen for yen. On a surface level, it's also great to have this coming-of-age tale led by such a brave, forthright, decent, ass-kicking girl. There should be one in every story.

The film isn’t perfect: while transfixed and impressed by its balls-out, apparently authentic weirdness, I found it initially distancing, and there were times when the movie’s proliferation of oddball supporting characters, the scenes necessary to accommodate them and its general noisiness (compared to my favourites thus far, Totoro and Porco Rosso) began to tire. It always, though, came back to itself: to Miyazaki’s singular if somewhat unregulated imagination, to the sincerity and simplicity of the Chihiro-Haku relationship, and to the aesthetic analogue that is Spirited Away’s exquisite animation. (3.5)

The music's lovely too.

***

TV



The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) – A topical rerun of this seminal series, 20 years on. It’s history as investigative journalism, shorn of all sensationalism and ghoulishness, which changes much of what you thought you knew about the Nazis, such as their bizarre, deeply dangerous power structure – competing, antagonistic department heads seeking to turn Hitler’s psychopathic monologues into policy – the role of voluntary, informal informants in making the Gestapo appear omniscient, and the self-justification of ‘ordinary’ Germans who enabled them to commit unprecedented horrors. From its striking credits to Samuel West’s crisp, authoritative voiceover, its unearthing (and understanding) of revelatory documents to its astonishing interviews with perpetrators and victims alike, it’s a class act, which manages to answer (or at least posit a compelling answer) to that eternal, chilling question: how could it happen? (4)

***



Spiral: Season 5 (2014) – For five episodes, this erratic but often exquisite French crime series appears to have given up the ghost. It’s tired, disjointed and – yes – even boring, as Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), Gilou (Thierry Godard) and the rest return to solve a slow-moving murder case, a series of ATM ram raids and the mystery of what the hell’s happened to Spiral. Then suddenly, and almost without warning, it explodes into brilliance, its stories dovetailing – and then artfully unfolding – its human subplots becoming uncommonly compelling, and Proust, Godard and Audrey Fleurot (as complex, flamehaired, bad-ass shyster Josephine Karlsson) hitting devastating peak form. It turns out that it’s all about mothers and daughters, and that neither we nor Laure are allowed to have anything nice happen to us ever. It’s back later this year, apparently. I’m going to record them all and then binge. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Review of 2016: Part 3 – Books and TV

I read 32 books and watched 43 TV shows this year. Enough boasting, here's a piece about which ones were good and which ones weren't.

BOOKS

Fiction



My favourite book of the year was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), an endlessly economical, alarmingly relatable marvel about lecturer Jim Dixon, who's caught between two very different women, and plagued by a litany of unspeakable men, as he attempts to hold on to his job and arrest a casual but definite decline brought on by booze, poor fortune, general confusion and a tragic inability to Play the Game. Barely a sentence goes by without Amis introducing some black, bleak or brilliant idea, revolving on some inspired turn of phrase, while the book’s blending of the cynical, romantic and inutterably, breathtakingly funny is just about perfect. It's an absolute wonder.

In April, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), a chilling piece of alternate history, in which heroic aviator and fascist sympathiser Charles Lindbergh ascends to the US presidency and agrees an ‘understanding’ with Adolf Hitler. Against the slow-burn of burgeoning anti-semitism, the young Roth comes of age, while the older brother he idolises is co-opted by the establishment, his cousin is crippled by war and his parents are torn between pragmatism and self-respect. Roth's humanity, intelligence and explosions of ironic violence keep you gripped and gazing in slack-jawed amazement, though of course it could never happen.



Another of my highlights was Tom Perrotta's Election (1998), an exceptional piece of storytelling told from five vantage points and prefaced with perfection by Irish novelist William Trevor's observation that "the world is the school gone mad". So I asked for two more of his books for my birthday: Little Children (2004) was a modern masterpiece that transcended its suburban trappings, and offered such virtuosic delights as a sarcastic child molester; The Leftovers (2011) was superbly plotted but saddled with a bafflingly blunt and broad sense of humour.

There is no piece of writing I love more than James Joyce's The Dead, which makes up for any of the other failings of Dubliners (published 1914), and indeed for some of the year's relative disappointings, including Dashiell Hammett's flat The Thin Man (1934), a rare case of a book being vastly improved in its cinematic translation, Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1954) – an interesting but imperfect sci-fi work – and David Peace's 1974 (1999), which is unforgettable, but not always in a good way.



I was seriously underwhelmed by a couple of early Evelyn Waugh comedies: Scoop (1938), with its thin characters and fixation merely on language, and Vile Bodies (1930), an oddly blinkered and distractingly self-satisfied work with only a few passages of breathtaking wit and the superb character of absent aristocrat Colonel Blount to recommend it. It's deathly dated in its satirising of people and phenomena long forgotten, with nominative determinism that's a shallow bore, though its principal problem is its triviality: that's perhaps the point of the book, but it's also entirely self-defeating, preventing it from really amounting to anything.

This year's two Vonneguts were lesser works, though I found plenty to love about Deadeye Dick (1982), less so Galapagos (1985).

But most of the books I read were good, and many of them were simply fantastic. Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1945) is a playfully heightened, impeccably-written romantic comedy, laced with insight, understated emotion and dazzling wit, based upon her own life – and her experiences as a member of Britain’s most notorious family. It’s not especially ambitious in terms of scope, but it is magnificently realised. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961) was slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. And A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) was as repulsive and rip-roaringly funny as you could ever want, a hypnotically original slice of Southern Gothic, full of virtuosic passages of bilious wit, as Ignatius J. Reilly and a gallery of hysterically funny supporting characters go almost aimlessly about their daily business in a vividly-realised nightmare of New Orleans, before you realise that Toole has been shuffling everyone expertly into position for a quite brilliant finale.



I also read my first Márquez novel this year, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), which is great if you want to read about a disgusting old man fucking a child, and luxuriated in a book of epic silliness and staggering readability, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by (Joel Dicker, 2012). I'm finishing the year with Northanger Abbey, the one of Jane Austen's six completed novels that I hadn't yet read. She wrote it first, though it was only published post-humously, and there's a different feel to her later books: an immense energy allied to an apparently limitless supply of withering sarcasm.

I read lots of kids' books to help with my pitching of my own novel for eight to 12-year-olds (nothing yet, but I'll keep you posted), though one I read for pleasure, and received incalculable amounts, was How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban (1974), an utterly beautiful ode to silliness, with hilarious, sumptuous illustrations by the incomparable Quentin Blake.



***

Non-fiction



My non-fiction book of the year was unquestionably T. Harry Williams' epic treatise on the life of Louisiana senator Huey Long (1969). Next to that (but also next to most history books), Bill Bryson's One Summer (2013) looked frankly dire, though Owen Jones' Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Classes (2011/12) remains fresh, relevant and important after five years in which so much has changed, and yet nothing has.

As usual, I read quite a few books about movies. Margaret Talbot's book about her father – actor Lyle Talbot – and his times, The Entertainer (2012) was frequently excellent, Mark Kermode's Hatchet Job (2013) proved shapeless but lively, and I really enjoyed the third volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles behemoth, One Man Band (2015), covering 1947 to 1965 in considerable style. The best by far, though, was François Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock (1967, revised 1983), which fundamentally changed the way I look at cinema. I wrote about it a little here.

***

TV



My elder brother exposed me to the French cop show, Spiral, which quickly became a favourite, as I consumed the first four seasons, though my attempts to marry Laure Berthaud (above) have thus far come to naught. At times it traverses the line marked 'do not cross, silliness ahead', but at its best it's remarkable. Season 2 is a marvellous thing.

The Thick of It and Veep were regulars round my place, with just the right balance of misanthropy and swearing at a time when I was in dire need of both. I also caught up with some quality BBC dramas from recent years, and loved all of them: The Shadow Line, State of Play and Life on Mars. I travelled a little further back too, for all three brief, brilliant series of the original House of Cards.

E4's Misfits ('superheroes with ASBOs') was escapist and intensely funny, though I bailed after Season 3, by which time all of the original cast had left. The Simon/Alisha storyline in the second series is so ambitious, and so deeply affecting. Some amazing, incredibly handsome reviewer described the programme as "an antidote to morality plays, Marvel movies and just about everything else", and who am I to disagree?



Aside from Lillian Gish, my favourite actor of all time is Wendy Hiller. She was primarily on the stage, but appeared in a handful of films, and did a fair amount of TV work late in life. I watched three of her small screen triumphs: All Passion Spent (above), a delightful rom-com called The Kingfisher that reunited her with Major Barbara co-star Rex Harrison and, best of all, The Best of Friends, a miraculous drama based on the correspondence between legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw (Patrick McGoohan), esteemed museum curator Sydney Cockerell (John Gielgud) and Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Hiller).

The American Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary, got by on the strength of its central relationship, Adam Curtis made the hyper-intelligent HyperNormalisation for iPlayer, and I developed an unexpected fondness for true crime films – or at least miscarriage-of-justice polemics – devouring the likes of Making a Murderer, The Jinx, Netflix's Amanda Knox film, and old documentaries about James Hanratty on YouTube. (Bit of a weirdo, sorry.) I bailed on the much-lauded Stranger Things after two derivative, pointless episodes.



I also attended Vicky's fabled Eurovision party, finding to my perpetual astonishment that this programme I'd been avoiding for years was actually great fun, especially with friends and without Terry Wogan. I have listened to the Italian entry more times than I'd care to admit this year. The Apprentice, which in the past I'd really looked forward to, was for the most part exceedingly dull, with no heroes and – even more damagingly – no decent villains. (And I listened to a lot of podcasts, but I can't review everything, where would it end?)

I've just started Master of None (2015) on Netflix, which is a sweet and beautiful thing.

***

Thanks for reading.

Maggie Smith, A. I. and a trip to see David Niven's suit − Reviews #244

Please excuse the relative sparsity and brevity (and indeed one of my most obvious opinions, about A. I.), I've been moving flats. A second update is on the way after this one.

FILMS



The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969) − As an adaptation of a quite brilliant novel, this doesn't hack it, but as a film in its own right, it's rather wonderful, hammering a deliriously modern and subversive book into a work of eccentric nostalgia, culminating in a histrionic battle of wills.

Maggie Smith is Miss Jean Brodie, an idiosyncratic, unmarried teacher in '30s Edinburgh who adores her charges, idolises Mussolini and won't shut up about being in her prime. Caught between two men − upstanding music teacher Gordon Jackson and rakish arts master Robert Stephens − she incurs the wrath of prim, moralistic headteacher Celia Johnson, as her relationship with self-possessed student Sandy (Pamela Franklin) begins to sour.

I find the film's synthetic, pastel-ish appearance simply unattractive and the book's wry wit and deliriously inventive flashes forward are much missed, but the music is wonderful, Smith is sensational and the film gains in momentum as it progresses, leading to a devastating monologue about Dante (invented for the stage production that preceded the film) and a climactic confrontation of sheer quivering fury.

It's a much more conventional work than Muriel Spark's source novel, but perhaps I'd rather find a film that does something different rather than emerging as a pale shadow of a beloved book. (3)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
A. I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001) − Striking, heartwrenching sci-fi that for almost two hours hits the sweet spot between Kubrick's cold intellectualism and Spielberg's sodden soppiness, as robo-kid Haley Joel Osment is adopted, rejected and goes off in search of the 'Blue Fairy' who can turn him into a real boy. Dominated by Osment's wonderful performance and augmented by stunning visuals and John Williams' slowed-down-Raiders score, it's a film constantly in motion, never quite satisfying us until it reaches a point of poignant, terrifying clarity. Then Spielberg serves up the usual embarrassing half-hour coda saturated in treacle. (3)

See also: I decided to seek this one out after reading Mark Kermode's book, Hatchet Job, which discusses it at some length.

***



Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975) − I'm a huge fan of Woody Allen movies, but his "early, funny films" − as he termed them in Stardust Memories − aren't really my thing. Pitching his familiar, bespectacled persona into some incongruous setting: the future (Sleeper), a South American revolution (Bananas) or Russian history (Love and Death) like an old Bob Hope or Marx Bros film, they're largely a barrage of gags, bereft of the warmth and deft introspection that typify that decade of classics he produced between Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanours.

Love and Death has its moments: a couple of inspired monologues to camera, some great one-liners ("Where did you go to finishing school, on a pirate ship?") and the inspired use of Prokofiev's music, but a lot of it consists of shameless mugging, self-satisfied nods to Russian novels and the kind of broad humour that veers awfully close to Mel Brooks territory − and I can't stand Mel Brooks. Even Diane Keaton can't make some of this work. (2)

See also: I'll be reviewing Woody's latest, Cafe Society, in the next reviews update. And here are 10 things I learned about him from an excellent 2012 documentary, as well as an address to the elephant in the room.

***

BOOK



Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut (1982) – Vonnegut's 1982 novel is superficially about gun control, but as usual goes much wider, weirder and deeper than that, as narrator Rudy "Deadeye Dick" Waltz recalls his double-murder, his visit to Broadway and the neutron bomb that wiped out all life as we know it in Midland City, Ohio. It's partly about the death of innocence, partly about the sins of the father (in this case a former mate of Hitler's whose whole life, like his house, is a meaningless construct) and partly Vonnegut taking aim at the hypocrisy and muddled priorities of 20th century America, though it's about much else besides. And its narrator, meanwhile, is almost entirely dispassionate, lending the book a disorientating, otherworldly feel, strengthened by the flights of forced removal whereby he begins to write about stressful events in his life as if they were in a play.

Everything you would want from Vonnegut is ultimately here, from the stylistically childlike language (death is described as someone's "peephole closing") to the mischievous form (relevant recipes are sprinkled throughout) to the championing of art and community, even if it it's rather harder to get a handle on than most of his works. The passage about the way lives translate to stories ("If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is") typifies what I love about him as a writer: profundity distilled through a knowingly simplistic folksiness. Deadeye Dick is wry, dark, humane and wise, and it couldn't be mistaken for a book by anyone else. (3.5)

***

TV



Spiral (Season 3, 2010) – A far-fetched but very entertaining third series of my new favourite programme, with Laure (Caroline Proust) and co hunting a serial killer, and Judge Roban (Philip Duclos) turning his steely blue eyes on political corruption. The grubby realism of Season 2 is exchanged for some improbable melodrama – would all of these things really happen to these people in just a few months?! – but the acting is excellent, stocky, taciturn cop Gilou (Thierry Godard) really comes into his own, and the final episode is a knockout, with a phenomenal conclusion that sheds new light on both Laure and ruthless lawyer Josephine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot). (3.5)

***

EXHIBITION



Real to Reel (Imperial War Museum) − This handsome exhibition looking at war movies and the real stories behind them is rather stronger on movie artefacts than those from genuine battles, but if that's what you're after, then the IWM's scholarly but accessible exhibition is essential viewing. As a proper film nerd, I was delighted and surprised by the scope and depth of the cinematic knowledge underpinning it, and by the chance to see David Niven's costume from A Matter of Life and Death, Dietrich's USO dress and the coat that Gable wore during WWII. More eerie, and yet arguably even more fascinating, is a rare opportunity to view a clip from a piece of shimmering Nazi escapism (a rare instance of interactivity), since almost every film made under the Third Reich is banned from distribution. My favourite of all the exhibits was in the final room, but I won't spoil the surprise (perhaps I'll publish a picture once the exhibition has closed): think '40s Warner Bros movies and prepare to get very excited. Incidentally, Real to Reel uses the 100 years since the drama-doc The Battle of the Somme as its hook, so there's no nod to the first, most influential and perhaps most troubling war movie of them all, Griffith's notorious Birth of a Nation. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Caroline Proust, My Night at Maud's and the birth of satire − Reviews #240

A round-up of some things I never got around to sharing, plus Season 2 of Spiral.



*SOME SPOILERS*
My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1969) − I’ve become a huge Eric Rohmer fan over the past few years. The older I get, and the more complex my idea of life becomes, the more I appreciate his work: full of eroticism, irony and paradox, where the sun only comes out to cast darker shadows. There’s no denying, though, that many of his films follow a certain formula: not just in their plots (his six Moral Tales, made between 1962 and ’72, are all based on F. W. Murnau’s expressionist silent romance, Sunrise), but also in the form and structure he favours. My Night at Maud’s isn’t his best movie, but it’s perhaps his most Rohmerish, almost to the point of exaggeration: it begins slowly, turns tiringly talky and then whacks you in the solar plexus with a coda that’s rooted in the philosophical groundwork he’s been laying, while trading the verbose, probing philosophy for poignant, nail-on-the-head specificity. Stop someone halfway through a Rohmer film, and they might tell you they’re bored. Ask them what they think at the finish, and they’ll tell you they’re floored.

My Night at Maud’s – his most famous and popular film, and the third of his Moral Tales (though released after part four, La collectionneuse) – reminds me a bit of Melville’s superb and atypical Leon Morin, Priest, in which a sexually frustrated war widow becomes infatuated with a kind, cerebral and undeniably hot man of the cloth (Jean-Paul Belmondo). This too is an exploration of sex and spirituality, though not of celibacy, as a practical but serious Catholic (Jean-Louis Trintignant), not entirely unlike Rohmer himself, is caught between two women: one whom he sees as pure and innocent – blonde churchgoer Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault, the niece of Jean-Pierre, star of the greatest French film of all, Les enfants du paradis) – and the other whom he dismisses as too slutty and too atheist, Maud (Françoise Fabian).

The film’s opening and closing chapters are dazzlingly presented, but the middle-section – the night at Maud’s – is almost wilfully uncinematic in conventional terms, consistingly largely of Trintignant and Fabian in a room, chatting circularly about faith and attraction. The presentation, aside from a single cut-away to a snowy exterior, is drab and restricted, but it forces us to focus on the nuances, zoning in on the basic incongruity of the situation, as Trintignant’s Jean-Louis mounts an aggressively calm, contextualised campaign of verbal self-justification, as his passions are stoked by this woman who seems to represent everything he purports to detest, and yet on some level is also everything he wants: and that’s not just a sexual level, he finds her invigorating and fascinating, a philosophical adversary and yet perhaps a spiritual twin. His face tells the story, as his voice lies. That disconnect between a character’s actual desires and what they will admit, even to themselves – that gaping chasm of self-awareness – is what powers these films.

I’m not a big fan of Trintignant generally, but here he’s so deep in his quiet, serious but impassioned personification that you can’t imagine what this film would be without him. Barrault is used more as a symbol than as an actress, but works brilliantly as an avatar for Rohmer and Jean-Louis’s collision of humanism and idealism, while Fabian floods the screen with a desperate, exhausted pragmatism that inspires an endless empathy. Sometimes in its central sequence the film does feel too heavily academicised for me, becoming more a discussion of abstract ideas than of these characters’ burning and overwhelming preoccupations, but it’s littered with fascinating insights, and when it turns from mere talk to action and revelation it’s a genuinely explosive film, explosive in the way that only Rohmer’s films are, as a character quietly implodes and it blows us apart. The ending here, picking up five years after the story proper, is one of his biggest departures, biggest gambles and most extraordinary successes, taking us to the beach and flipping the whole film upside down. (3.5)

See also: I've reviewed the first three Moral Tales already: The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne's Career and The Collector.

***


Robert Evans with convicted rapist Roman Polanski.

The Kid Stays in the Picture (Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, 2002) - The charming former Paramount honcho Robert Evans tells us repeatedly how handsome he is in this classic ‘unreliable narrator’ doc (though he is admittedly quite handsome), which allows him to spout forth on his life and work, and take credit for just about everything, though particularly The Godfather.

There’s some great footage, especially at the beginning when we see his three movie appearances as a young man – which start well and end with him giving arguably the most ridiculous performance of all time – and later when he’s selling the moneymen on his most beloved project (himself), but the bulk of the picture is just artfully animated photos and some film of his house, accompanied by Evans spinning tales in voiceover: his fortuitous rise to prominence, his marriage to Ali McGraw, and his coke-fuelled descent into redundancy and worse. It’s all rather shallow, but also colourful, conspiratorial and highly entertaining: a fast-moving Hollywood saga bringing to life the highlights of his memoir, also called The Kid Stays in the Picture.

That title, incidentally, is what Evans claims legendary Fox producer Daryll F. Zanuck yelled through a bullhorn on the set of The Sun Also Rises, a Hemingway adaptation from which the author – and almost everyone else connected with the film – attempted to sack him. Director Brett Morgen went on to make a functional but enjoyable Rolling Stones doc, Crossfire Hurricane, before compiling that bloody awful Kurt Cobain cinematic biography, Montage of Heck. (3)

***

TV



The Thick of It (Series 4) − The last, and least, of the definitive modern political comedy's four series traverses mostly old ground, though it's still very funny, and extremely prescient in its depiction of the crumbling Labour Party. Its main flaw, aside from familiarity, is that the character comics playing the Lib Dem leader and his special advisor are too broad and mannered, the incisive material rarely emerging unscathed from their superficial sitcom delivery. Still, the first instalment − in which outdated 'one nation' Tory Peter Mannion (Roger Allam) attempts to launch a tech initiative − is a classic, and the double-length penultimate episode concerning a public inquiry is ambitious, cleverly conceived and extremely impressive. (3)

***



Beyond the Fringe (1964) − It’d be convenient if Beyond the Fringe no longer existed – most of it, anyway. This astonishingly popular comic revue was so important and so influential, single-handedly inspiring the British satire boom of the 1960s, and yet long stretches of it are virtually unwatchable today.

The best routines are all Peter Cook’s, and the best of those are as funny as anything he ever did: the ‘Great Train Robbery’ sketch, with its overly literal investigating officer, the ‘Perkins’ section of The Aftermyth of War – in which Jonathan Miller’s private is asked to make an entirely futile sacrifice – the surrealistic monologue by a regretful miner, ‘The End Is Nigh’, which closes the show, and the famous ‘One Leg Too Few’ (with Dudley Moore as a manically cheery, one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan), which was added midway through the run.

The rest of the two-hour show ranges largely from the pale to the painful: Miller mugging, Moore playing interminable ‘comic’ piano pieces, and Alan Bennett apparently ill at ease with a succession of sketches that require him to play posh idiots; of the non-Cook pieces, only his T. E. Lawrence skit stands the test of time, as Bennett recalls his brief friendship with the famed adventurer, which begins with the narrator accidentally going to the wrong house where he mistakes a schoolboy for the aged Lawrence. (2.5)

***



Misfits (Series 3, 2011) – This third series is a big step down from the first two, struggling to know what to do with the metaphysical relationship between Simon (Iwan Rheon) and Alisha (Antonia Thomas) developed so stunningly last time out, until a dazzling conclusion to the final episode, and offering little in the way of compelling through-lines. Instead it serves up a succession of self-contained outings that are often involving and amusing, but sometimes just a little desperate (an episode about Nazis has an astonishingly good prologue but then goes awry, with little to say and a completely nonsensical treatment of time-travel; and another in which Simon is manipulated by a comic book artist begins to unpick the fabric of the programme). With Nathan – the funniest character in the show – now written out, the bulk of the comedic burden falls on newcomer Rudy (Joseph Gilgun). While it takes an episode to get used to his big performance, he is extremely funny, but he isn’t properly integrated into the ensemble: often he’s grandstanding brilliantly and the others are simply forced to pull faces in the background, an awkward juxtaposition that stops you from becoming immersed in the action. The third series is a pleasant enough time-filler, but it’s not exceptional as the first two series were, at least until it wraps up Simon’s story in perfect, mythmaking fashion. (3)

***



Spiral (Season 2, 2008) – This second series retools the original template to perfection: as sexycop Laure Berthaud and her team launch a season-long war on dealers, the incidental, self-contained storylines are stripped down to the bare essentials, the purpose of them now to pad out an hour’s TV but to shine a light into the corners of its characters. Original, involving, literate, confrontational and, in its denouement, almost unwatchably tense, it offers a gallery of new characters – including brilliant undercover agent Samy – revels in the multi-layered, multi-faceted complexity of its others, and turns an interesting show into one that’s simply unmissable. I start on the next series tonight. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.