Two Films
Saw two films in the Belfast Film Festival, both on the same night. I probably will only see two films in the Belfast film festival - I'm not made of money, I'm made of angst, horror and larded with a strange talent for not getting paid. I still remain the only writer in the history of time to be asked to pay in to see his own play. So, I'll probably see only two films in the festival - I don't get invited to things any more.
First up was The Old Crowd at the Beanbag Theatre, a 1979 TV play written by Alan Bennett, directed by Lindsay Anderson and produced by Stephen Frears. Well now, that's a no brainer, isn't it? In my house Alan Bennett is something of hearth god. People characterise him as a doddering, tea-and-fondant fancy, minor key minimalist, cataloging defunct biscuit brands and fetishising pinnies and polishing the front step. He's nothing like that of course: his writing can be savage and disturbing, melancholy and hilarious, high drama accented with keen observation. He started as a satirist but he's a deeper, richer more inclusive writer than that now. He does it all.
He doesn't here though. Lindsay Anderson's fingerprints are all over this heavy-handed, creaking satire of...wealthy people, is it? The bourgeoisie? England? There aren't many Alan Bennettisms here - its arch and unnatural, the dialogue stilted, the interactions based on thumb-nail sketches of social types - all hallmarks of Lindsay Anderson's approach: more on-the-nose than Michael Jackson's surgeon. Bennett is at pains to defend Anderson, calling this a complete collaboration, but there's little of his delicacy of touch. I love Anderson's films of the 60's and 70's, his unrolling Hogarthian satires, but they take up room, they sprawl, they need the largeness of cinema. They look unwieldy and simplistic on telly. Anderson, didn't watch television and had no respect for it, and that's clear here.
The cast are all fine in shouty, underwritten parts. The fourth wall is subverted by the frequent inclusion of the camera crew invading the shots. There is a man wandering around with a transistor radio listening to global disasters, the caterers - uncommunicative working class types, menacing and leering and straight out of Pinter - are referred to as "slaves". Cracks appear in the ceiling of the new house in the very first shot. DO YOU SEE?
Still, as an oddball curio it was worth seeing. And as a rare sliver of clay glimpsed at Alan Bennett's ankles it is very gratifying.
The other film, at QFT, was Peter Strickland's In Fabric. I've liked all of Peter Strickland's films: The Duke of Burgandy and Berberian Sound Studio (though, perhaps tellingly, I haven't bothered my arse to watch his first film Katalin Varga despite owning it for about a year). His themes are interesting, his influences are surprising. He has an incredible eye: the films are visually beautiful, prone to breaking down, crashing out of rational structure, drifting into collage and rupturing on the screen. The music is always wonderful.
All of that is here. And yet this is the first time that the spell has been broken for me. The first time I've thought one of his films silly, as though it were meant to be silly. Not funny - silly. It wastes the intrigue and the mystery and Marianne Jean-Baptiste's beautiful performance as Sheila. That gets thrown away completely. The second half, a mirroring of the first, gets bogged down in a load of stylishly photographed nonsense. It feels churlish to complain about a film about a haunted dress being silly, but it works really hard in the first instance to develop this creepy, jittering, jarring atmosphere where the laughs are nervous, stuttered out. By the end of the film some bloke in the cinema was guffawing away and I was looking at my watch and wondering if I'd make the last bus.
Disappointing. Twice.
First up was The Old Crowd at the Beanbag Theatre, a 1979 TV play written by Alan Bennett, directed by Lindsay Anderson and produced by Stephen Frears. Well now, that's a no brainer, isn't it? In my house Alan Bennett is something of hearth god. People characterise him as a doddering, tea-and-fondant fancy, minor key minimalist, cataloging defunct biscuit brands and fetishising pinnies and polishing the front step. He's nothing like that of course: his writing can be savage and disturbing, melancholy and hilarious, high drama accented with keen observation. He started as a satirist but he's a deeper, richer more inclusive writer than that now. He does it all.
He doesn't here though. Lindsay Anderson's fingerprints are all over this heavy-handed, creaking satire of...wealthy people, is it? The bourgeoisie? England? There aren't many Alan Bennettisms here - its arch and unnatural, the dialogue stilted, the interactions based on thumb-nail sketches of social types - all hallmarks of Lindsay Anderson's approach: more on-the-nose than Michael Jackson's surgeon. Bennett is at pains to defend Anderson, calling this a complete collaboration, but there's little of his delicacy of touch. I love Anderson's films of the 60's and 70's, his unrolling Hogarthian satires, but they take up room, they sprawl, they need the largeness of cinema. They look unwieldy and simplistic on telly. Anderson, didn't watch television and had no respect for it, and that's clear here.
The cast are all fine in shouty, underwritten parts. The fourth wall is subverted by the frequent inclusion of the camera crew invading the shots. There is a man wandering around with a transistor radio listening to global disasters, the caterers - uncommunicative working class types, menacing and leering and straight out of Pinter - are referred to as "slaves". Cracks appear in the ceiling of the new house in the very first shot. DO YOU SEE?
Still, as an oddball curio it was worth seeing. And as a rare sliver of clay glimpsed at Alan Bennett's ankles it is very gratifying.
The other film, at QFT, was Peter Strickland's In Fabric. I've liked all of Peter Strickland's films: The Duke of Burgandy and Berberian Sound Studio (though, perhaps tellingly, I haven't bothered my arse to watch his first film Katalin Varga despite owning it for about a year). His themes are interesting, his influences are surprising. He has an incredible eye: the films are visually beautiful, prone to breaking down, crashing out of rational structure, drifting into collage and rupturing on the screen. The music is always wonderful.
All of that is here. And yet this is the first time that the spell has been broken for me. The first time I've thought one of his films silly, as though it were meant to be silly. Not funny - silly. It wastes the intrigue and the mystery and Marianne Jean-Baptiste's beautiful performance as Sheila. That gets thrown away completely. The second half, a mirroring of the first, gets bogged down in a load of stylishly photographed nonsense. It feels churlish to complain about a film about a haunted dress being silly, but it works really hard in the first instance to develop this creepy, jittering, jarring atmosphere where the laughs are nervous, stuttered out. By the end of the film some bloke in the cinema was guffawing away and I was looking at my watch and wondering if I'd make the last bus.
Disappointing. Twice.
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