2012 threesomes

Before we settle too cosily into 2013 I am going to recycle the format I stole from Becca’s Blog last year and look back at my cultural year.

Top 3 books
My greatest joy has been in reading P.G. Wodehouse, with three Jeeves and Wooster books late in the year reminding me what an unutterably funny writer he is. Sadly I only have about 90 of his books left to read. But if I’m going to choose individual titles, I shall go for Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the wit and imagination of which was an unexpected delight, Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a sparkling and cheeky variation on the Cinderella story, and Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Completed in 1848, it’s not Dickens’ greatest novel, but it shows the stirrings of a greater ambition that would be realised in the masterpieces he wrote in the following twenty years, and in the likes of Captain Cuttle, Solomon Gills, Walter Gay, Toots and Florence Dombey it contains some of his sweetest and most lovable characters.

Top 3 CDs (classical)
Late in 2011 I heard this Radio 4 documentary which contained some beautiful guitar arrangements of French piano music. I contacted the producer, who kindly informed me that the CD used was Rêverie by the Groningen Guitar Duo. I have enjoyed getting acquainted with it this year. An article in Gramophone alerted me to a 1999 disc of French Airs de Cour performed by Catherine King, Charles Daniels and Jacob Heringman, which is superb and contains much unfamiliar and charming repertoire. I haven’t bought a great many CDs released this year, but the disc of choral music by Howells sung by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge under Stephen Layton is one that stands out. The programme is inspired, beginning with the Hymn for St Cecilia and ending with ‘All my hope on God is founded’. The recent discs of Howells from Hereford and St John’s, Cambridge have missed a trick in not including any of Howells’ hymn tunes. I could have done with one or two more on the Trinity CD.

Top 3 CDs (other)
I have been recommending Todd Rundgren’s 1972 double album Something/Anything? to all and sundry this year, and have given it to people as presents. It’s enormously sugary and 90% of it is seventh chords, but I love it. I have also been spending a lot of time with Para One’s soundtrack to Céline Sciamma’s film Naissance des Pieuvres. I saw the film two or three years ago. It’s a coming-of-age drama centred around a swimming pool, a fine piece of work, but I think the music stands on its own. It’s sumptuously atmospheric, and very watery. And I was lucky to find a cheap copy of this William Sheller anthology. It’s been lovely discovering songs of his I didn’t know before.

Top 3 films
I’ve already written about my favourite new films of last year, but what of those I came across on the TV? I watched quite a lot of them. Omitting those I’d seen before (though I would like to give an honourable mention to Basil Dearden’s Victim, which came across as a bold minor masterpiece that I hadn’t acknowledged before), I have narrowed the list down to three, two of which are very recent films anyway. Firstly The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s audacious drama-documentary about the life of Andrea Dunbar, which marries documentary footage with new interviews lip-synched by actors. At times it takes the breath away. Then Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo), a gentle, illuminating drama about a family convening to mark the anniversary of a son’s death. It has been compared by some to the films of Ozu, which is not unwarranted praise. And thirdly, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s remarkable religious melodrama Ordet, which packs an astonishing emotional punch at its climax.

Top 3 live music
I love instrumental and chamber music, but my favourite concerts in 2012 were on a larger scale. I don’t always like the Royal Albert Hall as a venue, but I find it’s better if a) there are a lot of performers to fill the space; and b) you’re not too far away from them. I was lucky to be in the side stalls for two excellent Proms – Les Troyens in July, and Bernstein’s Mass in August. Both were thrilling. Smaller but no less exhilarating was English Touring Opera’s production of Britten’s Albert Herring at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge. I hadn’t realised how fun and how funny it is; I’d certainly never laughed at an opera before. I hope to see plenty more Britten on stage in his centenary year.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals again. One of my choices last year was the Chichester production of Sweeney Todd, then about to transfer to London. I went to see it three more times after the transfer, and I’m choosing it again. I suppose this is about as close as I get to being a fanboy. I marvel at Sondheim’s genius, and vow to get to know more of his work this year. Company is on at the ADC in a month, so that can be the first step. Then, the revival of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National Theatre, a haunting and upsetting musical based on verbatim transcripts of interviews with the residents of London Road in Ipswich, in the aftermath of the 2006 prostitute murders. It sounds unpleasantly sensationalist; in fact it’s just sensational, and grows in stature with the passage of time. And lastly, the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, which I went to twice, firstly at the Globe and then at the Apollo Theatre. The play’s a masterpiece, of course, but this production is a dream. The grace and sweep and composure of Mark Rylance’s performance as Olivia defy description. He is the finest actor I have ever had the privilege to watch, and I am going to see his Richard III soon. You still have time to catch them before they close next month.

On the subject of theatre, I feel bound also to credit Gatz, the unabridged theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby staged by Elevator Repair Service at the Noel Coward Theatre, Helen Edmundson and Neil Hannon’s captivating musical of Swallows and Amazons that I caught at Cambridge’s Arts Theatre, and a number of comedy gigs (Sheeps, Jonny Sweet, Tom Basden, Tim Key, the excellent Staple/face). There is one more event I would like to mention that doesn’t quite fit into any of the categories above: Alex Preston’s discussion with Richard Holloway at the Cambridge Union as part of Cambridge Wordfest in April. It felt a great privilege to see Holloway in person, a wry, humane, sympathetic and wise man. I’m sure I will read his acclaimed memoir, Leaving Alexandria, this year. Let’s all of us have a good one!

My films of 2012

As 2012 limps towards its end every blogger in the kingdom is posting his or her lists. This blog has gone very quiet this year, particularly since the summer, and that’s mostly because there hasn’t been a great deal that I’ve thought worth writing about. On the rare occasions when I have found myself having an opinion, I have done you the kindness of keeping it to myself. Please consider reciprocating by not posting a comment below.

To fill the many hours I have spent not writing, I have gone to the cinema probably a little more often than in previous years. Most of the best films I’ve seen there, predictably, have been classics — La Grande Illusion, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Inherit the Wind. If an old film is on at the Arts Picturehouse, that’s generally because it’s worth watching. But among the many new films I’ve come across, the following are ten that have stood out as among the best. They’re a predictable melange of sentimentality and physical or psychological abuse.

10. A Cat in Paris [Une Vie de Chat] (Alain Gagnol, Jean-Loup Felicioli)

A beautifully drawn, charming and exciting adventure, in which a little girl joins forces with her cat and a local burglar to catch the gang of crooks responsible for the death of her father. It is animated with wit, humour and tenderness, and certain aspects of it recall things like The Snowman, though it’s a bit livelier than that, and Wallace and Gromit. The original soundtrack is recommended over the English dub.
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9. Petit Nicolas [Le Petit Nicolas] (Laurent Tirard)

Created by René Goscinny of Asterix fame, the adventures of Petit Nicolas are popular in France but haven’t caught on overseas. That’s a shame, as otherwise this enormously likeable film might have had a larger audience in the UK. Nicolas leads an idyllic life, but when his bickering parents start to get along he fears it may mean a little brother or sister is on the way, and resolves to put a stop to it. By and large it stays on the right side of saccharine, though there are some near misses, but I can’t immediately recall a single British children’s film that has its knockabout good humour and joy.
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8. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

A gripping psychological drama dealing with the after-effects of a young woman’s escape from a cult. The most striking thing, I thought at the time, is how beautiful and natural it looks, but that is not to detract from the performances, which are superb, especially those of Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson as the two sisters. John Hawkes is his customary charismatic self.
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7. Amour (Michael Haneke)

Michael Haneke’s study of dementia is an emotionally gutting film to watch, but full of life and alive to the tenderness and fragility of human existence. The performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are beautiful, and the conversation scenes between them superbly observed and entirely credible. Trintignant has a couple of spellbinding scenes involving a pigeon, and the pigeon gives one of the great performances in cinematic pigeon history. Music is central to the plot of the film, and it is used sparingly and to great effect.
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6. Michael (Markus Schleinzer)

Not something one could bear to watch often, this Austrian film is a compelling and all too believable study of an outwardly unremarkable insurance broker who secretly keeps a boy locked up in a custom-built cellar in his house. It features two tremendous central performances and engages the mind constantly. Its sense of tension and nerviness reminded me of the Dardenne brothers’ Le Fils, one of my favourite films of recent years, and there is a great deal in it that merits high praise. It is telling that first-time director Schleinzer is a long-time collaborator of Michael Haneke, whose stamp is on the film. The banality of evil has rarely been so well realised in cinema. There are any number of telling little touches that took me aback – like the simple writing of a cross in a notebook.
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5. North Sea Texas [Noordzee, Texas] (Bavo Defurne)

The debut feature film of Belgian director Bavo Defurne, whose short films, generally on gay subjects, have caught my attention in the past. It’s a coming-of-age story set in the 1970s, and centres around Pim, a teenage boy with a passion for his older neighbour. Then the other boy gets a girlfriend and things become complicated. It’s the kind of thing that might easily be drearily formulaic, but it’s nothing of the kind. Defurne coaxes winning performances from his young cast and the result is a tender, moving and erotic film.
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4. The Imposter (Bart Layton)

In 1994 a boy goes missing from San Antonio, Texas. In 1997 he is reported found in Spain. But the boy who is found isn’t the boy who went missing. Why do the missing boy’s family take the other one in when it is so obvious he isn’t who he claims to be, and why are they so desperate not to let him go as the truth dawns? The most unlikely thing is that it isn’t all made up. It actually happened. This documentary is sensational without being sensationalist. With the source material it would have been so easy to make something tacky and/or partisan, but the film avoids those traps. The viewer’s loyalties shift. The real boy’s mother, sister and brother-in-law are interviewed, as are the surrogate boy, an FBI investigator and a private detective, all of them giving engaging testimony. The use – the mere existence! – of documentary footage of the boy’s arrival ‘back’ in America is genuinely breathtaking. The film is a tour de force that had my brain doing gymnastics. The people around me laughed at some of the most shocking things, and that’s understandable. The most upsetting things the film relates are also laughable, and there is a very fine line between harrowing and ridiculous.
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3. Skyfall (Sam Mendes)

Not a perfect Bond film, but damn good fun. The synthesis of the high-octane, post-Bourne revamp of the Bond franchise with the old gadgets and cars and sly humour is enormously pleasing. Daniel Craig doesn’t do enough jokes for my taste, but at least he’s not as po-faced as Lazenby and Dalton were. The addition of performers of the calibre and charisma of Javier Bardem, Ben Whishaw and Ralph Fiennes is an enormous boon, but at the heart of the film is Bond’s relationship with M. It’s a delight to see this aspect, which has taken a back seat since Judi Dench’s Bond debut in GoldenEye, in the foreground for a change, and it provides an emotional core that is too often absent from Bond films. It’s a thrilling ride.
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2. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)

It’s bold to claim that this film has the visual sweep of something like Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons, and I’m not sure it’s a claim I could justify if pressed, but I certainly felt in the world of those old classics. The actors, from Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo to James Cromwell and Uggie the dog, have verve and charm in bucketloads, and the film is a delightful homage to silent cinema that I found irresistible and occasionally overwhelming. I was delighted to see it garlanded with awards earlier in the year.
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1. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

I’m not sure I have ever before had the experience of feeling a film might have been made specifically for me, but by gum I had it while I watched this. I’ve admired Wes Anderson in the past, but this is the first time I have fallen in love with one of his films. Set in 1965, it tells the story of a boy scout who absconds from camp with a girl he met at a production of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde the previous year, and is told with Anderson’s usual stylisation and quirkiness and the most beautiful colour palette imaginable. The performances are all excellent (I’d single out Ed Norton and Bruce Willis for particular praise, and Bob Balaban’s oddity of a narrator is a sublime touch), but what I really love is the innocence of the whole thing. Anderson’s treatment of Britten’s music is respectful and sensitive, and my heart wells up to think about the film. Exhilarating and transcendent.
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50 films: #6. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

It’s by the luck of the draw that I find myself writing about this film barely a week after an excellent piece about it appeared in the blogosphere. There may not be a great deal of interest I can add to that, but I will preface what follows with a warning that it contains plot spoilers. I don’t believe the watching of this film is harmed by advance knowledge of what happens in it, since the arc of the story relies on banal romantic conventions and clichés to such a degree that it is quite possible for the perceptive first-time viewer to divine its outcome on the basis of having watched only the first ten or fifteen minutes. One of the things that interests me about Les Parapluies is how a film with such an ostensibly hackneyed plot should be so successful in shunning banality.

I was in my mid-teens when I first became aware of Les Parapluies. I’d been devouring French films at a steady pace for a few years, but a French-language musical was a novelty to me – furthermore, a musical containing no spoken dialogue at all, in which even the most mundane lines are sung. It sounded bewilderingly exotic.

In spite of the sumptuousness of all that follows, I love the opening title sequence most of all. The sound of a foghorn ushers in the aerial view of a cobbled Cherbourg street, a picture-postcard impression of a seaside town, as that familiar, bittersweet tune begins in Legrand’s tender, minimal scoring. The rain falls vertically, the meticulously choreographed pastel umbrellas and bicycles move across the screen, and the heart is automatically enraptured by the impeccable care and attention paid to the film’s colour and surface and style. Well, my heart anyway.

The action begins in the garage where 20-year-old Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) works. His workmates are the campest mechanics imaginable. One sings of his plans to go dancing, while Guy is excited about seeing Carmen. He is mocked mercilessly: ‘L’amour est enfant de Bohème, la la la la-la-la-la la la!’ His colleague cannot abide the artifice of people singing everything. ‘Tous ces gens qui chantent, moi tu comprends ça me fait mal!’ he sings.

Guy, it transpires, is straight. After clocking off he meets his beloved, 17-year-old Geneviève, whose mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), owns the eponymous umbrella shop. He must have met this girl quite a few times already, as he evinces no shock at her being Catherine Deneuve. Despite Madame Emery’s well-intentioned naggings, Geneviève persists in stepping out with this older man.

A digression now about Michel Legrand’s magnificent score. It is through-composed in the way that a Wagnerian opera is. (I think a direct comparison of Legrand and Wagner might see the former come off pretty badly, though as the writer of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ he probably wins in the hummability stakes.) There are only a couple of free-standing songs capable of being extracted from and sung independently of the musical: the one everyone knows (‘Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi’, rendered into English as ‘I Will Wait for You’ and sung by a thousand Lesley Garretts and Susan Boyles the world over), and Roland Cassard’s sweet little aria that later became ‘Watch What Happens’. Melodically, Legrand relies on the Leitmotiv, with the jaunty ‘C’est toi, Guy?’ / ‘Bonsoir, Tante Elise’ as Guy returns home to the elderly aunt he lives with (Mireille Perrey); and then the sensuous ‘Bonsoir, Guy’ / ‘Bonsoir, Madeleine’, which recurs whenever Guy meets his aunt’s young carer (Ellen Farner). Much later in the film, Guy will sing to Madeleine, to the same tune, of his dream: ‘Être heureux, avec une femme, dans une vie que nous aurions choisi ensemble.’ Harmonically, Legrand relies heavily on the circle of fifths. Few composers have exploited the potential of the circle of fifths so effectively, and none so often.

Guy and Geneviève talk (sing) of the future, which is rarely a good idea at such an early stage of a film. Incurable romantic that Guy is, he dreams that they will one day own a petrol station. Geneviève is more interested in children, and informs him that they will have a girl called Françoise. But what if it’s a boy? asks Guy, reasonably. Geneviève explains, ‘Il y a toujours une fille dans la famille.’ These are the prophecies that will be both fulfilled and shattered by the end of the film.

Before long, Guy receives his call-up papers and bids Geneviève a tearful farewell to go and serve in Algeria. Soon after his departure, she finds she is pregnant. For the sake of respectability, and at her mother’s behest, she marries a jeweller, the kindly Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), and stops writing to Guy. He returns from the war to find everything changed, and marries Madeleine. An epilogue shows Guy and Geneviève meeting again, a few years down the line.

It reads like the plot of a second-rate romantic novel, and the twists in the tale revealed at the end – that Guy does now own an Esso filling station, that Geneviève has called her and Guy’s daughter Françoise, and moreover that Guy has called his and Madeleine’s son François – may seem like the customary clichés of popular fiction. And yet they are gutting in their way, like the twist of the knife at the end of Manon des Sources. Surely it is a combination of the film’s visual style and its intoxicating music that produces this effect.

Roger Ebert, from whom I am seldom minded to dissent, writes that the film’s style, i.e. constant singing and thereby, presumably, whimsicality, ‘would seem to suggest a work of featherweight romanticism, but “Umbrellas” is unexpectedly sad and wise, a bittersweet reflection on the way true love sometimes does not (and perhaps should not) conquer all … The very last scene, of a final meeting between Guy and Genevieve, is one of such poignancy that it’s amazing the fabric of a musical can support it.’ Of course, opera supports this kind of thing all the time, and some of the bolder musicals (West Side Story) have a stab at it (no pun intended), but Les Parapluies is a rare creation in this regard. You don’t expect a musical to have such a profound effect on you. I remember watching it with my mother and brother a few years ago, and at the end sitting in silence for maybe twenty seconds, all of us too choked up to talk. I don’t think my memory has played me false in this recollection.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Oscars. A new print, restored under the supervision of Jacques Demy’s widow, the director Agnès Varda, was released in 1996. It is currently available for viewing online here.

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50 films: #5. Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Misery is not a film of great depth. Neither is it a film of great visual style. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a faithful and in some respects, it might be contended, pedestrian adaptation of a pulpy horror novel. I love it.

Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a writer who longs to be taken seriously but has fallen into the rut of writing a series of florid but marketable novels set in the 1870s featuring the central character Misery Chastain. To free himself from the shackles of Misery, Sheldon writes a serious and worthy autobiographical novel about life in a slum (which sounds just as dreary as his other books, but that’s by the by), his completion of which coincides with the publication of the final Misery book, Misery’s Child, in which Sheldon has killed off his heroine. As he travels home from the remote Colorado retreat where he traditionally goes to finish each book, his car comes off the road. He is rescued by Liberace-loving nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).

Rescued isn’t exactly the right term, it turns out, since Wilkes turns out to be his ‘Number One Fan’. Her initial hero worship of Sheldon quickly becomes something more sinister, and when her discovery of Misery’s fate prompts a violent reaction he realises his life may be in danger. From this point, the film is a battle of wits between the two characters, as the incapacitated Sheldon plots his escape and the increasingly deranged Wilkes foils him at every turn. She also has to contend with the local police’s efforts to track down Sheldon after the discovery of his car. The film’s climax is gratifyingly gruesome.

If so much of the film is apparently unremarkable, what is it that makes it special? Primarily, I think, the character of Annie Wilkes and the performance of Kathy Bates, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. Wilkes’ simple-mindedness, her puritanism and abhorrence of profanity, her stomach-churningly twee quirks of speech, all make her quite delightful to watch. She is giddily excited as she starts to read the latest Misery book. ‘What’s the ceiling that dago painted?’ she asks Sheldon. ‘The Sistine Chapel?’ he tentatively suggests. ‘Yeah! That and Misery’s Child – those are the only two divine things ever in this world!’ There is a dry vein of humour running through the film. Wilkes later complains, ‘People just don’t respect the institution of marriage any more,’ while she punctuates the air emphatically with the bottle of urine in her hand. The moments when she turns from harmless to menacing, when the eyes go dead, have the capacity to chill, provided you’re not laughing too much.

There are nice supporting turns from Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen and Lauren Bacall, but the film’s essentially a two-hander. Caan is perfect as Sheldon, tolerantly amused at Wilkes’ kookiness to begin with, and becoming more rebellious as he realises the fate she has planned for him. The end sees the liberated Sheldon (spoiler, I suppose, but the grammar of the genre permits no other possible outcome) reunited with his agent – but there is still a final little twist in store which is creepy and inspiredly comical in equal measure.

So there you have it. A black comedy, I’d say, with a lot of cheap thrills along the way – but there’s nothing wrong with cheap thrills. Like cheap music, they have their potency.

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